SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Sadly, the conclusion that 95% draw from historical eugenics movements is not that murder and forced sterilization are bad, but that any attempt to make future generations healthier is bad.
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
"Twit" is used commonly in American English. I've made the same joke myself.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%.
While these are mostly Republicans, a substantial minority are Democrats and "liberal" independents who don't trust the media because they aren't shilling hard enough for the left. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
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
1yr ago
Right. If an increase in parents picking up children late is a problem, you're not charging enough. If you charge the right price, either parents will pick their kids up on time, or you'll make enough money from the late fee that you don't care.
SerialStateLineXer
16d ago
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues.
There's a lack of quantitative reasoning in general. People just throw out qualitative claims and assume that the quantitative stuff works out to whatever is most convenient for their argument.
I wonder if there's a connection between this and schoolchildren's notorious aversion to word problems.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
People who really care about anti-semitism are 1) Jews 2) wokes and 3) boomercons.
And with #2, it turned out to be negotiable.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo 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
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.
Someone who spends their money by buying stuff gets hit by sales taxes, while someone who "spends" their money to make more money gets hit with capgains taxes.
And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.
Taxes on investment income distort the trade-off between present and future consumption in a way that neither taxes on consumption nor taxes on wage income do.
There's a superficial appearance of symmetry here, where it seems like taxes on investment income discourage investment and taxes on consumption discourage consumption, but the illusion goes away if you work through the math. The tax system really is set up in a way that penalizes saving and investing.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.
It's kind of surprising. Generally plants that are useful to humans flourish due to intentional cultivation. It's not like wheat went extinct. Though the Wikipedia article does mention some speculation that it may not have been amenable to cultivation for some reason.
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
Do they have e-guy bullshit, or does the easy availability of sex to gay men immunize them?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr 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
5mo ago
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
They should just tax emissions, but it's very important to Democrats that a) they be seen by their base as sticking it to corporations, and b) the increase in the cost of owning and operating a vehicle be seen by the base as caused by corporations raising prices, rather than by Democrats raising taxes.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The thing is, it's not just left: It's oblivious left. They demonstrate absolutely no awareness of then existence of obvious counterarguments to the ridiculous things they say. After the split, /r/SlateStarCodex didn't just move left. It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
It sure was lucky for the left that the Kochs aren't Jewish.
"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
6mo 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
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
1yr ago
There's also the odd Hispanic Asian, due to Asians immigrating to Latin America and their descendants to the United States. I don't know of any famous examples off the top of my head, though.
I think there are also some Hispanic Native Americans, which genetically is most of them, but the Census specifically defines Native Americans as indigenous people of the Americas who maintain tribal affiliation, which narrows it down quite a bit.
God: Hey, I need you to turn my son over to the Romans so that can crucify him.
Jews: :-/
God: Trust me, it'll be awesome! You're my chosen people! Would I lead you astray?
Jews: Well, there were those forty years in the...
God: Oh, for my sakes! Will you let that go already? I gave you manna, didn't I?
Jews: Okay, fine, you're the god.
Jesus: X-(
A thousand years later...
Jews: :-(
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