PokerPirate
2d ago
I really like this death penalty proposal even though I would normally be against the death penalty in the US. The main difference, as I see it, is that working an election is an entirely voluntary endeavor, and I like the idea that the oath's people take have some sort of real legal meaning behind them.
Of course, there's lots of problems with the idea. The most obvious I see are that the number of volunteers would plummet and that foreign intellignece services would certainly try to plant evidence of voter fraud (and I'm sure they'd be able to do it very convincingly) and they could use the death penalty as leverage to have agents in the voting system.
PokerPirate
5d ago
Scott notes that the second derivative of various economic indicators does highly correlate with the vibecession, but questions "can people really sense the second derivative of GDP over decades-long timescales"? I think you give a pretty strong argument that yes, people can easily notice this second derivative. All your examples about consumerism not leading to increased real economic power seem pretty second derivativy to me.
PokerPirate
7d ago
At the private school: Under the "dean of students" office, I count 10 people with the title of dean (or vice/assistant dean), 4 with the title of director, and 5 administrative assistants. We have about 1500 undergrads.
At the public school: There are 3 people total in the "dean of students" office: The dean, a vice dean, and an administrative assistant. They have 25000 undergrads.
Both schools have separate deans for managing the faculty and the dean:faculty ratio is similar between both schools. Both schools also have separate "student-centered" departments (not part of dean of students) for financial aide, study abroad, career center, the gym, varsity sports, etc.
PokerPirate
7d ago
I teach at an expensive private college (cost per year >$90k) and I used to teach at the state school down the street (cost per year $20k). There is definitely a difference in the quality of the education, but the private school is at most 1.5x better than the state school. (For some majors, the state school would be 1.5x better than the private school.) The amenities (food, gym, clubs, etc.) are basically the same.
The main difference---and what the parents are really paying for---is that the admin of the private college is VERY hands on. The private college has something like 10x the number of deans per student, and those deans have very busy jobs interacting with the students. One of their jobs is to ensure that every student is registered for whatever accommodations they might be eligible for. They see themselves as "cutting the red tape" for the students and "helping them navigate the bureaucracy". At the private school, I deal with these deans every semester, and your stat (20-30% of students on accommodations) matches my experience here. The public school is very different. There are no deans helping students get these accommodations, and a student must be very proactive in order to get them. (My sense is that basically none of the engineering students I had would have even known accommodations existed.) Teaching at the public school for 6 years, I literally never had to deal with the deans about student accommodations.
I don't think accommodations are the only reason for the price difference between public/private colleges (the administrators do a lot of other things as well), but I'm sure they make a substantial part.
PokerPirate
8d ago
TNG is on my list of shows/movies that I'll be forcing my kids to watch. It's great for teaching leadership lessons that I want my kids to learn, and (as you allude to) it's great for teaching them what growing-up-in-the-90s-tech-leaders think of as an ideal future.
I never could get into any of the new star treks though.
PokerPirate
8d ago
I appreciate you posting this. I hadn't previously heard of this book, and I'm interested in the subject, so I might read it now.
That said, this was a hard review to read because of a lack of structure. You don't ever actually clearly state what the book is about or why we should care about the author. (Your 3rd to last paragraph references "director of global public policy" but it's not clear if this was her actual title at facebook, and this should be front and center). It's also clear that you believe that the narrator is unreliable, but you don't actually provide any examples of what she wrote that makes you believe that.
So other than being made aware that the book exists, I didn't really gain anything from your review.
PokerPirate
19d ago
Two exceptionally reasonable decisions that give me confidence that the justice system works like it should.
I hope John had to pay the court+Frank a shitload of money for wasting their time and being a shitty neighbor.
PokerPirate
21d ago
Several wartime militaries have included large percentages of females. The obvious example is the Soviets in WWII, but the Chinese, Israelis, and many other modern-ish armies have fielded large percentages of female soldiers. In no case have any of these armies treated women as "fully equal" to men in combat, but neither does the US military.
I suspect that a look at the population graphs for these countries would support your thesis, but it seems disingenuous to talk negatively about women in the military without referencing these concrete examples and actually testing your thesis against data.
PokerPirate
23d ago
Thanks for replying, and sorry if I sounded hostile. I enjoy your posts :)
PokerPirate
23d ago
sûre
I could tolerate your accents on thé as a weird quirk, but now I have to ask: are all of these extra glyphs typos? do they have meaning to you? is it an experiment to see how long mottizens will go without mentioning it?
Yes, we treat treason as a capital offense and execute people for it. Nevertheless, the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc very explicitly design their procedures so that foreign powers cannot get leverage over people. If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.
For example, I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens. But I also suspect the vast majority of citizens to turn into traitors and sell information about the election to Russia if a Russian agent provides a credible threat of presenting falsified evidence that the honest citizen committed execution-worthy fraud. This is a textbook case of when falsified blackmail is an effective leverage.
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