SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
with simple tips like “wear a suit to a job interview” or “don’t curse in front of your boss.”
Sometimes I forget that the tech industry is weird.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Yesterday, I was indirectly reminded of an old classmate I had in 5th through 7th grade. Out of idle curiosity, I looked him up and found that he had died of a fentanyl overdose last year.
I hadn't really thought of him for decades, and we weren't all that close back then, so it didn't hit me particularly hard, but it did shock me a bit, since he didn't really seem the type. He was from a high-SES family, both parents being archaeologists, and in the same gifted classes as I was. His best friend from back then is an attorney now.
I wonder how people's lives go off the rails like this, even when they seem to have everything going for them.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Maybe even consider removing it from your toothpaste.
Let's do the math on this. Toothpaste is about 0.1% fluoride. Typically you'll put about 1g of toothpaste on your toothbrush, so that's 1 mg of fluoride. If you ingest 10%, that's 0.1 mg. Fluoridated water is typically around 1 mg/L, so by using fluoridated toothpaste twice a day, you're probably ingesting about 10% of what you would get from two liters of fluoridated tap water. Not insignificant, but probably not a major concern.
On the other hand, if it's available in the US, hydroxyapatite toothpaste is a perfectly acceptable substitute, if a bit more expensive.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
the democratic candidate being VP to a very unpopular president, which has historically been a near ironclad portent of defeat.
On the other hand, the Republican candidate was an unpopular President. I don't think we have much data on former Presidents running for a non-consecutive second term after losing reelection once. How many have done that, just Cleveland and Roosevelt?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
YouTube Music is better in the very specific way that it allows you to play songs from YouTube videos on your phone in the background, without keeping the video up on your screen, and without having to download the video at all. If there's a lot of music you want to listen to that is on YouTube and is not licensed to any streaming services, it's the obvious choice.
Which is to say, its killer feature is facilitating light piracy. In other respects it leaves much to be desired, but being a fan of Showa-era Japanese pop music, for me they're the only game in town.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
People often talk about the degree barrier
Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.
That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.
If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.
I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.
Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Parties are private organizations, though. They can just disregard the Colorado primary in deciding which candidate to back in the general election, can't they?
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime.
I don't think supporting a crackdown on crime is authoritarian. Rather, I see my libertarianism and support for incarcerating criminals as two sides of the same coin. I think government should be in the business of protecting people's right to life, liberty, and property. I oppose government trying to take these away, and I oppose criminals trying to take them away.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
I regard it as what happens when libertarians who read Hacker News and Ayn Rand stop believing in liberty.
No, it's more that they stop believing in the ability of democracy to deliver liberty. The whole point of competitive government is that exit is a better guarantee of liberty than voice.
Wealth inequality is a made-up issue. To the extent that we care about economic inequality, our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters. The whole point of accumulating wealth is to allow you or your heirs, or the beneficiaries of your charitable contributions, to consume more in the future. Consumption is what you've taken from the economy, and wealth is the difference between what you've contributed and what you've taken.
For various reasons that should be fairly obvious if you think about it, consumption inequality < income inequality < wealth inequality. That is, in any given year, consumption is most equal and wealth is least equal. Lifetime consumption is even more equal than consumption in a given year, because at least some of the inequality in consumption is just due to life cycle effects. This is also true of income, and even more so of wealth.
Egalitarian ideologues started out talking about income inequality, because it's easiest to measure. At some point they should have realized that it makes more sense to talk about consumption inequality, but instead they went in the opposite direction and started talking about wealth inequality.
Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize. The top 1% might do 5% of all consumption in the US, but they earn 20% of all pre-tax income, and own something like a third of all wealth. US billionaires may have more combined net worth than the bottom 50% of the population (If you say this, a lot of people will incorrectly assume that it means that billionaires own the majority of wealth, which is why Oxfam releases a statement to this effect every year), but they probably consume less than than the bottom 1%. There are fewer than a thousand US billionaires and 3.3 million bottom one-percenters; to consume more than the bottom 1%, billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita. If the bottom 1% each consume $20k per year, that's about $70 million per capita for billionaires. Likely some of the richer billionaires hit that at least some years, but $70 million is quite a lot to spend in one year if you only have a net worth of $1-2 billion.
So if you're trying to promote hatred of the rich and build a consensus for more redistribution, obviously you want to talk about wealth, and not consumption, so that's what we get.
I have a genetic defect that puts me at extremely high risk for developing a fatal neurodegenerative disease in my 50s or 60s. Recent evidence suggests that reducing neuroinflammation might help delay or even prevent onset, and there's also evidence that a diet high in soluble fiber can reduce systemic and neuroinflammation through increasing production of butyrate and reducing production of lipopolysaccharides by gut bacteria.
Which is to say, I've been trying to eat more legumes, but legumes are kind of a pain to cook. I want to live, but I'm also lazy. Purely by chance, a package of ZENB spaghetti, which is made of yellow peas and nothing else, caught my eye at 7-Eleven, and I decided to try it out. With the caveat that I have eaten very little pasta in the past 20 years, and pasta enthusiasts may disagree, it doesn't taste much different from wheat pasta to me. Pasta's mostly just a vehicle for sauce anyway, right?
