MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4hr ago
You can just have high IQ people who are historically normal in other ways, and these people will invent things and also have a TFR above 2 because they will get married young and have a lot of babies.
Assumes facts not in evidence. Empirically, the only group which can do this is Modern Orthodox Jews. I don't think they count as "historically normal in other ways" given the importance of the Diaspora and the Holocaust to their folk history. It's also the case that Modern Orthodoxy only develops the way it does because of extensive contact with cisHajnal societies.
First, the elections at issue were in a small municipality on a barrier island. So I'm guessing that most of the property is owned by non-residents
The City of London (the one-square-mile financial district which has its own sui generis local government which has maintained institutional continuity since time immemorial) has the same issue - most of the property is owned by businesses and the employed population vastly exceeds the resident population. The franchise since the 19th century (which survived the abolition of votes for nonresident property owners in the rest of the country in 1969) was voting-age natural persons owning or leasing property in the City, which didn't cause problems when most of the businesses in the City were partnerships - the partners qualified to vote. But the transition from traditional partnerships to either corporate ownership (the banks) or LLCs and such-like (the law and accountancy firms) meant that the business property franchise had ceased to represent the real business City, so they changed the rules in 2002 to say that property-owning businesses (regardless of corporate form) should designate electors who work in the city to vote on their behalf. The system avoids some of the abuses mentioned elsewhere in the thread by tying a business's voting power to the number of full-time employees it has who work in the City.
There is a joke that the City of London is the only place where introducing multiple votes for corporations could be a positive democratic reform.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8hr ago
Yeah, and furthermore for calculus we all still pay the price because limits are honestly only taught as a holdover from that attempt to prove to other math people calculus was legit.
I'm going to defer to the mathematicians on what it is "for", but analysis is one of the major fields of modern mathematics - you need limits to do almost anything rigorous with general real numbers. I agree the only thing you explicitly use limits for in high school maths is making calculus look rigorous, but other very obvious applications in "maths for physicists" are summing infinite series and explaining what it means for numerical algorithms to converge. But limits come up everywhere - in frequentist statistics probability is a limit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8hr ago
All of these are defining "rich" relative to your expected level of spending, which is not how the general public think of the term. Someone who FIREs into a lower-middle class lifestyle which they need to clip coupons to maintain may be "rich" in some spiritually meaningful sense, but Joe Public is going to think of them as a bum.
The stupid think of rich as "currently enjoying a lifestyle above upper-middle-class". (Complicated in the US context by very high salaries and share options in some upper-middle class career fields such that a lot of upper-middle-class people can support a lifestyle above upper-middle class, particularly if they retire to a low COL area). The smart think of rich as "able to support an upper-middle-class lifestyle indefinitely without being subject to the grind and risk of an upper-middle-class career" - and so do most of the rich.
The other point is that if you define "upper-middle-class lifestyle" as a fixed income, then the gap between 2 and 4 is quite small - the difference in PV between "maintain upper-middle-class lifestyle for 40 more years" and "maintain upper-middle-class lifestyle in perpetuity" is small because of discounting. So the real difference between 2,3 and 4 is about the cost of grandchildren. 2 implies "upper-middle-class lifestyle for retired couple" whereas 3 (partially) and 4 (fully) implies "upper-middle-class lifestyle for family probably including private school fees".
So what do I think? Well if you have grandchildren who receive a lower-middle class upbringing, whether because you can't afford to help your kids or because you refuse to, then you failed at being rich. And if you don't have grandchildren, then Darwin has found you wanting and selected you out. If, as Gordon Gecko said, greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit, then I suppose you have failed at greed.
So to answer the original question, I think the ordinary English meaning of "rich" is most consistent with 3, but with the proviso that you can maintain an upper-middle-class lifestyle.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8hr ago
I was going to say, based on my experience of spergy young men, that acquiring these skills in your twenties is the exception and not the rule. Many sufficiently high-functioning spergs pick up the skills only slightly later than their neurotypical peers (as I did for the set of social skills not related to picking up chicks). And the "never" category is also obviously real.
80+% of spergy young men who can't chat up a girl at 21 are never going to learn.
This is the kind of question where the Motte would benefit from polling functionality.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
They're historically abnormal and are going extinct, so maybe not a great exemplar to use.
