SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo ago
I was just joking about the name. Lord Zir is not actually canonically non-binary.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Well, not a fast mass suicide.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo 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.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
It's consistent with what I said, but adds more details. I think it further weakens the objection to the original post as well: Every game on the list is either Japanese or made by a team small enough not to be infested with entryists.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Note that all of those but Slay the Spire come out of Japan.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
1mg is a good dose, you cannot come off it ever btw, once you start.
Sure you can. You'll start losing hair again, but it's not like you become dependent on it.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I've never failed a test before :(
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Outside the bounds of prescribed behavior. It's a highly proscribed behavior, unless the fentanyl is prescribed.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Thanks for doing your part to fight dysgenesis.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Yesterday, I was indirectly reminded of an old classmate I had in 5th through 7th grade. Out of idle curiosity, I looked him up and found that he had died of a fentanyl overdose last year.
I hadn't really thought of him for decades, and we weren't all that close back then, so it didn't hit me particularly hard, but it did shock me a bit, since he didn't really seem the type. He was from a high-SES family, both parents being archaeologists, and in the same gifted classes as I was. His best friend from back then is an attorney now.
I wonder how people's lives go off the rails like this, even when they seem to have everything going for them.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
The oxford study results paint a grim picture for East Asians where it states that women of east asia are more likely to prefer dating people of other races with whites being highest rated, I would argue that the subcontinent and south-east Asia has the similar issues
The silver lining, for South Asian men, is that white men generally aren't nearly as attracted to South Asian women as to East Asian women.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo 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
7mo ago
There's nothing wrong with wanting to not be on the receiving end of a trade war, tariffs or sanctions.
Trade wars only have receiving ends.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Average adult height in US men peaked for those born in the late 70s, but the decline from there to the 1996 birth cohort was less than half a centimeter, and there was a similar decline for women. I suppose it's possible that there was a rapid male-specific decline in cohorts born in the decade after 1996, but it seems unlikely.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-by-year-of-birth?country=~USA
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Right, that makes sense. I forgot what I had said in my original comment, so I misunderstood your response.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Maybe even consider removing it from your toothpaste.
Let's do the math on this. Toothpaste is about 0.1% fluoride. Typically you'll put about 1g of toothpaste on your toothbrush, so that's 1 mg of fluoride. If you ingest 10%, that's 0.1 mg. Fluoridated water is typically around 1 mg/L, so by using fluoridated toothpaste twice a day, you're probably ingesting about 10% of what you would get from two liters of fluoridated tap water. Not insignificant, but probably not a major concern.
On the other hand, if it's available in the US, hydroxyapatite toothpaste is a perfectly acceptable substitute, if a bit more expensive.
I was referring to his 1912 run for President with the Progressive Party, beating out Taft for second place, leading to the unfortunate election of Wilson with only 41% of the vote.
Technically that was a campaign for a non-consecutive third term, not second.
Edit: Oh, I see what you mean. I forgot that I had specified "after losing reelection once" in my first comment.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
the democratic candidate being VP to a very unpopular president, which has historically been a near ironclad portent of defeat.
On the other hand, the Republican candidate was an unpopular President. I don't think we have much data on former Presidents running for a non-consecutive second term after losing reelection once. How many have done that, just Cleveland and Roosevelt?
I feel like a big part of the problem with modern games is that they just try too hard to be novels or movies. I miss the old minimalist approach that was more about establishing a tone and the outline of a plot, and letting you fill in the rest with your imagination, than about spelling out every freaking detail.
I realize that this was largely due to technical limitations, but some people just need enforced discipline.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Makes sense. I tried meat-based milk and didn't like it at all.
"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.
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