ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
I would eliminate pennies, nickels, and dimes as you suggest, but bring back a redesigned half dollar coin as well. I also prefer dollar coins to bills, and think having both in circulation is silly. The price reform is sensible, but as others have pointed out the $200 bill would mostly just help the money laundering industry.
ResoluteRaven
25d ago
China graduates several times as many scientists and engineers as the US every year. Even if each of them is of lesser quality and their future demographic collapse is certain, that doesn't mean they aren't a rival in the short-term.
ResoluteRaven
25d ago
Countries with mass immigration like the UK, Canada, and Australia (most of Europe is not far behind) have had negative real GDP per capita growth in recent years (despite massive and increasing government spending as a major contributor to GDP I might add).
Apples and oranges. H1-B's are a tiny fraction of the total immigrant population and are selected for education and skills. The process could certainly be made more selective, but in no way does it compare to the kind of mass influx seen in Canada, Europe, or across the southern border.
ResoluteRaven
26d ago
If China or India gets their shit together, they'll out-compete us on demographics alone, and it's increasingly apparent that at least China is getting its shit together.
While I agree with your general argument, I don't think this is true of India. The only potential peer competitors of the US are China and the EU, at least this century.
ResoluteRaven
26d ago
Or the systematic abuse of H1B that three-quarters of the allotted visas are for Indian nationals?
How it this fact by itself evidence of systematic abuse? India is the most populous country in the world and all of them want to be engineers in the US. The only other place that could provide a comparable number of applicants is China, which is both a geopolitical rival and a much nicer place to live these days, explaining the disparity in numbers.
ResoluteRaven
26d ago
I understand that Canada and the UK have this problem, but I've never seen a South Asian ghetto in America. Perhaps a few neighborhoods in Queens come close, but in general Indian immigrant enclaves seem cleaner and more orderly than average, certainly compared to their Black or Latino equivalents. If there's some corner of Silicon Valley where H1-B's are shitting in the street while pretending to work entry-level code monkey jobs, I'm curious to know where that is.
ResoluteRaven
30d ago
This is mostly because the brutal KMT crackdown on the Japanese-educated upper classes of Taiwan starting in 1947 made the colonial period seem better in retrospect to those who saw a decline in their social and economic status while their friends and relatives were imprisoned or executed.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I know the native Alaskans have done quite well for themselves by selling drilling rights on their land to oil companies. Other stories that have come to my attention over the past few years include the Squamish Nation's proposed high-rise housing project in Vancouver and the court battle over whether half of Oklahoma was actually tribal land and outside the state's jurisdiction.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The inferential gap between modern Anglophones and people from more complex linguistic situations (diglossia or even polyglossia) is quite large and usually makes it a waste of time to argue about such things. Your average English speaker will have only ever encountered languages that are either completely unintelligible to him in writing or in speech e.g. Russian, or that are nearly identical to his own e.g. New Zealand English. If we lived in a world where a billion people spoke Jamaican Patois or Scots and our formal education was in Old English there would be a lot less confusion on the matter.
As to the nature of Chinese specifically, more or less all formal writing in the Sinosphere (including Korea and Vietnam; Japan was more complicated) prior to the early 20th century was in standardized Literary Chinese. No Koreans were under the impression that the language they were speaking was Chinese, even if that was the only language they could write, but your average Chinese scribe would tell you they were speaking and writing the same language, the same way Arabs do with their vernacular dialects and Modern Standard Arabic, or a Carolingian monk might have with Old French and Latin. If you define languages by mutual intelligibility, or from a learner's perspective ("do I need a different textbook for this?"), then they are clearly wrong, but if you then conclude that something like Ottoman Turkish is just a language like any other that you can learn to speak (good luck!) you are also missing something important about how it was used.
