MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
10hr 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
11hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
The staffers who wrote the rules and the bureaucrats who implemented them would have been Silents. I think the Greatest Generation leaders who decided in principle to do it genuinely had no idea how much trouble it could cause.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I have some thoughts on why this system disappeared, but that's a bit beyond the scope of your question.
[FWIW, the system is the same in all large professional services firms]
It still (mostly) exists in the UK - my father's firm had performance shares, but the dispersion between high and average-performing partners was about a factor of 1.5. Conventional wisdom is that it failed in the US because over-performing partners would quit to found boutiques. No idea why the US and UK are different.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
At least in the UK's uniformly fucked housing market, the average homeowning Boomer is worth more dead than alive because they are under-occupying a valuable family-sized house. Press coverage tells me that the situation in the US is similar but less extreme.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
"Going out on the ice floe" is the exception. In a world where food is scarce and malnutrition is a major cause of death (which is almost everywhere until the 20th century) the old "kill themselves for the sake of their descendants" by letting the prime working/child-bearing age family members eat first. And they do, in almost all times and places we look at.
Families where the core workers eat first get through the hard times a few members shorter.
Families where the elderly eat first don't get through the hard times at all.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
In the Anglosphere, mostly continuing to live in the houses they raised children in while making it impossible to build new family-sized homes for the next generation.
In Continental Europe, mostly retiring too early.
In all cases, not having enough kids to keep the Ponzi scheme going. The Silent Generation (and to a lesser extend the Greatest Generation) got a very good deal in retirement because there were a lot of Boomers in their peak-earning years to pay for it. The Boomers think that they deserve the same deal despite having fewer kids.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
A high rate on a lower balance means that you needed a much lower deposit (and had the benefit of those high interest rates while saving for it). In addition, inflation was higher (with, as always, wages and prices roughly keeping pace) so the monthly payment didn't stay excruciating for as long.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
We would have been bred out as autistic. I'm not even sure that they would have been making a mistake doing it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Standard Cambridge Natsci workload per week according to the faculty, and roughly correct in my experience (admittedly only during the 8-week term) Lectures: 12 hours (Sitting in lecture listening and taking notes - the quality of lecturing was high enough that people went to the lectures) Supervisions: 4 hours (2-1 interaction with a tutor) Practicals: Up to 12 hours in lab depending on what options you were doing (biologists have more labs than physical scientists). Possibly 2-4 hours a week writing up lab reports outside the lab, depending on what labs you were doing that week. Self-study and review of lecture notes: 6 hours Preparatory work to discuss at supervisions: 16 hours. Seeking additional academic support: 2-4 hours a week if you needed it.
So 50+ hours academic work a week, and the gunners had at least one and often two demanding extra-curriculars on top. Preclinical medics had it slightly worse.
This is not usual for either UK or US undergraduates.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
In my view, 1/20 is more than enough to form the basis for class resentment.
To trigger class resentment, the elderly would need to be a privileged class. There are two institutions that allow this in the modern west: pensions, and mass homeownership. America doesn't really have pensions until the New Deal, and the only non-rich Americans who own their own homes in that period are farmers. The (middle-class and below - class resentment of the rich elderly is obviously real, but is about class and not age) urban elderly were seen as pitiable before these institutions came into their own.
I can't speak for 160-acre family farms in the early 20th century US, but in the (very long) era of subsistence family farms in the west, gramps is generally perceived as a net positive (but is still allowed to starve before the prime-age family members when food gets short). So I don't think there would be widescale resentment of the elderly among the smallholding class either.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
In the strong sense of maximal, I agree with you - the maximum human lifespan has been 100-105 since time immemorial. But decreasing mortality at older ages means that any given high percentile (95th, 99th, even 99.9th) has been visibly increasing in my lifetime.
The apparent maximum lifespan has dropped because there are fewer places where you can credibly claim to be 110+ based on dodgy records.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I've gotten the impression that the situation is somewhat better in Europe than in US
I think "manufacturing is in a better state in Continental Europe than in the Anglosphere" has been both conventional wisdom and true since the 1980s, if not earlier.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Beyond freedom etc.
