SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic
I witnessed a similar exchange with another Indian guy at a presentation on pronouns. God bless the unassimilated and keep them safe from cancellation.
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
2yr 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.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
The users of Bluesky, a platform that promotes itself as X/Twitter but without hate speech
Without hate speech, or with the right kind of hate speech?
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.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
realizing that the government's deficit is the private sector's surplus, which most people find desirable and wouldn't want to cut.
You're reasoning from an accounting identity, and I won't stand for it.
Yes, in order for the private sector as a whole to be a net creditor, the government must be a net debtor, but that's meaningless. There's no reason we should care about the private sector being a net creditor.
Note that this does not mean that the private sector can't accumulate net positive wealth without government debt. Private wealth did not decline along with net federal debt in the late 1990s, but grew rapidly. Real wealth is physical assets, not entries in a ledger.
It's true that if government doesn't run deficits private investors can't invest in government bonds, but they can buy private bonds or invest in equities. The government borrowing doesn't alleviate private actors of the burden of borrowing so that others may be creditors, but adds to the burden of private borrowers by driving up interest rates and reducing the amount of capital corporations can get by issuing stock.
If there's enough demand for government bonds that government can borrow at rates low enough to invest in infrastructure that will add enough value to pay for itself, that's a reasonable thing to do, but government borrowing does not, in itself, enrich the private sector.
Under no circumstances should the government borrow 6% of GDP at 4% interest at the peak of the business cycle in order to subsidize middle-class consumption.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
he is seen as a well-meaning dorky guy who likes jews so cannot be bunched with ss sympathisers
You are greatly underestimating the power of motivated reasoning.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Selective immigration, probably. We're not getting random Jamaicans.
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
This comment awakened ancient memories within me, and I reflexively looked around for a link to a site selling counterfeit handbags or something.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo 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
1yr ago
But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.
College students have been engaging in consequence-free (well, except for Rachel Corrie) protesting of Israel for decades.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
This is pretty bleak: Adjusted for inflation, South Africa's GDP per capita is up less than 7% since 1974.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
I'm 100% on team HBD, because that's where the evidence strongly points, and I'm sick of midwits trying to smear those of us who can actually follow the science as racists, but "normalize Indian hate" sounds an awful lot like actual racism to me.
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
7mo ago
It's been working in practice for generations.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo 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
1yr ago
The scaling also heavily favors low earners:
For an individual who first becomes eligible for old-age insurance benefits or disability insurance benefits in 2023, or who dies in 2023 before becoming eligible for benefits, his/her PIA will be the sum of: (a) 90 percent of the first $1,115 of his/her average indexed monthly earnings, plus (b) 32 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $1,115 and through $6,721, plus (c) 15 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $6,721.
Social Security has great returns if you earn minimum wage your whole life, and terrible returns if you consistently cap out every year.
That's the motte, but people pushing the systemic racism narrative routinely go out of their way to interpret it in ways that make modern white people the villains. The standard response to "I never owned slaves" is "But you benefit from the perpetuation of a system of racial privilege and oppression†." Maybe it's not technically your fault, but it's totally your fault. Also, modern white people are actively perpetuating systemic racism with microaggressions, cultural appropriation, voting to imprison criminals, not voting for reparations, reading to their kids, demanding that high schools teach calculus, etc.
There is some hypothetical systemic racism narrative that scrupulously avoids blaming modern white people just minding their own business, but it's not the one we get in the real world.
†Not actually true; white people would actually be better off if black people started performing at par. Less crime, less welfare dependency, no longer needing to pick up the slack on taxes, etc. We'd still have to deal with opioid addicts, but many of the US's problems would diminish greatly.
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
Specifically, IQ is positively correlated with classical liberalism. As a classical liberal, this doesn't bother me much.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Why do we keep on writing bloated shit?
Because hardware is good enough that we can get away with it, kind of.
I work at a large company with a couple thousand software engineers and fairly selective interviews, and it's unbelievable how much waste there is in terms of easy optimizations left undone. There are $10,000 bills just lying around all over the place, and people often drag their feet on fixing them even when I point it out and spell out the solution.
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
If I ask you what’s the result of 22+2, you are most likely going to answer 24, but if I ask you what’s 22:00+2:00, you are likely not going to answer 24:00 (which isn’t a thing)
It's quite common in Japan to see a bar or restaurant with posted hours of operation from 17:00 to 27:00 (i.e. from 5:00 PM to 3:00 AM). 27:00 is valid in the same sense that 27/24 or 400° is valid; we might call it an "improper time."
You also don't specify whether 22:00 is time of day or duration. If it's a duration, then 24:00 is clearly the correct answer.
SerialStateLineXer
22d ago
Caplan's record, as he readily admits, is somewhat less impressive when you account for the fact that he wins by consistently betting in favor of consensus and the future being like the past. He's not successfully predicting black swan events, but arbitraging others' overestimation of the frequency of black swan events.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
An interesting result of an economy where everyone is equally talented is that the least enjoyable jobs pay the best. People actually have to choose to do those jobs rather than being stuck with them because they're not smart enough to be engineers or whatever.
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.
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