When China transitioned to writing in the vernacular, only Mandarin successfully made the jump, which meant that your average educated person in Guangdong went from speaking Cantonese and writing in Literary Chinese to speaking Cantonese and writing in Mandarin. A generation or two ago this person would not have been able to speak Mandarin except as a sort of cipher or word for word translation into Cantonese, but nowadays they will be fully fluent in both spoken forms. While there have been attempts to standardize written Cantonese in Hong Kong and written Hokkien in Taiwan (basically selecting or inventing new characters for all the words without obvious cognates in Mandarin), no one outside of a handful of hardcore separatists and language nerds (and speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead) cares about them, and even the spoken forms are on the road to extinction alongside their failed political projects.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Only temporarily. The next Democratic administration will simply praise all the universities that stood up against "the war on science" and move them to the top of the pecking order, while those that bent the knee will be shunned and see their funding cut in a mirror image of what's happening now.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
And what would they do? Move to China, lol? They're too self-interested for that, and China censors even more things they'd be inclined to make noise about. Move to allied nations, maybe Australia in Tao's case? It's not such a strategic loss given their political alignment with the US.
Most who choose to leave will move to Europe, but a few (early career, mostly foreign-born) will find what China can offer them appealing. There's an outside chance that the EU will get off its ass and become a geopolitical rival to the US, but even if they remain aligned it's risky to outsource your brainpower and key industries, TSMC being the most obvious example.
The sanctity of folks like Tao is a strange notion. They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
That doesn't make him any worse at math. Such beliefs are common in people like Tao from living in a high-IQ bubble their whole lives. You can listen to Richard Feynman claiming that anyone can do physics at his level through hard work alone (apologies for the silly background music). If we were to fire every professor who believed in the blank slate and replace them with true believers in meritocracy, we'd end up with just the inhabitants of this forum. And while the folks here are pretty bright and may include the vice president, I don't think any of us are solving the great mysteries of theoretical physics anytime soon.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The cancelled grants can just as easily be reinstated by the next administration. The only permanent effects in that case would be years of lost work on those projects (perhaps majority useless, but some worthwhile) and some scientists leaving for Europe or China, while the net effects on DEI would be the same as in my proposal. If you know of some damage that has been done to academia that can't be undone 3 years from now, I'm curious to know what it is.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Most of the DEI requirements I am aware of are additional diversity statements tacked on to the ends of grant applications that could easily be eliminated by the funding agencies. That and getting rid of all the unncessary scholarships for women and minorities, which are easy enough to identify, would have achieved more or less the same results as far as fighting wokeness is concerned with minimal collateral damage.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Science's first loyalty is to academia, not the country. And academia is dominated by a culture of rootless cosmopolitanism, which doesn't see any special value in any particular country (least of all America). I have extreme doubt as to The Science's commitment to America being a world leader in anything when they only ever kowtow to their humanities overlords in lieu of fact-finding - overlords who typically hold America in absolute contempt.
Do you expect demands of political loyalty to result in better science when they are coming from the nationalist right rather than the woke left? What would it even mean for academia to place America first? Only working on research projects that increase national power in some tangible way? Refusing to use foreign inventions or admit international students? Making every PhD go through the security clearance vetting process?
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.