They're also the only societies that produced modernity, and empirically the societies that go extinct slowest under conditions of modernity (except Modern Orthodox Jews). A RETVRN to goatfucker patriarchy is impossible, because even a suburban McMansion doesn't have a big enough lawn to graze the goats.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Due to civil-rights era precedents, not while using state elections infrastructure to run them. (In the Jim Crow south, some Dixiecrat state parties used to end-run the 15th amendment with all-white primaries). The 1st amendment applies to government-supported primaries in the same way the 15th does.
Parties which run their own internal elections at their own expense (which, for example, all UK political parties do) can impose whatever rules they like.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
No - the point was to press-gang experienced sailors. Most press-gangs operated at sea and pressed sailors off arriving merchant ships (US-UK dual nationals being pressed in this way was the official American casus belli in the war of 1812). Land-based press-gangs targetted sailors' pubs in the port where a merchant ship had just paid off.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yes, but I suspect everyone (particularly including the kind of donor who gives $7,000 to their Rep) understands that the campaign donation is actually being used to buy better committee slots.
If I was a political donor and my Congressman (who I liked and had donated to in the past) said "can you contribute another $7,000 towards getting me off Indian Affairs and onto Banking?" then I would consider that a worthy cause.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
fighting a war should be the privilege for the best men, not the punishment for the worst
That is not how armies worked between about 1600 and 1970. I would say that the British Empire was built by our worst men (led by some of our best - hence the officer-enlisted divide), and Wellington famously did say that at the time, but the counterargument was that it was actually built by the navy, which did enlist the best men it could find. (whether working-class boys as seamen, middle-class boys as warrant officers' mates and future warrant officers, or smart younger sons of the elite as midshipmen and future officers).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I don't. My impression is that middle-class white young offenders get off even more easily, though it is hard to tell because the vast majority of middle-class white kids who commit serious crimes have real, severe diagnosable psychiatric conditions.
Kids getting long jail terms for serious crimes short of murder is something that essentially doesn't happen in western countries, and probably should.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Among the vanishingly small number of people who have actually made major lifestyle changes because of climate (some of whom exist in my social circle), I think having fewer children that you might otherwise do is common. Normally this means one instead of two.
I agree that anyone who flies for leisure travel and claims to be restricting family size for climate reasons is lying.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Most apocalyptic scenarios don't select on any meaningful definition of "strength" - nuclear war certainly doesn't and nor does the kind of pandemic with a 50+% fatality rate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.
The Gnostics were anti-sex, in the sense that they believed that a celibate lifestyle was morally superior to the alternatives for everyone, with marriage being a second-best compromise. If taken seriously, this becomes anti-natalist in practice.
Paul spends a lot of effort in the Epistles trying to convince the early Church that marriage (and marital sex) were okay, suggesting that the uncorrected early Church tended to agree with the Gnostics on this point.
"Marital sex is part of a second-best compromise and it would be better if married couples had the bare minimum amount of sex for reproduction, like the Protestant couple in the Every Sperm is Sacred sketch" is a very common error that crops up in Christian thought over the centuries, to the point where I am not sure if it is an error.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Women marrying before 22 was never the default in cisHajnal societies (and transHajnal societies where women married younger didn't really do love marriage) so 22 as the upper end of the optimal range for female love marriage is too high.
My own marriage is a point in favour of the "dating jadedness, not chronological age" thesis - my now-wife and I did the whole teen romance thang with all the cringe you would expect in our mid-20s, having both only been meaningfully on the dating market for 1-2 years (in my case, late acquisition of required social skills due to likely autism).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
As a simple model, this is wrong. The driver of falling fertility we don't really see is an increase in voluntary DINKdom.
What we do see is smaller families (and in particular 2 instead of 3+) among couples who do have kids - and per surveys most of the 3->2 shift feels involuntary - and (since 2014 or so) reduced coupling.
The vast majority of people still want marriage and children, and the vast majority of them will have at least one child if they find themselves with a biologically suitable partner. There is not a large number of people who want a childless marriage, and no evidence that this number has increased. It is possible that there has been an increase in the number of people who want neither marriage nor children, but anecdotally most of the increase in singleness is involuntary due to FUBAR dating markets. We don't know how many people want children without marriage because it isn't (for good reasons) an available option for the social classes with the intelligence and conscientiousness for what they want to affect their behaviour.
