SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
In the immediate aftermath of the January 6th riots, there was what appeared to be a coordinated campaign to get as many people as possible to use the word "insurrection" to describe it.
This never occurred to me at the time, but were Democrats playing the long game here, trying to build a consensus that Trump had engaged in insurrection and thus was disqualified to run again in 2024?
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
SerialStateLineXer
8mo 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
8mo 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?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
and said "there are stats that look at crime in others countries and they take a steamy shit on the 13/50 stat."
Am I correct in assuming that he was unable or unwilling to produce these stats?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
What I would do myself: I'd go "yeah I knew it, wireless earbuds are a stupid product" and go back to wired forever.
I use wired headphones with a USB dongle on my Pixel 6. There's a loud white noise effect that plays whenever the volume falls below a certain threshold.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Nara Burns is an anime character? I always assumed that your user name was a reference to a historical event involving the burning of Nara, or maybe the annual festival where they burn text into the hillside in Nara.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
It sure was lucky for the left that the Kochs aren't Jewish.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I occasionally dip into Cyberpunk 2077 to marvel at the production quality
Huh. That's not a sentence I expected to see based on what I've heard.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr 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
1mo ago
I've done it. I had a lot of money saved up and needed a break. The hardest part was not getting through interviews for another job, but psyching myself up to update my resume, which I hate doing.
Ultimately it depends on how much money you have saved and how much of it you're willing to burn through and how tight the labor market in your industry is. If the labor market is tight, you can probably find another job without too much trouble even if you're not currently employed.
But I was applying for software engineering jobs in 2012, so my experience may be nonrepresentative. I wouldn't quit my current job without a replacement lined up.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
The radical DSA councilwoman retired, and was replaced with the "more conservative" of the two choices
This was due to a redistricting that pretty much guaranteed she would lose, right?
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I do not get the appeal of dogs with small heads and long faces. Those things creep me out.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Keeping the peace is a fairly small part of most modern governments' budgets. Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.
If we were to say that Bill Gates' tax bill should be equal to a share of military and police expenditures proportional to his share of the nation's aggregate wealth, he'd get a tax cut. If we value a statistical life at a mere $1 million ($10 million is more typical), then the US has a total wealth of around $500 trillion. Gates has a net worth of about $100 billion, or 0.02%. Military plus police spending is around $1 trillion per year, so he'd have to pay around $200 million per year, which I believe is less than he's actually averaged over the past few decades; he claims to have paid over $10 billion in taxes. And that's with an extremely conservative valuation of a statistical life; a more reasonable valuation would put his annual tax bill well under $100 million.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo 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
7mo 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
7mo 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
8mo ago
To elaborate on this, a town has to have an economic raison d'etre: Something they produce to export in order to get money to buy imports. A mining town might export minerals, a factory town might export manufactured goods, a farming town food, a tourist destination might "export" hotel and restaurant services. Everyone else earns money by by providing services to people who produce the exports, or by providing services to those people, and so forth. In principle you could have a small town supported by exporting things like software, but I don't know whether any such towns actually exist.
When a town no longer produces things to export, it no longer has a reason to exist. The sole service it provides to the outside world in exchange for money to buy imports with is qualifying for welfare.
People blame the government for not giving it a reason to exist, but if the government subsidizes unprofitable industries for the sake of propping up a town with no economic reason to exist, the residents are just LARPing at being productive. Maybe it's cheaper than just giving them straight-up welfare and getting nothing at all in exchange, but in the long run, this isn't good for anyone involved.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
I've seen about a hundred people express concern over what other people would do if HBD became public knowledge, and about zero people express the idea that we should enshrine racial discrimination in law because of HBD. There's some selection bias here, of course—I don't really hang out in racist forums—but I do think that the idea of equality before the law is deeply enshrined in the modern American consciousness. Pushes for racial discrimination come almost exclusively from the environmentalist left. We do not, in general, endorse restrictions on the rights of people with low intelligence. There's a very strong knee-jerk reaction against the idea of, e.g., gating voting behind a test of civic literacy, or sterilizing institutionalized women with severe mental disabilities, who are at elevated risk of sexual abuse and clearly incapable of raising children.
