SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
posted memes about feds on Jan 6 and even questioned the deaths of officers on that day
Precisely zero officers present at the Capitol on January 6th died on that day. Brian Sicknick died the next day. We can't completely rule out that it was caused by the events of the previous day, but the conclusion of the autopsy was that he died of natural causes. The other four deaths were suicides. Possibly one of them, Jeffrey Smith, was caused by a TBI sustained in the attack, but I don't know how strong the evidence is there. Two of the suicides were six months later.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Earlier this year my aunt shared a Facebook post from Dan Rather saying something like, "Last time I checked, pro-lifers weren't lining up to adopt children."
Having higher standards than Dan Rather, I took a few minutes to look it up, and found, as I expected, that evangelicals do adopt a lot of children, but also that the media have been running occasional hit pieces on evangelical adoption for at least a decade.
SerialStateLineXer
10mo ago
Are you familiar with the PoliSci 101 arguments against campaigning on sensible economic policy?
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
She's not going to want to look at you with 20/20 vision.
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
1mo ago
Remember a hot business studies chick in my dorm slept with half the econometrics track guys to get them to do her maths homework.
I was good at math! Why did nobody tell me about this opportunity?
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
I regard it as what happens when libertarians who read Hacker News and Ayn Rand stop believing in liberty.
No, it's more that they stop believing in the ability of democracy to deliver liberty. The whole point of competitive government is that exit is a better guarantee of liberty than voice.
SerialStateLineXer
10mo ago
We're all out of ideas. We've tried restricting supply, we've tried subsidizing demand, and nothing works!
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances.
I believe that this claim relies on cherry-picking a few individual races. If you look at records for various distances and times, the male record in every event is better than the female record.
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.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic
I witnessed a similar exchange with another Indian guy at a presentation on pronouns. God bless the unassimilated and keep them safe from cancellation.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
The users of Bluesky, a platform that promotes itself as X/Twitter but without hate speech
Without hate speech, or with the right kind of hate speech?
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
3mo ago
realizing that the government's deficit is the private sector's surplus, which most people find desirable and wouldn't want to cut.
You're reasoning from an accounting identity, and I won't stand for it.
Yes, in order for the private sector as a whole to be a net creditor, the government must be a net debtor, but that's meaningless. There's no reason we should care about the private sector being a net creditor.
Note that this does not mean that the private sector can't accumulate net positive wealth without government debt. Private wealth did not decline along with net federal debt in the late 1990s, but grew rapidly. Real wealth is physical assets, not entries in a ledger.
It's true that if government doesn't run deficits private investors can't invest in government bonds, but they can buy private bonds or invest in equities. The government borrowing doesn't alleviate private actors of the burden of borrowing so that others may be creditors, but adds to the burden of private borrowers by driving up interest rates and reducing the amount of capital corporations can get by issuing stock.
If there's enough demand for government bonds that government can borrow at rates low enough to invest in infrastructure that will add enough value to pay for itself, that's a reasonable thing to do, but government borrowing does not, in itself, enrich the private sector.
Under no circumstances should the government borrow 6% of GDP at 4% interest at the peak of the business cycle in order to subsidize middle-class consumption.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
he is seen as a well-meaning dorky guy who likes jews so cannot be bunched with ss sympathisers
You are greatly underestimating the power of motivated reasoning.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I'm sure they do seem like a lovely person
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I see this all the time and genuinely wonder why people do this. The person in question is clearly identified as a "girl," and OP consistently refers to her with the appropriate female pronouns. Why the "they/them?"
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
This is pretty bleak: Adjusted for inflation, South Africa's GDP per capita is up less than 7% since 1974.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
I'm 100% on team HBD, because that's where the evidence strongly points, and I'm sick of midwits trying to smear those of us who can actually follow the science as racists, but "normalize Indian hate" sounds an awful lot like actual racism to me.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo 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
7mo ago
It's been working in practice for generations.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
The idea is that since drug dealers are disproportionately black, they must have some special expertise that will give them an edge in legal cannabis sales.
Of course, most drug dealers' comparative advantage is in willingness to risk prison and engage in violence to defend their turf, neither of which are particularly useful in sales of legal products.
Surprising no one who gave it five minutes of thought in advance, neither black nor Latino people have, in fact dominated legal cannabis retailing.
Either she didn't get the memo, or she's alluding to some sort of program that privileges black-owned (i.e. mostly white-owned with black figureheads) cannabis businesses.
SerialStateLineXer
9d ago
Caplan's record, as he readily admits, is somewhat less impressive when you account for the fact that he wins by consistently betting in favor of consensus and the future being like the past. He's not successfully predicting black swan events, but arbitraging others' overestimation of the frequency of black swan events.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
"Gulf of America" is kind of silly, though. The US borders many bodies of water. The Gulf of Mexico is the one that has Mexico on the other side.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
one interesting data point that I've come across is that people who grew up poor tend to lag behind, even after obtaining the degree
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.
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.
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