SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
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.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
8 episodes released over six weeks (two episodes the first week).
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The problem is that no one has $1bn plus in cash, gold, or liquid assets that can be accessed without distorting the market.
The total market cap of all listed US stocks is in the tens of trillions. Pulling out a billion dollars isn't going to tank the market. Bezos and Musk each sold $10 billion in stock last year.
SerialStateLineXer
24d ago
I think the reason for higher rates of comorbidities among low-IQ individuals from higher-IQ populations is that you're very unlikely to get an IQ two standard deviations below the mean purely because of additive genetic effects, so a large proportion of people with IQs this low are going to have some major developmental disorder causing the cognitive deficit. On the other hand, if an IQ of 70 is only one standard deviation below the population mean, then a sixth of the population is going to get there with additive genetic effects and a relatively small proportion will get there through some major developmental disorder.
I don't think it works the other way. The only way you get an IQ two standard deviations above the mean is with additive genetic effects. There's no anti-Down syndrome, where you can get an extra chromosome that gives you 30 extra IQ points.
However, it's worth noting that black students don't actually perform better in college than white students with the same test scores. They're just more likely to enroll and stick it out to the end. This is why I suspect that non-academic factors like higher family SES and athletics play a role. Unlike raw IQ, educational attainment has a substantial shared environment component in twin studies, probably due to a combination of cultural attitudes toward education and parents' ability to help pay for college.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflation-and-its-impact-on-inflation.htm
For example, if a half-gallon (64 oz) of Brand A vanilla ice cream is priced in January 2021 at $5.99, then the effective price per ounce is $5.99 divided by 64 oz or $0.093 per ounce. If, in February 2021, the same Brand A vanilla ice cream is reduced in size to 60 oz, but the price is still $5.99, the effective price per ounce would be $0.0998 per ounce. This results in a 6.7-percent increase in the price per ounce of the ice cream, and the CPI would include this price increase.
Our economists even adjust for items that do not have a weight, like toilet paper. For example, when the number of sheets per toilet paper roll changes from 220 per roll to 200, the economist will adjust the data to show a 10-percent price-per-sheet increase.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
With programmers you can get some degree of bilateral monopoly power, where a long-time employee of a firm has a lot of firm-specific knowledge, which is very valuable to the firm but not to anyone else. This the programmer has something unique to offer the firm, and the firm is the only one willing to pay for it.
This is probably more likely to happen at non-tech firms, as tech firms are better at making sure that no crucial software is exclusively maintained by one person.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Another approach is to bar public schools from requiring or giving pay premiums for advanced education degrees.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
I'm not sure if this is Thomas's, but an originalist interpretation of the Commerce Clause would invalidate pretty much all federal regulation of intrastate activity. The Commerce Clause only gives Congress authority to regulate interstate commerce, not anything which might conceivably affect interstate commerce.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
It was this executive order, repealed on Biden's first day in office.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr 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
1yr ago
Order a custom orange shirt with an appropriate quote from Havel printed on it.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo 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.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
I think that academic freedom does have some value, so I'm not sure I'm ready to throw my support behind government stepping in and regulating the research of academics, even at public universities.
However, there are totally reasonable ways governments can regulate public universities that do not infringe on academic freedom:
- Ban ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions.
- Regulate the activities of administrators and the number of staff which can be hired for certain roles.
- Ban the use of DEI statements and other ideological tests and discrimination in hiring.
These are broad principles, not blueprints for concrete laws. I'm well aware that "no ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions at public universities" sessions is unlikely to be an effective law; it needs to spell out the details, and multiple passes may be required to plug loopholes.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
I'm not familiar with the historical Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean/Adriatic classification system, but it corresponds pretty well to the clear pattern of differences between Germanic, Romance, and Balkan (and Slavic more generally) countries. The North Germanic and West Germanic distinction is a bit more subtle, but it's still there.
I don't have a strong opinion on how much of this is genetic and how much is cultural or otherwise path-dependent, but if you look at HDI rankings, there is almost a complete disjunction between Germanic, Romance, and Balkan countries.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Connecticut has a strict limit on punitive damages, so the damages are all compensatory. Given the implausibility of the idea of actual damages being that high (for comparison, OJ Simpson was ordered to pay only $8.5 million in compensatory damages for killing two people), I think it's pretty clear that the jury is trying to do an end run around the punitive damages cap.
If juries are allowed to award arbitrary punitive damages as long as they call them compensatory, then there is, in effect, no cap on punitive damages. An activist judge may allow this to stand, but it seems pretty clearly illegal to me.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
There are, broadly speaking, two types of growth:
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Extensive growth is where you increase outputs by increasing inputs.
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Intensive growth is where you increase outputs through process improvements that allow you to produce more or higher-quality outputs with the same inputs.
In recent decades, economic growth in wealthy countries has been heavily skewed towards intensive growth. For example, carbon emissions per capita peaked in the 70s in the US, and total emissions peaked just before the GFC. Growth is coming mainly from producing better stuff, not from producing more stuff. Computing technology is the ultimate example of this: Computers are orders of magnitude more powerful than they were in the 80s, but use the same materials in the same quantities, more or less.
The socialist claim that capitalism requires infinite growth (it doesn't, although increases in per-capita GDP are certainly desirable) and therefore requires infinite growth in resource consumption is simply false. We have had quite a lot of intensive growth, and can continue to do so indefinitely. In theory, there may be some optimal state of the economy beyond which no improvements are possible, but that's so far removed from the status quo that it's a purely theoretical concern.
The point of growth is that it increases material standards of living. That aside, there's a cognitive bias where people perceive slow growth as regression. This is how you get people like Bernie Sanders and his followers on Reddit insisting that real incomes have collapsed when all the evidence says otherwise. Living in a high-growth economy just feels better than living in a low-growth economy.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Use of the specific word "insurrection," which is used in the 14th Amendment but had rarely been used in living memory to describe domestic riots, seems unlikely to have been a coincidence.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo 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
Oh, also it helps if you spend a decade learning Japanese first, but not as much as you might think.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
It's the "safe edgy" meme!
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
It's "reproductive choice." Lefties talk a big game about reproductive choice, but they only want to allow women to choose whether to have children. I want to allow women to choose what kind of children to have. That's real reproductive choice.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Hepatotoxicity actually is a real problem with many different classes of drugs, including NSAID and opioid painkillers. It's not just a coincidence.
The liver likes to grab onto and break down drugs in the bloodstream, which is a problem with drug delivery; not only can many drugs harm the liver, but the liver also prevents the drugs from reaching their target tissues.
Of course, hepatotoxicity from medicine is much more of a problem for people whose livers are busy and/or damaged from processing excessive alcohol and/or fructose. For most people with healthy livers, occasional use of painkillers is fine.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Some Supreme Court justices are better than others in some abstract sense, but in practice, the main consideration is that the appointee should reliably take the appointing party's side while being creative and erudite enough to avoid looking like too much of a hack while doing it.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The strongest justification for a large award is to recover the ill-gotten gains of Jones.
The state in which the lawsuit occurred explicitly does not allow punitive damages (I can't remember how general this rule is, but it applied to Jones' case), which is why the compensatory damages were so high. As I said at the time, using inflated compensatory damages to circumvent a ban on punitive damages certainly seems legally dubious to me, with the caveat that I'm not a lawyer.
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.
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