Soriek
1yr ago
No worries, I chopped a bunch of stuff to make it less long. The tax increase in general is def pretty obvious, I just thought it would be helpful to give some specific proposals and estimates.
Soriek
1yr ago
The core purpose of the NECM is to account for the fact, long established in the research literature, that the cost of providing a given level of education is not uniform across districts (Duncombe and Yinger 2007). Perhaps most importantly, districts that serve larger shares of high-need students (e.g., higher Census child poverty rates) will have higher costs. In addition, other factors, such as labor costs (e.g., districts in areas with higher costs of living will need to pay their employees more), size (economies of scale), and population density, all affect the “value of the education dollar.” The model, therefore, first estimates the relationships between district spending and these important factors, including testing outcomes. Importantly, the model accounts for the fact that school funding both affects and is affected by testing outcomes (For example, a district with higher test scores will tend to have higher property values than a district with lower scores. This high valuation allows the former district to collect more property tax revenues, which, in turn, boosts spending and positively affects testing outcomes. The NECM uses econometric methods to account for this endogeneity and tease out the causal relationship between spending and outcomes.)
This initial model yields a kind of “relationship inventory” of how each factor is related to spending. We then use the “inventory” to predict the cost (spending levels) of achieving a common outcome level (e.g., national average math and reading test scores) for each individual district, based on that district’s configuration of characteristics (in a sense, by comparing each district to other similar districts). These “required spending” estimates can then be compared with actual spending levels (total spending, direct to elementary and secondary education) in each district (this same basic process also yields our state-level estimates, which are aggregated district-level estimates). The difference between actual and required spending is a measure of adequacy relative to the common goal of national average scores.
Soriek
1yr ago
You do you but I'm generally pretty dubious. I think the quote you're thinking of from Scott is below:
Several come to my mind as comparatively liveable. Kenya. Tanzania. Botswana. South Africa. Namibia (is your list similar?) And one thing these places all have in common was being heavily, heavily colonized by the British.
Maybe he takes a closer look elsewhere but he doesn't actually compare wealth or gdp per capita or anything here, just kinda picks some good sounding ones. Most of these countries are spread across the continent's HDI and gdp per capita rankings except for South Africa (which was a self governing dominion) and Botswana (which was maybe the least heavily colonized country on the continent - the British basically left the existing monarchy in place and just demanded taxes). I could counter that other heavily British-colonized areas remain basket cases at the bottom of most relevant rankings: Sierra Leone, Malawi, the Gambia, Uganda, etc.
I did take a deeper look at India at least and found the British record pretty dismal. A while back I had ambitions of doing one of these for each of a bunch of the larger colonies, like Indonesia, Algeria, Malaya, Egypt, but got too duanted by the size of the project.
Soriek
2yr ago
It seems there are two separate arguments happening at the same time.
Yeah, I likely blended the two together through reading rushedly both of your comments.
Still, you haven’t yet offered an affirmative defense of feminine governance models. My contention is that most men would be more psychologically comfortable under a macho fascist-adjacent government - even one that led them to fruitless slaughter - than under the soft gynocratic model of governance under which they live now
Imo it's more than enough to argue that modernity (if you consider it to be run by women, which I don't actually) is a lot better than many of the previous societies we can pick from among. All the women-dominant world needs to be is not demonstrably worse than the alternatives for us to take pause before we assume that rolling back women's political representation would improve things. I'm skeptical of the argument that men would be psychologically healthier under a more masculine, authoritarian government, largely because I've lived in a country like that and can't say particularly that men were thriving more than anyone else. I think that kind of thing sounds a lot cooler in theory than in practice. Even assuming it were true, there are lots of things I don't like about society that I consider a fair trade off for overall modern peace and prosperity. I don't much like the psychological experience of going to work and taking orders from my boss either, but I still conclude the modern economy is probably a net win - others are free to disagree.
To loop back though and address broader left wing changes, I'm also skeptical these can be laid at the feet of women either. To take OP's example of mass immigration, America's most restrictive modern anti-immigration bill was passed shortly after all women in America gained the right to vote, and was only reversed in the 60s by Emmanuel Celler, who was many things but not a feminist, and rather than cater to women's preferences ultimately lost re-election because he explicitly did not do so (ie by loudly and publicly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment).