The more people buy it, the more likely they stay in business, and the less effort it takes for me to do everything I can to keep my brain from eating itself, so I'm pimping it out here. If you like pasta, but wish it had more protein, fiber, and potassium, with fewer empty calories and/or no gluten, try ZENB pasta! Your Italian grandmother will hate it, but you might not!
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I keep hearing about how great everyone feels after quitting drinking, and I kind of feel bad that I don't have a way to get that kind of improvement. For me, not being in a constant state of low-grade chronic alcohol poisoning is just normal, so I don't really appreciate it.
This is actually the second excavation to turn up no actual corpses. I don't think there's any basis for doubt that a lot of children died at the residential schools, partly due to the fact that children dying was a common occurrence back then, and partly due to the fact that they were kept in crowded housing that promoted the spread of infectious disease. Poor nutrition and extra susceptibility to European diseases may or may not have been factors.
However, it's clear now that the false positive rate of these GPR investigations is very high (0 for 48, by my count), and representing these hits as the discovery of definite or probable corpses was grossly irresponsible.
I don't remember to what extent the media actively encouraged this misinterpretation, or at least failed to discourage it in their reporting, but a lot of people were under the impression that these GPR surveys provided proof of hundreds of deaths above and beyond those which had already been documented, and/or cover-ups of actual murders.
My name is a snarky reference to the bizarre fixation of the left on the imaginary crime of crossing state lines during coverage of the Rittenhouse case, and has nothing to do with Nazis.
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
indeed asian crime rates are lower than other ethnicities countrywide
Yes, but Asians are also richer than other ethnicities nationwide. What's interesting about New York City is that for some reason they have the highest poverty rate, and still commit the least crime.
Why Asians have such high poverty rates in New York City is an interesting question. I virtually never see this discussed except as a throwaway line in articles promoting the "Model Minority Myth" myth. I suspect that it has something to do with NYC being a destination for Asian immigrants with limited English and technical skills, and possibly some confounding by age (which would be relevant to the crime issue as well), but I'm not sure.
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
On the other side of the spectrum, of course, you have the shit-test case, where you rally behind the most unsympathetic, obviously in-the-wrong person you can find and dare people to call you on it.
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
I think you're overlooking a simpler explanation: You don't need recruiters if you're not hiring. As for HR, I'm not sure about this, but I suspect that they spend a wildly disproportionate share of their time dealing with onboarding new employees. So there's less need for that during a lull in hiring as well. Plus companies that laid off engineers have fewer existing employees to manage.
SerialStateLineXer
13d ago
Gonzales v. Raich
I just realized that the closer you get to New England, the more specific a background "Yankee" denotes. Overseas, it means an American. In the US it means someone from the Northeast. In the Northeast it specifically refers to someone from New England. I assume that this regresses further, and that in New England it refers to someone from Massachusetts, where it refers to someone from Boston, that within Boston it refers to a specific neighborhood, and that within that neighborhood resides the One True Yankee.
I'm agnostic as to whether it's a hereditary title or one that comes with the house.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Yeah companies want them because they can't leave.
They can, though. There's some paperwork, but it's absolutely possible to change employers on an H-1B visa. It's not even that rare—in 2023, there were 76k approved change of employer petitions, down from something like 120k in 2022 (due to a slowdown in tech hiring generally).
Twitter had a very interesting few days before Christmas, we even saw the return of the huwhite man Jared Taylor to Twitter
It's not "huwhite," just "hwite." Taylor speaks with an accent that hasn't undergone the wine-whine merger, probably because he's from...(checks notes)...Kobe, Japan.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Why would China nuke Taiwan? From their perspective it would be nuking their own people.
I don't pretend to be an expert on foreign policy in general or China-Taiwan relations in particular, so maybe I'm wrong, but that sounds unlikely to me.
My friend Fred says that median real wages for doctors have been going up since 2000 at least. Although $2700/week seems pretty low. What's your source for the claim that they're going down?
Anyway, I don't think we should cut doctors' salaries as such. We should allow more people to become doctors and let the market sort it out.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I'm sure they do seem like a lovely person
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I see this all the time and genuinely wonder why people do this. The person in question is clearly identified as a "girl," and OP consistently refers to her with the appropriate female pronouns. Why the "they/them?"
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
one interesting data point that I've come across is that people who grew up poor tend to lag behind, even after obtaining the degree
It's worth noting here that years of education completed is a piss-poor measure of human capital. It's better than nothing, but there's tremendous variation in IQ, non-cognitive skills, and even knowledge among people who nominally have the same educational attainment. Since IQ and non-cognitive skills are highly heritable, it's not surprising that people whose parents were weak in those areas and consequently had limited earning power do not, on average, accomplish as much with 17 years of formal education as people whose parents were strong in those areas and consequently had high earning power.
The flip side is that if you actually do have those traits, either because you got lucky with meiosis or because your parents were poor for reasons unrelated to lack of talent, your parents having been poor isn't nearly as much of a handicap as that Brookings white paper suggests.
Linoleic acid. I wouldn't say it's unusual, but you wouldn't normally get it in the concentrations you get in processed foods cooked in seed oil.
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