SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The impression I seem to get from the internet is that lawyers are all miserable alcoholics who wish they had become software engineers.
20 years ago, my girlfriend's CS professor told me I should quit working at Microsoft and go to law school because that's where the real money is. I almost did it, too, until I found out that you have to work like 80 hours a week for years to make partner and start making said real money. Tech is best for smart lazy people.
Interesting guy, though. He taught theory of computation, but I don't think he actually knew anything about software engineering. I can't believe he's still alive; back then he weighed at least 300 pounds and had recently had a stroke.
"Deaths of despair" are confounded by increased use of opioids on an outpatient basis and the subsequent crackdown (leading addicts to substitute more dangerous alternatives), followed by the fentanyl boom.
Also, the other ideas OP mentioned are confounded by mental health care becoming more fashionable, greater awareness, greater access to mental health care due to increases in income, changes in insurance coverage, etc.
Finding an objective measure of mental health that's been tracked reliably over time is a very difficult problem.
IMO Angus Deaton, the guy pushing the "deaths of despair" narrative, is cashing in his Nobel credibility to push an ideological narrative that is at best one of multiple hypotheses consistent with the available evidence.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
As someone who is smarter than the average academic and chose to go into industry, this is how I've always thought of it. A lot of leftists have an ideological hatred of industry, or at least think of it as vulgar. So they just stay in academia forever, if they can, even if they have to accept adjunct wages.
I had the grades and test scores to get into a high-ranked PhD program, but I wanted to go into industry, partly for the money, but partly because industry is awesome. In the years since, I've gained more respect for what academia could have been, while simultaneously losing respect for what it actually is. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck around for a PhD so I could do research, but if I had, I'd be doing research in industry.
This creates a vicious cycle, where the overrepresentation of leftists in academia allows them to make it less attractive to non-leftists, which further increases their overrepresentation, and now it's become so extreme that they've been allowed to enforce ideological tests for hiring.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
And interest rates were kept artificially low for 14 of those years.
I see this claim a lot, and it's based on a misunderstanding of what the Fed actually does. If the Fed tries to lower interest rates below the natural rate of interest and hold them there, we get inflation. Now, not after 14 years.
What the Fed actually does is help markets clear faster by targeting the natural rate of interest, i.e. the rate at which the amount of money people want to lend is equal to the amount other people want to borrow. This results in savings being efficiently channeled into investments. If the Fed sets rates too high, there are excess savings that don't get borrowed, causing a recession. If the Fed sets rates too low, it causes inflation.
The fact that inflation was unusually low in the 2010s tells us that the Fed was more or less correctly targeting the natural interest rate, or even a bit above it; the natural interest rate may have actually been negative in the early 2010s.
The huge spike in inflation in 2021 was not the chickens coming come to roost after 14 years of artificially low interest rates. It was the result of a sharp increase in the money supply that made the early rounds of QE look like anthills, combined with excessive stimulus, and pandemic savings burning holes in the pockets of middle-class consumers.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
What's the problem? You made a lot of economic contributions while taking back little in return for a long time, and now you have a surplus accumulated. By deferring your consumption, you allow the diversion of resources towards investment, which improves productivity and makes workers better off. The wealth you enjoy now is the fruit of your past labors. This is everything working exactly as it should.
A small minority of people get to skip the first part, because their parents deferred consumption to the next generation. It's not fair, but it's not really a problem. They're not hurting anyone, and their accumulated capital benefits workers, again through higher productivity. Seize the accumulated capital and give it to the masses to spend on present consumption, and that will divert resources away from investment, slowing economic growth.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Communism mainly hates people for things that they can change about themselves (being rich, being capitalists, being landlords, etc.), whereas racism hates people for things they can't change about themselves.
This is why communism is worse than racism. Hating people for their virtues is worse than hating people for morally neutral properties like race.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The scaling also heavily favors low earners:
For an individual who first becomes eligible for old-age insurance benefits or disability insurance benefits in 2023, or who dies in 2023 before becoming eligible for benefits, his/her PIA will be the sum of: (a) 90 percent of the first $1,115 of his/her average indexed monthly earnings, plus (b) 32 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $1,115 and through $6,721, plus (c) 15 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $6,721.