In fact, it's an oft repeated talking point that one of the longest lasting arguments against women's suffrage was that women were on net considered more conservative than men. This held true in the West till pretty recently, with American women more likely to identify Republican than men until the 60s, only noticeably voting significantly more for Democrats by the 80s and the present day gap being a historical anomaly. And keep in mind that crude party preference also obscures things like high women's support for Bill Clinton in the 90s, a candidate who slashed welfare and regulations, passed the strongest anti-crime legislation in a generation and banned federal recognition of same sex couples. Likewise, European women voted for conservative parties more than men until the 70s and in some places later. To take one salient example from our cousin country across the pond, Thatcher would have lost her election if only men were voting, and English women supported conservatives over labor until 2005.
Women are more left wing than men in the past few decades, but a glance at the recent historical record indicates this is in no way fixed. Today's rightist are skeptical of woman's suffrage making everything woke; a century ago liberals were skeptical of women's suffrage because they thought women would restore the Bourbons to the throne.
If your argument is that those same men are stupid to feel that way, and that they ought to be far more willing to give women an honest go at governance for a while, since men fucked it up so badly a century ago, then it’s an argument we can have.
I don't blame all of the world's problems on men either, nor am I really interested in balancing out past wrongs or whatever; I just need an active argument to draw a line from anyone's liberties to societies' problems. My position is that gender just isn't that important till proven otherwise. There are societies both bad and good, liberal and conservative, across all varying degrees of women's enfranchisement, and their ills or successes usually come from elsewhere.
This is either wildly wrong or extremely pedantic.
…it isn’t though? Fitting your hand behind the back of somebody’s head and pushing down isn’t a natural, easy-to-fall-into movement - you might have to literally force your hand up in between their body and yours while they’re struggling - and that move is specifically what causes the blood flow to cut off. Almost every other form of back control doesn’t have that immediate risk because the RNC isn’t back control, it’s a submission. Even just take the same hand and use it to pin his arm to his body and you have a movement both less dangerous and more natural for beginners, whereas as the RNC isn’t something people know intuitively without being taught.
As for your comment about lethality, in every conversation I’d had about this event, including my comment above, I’ve very explicitly said I’m not condemning the use of lethal force, which may have literally been necessary if the guy was attacking him or somebody else on the train. I’m disagreeing with the people who are for some reason arguing that choking someone out for a long ass time doesn’t have obviously lethal potential. And if it turns out the guy wasn’t attacking anyone, for better or for worse you don’t get to knock people out just for being awful.
Soriek
2yr ago
From your above comment you did judo? How often are rear naked chokes used? I thought pushing down on the back head as part of a choke was fully banned in judo tbh. I've seen people go out more times than I can count in bjj and have come close to passing out myself.
Soriek
2yr ago
Completely agreed Roosevelt had an unusual commitment to decolonization, but what about Nixon stands out to you? (past like the same kind of empty-but-supportive debate rhetoric that Kennedy also made when they were first running - and Kennedy of course went on to write up the interventions against the DR and Brazil later launched under LBJ). Insofar as Nixon's policies wrt colonization are memorable to me it's in the "Tar Baby" strategy of supporting the colonial-relic white minority governments in Southern Africa, even against growing domestic public sentiment in the US. His posture there feels like the opposite of "ideological impulse rather than practicality as necessary or if necessary".
Otherwise no huge objection - America did want to end colonialism and contributed somewhat towards hastening its end, I just don't think it was really all that important to us? The strongest direct actions I think we took were opposing Salazar and threatening to boot the Netherlands out of the Marshall plan if they didn't leave Indonesia - the rest was just not directly getting involved in the Empires' counter-revolutionary wars, which I think is too tall an ask for America fresh out of several wars.
Sometimes we ignored colonialism, sometimes we supported it in ways (sending Britain funds in Malaya and France materiel in Vietnam). When and where we did oppose colonialism feels for me less driven by ideology than by the same issues of Suez repeated elsewhere: weakening potential rivals and bolstering our credentials with the various non-aligned countries during the Cold War. If we truly felt ourselves to be kindred spirits with the other colonies, it's a little strange that we didn't feel dissonance putting those kindred spirits under new dictators that replicated the worst aspects of colonial rule - as long as they now reported back to us. As in, there might have been people that felt motivated by ideology, but it was a an ideology of such a self-serving sort that it's hard to distinguish from what someone would have done motivated by realpolitik alone.
I will read your link though (it may have answered my questions), I'm just trying to find a non-jstor version of it.