Freedom etc. doesn't get you limited liability for negligence. (A business in a world without companies could get limited liability for ordinary business debts by negotiating it into every commercial contract they signed, but thinking about the practicalities of that tells you why a standard-form deal of limited liability in exchange for transparency is something a government would want to create). "I absolutely cannot under any circumstances lose more on my passive investments than the amount I invested even if my business partner is evil" is a socially valuable deal to have available that you can't contract for at common law.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Lawsuits against non-profit and up-and coming models for breaching the copyrights of the big LLM's.
This is a very, very high risk strategy for the big LLMs given that they have breached the copyrights of absolutely everyone in the process of training their models on a corpus of copyrighted text. "You can't train an AI model on publicly-available but IP'ed data" is not a net win for Anthropic or OpenAI.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
I think this is a product of a long-running psy-op to convince people that National Socialism was not a fundamentally left wing movement.
If National Socialism was ever a "fundamentally left-wing movement" then nobody told Hitler's contemporaries. The right found him sympathetic and the non-communist left didn't.
There were a lot of left wing journalists and academics in the immediate post World War II period who suddenly found the need to "memory-hole" which horse they'd been backing prior to the allied victory in Europe.
Only because of the Nazi-Soviet pact. A number of Communists went from being loud and proud anti-fascists to pacifists when Soviet policy changed, and straight back to being anti-fascist after Barbarossa.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
It means, to me, that there are two sides: pro migration and anti migration. All other issues are secondary to the real issue, and therefore all parties will align on the topic of greatest importance.
That would you be considering the parties to the left of Le Pen interchangeable. not the parties considering themselves interchangeable (which was your original claim). I agree that, as a single-issue anti-immigration voter, you are correct to do so.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
The British aristocracy were over-represented among the dead in WW1 and WW2 (and, as far as I am aware, in most of the 19th century wars). That is, of course, to be expected for a group that justifies its privileges by claiming to be a warrior elite. As far as I am aware, the same was true for the Germans. (The Prussian aristocracy was uncomplicatedly a real warrior elite in WW1. In WW2 the Waffen SS did more dangerous stuff than the Reichswehr, and Nazi elites' sons were more likely to be in it).
That the planter class in the Confederacy widely dodged the draft would be surprising to me, if true. They tended (as do their descendants in the red tribe elite) to see themselves as a warrior elite.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I think "even though the bad guy is known to be bad, I am going to try to distinguish the bad things he did do from the bad things he didn't do" is a fundamentally autistic way of thinking. Once normies know someone is a bad guy, they just put him in the "bad" bucket and believe everything bad about him and disbelieve everything good.
The term "Clinton Derangement Syndrome" wasn't used at the time, but there was a similar phenomenon where conservatives, even otherwise sensible ones, who had (correctly) worked out that he was a bad man started believing every negative rumour about him (and his wife) including the obviously silly ones, and a similar pro-Clinton litany of obnoxious efforts to psychoanalyse them. Something similar happened among small groups of anti-Obama and anti-GW Bush political obsessives, but on a much smaller scale because normies didn't see Obama or GW Bush as bad people.
People as venal, chronically dishonest, sexually incontinent, and reckless as Clinton and Trump normally get jailed or at least driven out of public life in disgrace.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Medicare fraud is different.
I'm not joking here - Republicans see Medicare as a program which helps good people, so a little bit of fraud is inevitable and acceptable. Whereas Medicaid is a program which helps the undeserving poor, so any fraud at all is grounds for throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This also explains why the government is so bad at anti-fraud efforts. The voters who are outraged by fraud believe (wrongly) and the politicians who pander to them pretend to believe that fraud is mostly a problem caused by politically unsympathetic groups of program beneficiaries claiming more than they are entitled to. People with experience of private sector anti-fraud work start with the assumption that most fraud involves organised, professional fraud operations such as the one Rick Scott ran.
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.
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