SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I haven't really dug into the issue, but my recollection is that her recall election was close enough that any loss of supporters due to redistricting would have made reelection unlikely.
But maybe it was more than pendulum swinging back towards the center than the redistricting.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
The radical DSA councilwoman retired, and was replaced with the "more conservative" of the two choices
This was due to a redistricting that pretty much guaranteed she would lose, right?
We have these:
- Non-technical Universities
- Black underclass, where a large percentage of the men are dead or in prison.
Edit: This was supposed to be a response to that comment speculating about the effects of reducing the male : female ratio. I'm not sure what happened.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?
My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'
No, this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and flatly contradicted by multiple streams of available evidence.
First, there's the historical example of East Asian and Jewish Americans. Yes, recent immigration from East Asia has been selective, but East Asians had already pretty much caught up with whites by the late 60s, before selective immigration really got going, and I don't think there was ever much selective immigration with Jews, who were already so overrepresented at top universities that Harvard imposed quotas in the 20s, when antisemitism was still a very real problem.
Second, poverty just isn't that sticky. The intergenerational rank-rank elasticity of permanent income (i.e. lifetime earnings) is about 0.4, meaning that on average, the children of parents at a given permanent income level will regress about 60% of the way to the 50th percentile.
Note that that 0.4 elasticity is not purely due to the stickiness of exogenous poverty, as much of it is due to the heredity of cognitive and personality traits. The true exogenous effect of parental income is considerably smaller than this. What this means is that we can expect regression to the mean in just a generation or two. This is commonly observed with truly exogenous poverty, e.g. with Vietnamese refugees.
Finally, rapid regression towards the mean was observed with black families during and for approximately one generation after the Civil Rights Era. And then it stopped, and has now been stalled out for two generations. We now see downward mobility of black men born into families with permanent incomes above the black mean, even when below the white mean. In other words, black men regress towards a lower mean than white men. It's tough to pin this on the the intergenerational stickiness of poverty (even ignoring the aforementioned fact that it's not actually that sticky), but is exactly what we would expect to see if there were a genetic basis for the achievement gap.
Raj Chetty says that this isn't consistent with a genetic basis for the gap because black women don't exhibit the same degree of downward mobility, but the case of women is more complicated because the shortage of reliable black men means that black women are more dependent on their own incomes than white men. Furthermore, black women from middle-class families are especially well positioned to benefit from affirmative action because they're less likely to have criminal records than black men. Finally, black women still do not exhibit the upward mobility that we would expect to see if their parents' poverty were truly exogenous.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Don't Catholics always have sins to absolve because of original sin?
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
Food poisoning worked for me.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Wasn't ye plural?
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
In a nutshell: If we adopt the FairTax, many taxes are gone, replaced by a 23% sales tax on new products and services.
It's actually defined such that the tax is 23% of the total amount you pay, including tax. So if the total price is $100, $23 goes to the tax and $77 to the seller. It's more like a 30% tax.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
I couldn't find any reference to Cohn from more than a few years ago.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
In the NEJM tirzepatide study, they reported a final fat-to-lean ratio of 0.7, which means that the subjects were still about 0.7/1.7 = 40% body fat.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
There are gas taxes, but they're mostly to fund roads, so they may cover the cost of roads (though I'm not 100% sure of even that), but they don't also cover the social cost of carbon emissions. There also aren't generally taxes on other uses of fossil fuels.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Greg Mankiw says that the stress tests probably wouldn't have caught this, although I imagine that they'll be modified to cover this scenario in the future.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Yeah, but I meant Americans.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
That's a summary report. The full report is like a hundred pages with statistics for over a hundred different causes of death broken down by multiple demographic stats. Here's the report for 2019:
This is not my area of expertise, but I'd expect that to lead to much larger distances on the right tail.
It does, but I accounted for that. The right tail is longer than expected even when accounting for the fact that it's logistic. Either there's something I'm not understanding about how this works, or someone screwed up somewhere.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
That looks like a bug. The use of backticks didn't prevent the tildes from creating a strikethrough effect.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I don't know. Switzerland, maybe? Low taxes, high wages, smart people, and excellent graphics. Singapore seems cool, too. Taiwan has low wages, but would otherwise be a pretty swell place if not for the threat from China.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
There are tons of people in the US who don't care at all about politics. Find them. Or find like-minded people in the US and move to where they are.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I do not get the appeal of dogs with small heads and long faces. Those things creep me out.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
As I understand it, heritability can only be greater than 100% if you have negative gene-environment correlation, i.e. if the people with higher polygenic scores tend to raise their children in environments less conducive to increasing intelligence.
Hypothetically you could have infinite heritability if environment perfectly cancelled out genes, resulting in everyone having equal intelligence despite variation in genetic potential.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
There were reasons for the US to be ahead back then that no longer apply, though. The two World Wars. The greater importance of land and natural resources to GDP back then. The US having a large internal free trade zone.
Currently the US operates with a pretty significant human capital disadvantage from the high black and indigenous population.
There's also a straightforward theoretical explanation for high taxation and welfare spending to reduce GDP level path: Diversion of resources away from investment and towards consumption, plus deadweight loss from high taxes. Why knock yourself out if it's only going to make a small difference in after-tax pay?
I'm not sure it's true that the US spends as much on welfare as Western Europe. I've looked into this before, and IIRC several of those countries spend more. But even if it does, this doesn't contradict the claim that the US is richer because it spends a smaller percentage of GDP on subsidizing consumption.
Consider that if I consistently spend 50% of my income on consumption and invest the rest, eventually I will end up spending more on consumption than my coworker who has the same salary and consistently spends 90% and saves 10%, precisely because limiting my consumption spending to a smaller share of my income has enabled my income to grow faster.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
The Law of Merited Impossibility wasn't what I was thinking of, because it was definitely a sequence of assertions, shifting over time as earlier stages become untenable. The Narcissist's Prayer is much more similar to what I had in mind. The name doesn't ring a bell, but maybe that was it.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
The link has expired. What was it?
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
The stuff I was doing last week is all out of bounds, I'm not going to be doing KBs or Olympic lifts for a while.
I don't know exactly what's wrong with your back, but two-handed kettlebell swings have actually really helped when I've tweaked my back, as I do every five years or so.
What I do is start with a conservative range of motion, and then after several reps the pain-free range of motion increases a bit. I continue until I can do the full range of motion pain-free. Usually the pain comes back after a while, but it gives me short-term pain relief and probably accelerates healing.
Not sure if this works as well for the upper back, but it's worth a try. Generally you want to use the injured muscles ASAP to increase blood flow to the injured tissue, rather than just resting it completely.
Oh, sorry, I didn't see this until now. It was about a year and a half, half because I wanted a break, and half because I really hate updating my resume and kept putting it off.
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