This has always been the case. I learned years ago from my professors that when writing a grant proposal under a Democratic administration you say "by improving the electrolyte in this battery we will increase diversity in STEM, lower carbon emissions, and promote gender equality in developing countries" and when writing one under a Republican administration you say "by substituting this zeolite catalyst we will bring jobs to rural areas, ensure American energy independence, and strengthen our national security." While for some (mostly American-born) the former is what they really believe and the latter is just a game they play to hide their power level, for others (many of the foreign-born researchers the current administration seems to want to get rid of) the whole process is just another hoop they need to jump through to continue autistically pursuing their niche interests and they have no true political allegiance.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
About 11 years, after following a link to SSC from some other blog, though I wasn't aware of the culture war thread until the move to /r/theMotte.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
The fertility crisis isn't going to be solved in or by Ukraine. If a solution is found, then Ukrainian wartime casualty counts will be irrelevant assuming they stay within 20th century (i.e. WWI level or less) norms, but could make the difference between Ukraine existing or not as a sovereign state in the future. Presumably the soldiers fighting are motivated by nationalism and care about such things. If a solution isn't found, then we go extinct and this discussion is moot.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Without fixing its manufacturing base, the US will lose any conflict with China that isn't decided in the first few days regardless of whether we're talking about 2022 or 2025 level weapon stockpiles. The fact that running out of 155 mm shells, drones, and missiles in trying to supply Ukraine has led to military and civilian leaders realizing this is a problem and working to solve it is the best thing that could have happened for American military preparedness short of not having outsourced all of those industries in the first place, even if there is a temporary shortage as a result.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Ukrainians are by any measure I can think of more different from Russians than Taiwanese are from Chinese or South Koreans from North Koreans. Kiev began diverging from Moscow at the time of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Also there's been a pretty large divergence between Malaysian Chinese (Largely spun off of southern Hokkien/Teochew/Cantonese/Hakka speakers who have remained in touch with mainland trends via the cultural sinosphere) and Mainland-Chinese, even when speaking Mandarin.
I wouldn't say that the language differences between Malaysia and the Mainland are that great, certainly not compared to the variation within China itself. You could find plenty of grandmother-granddaughter pairs from Fujian (and more from Taiwan, while we're at it) that would sound about the same, as their ancestors all spoke Hokkien. Perhaps the youngest and most highly educated generation of Mainlanders are converging on a Beijing accent regardless of hometown, but such a change has only just begun and will take decades or perhaps centuries to complete.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
If being highly literate is the standard for knowing a language, then the vast majority of people in the world do not even know their native language. This is not to mention cases where someone's mother tongue lacks a literary tradition or even a writing system. It seems to me that in practice most people equate "speaking a language" with something like a B1 level on the CEFR, though your typical Anglophone would probably start saying they speak Spanish or French at an even lower level than that.
I do agree that most people underestimate how hard it is to get from that basic level to high literacy e.g. it would probably be easier for me to learn half a dozen (related) languages to B1 than to get to C2 in my heritage language despite the enormous head start of having literally spoken it at home my entire life. At the end of the day though, language is a tool, and what matters is if it serves its purpose i.e. if you can sing lullabies to your children in your mother tongue, haggle at the market in your local trade language, and read a book in the literary language of your imperial overlords, then you can have a fine life without bothering to "fully learn" any of them.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Ask any Chinese nationalist and you will hear all kinds of animosity towards Europe, particularly Britain and France but also the rest of the Eight-Nation Alliance. Right now it's a bit of a "for you it was the worst day of your life but for me it was Tuesday" sort of situation, but when the power balance is inverted it matters quite a bit what their feelings on the subject are.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development. As an attack on the woke elements of the Academy they seem both disproportionate and poorly targeted, and as an attempt to burn it all to the ground they are clearly insufficient. I'd like to see someone at least propose a new Bell Labs-type enterprise as a replacement for the scientific infrastructure that they're trying to dismantle, if that's the way we're going.
In other news, Elon promised to start a new political party and to primary a bunch of Republican congresscritters if the bill passed. That should be entertaining to watch if he doesn't chicken out.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Maybe it doesn't matter, that in the end us dysgenic neurotics will end up being weeded out of the gene pool, and that future populations will be able to break out of this local minima and take over the world.
This is, unfortunately, the conclusion I have come to. The crisis of meaning is, like the problem of low birthrates, ultimately self-correcting via natural selection, as those without the psychological capacity to handle modernity will end up in some ideological or nihilistic dead end or another and fail to perpetuate their lines. But who knows, maybe someday we'll invent the mental health equivalent of GLP-1 agonists and people will be able to pop a meaning of life pill every morning to motivate themselves.
Multiple countries have changed which side of the road they drive on, adopted the metric system, or switched the alphabet used to write their official language, so clearly such reforms are possible, even if they cause a great deal of temporary confusion. The question is simply whether the inconvenience is worth it and if the political will exists.
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