Given that there's extremely strong resistance to any kind of limitations on the rights of individuals with even severe intellectual disabilities, the idea that the public would suddenly decide to restrict the rights of even highly intelligent individuals on the basis of membership in ethnic groups with low average intelligence strikes me as wildly implausible. Meanwhile, the insane overreaction to racial achievement gaps by heredity denialists is a very real problem that we're dealing with right now.
Could you give a couple of example? This reeks of "our enemies hate us because they know we're right", which is basically never correct.
Off the top of my head, I can give you one. The other two recent examples that come to mind would require self-doxxing. Here's Jamelle Bouie on Richard Hanania:
The question to ask here — the question that matters — is: Why does an otherwise obscure racist have the ear and support of some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley? What purpose, to a billionaire venture capitalist, do Hanania’s ideas serve?
Look back to our history, and the answer is straightforward. Just as in the 1920s (and before), the idea of race hierarchy works to naturalize the broad spectrum of inequalities and capitalist inequality in particular.
If some groups are simply meant to be at the bottom, then there are no questions to ask about their deprivation, isolation and poverty. There are no questions to ask about the society which produces that deprivation, isolation and poverty. And there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done: Those people are just the way they are.
If some groups — and really, if some individuals — are simply meant to be at the top, then there are no questions to ask about their wealth, status and power.
I'm not saying that Bouie has done a deep dive into the evidence, concluded that there is in fact a strong genetic basis for racial achievement gaps, and decided that he has to help cover it up. I'm not saying he hates us because he knows we're right. Frankly, I don't respect him enough to give him that much credit. What I'm saying is that I don't think he cares that much about the science, and that his true objection is that hereditarian explanations for achievement gaps undermine the idea that these gaps are the product of a deliberately rigged economy, and let those bastards off the hook. He's pretty explicit about this.
SerialStateLineXer
10mo ago
That's far smaller than the bill that the Apollo creator would be getting for my usage when I'm on mobile.
Reddit's been saying that under their current pricing model the average Apollo user would incur about $2.50/month in API charges, and that Apollo is a particularly inefficient user of the API, with other applications like RIF incurring about a dollar per month per user in API charges.
However, it's not really clear what an "average" user is. Maybe it's diluted by a bunch of users who only use it for a few minutes per day.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
There are gas taxes, but they're mostly to fund roads, so they may cover the cost of roads (though I'm not 100% sure of even that), but they don't also cover the social cost of carbon emissions. There also aren't generally taxes on other uses of fossil fuels.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
You cite the unadjusted PE RR of 1.54, but after they adjust for the fact that patients receiving the Pfizer vaccine were older and more likely to be in nursing homes than the controls, the RR fell to 1.15. Given the small RR, the fact that they made many comparisons, and the fact that no such increase was observed for the Moderna vaccine, with a similar mechanism of action and higher dose, this is very likely to be either spurious, or possibly related to a Pfizer-specific adjuvant rather than to the mRNA LNPs.
Also, that autopsy paper you're tricking out all over the thread is not the smoking gun you think it is. It's been known and widely acknowledged that the mRNA vaccines are associated with myocarditis and pericarditis mostly in young males at a rate of about 5 per 100k, compared to 150 per 100k in infected patients. If you live in a country with a high chance of infection, such as the US, vaccination greatly reduces risk even when ignoring all the other sequelae of COVID-19 infection and considering only myocarditis risk.
There's been a group of people who clearly have a deep ideological and emotional investment in mRNA vaccines being far more harmful than COVID-19, and who have demonstrated a tendency to grossly misinterpret various data, anecdotes, or urban legends in order to provide support for that claim. After chasing down numerous such claims and finding that they don't hold up, I usually just don't bother. When I do, it's more in the spirit of, "How specifically did was this nonsense rationalized?" rather than out of wanting to see whether it's true. Anti-vaxxers just have no credibility left.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
There's also this Random Critical Analysis post.
Also important to note that the correlation between crime and poverty is confounded by personality and cognitive traits. People with low intelligence and poor impulse control tend to commit more crime and not be very employable. That doesn't prove that the poverty causes the crime. So much of what R*dditors "know" about sociology is either just made up, or at best based on low-quality research that fails to account for obvious confounders.
We have these:
Edit: This was supposed to be a response to that comment speculating about the effects of reducing the male : female ratio. I'm not sure what happened.
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