SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The fact that breasts lose elasticity with age is proof that there is no God.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Famously Evelyn Waugh (the male writer) was married to a female Evelyn.
I heard she was wild in bed. A real homonymph.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
My redpill was all the stories about how white the tech industry is.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The main advantage of a blockchain is that it makes it extremely difficult to rewrite history. It doesn't really do anything to prevent writing lies into a new record, especially when it's about claims that require real-world evidence to verify.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I don't know that health insurance is particularly unprofitable. Profit margins can be misleading, because they're a percentage of revenue. With health insurance, it's easy to take in huge revenues, because you get thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per customer every year. It's one of the highest-revenue industries there is. Of course, you also have to spend a ton of money. But due to the high revenues, a health insurer can have large profits with a small profit margin.
Also, profits go to the shareholders. Maybe there is a wage premium for employees.
Not to dispute the broader point, which is that insurers provide an important service. The irrationality of the public puts them in a bad position. The public wants low premiums, low deductibles, and unlimited coverage, and they will always side with providers over insurers. There's no good way to satisfy them.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr 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
1yr ago
My feed is also full of asses and boobs, but not that kind.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
There been dragons.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
How many tabs do you have open, that closing 10% merits inclusion in this list?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr 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?"
I believe it originally referred to the leaders of Scottish clans.
Maybe? But there was only a 1.1-point difference in SNAQ score (range: 4-20), so I don't see how that could lead to such a large adjusted difference, nor does it explain the discrepancy between baseline, end value, and "change from baseline."
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I meant that more in the sense that anything is legal if you don't get caught. The idea is not that people who think they pass would be encouraged to violate the rule, but that those who actually do pass would in fact get away with it, just as people often get away with violating many other laws and rules.
I'm not even commenting on whether it's a good policy, just pointing out that the idea that we'd need to have a genital-checking guard for enforcement is either stupid or in bad faith (one can never tell with Ocasio-Cortez).
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Can anyone make sense of table 3 in this study? As I read it, none of the numbers add up. For example, in the "PAL: total no. errors" section, they claim a large difference between placebo and intervention with p < 0.001, but the change from baseline looks about the same in both groups. Also, the change from baseline in both groups is about 8 points, but they report about 5.
I've read a lot of scientific papers before, and I can usually make sense of them, but I have no idea what's going on here. Is this some kind of error, or are they using a convention I don't understand?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Due to diminishing marginal utility, quality of life is even more equal than consumption. The difference in utility between a $100,000/month home and a $1,000/month home is not 100 times as great as the difference between a $1,000/month home and living on the street. A meal at a three-star restaurant may cost a hundred times as much as a cheap, nutritionally adequate meal, but the difference between them is less important than the difference between the cheap meal and starving.
Anyway, the monetary value of goods and services are important, because, unlike income, wealth, and subjective quality of life, consumption is rivalrous—it reduces the availability of goods and services for others to consume. The monetary value of the goods and services you consume is a measure of how large a share of total output you consume.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
the study I dissected was on novel evidence suggesting semaglutide decreased incidence of Alzheimer's
Mechanistically, this seems plausible, given the evidence implicating insulin resistance and systemic inflammation in neurodegenerative diseases. Was that all, or did the study incorporate epidemiological evidence?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
"Cost-effective" does not mean it saves more money that it costs, if that's why you're surprised. It means that its net cost/benefit ratio meets a certain GBP/QALY threshold.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
It's been working in practice for generations.
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.
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.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The talking point about the lack of an enforcement mechanism is silly. The enforcement mechanism is the same as the one keeping regular men out of women's bathrooms: Mostly voluntary, but the women can call security if there's a problem. If you pass well enough that nobody notices or cares, you get away with it.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I was just joking about the name. Lord Zir is not actually canonically non-binary.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Well, not a fast mass suicide.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I can't figure out whether Diablo IV is woke because it has a non-binary boss (Lord Zir), or anti-woke because ze's monstrously unattractive and ill-tempered.
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.
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