SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
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
2mo ago
Don't Catholics always have sins to absolve because of original sin?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Communism mainly hates people for things that they can change about themselves (being rich, being capitalists, being landlords, etc.), whereas racism hates people for things they can't change about themselves.
This is why communism is worse than racism. Hating people for their virtues is worse than hating people for morally neutral properties like race.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
God: Hey, I need you to turn my son over to the Romans so that can crucify him.
Jews: :-/
God: Trust me, it'll be awesome! You're my chosen people! Would I lead you astray?
Jews: Well, there were those forty years in the...
God: Oh, for my sakes! Will you let that go already? I gave you manna, didn't I?
Jews: Okay, fine, you're the god.
Jesus: X-(
A thousand years later...
Jews: :-(
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The thing is, it's not just left: It's oblivious left. They demonstrate absolutely no awareness of then existence of obvious counterarguments to the ridiculous things they say. After the split, /r/SlateStarCodex didn't just move left. It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I'm not sorry at all, but my takeaway from "Injustice Democrats" is that the author has such a facile understanding of economic policy that he simply can't conceive of any reason anyone would oppose the agenda of the left wing of the Democratic Party other than hating justice.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible.
As a parallel, note that woke anti-whiteness is premised on a rejection of the hypothesis that the black–white achievement gap is due to genetic factors rather than oppression.
This is like the Venn diagram meme: At the intersection of the set of those who attribute belief in a genetic basis for the black–white achievement gap to anti-black animus and the set of those who attribute belief in a genetic basis for the gentile–Jewish achievement gap to antisemitism, we find people who do not have a strong need for intellectual consistency.
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
6mo ago
AFAIK Mizrahim don't have especially high average IQ (as I understand it their lower average SES is a point of contention in Israel), so they don't really count for purposes of measuring the size of Israel's Jewish talent pool. I also wonder about self-selection of Israeli Ashkenazim. Maybe they didn't get the cream of the crop?
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
IMO these are very different. Sheeple passively accept the status quo, while NPCs actively recite a script, which may or may not be supportive of the status quo.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I do think it's best for very old works to be in the public domain just because the marginal impact on incentive to create of the hundredth year if royalties is virtually nil, but I've always kind of rolled my eyes at claims that inability to crib famous character designs is holding back a tsunami of creativity. Who are these people who are so creative but can't come up with their own characters?
SerialStateLineXer
1d ago
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link