RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
1d ago
I've looked into the swedish response back during Covid and as far as I can see, they did mostly the same: They made a lot of recommendations to minimize social contact, they just didn't force you. And this worked: If you look, for example, into mobility data such as usage of trains and subways, it went down just the same as other large cities across the west.
The big problem with mandated legal lockdowns such as the UK and germany, both of which I'm more directly familiar with due to having lived in both and having family & friends in both, was their pointless tyranny and nonsense rules. I have a friend who got a massive fine in the UK. His crime? He took a walk with his flatmates through a forest - which was further than his allowed distance. He lived in central London of course, so he was allowed to take walks there. I, too, got told to move along and go home again in the UK. I was sitting on a park bench in a mostly-empty park reading a book.
Germany I at least didn't experience any problems going outside - but I was deliberately living in the countryside with my parents & girlfriend. My mom constantly reminded us, every time we technically were breaking the law, such as driving too far from home or staying outside too long or whatever. The situation in the cities was, of course, very different. Plenty of friends barely left their rooms and actually got stopped and controlled by police when they did, getting questioned to make sure they had legitimate reason to be outside.
Not to mention the insanities on the day care and school system and their still-lingering effects. Frequent & long closures threw back parents and children months to years in their career and education, respectively. Worse, the new culture of 1) always taking sick leave no matter how weak a cold is and b) always having to stay home two extra days after the cold passed "to be safe" is still on the books in many places and makes everything unworkable insofar as people actually follow the rules.
Again, my mom is a day care worker herself and she is extremely pissed about her younger coworkers constantly taking sick leave, always for a full week. She is staying even when seriously sick, because otherwise it would mean all the parents who depend on them couldn't work. This is still going on. Our own daycare also still has these rules on the book, and a few of the workers do seem to take advantage, but at least not as many. Several of our friends with older kids tell similar stories of schools with constant "teacher shortfalls" which are entirely due to teachers constantly taking sick leave by sticking to the letter of the current rules.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
2d ago
Yeah, Duggan is imo 100% wrong. This has nothing to do with ideology - today's social media is anything but cyberlibertarian anyway - and everything to do with what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever: Before, if you grew up in a crackpot community you might literally be unaware of the viability of alternative viewpoints well into your teens. Same deal for the relatively ubiquitous benign moderate religious communities. I've grown up in the latter, and we still had plenty of crackpots, too. Not to mention that Duggan seems like the kind of person who would like to just generally ban any speech to the right of Bernie Sanders.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.
I feel like there might be a breadcrumbs effect that is under-explored. Basically, every ultra-competent (in the sense of being simultaneously highly intelligent and highly conscientious and highly agentic, and so on) person in the world, if they are interested in leaving their country and going to the west, will try to get into the US first and foremost, since it's the powerhouse #1. And since they are ultra-competent, they will find a way in. Every single other western country - no matter how hard they're working to have selective immigration - will only get the breadcrumbs from this, only people who either aren't quite competent enough to get into the US or who want to go to another country for idiosyncratic reasons, like already having family present there. And worse, this effect is cascading down: If not the US, then it's north-western europe, which also isn't even terribly hard to get into for a reasonably motivated individual.
To be sure as long as you're not screwing up the selection you're still getting reasonably competent, unproblematic individuals. But I wouldn't be surprised if Australia in particular gets the chaff of the grinders: Those that needed to grind extra-hard just to barely make it.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
Not everything needs to be HBD. The UK is just generally very centralized around London (for various reasons, some sensible, some not), London is in the south, QED. There is also some other factors, like the canal boosting a variety of industries. If you look at a GPD per capita map, it also looks to me mostly like a London effect, with only some far smaller Scottish cities doing similarly well like Edinburgh, Glasgow or Aberdeen.
