SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
The average person's intuitions about what a "reasonable" wealth distribution should look like are totally unmoored from reality. Imagine a country full of people who all earn the same income, save the same percentage of it, earn the same return on their investments, retire at the same age, spend down their retirement savings at the same rate, and die at the same age. Literally just people living the exact same life with staggered birth years. Show the average subject in that "Sweden" study a pie chart of that wealth distribution, and he'll say it's way too unequal.
I could go on for pages and pages about how stupid wealth inequality discourse is and how little sense the way people think about it makes.
Dan Ariely, the lead author of that study, was recently at the center of a huge fraud scandal for some unrelated research. The data he used were definitely manipulated, but I guess he managed to convince the investigators that someone else did it and he didn't know. I have no basis on which to doubt that finding, but I haven't seen the evidence.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Nice. I've been in the top 0.5% in Japan for a couple years now, but that's bush league. It might not even put me in the top 5% in the US.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Surely learning Georgian is unlikely to increase your earning power meaningfully, so the claim must be about correlation, not causation. Most Americans who speak Spanish are Latinos, and Latinos tend to make below-average incomes. Most people who speak other languages are either positively selected immigrants, or natives who were smart and conscientious enough to learn another language as adults. So they tend to make more.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo 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.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
Payroll expenses are about 5% of federal spending. Laying off half of the employees would have only a minimal effect on total spending.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Some guy in China killed 35 people by driving a car around a running track.
Not that I'm complaining, but why doesn't this happen more often?
Much is made of the fact that US has more guns and many more mass shooting incidents than other wealthy nations, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that guns make it easy to kill a lot of people. But so do cars, and those are widely available in most wealthy nations.
So why is it that the US has a lot of mass shootings (yes, I know that they're a tiny percentage of total homicides), but running cars into crowds is fairly rare in countries that don't have such easy access to guns? Are Americans just especially prone to running amok? Are mass shootings a meme? Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
I don't have any good theories; I'm just noticing my confusion.
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
2mo ago
How did he get through the interview? Was it on-site, or could he have used AI?
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
How do we distinguish the effects of COVID from the effects of the anti-standards and anti-law-enforcement movement born out of BLM?
SerialStateLineXer
10mo ago
Are you familiar with the PoliSci 101 arguments against campaigning on sensible economic policy?
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
It's been working in practice for generations.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Bones heal, pain is temporary, and chicks dig scars.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo 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
4mo ago
I have a 10x coworker, and from what I know of our company's pay scale, he makes around four times what an entry-level engineer makes, and probably twice what an unremarkable mid-career engineer makes.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Things go up and down
Ideally more than 13 times.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
Any major Social Security savings are going to have to come from legislation, because the formulas for payouts are dictated by law. Maybe they find some people cashing dead parents' checks, but I don't expect that to be more than a small single-digit percentage, if that. Plus there's no real room for discretion, since payouts are only based on contributions and age of retirement.
There's some room for fraud in disability, but rooting that out without inspecting each individual on a case-by-case basis might be tough. Maybe they can look for doctors with anomalously high rates of diagnosing disability that can't be explained by specialty.
There's a lot more room for fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, because there's much more room for discretion. Again, reviewing individual cases is probably not possible, but maybe they can find providers with anomalous numbers.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
During the 2008 recession, the homicide rate continued falling. It didn't start rising again until the Ferguson Effect kicked in in 2015.
SerialStateLineXer
10mo ago
We're all out of ideas. We've tried restricting supply, we've tried subsidizing demand, and nothing works!
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
The idea is that since drug dealers are disproportionately black, they must have some special expertise that will give them an edge in legal cannabis sales.
Of course, most drug dealers' comparative advantage is in willingness to risk prison and engage in violence to defend their turf, neither of which are particularly useful in sales of legal products.
Surprising no one who gave it five minutes of thought in advance, neither black nor Latino people have, in fact dominated legal cannabis retailing.
Either she didn't get the memo, or she's alluding to some sort of program that privileges black-owned (i.e. mostly white-owned with black figureheads) cannabis businesses.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
You linked to an article about Bryan Caplan's book, but Caplan believes that most of the correlation between educational attainment and earnings is causal, but that in most cases it's mediated by signaling rather than by human capital improvements.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
Is he saying we should practice eugenics?
Not that I'm opposed, but...he knows about heredity and the poor track record of educational interventions above and beyond what we're already doing, so what else could he mean by "creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society?"
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).
The new editors-in-chief have been named, Crémieux is tentatively optimistic, but that has to be weighed against the suspicious selection process and the reaction of the other editors.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
And it's almost certainly disallowed by the Constitution.
There's nothing in the Constitution that bars corporal punishment. There's a prohibition on "cruel and unusual" punishment, but we know this doesn't mean all corporal punishment, because it was widely practiced at the time and not ended until long after the ratification of the Bill of Rights.
Certainly it's plausible that a Supreme Court containing at least five left-leaning Justices who take a somewhat cavalier attitude towards their oath to uphold the Constitution might rule that the Eighth Amendment bans corporal punishment, but that would be them, not the Constitution.
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?"
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