Soriek
1yr ago
I mean, he could have made immigration law take morality into account but didn't, suggesting it wasn't really that important to him as a matter of policy. Is the claim "not everybody in the world is equally awesome" really relevant to anyone but Bryan Caplan? Few people genuinely imagine the entire earth should move into their country.
Soriek
1yr ago
The dark old days when we still had users who actually had different opinions.
Soriek
2yr ago
Doing a bit of googling to confirm this: that's for a five year loan. A new car lasts a few times as long as that. Google says the average age of a modern vehicle is 11.4 years. So pay $716 for 5 years and then get a paid off car for a hell of a lot longer.
Thanks for crunching that out, others have also pointed out my table napkin math was (predictably) off, so I switched to O’Toole’s Bureau of Economic Administration stat that in 2017 drivers spent $1.15 trillion on cars.
I saw a Federal agency's list of per passenger mile fuel consumption for various means of transportation and public busses were shocking bad. Worse than a single person driving a big truck. A full bus is very fuel efficient per passenger mile. But most city busses are mostly empty most of the day, so they are horribly inefficient uses of fuel on average.
You’ve described the long and the short of it really: transit is much more effective than cars when full, but less efficient when empty, which raises the question if we should keep pushing policies that distort the market away from the most efficient form of transit, like single family zoning, municipal parking minimums, and diverting sales and property tax to road infrastructure.
The things you care about.
Affordability, efficiency, pollution, and use of public space are things that people on all sides of this debate are comparing, from Randal O’Toole to the most militant /r/fuckcars poster.
Soriek
2yr ago
That's not "depressed". That's actual less subsidy. Car users pay for their own rolling stock, both operating and capital costs.
I guess I should clarify that O'Toole's concerns wrt subsidies revolve around the cost burden on the taxpayer. Paying those costs privately is just a different, higher way of tallying the same burden
Soriek
2yr ago
Isn't this his point? Since the constitution doesn't guarantee a freedom of association then you don't have that right, AKA there's no reason the states can't infringe upon it, which is what they did in quite extreme fashion during segregation - if I as an individual wanted to go to McDonalds with my friend of a different race I was deprived of that right and legally barred from doing so. By ending the State's ability to prevent people of different races from voluntarily comingling, surely the CRA represented one of our history's more dramatic expansions in freedom of association.
Soriek
2yr ago
Yeah it can be confusing because gas taxes are used for both systems as well. Also correct that the 40% doesn’t include private costs but rather taxes; the remaining 60% is from user fees. I just added that in to point out that both systems are financed partially by people other than their users; the fact that car owners bear the private burden of their vehicle doesn’t mean that car infrastructure doesn’t receive other people’s money as well.
Soriek
1yr ago
I didn’t remove the end of the quote, that’s how I found it. Since you’re commenting on the tail end of a long conversation of me repeatedly arguing the addendum doesn’t change anything, either semantically or when we look at the actual immigration policy the quoted speaker pursued (or his other quotes on the issue), and you aren’t bothering to try to counter, do you have any point of substance to make? If not, let’s end this.
Soriek
1yr ago
because the claim that they don't change the meaning is not an objective, undisputed, fact, it's something you have to explicitly argue
Given that I have been explicitly arguing that, what exactly are you complaining about?
Soriek
1yr ago
My argument is that the longer quote doesn’t change the meaning at all. You’re trying to argue the longer quote means something different, that actually Washington would have reservations about poor immigrants. The fact that he pursued the most maximalist open borders immigration policy conceivable is a hint to which interpretation is more likely correct.
Because Anglos have tended to establish the world’s wealthier major states, mass immigration to them if open borders should exist is inevitable. These other peoples are unlikely to have a particularly great fondness for libertarianism, and so will slowly dismantle it as soon as they get the vote (just as happened, to some extent, in the US from the 19th century onwards).
One of Alex Nowrasteh's hobby horses is that we don't have a ton of evidence this is true, partially because it doesn't just matter how immigrants vote; it matters how the native population changes their own votes in response to immigration. America's government stayed unrecognizably small during our largest period of mass immigration in the 19th century. The period of 1921 to 1968 when America had its most restrictive immigration laws (and was 90%+ white and building a common national identity) also had the largest expansions of the government and the welfare state: the Great Society and the New Deal. After we reopened our borders government spending and union participation went back down, whether because xenophobic people don't like welfare going to foreigners, or language barriers make unionization harder, or maybe they're not related at all - point is more government doesn't necessarily follow from more immigrants.
