coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Young Latinos love KillTony and older Latinos from Puero Rico are probably critical of their home country. I doubt it changes their vote.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Well, do you think that Jeff Bezos would not have created Amazon if he didn’t expect to gain hundreds of billions of dollars? Do you think Bezos would not continue to run Amazon if a competitor popped up which reduced his profit by tens of billions of dollars? We would still have Amazon if we literally took billions of dollars from Bezos, so those billions are genuinely just wasted. Inefficiently allocated.
”People rationally decide things” is much better than “the whims of economic chance are magically right about how much profit the founder of Amazon should get”.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Tax deduction or credit to those earning less than 160k a year. Why not? I understand this is functionally just redistribution from wealthy to less, but if you call it a tariff more people will be supportive than “we are literally going to redistribute money now”. It has a nice conservative tinge. But also, this isn’t my steel-man of tariffs per the OP.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Which option are you talking about? I do not support a tariff where the revenue doesn’t go to those who have more use for the money. I don’t know the fine print of Trump’s “replace income tax with tariff plan”, but we can imagine a policy where the revenue of a tariff disproportionately benefits the lower through middle classes. Well, if everyone pays the tariff, and if wealthy people pay slightly more of the tariff because they import somewhat more goods, but if all the revenue goes to the lower and middle class, then the lower and middle class wind up having more money at the end of the day, implying that price increases pass on to all consumers equally and no American industry develops.
Unless I’m misreading you, then this doesn’t have to do with % income spent on tariff at all, so it’s simply a case of imported red herring to talk about % of income going to the tariff. Everyone pays tariff, and that total money goes to lower/middle class. I would support that. If that is what you were asking.
But the policy I support is a tariff so high that American industry develops. This has all the benefits of the aforementioned with one key difference: we now see wages rise because there is more middle class employment opportunity and employers must pay more to recruit workers.
The excess consumption of the wealthy is largely in the form of luxury services (personal cleaners, drivers, chefs, accountants, lawyers, etc.) or housing
Sadly it’s also in wasteful vacations, multiple cars, rolexes, foreign alcohol, cocaine, ayuahuasca retreats, multiple homes, homes that are too big, private jets and yachts, superfluous degrees. If we apply pressure on their finances they are likely to keep the stuff from your list but get rid of the truly crazy amount of inefficient resource waste from my list.
where most people are just unwilling/unable to buy that good any more
Before that happens the profit margin would evaporate, with the businesses owned by billionaires forced to cut into their profit margin.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
I think so, yes, you need the tariff to be so high that it promotes American industry. Otherwise it depends what you do with the tariff revenue. If everyone pays the tariff but the revenue goes to the middle class, then it’s just a tax on wealthy people really.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
I am alleging that this will increase purchasing power.
There is enormous economic efficiency in America because the super-wealthy have resources that they waste frivolously, when these resources would be better allocated to the lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle classes. These super wealthy people make money by selling people stuff made overseas. If you make them pay money to import their overseas stuff, they have two options: (1) reduce their profits and make their business more efficient; (2) attempt to raise the cost of their items. If they do (2), then things made in America can compete against them, which is great for all Americans but the super-wealthy, because your job’s wages are set according to the number of wage-competitive jobs available to you and your peers. Increasing the number of competitive middle class jobs increases all wages of the middle class, as well as the workers’ quality of life. Additionally, there’s a ceiling for the pricing of a lot of overseas items, because if a company like Nike prices them too high, fewer people will buy them and more will buy competitors. This means Nike, Nespresso, Shein, Temu, Alibaba, IKEA, and other sorts of businesses are not actually able to raise their prices in proportion to the tariff. Once their price is too high, people opt for a lower-cost competitor. Fast food is similar. We could tax the heck out of McDonald’s and they could never raise prices proportionately because once it reaches a certain high people will make their own food.
Be wary of talk about “economic efficiency”. If profits go to people who don’t need them then those profits don’t matter.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Torba is an OG alt-right influencer, founded Gab and is openly anti-Semitic. He’s like a slightly more refined Nick Fuentes. Chris Brunet is a former conservative think tanker who is now talking about too much Jewish influence at conservative think tanks.
Jared is, of course, orthodox Jewish, and he also has a hand in picking Trump’s cabinet, so that he followed these accounts around the same time is bizarre.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Why did Jared Kushner start following Andrew Torba and Chris Brunet on Twitter? Any theories?
