SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Huh?
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
Obligatory reminder that one of the first actions Biden took upon taking office was rescinding Trump's executive order banning executive-branch training that makes these sorts of claims about white people.
Edit: It wasn't limited to white people, but it was widely understood that nobody with any real power in the executive branch wanted to run trainings that made similar claims about people of any other race.
Someone who spends their money by buying stuff gets hit by sales taxes, while someone who "spends" their money to make more money gets hit with capgains taxes.
And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.
Taxes on investment income distort the trade-off between present and future consumption in a way that neither taxes on consumption nor taxes on wage income do.
There's a superficial appearance of symmetry here, where it seems like taxes on investment income discourage investment and taxes on consumption discourage consumption, but the illusion goes away if you work through the math. The tax system really is set up in a way that penalizes saving and investing.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
The reason to use free weights rather than machines is that you activate all kinds of smaller stabilizing muscles that aren't hit when using a machine because the machine guides the path of the weight for you.
Why do so few people take this to its logical conclusion and use dumbbells instead of barbells for presses? Dumbbells require more stabilization than a barbell does. At some point you get too strong for the heaviest dumbbells at your gym, but most people never get there.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Most people here will be familiar with the "This never happens...actually it's a good thing!" sequence. Is there a name for this? I feel like I've heard a name for it before, but I can't remember where (probably here) or what it was.
Also, does anyone know where this was first described?
SerialStateLineXer
10d ago
People often talk about the degree barrier
Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.
That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.
If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.
I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.
Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Parties are private organizations, though. They can just disregard the Colorado primary in deciding which candidate to back in the general election, can't they?
SerialStateLineXer
11mo 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
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.
This is actually the second excavation to turn up no actual corpses. I don't think there's any basis for doubt that a lot of children died at the residential schools, partly due to the fact that children dying was a common occurrence back then, and partly due to the fact that they were kept in crowded housing that promoted the spread of infectious disease. Poor nutrition and extra susceptibility to European diseases may or may not have been factors.
However, it's clear now that the false positive rate of these GPR investigations is very high (0 for 48, by my count), and representing these hits as the discovery of definite or probable corpses was grossly irresponsible.
I don't remember to what extent the media actively encouraged this misinterpretation, or at least failed to discourage it in their reporting, but a lot of people were under the impression that these GPR surveys provided proof of hundreds of deaths above and beyond those which had already been documented, and/or cover-ups of actual murders.
My name is a snarky reference to the bizarre fixation of the left on the imaginary crime of crossing state lines during coverage of the Rittenhouse case, and has nothing to do with Nazis.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
To whence
This is even worse than "from whence!"
Hence/thence/whence mean "from this/that/which place," so "from whence" is redundant, and "to whence" is nonsensical.
Hither/thither/whither/yonder indicate destination, so you might ask a passerby "Whence have you come, and whither are you going," though I suppose the contemporary verb conjugations might have been different.
So the question is whither to roll back the clock. Whence to roll back the clock? Hence, obviously.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo 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
1mo 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.
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
3mo 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
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Good example of this: Every year for a decade or more, there has been a UN resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. Back in 2017, an old friend of mine—a single, middle-aged Seattle woman with all the political attitudes that implies—shared a link to this article about the US, fuming about how "shameful" it was that the US stood nearly alone in voting against it. I pointed out that the Obama administration had voted against it as well, which took a bit of the wind out of her sails, but she was already committed, so she said that was shameful, too.
The rest of the story:
- While only the US and two other countries voted against it, (almost?) every advanced democracy abstained.
- The other two countries voting against? Ukraine and Palau.
- The country sponsoring the resolution every year? Russia.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
I seem to recall the name from maybe 5-10 years ago, with some annoyance, like maybe pushing ultrawoke Code of Conduct mandates on open source projects.
Are you thinking of Coraline Ada Ehmke?
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I've done it. I had a lot of money saved up and needed a break. The hardest part was not getting through interviews for another job, but psyching myself up to update my resume, which I hate doing.
Ultimately it depends on how much money you have saved and how much of it you're willing to burn through and how tight the labor market in your industry is. If the labor market is tight, you can probably find another job without too much trouble even if you're not currently employed.
But I was applying for software engineering jobs in 2012, so my experience may be nonrepresentative. I wouldn't quit my current job without a replacement lined up.
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?
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
There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Keeping the peace is a fairly small part of most modern governments' budgets. Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.
If we were to say that Bill Gates' tax bill should be equal to a share of military and police expenditures proportional to his share of the nation's aggregate wealth, he'd get a tax cut. If we value a statistical life at a mere $1 million ($10 million is more typical), then the US has a total wealth of around $500 trillion. Gates has a net worth of about $100 billion, or 0.02%. Military plus police spending is around $1 trillion per year, so he'd have to pay around $200 million per year, which I believe is less than he's actually averaged over the past few decades; he claims to have paid over $10 billion in taxes. And that's with an extremely conservative valuation of a statistical life; a more reasonable valuation would put his annual tax bill well under $100 million.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
And interest rates were kept artificially low for 14 of those years.
I see this claim a lot, and it's based on a misunderstanding of what the Fed actually does. If the Fed tries to lower interest rates below the natural rate of interest and hold them there, we get inflation. Now, not after 14 years.
What the Fed actually does is help markets clear faster by targeting the natural rate of interest, i.e. the rate at which the amount of money people want to lend is equal to the amount other people want to borrow. This results in savings being efficiently channeled into investments. If the Fed sets rates too high, there are excess savings that don't get borrowed, causing a recession. If the Fed sets rates too low, it causes inflation.
The fact that inflation was unusually low in the 2010s tells us that the Fed was more or less correctly targeting the natural interest rate, or even a bit above it; the natural interest rate may have actually been negative in the early 2010s.
The huge spike in inflation in 2021 was not the chickens coming come to roost after 14 years of artificially low interest rates. It was the result of a sharp increase in the money supply that made the early rounds of QE look like anthills, combined with excessive stimulus, and pandemic savings burning holes in the pockets of middle-class consumers.
I would argue that HBD, properly understood, is the least divisive explanation for racial achievement gaps. There are a few competing mainstream explanations:
HBD allows for the possibility that it's nobody's fault. White people aren't keeping black people down. Rich people aren't keeping poor people down (and neither are Jews). And black people don't just need to try harder (obviously this would help any individual on the margin, but it's not the main reason for group disparities).
Some of the more insightful leftists actually understand this, and hate HBD precisely because it offers an alternative to their libelous villain-and-victim narratives. Over the past week or so, I've seen several people "accuse" HBD advocates of being defenders of the "status quo," as if rejecting the idea that society is a conspiracy by whites/rich people/Jews to screw over everyone else were indisputable evidence of bad faith.
HBD also gives us a clear path to a biological fix to a problem that has stubbornly resisted all sociological approaches to remediation. We need to invest much more into understanding the genetics of human intelligence and developing technology for polygenic gene therapy. HBD is a red pill, not a black pill, and it offers a way forward out of this madness.
Edit: Wacky but also kind of serious idea to tide us over until STEMlords save the day: Offer low-SES women free access to semen from high-IQ men, explaining to them that this will give their children a much better chance at succeeding in life and greatly reduce the odds that they'll end up in prison.
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