Social Security has great returns if you earn minimum wage your whole life, and terrible returns if you consistently cap out every year.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I'm not sure if this is Thomas's, but an originalist interpretation of the Commerce Clause would invalidate pretty much all federal regulation of intrastate activity. The Commerce Clause only gives Congress authority to regulate interstate commerce, not anything which might conceivably affect interstate commerce.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Even if we interpret this as a Constitutional requirement that an appointed Senator be a resident of the state, it would be trivial to work around. Newsom could have had her move yesterday and appointed her today.
That said, this was almost certainly a drafting oversight, and Newsom is acting contrary to the spirit of the law. Seriously, there are a million black women in California. How hard could it have been to find one who would reliably vote with party leadership? Why not just pretend to care about the Constitution, when the stakes are so low?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I'm currently about 154lbs, and by the numbers, in order for me to exercise enough to lose a whole pound I have to run a literal marathon.
That actually might not be enough. The usual estimate is 100 calories burned per mile, which means that a marathon should burn 2,600 calories, which is not enough to lose a pound of fat.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Now you make me want to quit drinking. The only problem is that I never started.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Yeah. The math is a bit counterintuitive if you're used to thinking about income taxes. For example, a 100% sales tax only creates a tax wedge of 50%, and a sales tax can go over 100%. To create the 95% tax wedge that inspired the song "Taxman," you'd need a 1,900% sales tax.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Before the current epoch, the knock on a Fair Texas was that it would encourage excess saving and reduce consumption, thereby stalling out the economy. This no longer makes sense.
It never made sense. The income tax system discourages savings and encourages excessive present consumption at the expense of investment in future consumption. A consumption tax is neutral with respect to the trade-off between present and future consumption. It results in a ratio of present to future consumption that is appropriate, given the time preference of consumers.
In the long run, the economy is perfectly capable of adjusting to less demand for present consumption and more demand for investments. And the whole point of central banks is to make the adjustment smooth. We should not try to use an inefficient tax system to do what central banks can do efficiently.
In the long run, a tax system that encourages an excessive baseline level of present consumption will not prevent recessions, and it will result in slower growth due to less investment.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
In a nutshell: If we adopt the FairTax, many taxes are gone, replaced by a 23% sales tax on new products and services.
It's actually defined such that the tax is 23% of the total amount you pay, including tax. So if the total price is $100, $23 goes to the tax and $77 to the seller. It's more like a 30% tax.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.
I'm puzzled that anyone is puzzled by this. Living is awesome, and 80 years isn't nearly enough, especially when the last 60 are spent in slow decay.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I don't know. I'm not sure that US politicians get credit for consistently voting against this resolution. My perception that it's mostly ignored, and when people pay attention to it, it's "OMG, the [current] administration doesn't want to condemn Nazis! I'm so ashamed to be American!"
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Good example of this: Every year for a decade or more, there has been a UN resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. Back in 2017, an old friend of mine—a single, middle-aged Seattle woman with all the political attitudes that implies—shared a link to this article about the US, fuming about how "shameful" it was that the US stood nearly alone in voting against it. I pointed out that the Obama administration had voted against it as well, which took a bit of the wind out of her sails, but she was already committed, so she said that was shameful, too.
The rest of the story:
- While only the US and two other countries voted against it, (almost?) every advanced democracy abstained.
- The other two countries voting against? Ukraine and Palau.
- The country sponsoring the resolution every year? Russia.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
IMO these are very different. Sheeple passively accept the status quo, while NPCs actively recite a script, which may or may not be supportive of the status quo.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I think people need to stop assuming that conditions that are clearly due to extraordinary circumstances will continue indefinitely. We know why buying a house is difficult now. Mortgage rates are high because the Fed has raised rates to get inflation under control, and home prices are not adjusting downwards because people don't want to move and trade in their 3% mortgages for 7% mortgages.
Sooner or later, one of two things will happen:
- The Fed will start lowering rates.
- People will start selling houses again because they can't hold on forever.
Ideally we would also build a lot more homes, but that would require better voters, so don't hold your breath.
Also, the home ownership rate is currently 66%. The only time on record when it's been higher is 1997-2011, and even then it was only a little bit higher (the 2020 spike was just an artifact of pandemic-era polling practices). The percentage of people who don't own their own homes is about what it's always been.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
That chart is not actually the median mortgage payment, but what a mortgage for the median home sale price at current mortgage rates would be, correct?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I couldn't find any reference to Cohn from more than a few years ago.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I seem to recall the name from maybe 5-10 years ago, with some annoyance, like maybe pushing ultrawoke Code of Conduct mandates on open source projects.
Are you thinking of Coraline Ada Ehmke?
It's the "safe edgy" meme!
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