There are some possible splits in the UK, like celtic vs anglo/saxon heritage, and there is some evidence that celts might consistently lack behind across countries, but it's somewhat weak and I'm not even sure that there is a substantial differential in heritage between north/south england anyway so it might be completely irrelevant.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
I'm not aware of major new developments in germany. I'm going with "nothing ever happens" on this one; It will probably stay illegal bc there is no solid constituency to get it changed (no, men in general don't count; Caring about paternity implies that you think it plausible for your wife to cheat on you, which is pathetic), but laws will also not get more punitive bc many cases in practice are at least somewhat sympathetic (if you care enough to break the law about this, there is probably a clear reason for it).
For the record, I'd prefer if genetic sampling on birth was (opt-out-able) standard practice and would involve paternity testing by default, as well as testing for a host of inheritable diseases and whatnot.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
I find it really frustrating how often HBD gets dismissed, and then an alternative explanation is given that is perfectly compatible with HBD. Usually connected to the assumption that HBD is about either differences between people being either 100% genetics and/or that it's just about black vs white.
No, HBD is simply about the finding that genes/biology in humans matter for everything, even for those attributes where the implications are a bit unpleasant. Yes, some people are just more violent. Some people are just less conscientious. And yes, some people are just less intelligent. It's not even their fault so I have a lot of sympathy with them, in a way. But it's not claiming that environment has no influence at all; That's just silly.
Once you accept this, group differences follow directly. Let's take brain drain. If we accept that intelligence is, say 60% genetic, and that a place suffers from a large percentage of intelligent people leaving, what does this imply about the group that has left vs the group that stayed behind? It's nearly mathematically impossible for both groups to have the same genetic mean afterwards! It would require some convoluted simultaneous anti-selection. And this applies in one way or another to every large migration wave. There is always some reason why people leave, and that reason will have implications for group differences between the stayers vs the leavers. Also, this applies of course to the average, not to literally every single person in each group.
Of course, this is hardly the only dynamic; The recent Reich paper shows clear evidence for ongoing selection even just inside west eurasia and in particular shows that the idea of cultural evolution supplanting biological evolution is simply wrong; They work in tandem with each other. Which makes perfect sense: If a society requires substantial long-term planning for winter months, then you will have both cultural adaption to do so and biological selective pressure towards more conscientiousness, intelligence, etc. Likewise, living in literal centuries of civilization with a highly developed tax code such as China will plainly have different selective pressures than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Also, an aside: It's perfectly sensible to say that HBD is more important for differences inside developed states than for the differences between the developed vs the undeveloped world, since the latter has larger environmental differences. The black-white gap inside the US is probably substantially more genetic than the Europe-Africa gap. And this fits very well with the data, since the latter is significantly larger, even accounting for admixture.
Coming back to this post, assuming HBD is true, it makes sense that people with
Cultural antibodies hardened over a millenium that rejects the state, trusting strangers, higher IQ institutions
will also have substantially biologically adapted to that environment. Or the other way around, if we assume the differences currently holding them back were pre-existing, than we would of course expect them to fare badly in international warfare and regularly get conquered and colonized. I agree with @SecureSignals that at least part of the difference here is likely pre-existing.
Now you may ask, if HBD is so compatible with everything, when does it really fail? That's simple: I lean towards cultural/environmental explanations where the split is historically recent, and/or where there is little evidence for plausible, sufficiently large genetic differences. NK vs SK is the gold-standard here. Korea has historically always been relatively developed and well-managed. Koreans are of course not perfectly homogenous, every group has subgroups, but it's relatively isolated and as homogenous as it gets. The split is an inheritance of WW2, which is quite recent. And it's at this point well-known that neither communism nor most other autocratic governments are very conducive to economic development, so the cultural explanation makes very plain sense.
Since I know that you are german, I'd recommend to get a scalable capital account ASAP and put the 5000€ into the Tagesgeld there to start with. It gives 2.5% with no volatility, no fees, minimal risk and full access to take it out any time. That helps serve as a good basic protection against inflation. There's probably similar options with Trade Republic and the like, but I'm not familiar with those.
From there, you can start trying out any of the other investment schemes others recommend here. From my side, I'd just invest a percentage you're comfortable with into a world ETF through a fee-less monthly plan.
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