Soriek
1yr ago
Do we want a larger share of power and capital in the hands of dumb people?
I'd like for them to be provided for in retirement! Certainly better than them being up-in-arms against their poverty, even if it's self inflicted. The problem is much larger than a cohort of dumb people at the bottom of the population as well, insofar as you trust self-reported surveys, various studies are always showing that even surprisingly numbers of well-off people report living paycheck-to-paycheck (25% of people making over $200k, 30% of people making over $250k). If these were middle income folks I would happily accept the counter that raising their payroll taxes would make this worse, but if even the Americans with the most disposable income don't save any of it, it's hard to imagine this would be better in a less-guaranteed retirement system.
Similarly, the "funding solutions" you consider all involve taxing labour more...As Western Europe has already experienced, social democracy via tax-and-spend plus regulation ends up in a trap of stagnation that is politically hard to escape:
These just aren't very high taxes on labor. 0.3% isn't going to bring us to anywhere near Europe. I'll note that even if we were, the Scandanavian countries are the pretty central example of high taxes on labor/consumption, low taxes on capital, and have done some of the best in terms of keeping pace with the US.
But we could even skip that and go with option 2 and only tax the top 5% of laborers. If you'd rather fund it by taxing capital I'm fine with that too. But even the conservative Tax Foundation agrees payroll taxes are more efficient than taxes on capital:
due to the inelasticity of the supply of labor, payroll taxes generate a comparatively small amount of deadweight loss compared to other forms of taxation. This means that payroll taxes lead to a relatively small amount of economic inefficiency, since the quantity of labor in the market does not dramatically decline as a result. Overall, payroll taxes do much less economic harm than taxes on capital. This is evidenced by our analysis of Senator Bernie Sanders’ tax proposals, whose payroll tax rate increase raised nearly four times as much revenue as his proposed increases on capital gains and dividends, but with a fourth less of the impact on GDP.
We've also been pretty committed to keeping entitlements funded via payroll tax partially because it's the least unpopular tax, since people see it more as an investment.
Soriek
1yr ago
This does not appear to be true. Those numbers are not about where the respondents were "from" but instead where they were last housed
Yeah, the relevance of the stat is that homeless people aren't traveling to California for warm weather / permissible legal regimes, they just become homeless in the areas where they already live. This also raises the relevance of California specific factors like housing costs since these people didn't become homeless under a different state government then switch states, confusing the stats. As @huadpe says, about a third born in other states is fairly representative for a normal Californian anyway.
The world is a big place, 45 days isn't slow.
The claim on the part of the skeptics is that the scientist made an abrupt 180 on their views in only a few days because of pressure from the NIH. Instead they had a month and half during which relevant research was published that overturned the main cited uncertainty.
OK, but any other theory was called a conspiracy theory (at best). So they put forth one possibility and suppressed anything else... You don't see a problem here?
This is what the scientists had to say about the lab leak theory vs the market:
As many early cases of COVID-19 were linked to the Huanan market in Wuhan, it is possible that an animal source was present at this location....
Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.
Pretty reasonable imo. Anyone is welcome to dispute their scientific claims. Again, the same government you're accusing of supressing the lab leak has also repeatedly endorsed the lab leak. Seems like a pretty sloppy coverup imo.
Soriek
2yr ago
IANAL but my understanding is that the Ninth Amendment has never been held to confer substantive rights (which seems to be what the linked wiki page affirms as well). If it is supposed to do that, and Americans have always had a right to freedom of association, then surely segregation was always unconstitutional and the CRA just reestablished the right to association that we were supposed to have.
Soriek
2yr ago
We stray ever further into our personal experiences but this is another case where I’m sure what you say is true for you, but I just feel the exact opposite. The fact that a car is a private place in a public place is one of my least favorite things about it! It means my most valuable possession, and whatever possessions I might want to store in it, are outside of my house where I can’t keep an eye of them. Instead they sit on the street with the weirdos, and any time I want to go somewhere I have to hope none of the people passing by are gonna mess with it despite the fact that I hear about more car break-ins every week.
I don’t find cars very comfortable either, but in fairness I haven’t had nice cars.
Of course YMMV.
Soriek
2yr ago
There's a psychic cost that urbanists miss: namely, that public transit replaces the labor of driving with a lack of agency.
I think in some instances this is probably true, but I feel deeply “managed” and stripped of my agency when waiting at a red light or stuck in traffic.
From my OP:
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