The other thing that has changed is the perceived marginal cost of an additional child in a 2+ child family.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Re point #1, what does all this campaign spending even do?
Congressmen have quotas to kick up to the DNCC/RNCC/DSCC/NSRC, with the quota increasing depending on how many desirable committee slots you have. The committees use the money to blitz the small number of close races.
Press coverage of the system tends to say that it isn't really about fundraising, and more about creating busywork to stop backbench Congressmen participating in the legislative process.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Part of Dawkins' thesis in The Extended Phenotype (and in the closing chapter of The Selfish Gene) is that there are beaver genes "for" dam height in the same way that there are human genes "for" hair colour - the dam is a physical effect partially caused by the information contained in the DNA base sequence.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Huh, TIL. Is this a counterexample to the HBD argument?
The best counterexample to the HBD argument is probably the Irish in general. In the 19th century, the Irish (in Ireland, mainland Britain and America) had a reputation as the least intelligent white national group. The work of the early IQ testers demonstrated that this reputation was deserved - well-run IQ tests in the first-half of the twentieth century give an average IQ in the 90-93 range for both Irish in Ireland and Irish-Americans. But as Ireland develops and Irish immigrants in the US (and mainland Britain) assimilate measured IQ converges to the white average of 100. In the 1960's average IQs are about 92 in rural Ireland and 100 in the cities. And in the 21st century average white Irish IQ is the same as white British.
Note that all these figures are on top of the Flynn effect, which increases the level of actual g corresponding to 100 IQ over time.
Any eugenic force on the Irish would have been different in Ireland and America, and would have affected other American ethnic groups as well in a way we don't see. So this is an almost 10-point IQ gain from non-genetic causes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
This issue is now dealt with through planning law rather than tort law - in rural areas the typical pikey encampment is on land zoned as agricultural with the permission of the (often-absentee) landowner. And the lifecycle of the encampment is driven by the glacial speed of planning enforcement.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
You are indeed correct. I would point out that what you call the film doesn't matter that much - what's important is that you watch it. It's a very good film.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
If you want an insulting term that is more apt for Irish Travellers as opposed to Roma, the traditional slur was "Pikey", although as with all slurs the meaning is vague and liable to expand over time.* The Snatch (by the same team as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a most excellent British gangster movie in which one of the many factions robbing each other is a pikey gang, and is referred to as such by all the other characters (except for the visiting American, who has no idea what he is dealing with).
Romanichal is the traditional term for the long-established British Roma community (as opposed to recent eastern European arrivals).
The British version of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding is almost entirely about pikeys because they couldn't get any Romani gypsies to cooperate with the filmmakers.
* Apparently British Roma use "pikey" as a slur for non-Roma who lead a travelling lifestyle, including Irish travellers, travelling showmen, and New Age travellers. Wikipedia says that it has become a catch-all term for the feral poor similar to "chav", but I have not heard that usage.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
and when we multiply that by the incidence rate, w get a grand total of 5027 potential mastectomies in the whole country, for 2020 alone
Quibble, but the "incidence" for 2020 in the chart is scaled from the part of the year before COVID lockdowns prevented elective surgeries. But the full-year number for 2019 is in the same neighbourhood, so it doesn't affect your argument.
Also, I don't understand why you care about the diagnostic code for elective mastectomies on minors. The rate of breast cancer in teenage girls (whether or not pretending to be boys) is so low that you can reasonably treat all mastectomies on minors as transgender surgeries.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
You can't contract out of tort liability - you can indemnify by contract, but that only helps if the party giving the indemnity is good for the money. If one of my drone startup's drones negligently flies into a nuclear power plant and forces the evacuation of a whole city, at common law every partner in the business is liable to to the point of bankruptcy. You can't contract out of this because most of the people injured would never be party to the contract. So you need statutory limited liability.
When Galton was writing, cisHajnal societies still had above-replacement birthrates. I don't see what he could say which would be relevant to the question "Can we RETVRN to a Victorian society where the most advanced countries all had well-above-replacement birthrates?" because the question didn't exist in his day - he had been dead for 50 years before the fertility collapse started, and 100 years before it became critical.
More options
Context Copy link