SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
HBD is important because it's a refutation of the myth that low black and indigenous achievement is due to racism. It's also a refutation of antisemitic conspiracy theories about high Jewish achievement.
You point out the effects of genetics denialism on education, but it goes far beyond that. It also results in nonsensical ideas about and policies to address underrepresentation in cognitively demanding occupations, earnings and wealth gaps, incarceration rates, and even a literal blood libel about the causes of racial disparities in police shootings.
Note that although race gets all the attention, there's also class HBD, i.e. differences in average genetic potential for academic and professional achievement that break down along class lines, which is the main reason why even within races we see that children of successful parents tend to do better in school and earn more than children of poor parents. Because of genetics denialism, we get pants-on-head stupid discourse about "mobility" premised on the ridiculous idea that intergenerational income elasticity can be entirely attributed to rich parents buying advantages for their children and poor children having no chance to get ahead.
A lot of people, mistakenly believing that HBD is racist, nevertheless don't buy into the idea that racism causes racial achievement gaps, instead attributing the gaps to culture. There's probably a grain of truth here, but the very small effect of shared environment on adult IQ in twin studies is hard to reconcile with SES or culture explaining more than a small portion of the gap.
Aside from the fact that it appears to be wrong, I don't like the fact that this hypothesis adds insult to injury. Why blame people for something they can't help.
As for the dysgenic effects of welfare combined with low fertility among the cognitive elite, I do worry about this and would certainly be in favor of, e.g. sterilization of convicted violent criminals or making welfare eligibility contingent on use of long-term birth control, but I'm counting on genetic engineering to save us from the long-term consequences of the dysgenics program the government has been running.
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
The problem is that no one has $1bn plus in cash, gold, or liquid assets that can be accessed without distorting the market.
The total market cap of all listed US stocks is in the tens of trillions. Pulling out a billion dollars isn't going to tank the market. Bezos and Musk each sold $10 billion in stock last year.
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
Canned fish is the main source of edible bones. The canning process makes them brittle and easy to chew. You want ones that haven't been completely deboned.
I imagine there's something you could do to get the calcium out of bird or mammal bones, but it's probably a lot of work. You might as well just take supplements.
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
You're not going to get much calcium out of cream, anyway. There's yogurt. The other main source is bones, e.g. from canned sardines. After that, you have green vegetables. See here:
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
Here's a historical chart of the monthly quit rate for accommodation and food service. It's unusually high, but only about half a point higher than 2006-2007, and unemployment was higher then. And it's headed downwards. It's possible that the spike we saw last year was just "filling in the hole" from 2020, as people who had been waiting for a good time to quit their jobs took advantage of the opportunity. Also, total employment in these industries is still rising. A lot of the people quitting those jobs are quitting for other jobs in the same industry.
Quiet quitting is just a new term for an old phenomenon. I remember seeing an article recently pointing to survey data showing that self-reported levels of engagement at work had decreased only slightly, so I think it's probably overhyped.
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
One thing that changed is that there has been an excavation of 33 GPR hits at a former hospital site in Camsell. It turned up zero actual bodies.
But that's probably not what prompted the pope's visit. The the best of my knowledge, no actual human remains have been found yet as a result of the GPR canvassing. Why risk it?
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
Order a custom orange shirt with an appropriate quote from Havel printed on it.
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
There are, broadly speaking, two types of growth:
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Extensive growth is where you increase outputs by increasing inputs.
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Intensive growth is where you increase outputs through process improvements that allow you to produce more or higher-quality outputs with the same inputs.
In recent decades, economic growth in wealthy countries has been heavily skewed towards intensive growth. For example, carbon emissions per capita peaked in the 70s in the US, and total emissions peaked just before the GFC. Growth is coming mainly from producing better stuff, not from producing more stuff. Computing technology is the ultimate example of this: Computers are orders of magnitude more powerful than they were in the 80s, but use the same materials in the same quantities, more or less.
The socialist claim that capitalism requires infinite growth (it doesn't, although increases in per-capita GDP are certainly desirable) and therefore requires infinite growth in resource consumption is simply false. We have had quite a lot of intensive growth, and can continue to do so indefinitely. In theory, there may be some optimal state of the economy beyond which no improvements are possible, but that's so far removed from the status quo that it's a purely theoretical concern.
The point of growth is that it increases material standards of living. That aside, there's a cognitive bias where people perceive slow growth as regression. This is how you get people like Bernie Sanders and his followers on Reddit insisting that real incomes have collapsed when all the evidence says otherwise. Living in a high-growth economy just feels better than living in a low-growth economy.
Actually, that's not a perp walk. The article says that they were put on home detention. That seems really weird for someone accused of trying to sell secrets to Russia.
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
He looked like a man in the perp walk video. Not in a failing-to-pass way, but literally like a very average man making no attempt whatsoever to look like a woman. Either his earlier coming-out was just a grift, or he's had a change of heart since.
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
I don't think she would be considered black in the US, except by people who have an ideological interest in her being considered as such.
SerialStateLineXer
4yr ago
This is a problem that I don't think has a good solution. For example, consider the principle of academic freedom. On the one hand, there are major benefits to academics having the ability to conduct research without being constrained by the government. On the other hand, this can also go horribly wrong, as in the current situation where we have entire fields that have flushed rigor down the toilet and are just churning out straight-up propaganda. It's not clear to me that there's a way to have the benefits of academic freedom without the pitfalls.
Connecticut has a strict limit on punitive damages, so the damages are all compensatory. Given the implausibility of the idea of actual damages being that high (for comparison, OJ Simpson was ordered to pay only $8.5 million in compensatory damages for killing two people), I think it's pretty clear that the jury is trying to do an end run around the punitive damages cap.
If juries are allowed to award arbitrary punitive damages as long as they call them compensatory, then there is, in effect, no cap on punitive damages. An activist judge may allow this to stand, but it seems pretty clearly illegal to me.
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