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Joe asked Trump how he felt when he entered the White House on his first day. Trump tells a story about seeing the Lincoln Room and having the reality of the presidency set in. He saw all the details of Lincoln’s real life, like the bed that was custom-made because he was too tall, and the small photo he kept of his son who tragically died. Lincoln was no longer a mythical figure but a real person, who lived in this real room, occupying the same job as himself.
I guess this is rambling but at what point is rambling just good story-telling? I mean, Homer rambled. Trump talks like a wise old East Coast relative who has lots of good stories. I also think there’s an element of Irish American conversational style he inherited from his mother’s side. Trump’s mom was born in the Outer Hebrides in a Gaelic speaking household, people forget this.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
If they can be persuaded that what the founders intended precluded the children of non citizen fathers, then maybe all of them, why not?
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
The viable plan to ending birthright citizenship is to reexamine the legal definition of natural born citizen in light of earlier British jurisprudence which, in some cases, mentiins that the father must also be a natural born citizen. This is the kind of originalist legal argumentation that we find among Heritage Foundation guys and their SC picks.
We can do that, and then we can just restrict how many people can come in. Do a pregnancy test on women who come in. Lots of simple stuff. This issue is a failure of political will, not political thought.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
“your town is unpopular” may mean that the quality of life of your family is negatively affected, as there is fewer investment in your town. It may also mean you’re individually doing something wrong, because you could be part of the problem of your town. But this doesn’t apply cross-nationally. Countries that are regionally unpopular (Israel) may still have high QoL. It’s only an issue if their safety is affected, which is distinct from whether the proles of Honduras have a distaste for your country.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
Why would you consider voting for him if he 100% ended illegal immigration, but not if he merely increased the chance of ending it? This applies to your other issue (ending war in Ukraine).
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
epically fuck up what's left of America's standing in the world.
I don’t get this. I’ve heard people repeat it a lot. People respect and like countries that have a high quality of life. They want to move to countries that have high earnings potential and safety. They also like cultural products. America’s cultural products aren’t going away, so what we are left with is QoL, earnings, and safety. Is the candidate who supports DEI and more immigration going to increase QoL and safety?
But also, why the hell would you even care about what someone in Kurdistan, or China, or Bangladesh thinks about you? During the Cold War, much of the world hated America for propaganda reasons, and who cares? Lots of the Middle East hated us because of our wars, and yet… it doesn’t matter. I don’t think people should care about how “popular” their country is on the world stage. We should care about how popular it is among our citizens, which would involve not incessantly telling about racism, slavery, and oppressive institutions.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
Which candidate is mostly like to effect the end result of deporting aliens? The one who talks about how terrible mass migration is, or the child-of-immigrants who celebrates indigenous peoples’ day by talking about how America was founded on genocide?
If you genuinely care about effecting an end to illegal migration, then there’s an obligation to vote for whoever moves the needle on effecting that change. Trump didn’t succeed in building a border wall but he did smash the borders of acceptable speech on illegal migration.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
If you’re increasing everyone’s skill across the board then you haven’t made any domain more competitive. It would just be that everyone you come across is more competent. There would be the same amount of competitive within an industry, though it would definitely be harder to break into an industry in adulthood.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
Hereditary profession is not quite the same thing as nepotism, at least that’s not how I took it. Hereditary profession could mean that a lawyer purposefully raises a lawyer and a composer a composer, and that this is expected; nepotism means that a lawyer hires and promotes his kin who are lawyers, and a doctor his kin. My proposal doesn’t entail anything about nepotism, but it would involve an element of hereditary influence on profession. I think 1 in 5 American physicians are children of physicians, and there are 3.5 physicians per 1000 Americans, so clearly the children of doctors are influenced to be doctors.
Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them
I don’t follow. Many people in history did one task repetitively for hours on end, eg farming or weaving or milling or fishing. We have cases of people focusing on one skill and they improve in that skill. They might nominally be in school, but they attend special schools that are online and not taxing. So we know that Magnus would spends hours a day on chess. We know pianists spend hours a day on piano. We know marathon runners spend hours a day running. Faker, the best strategy gamer, spent 10-15 hours per day practicing. So it’s been abundantly tried, and the results show that the more practice the greater the result. (With the right kind of practice, and with rest, and with diminishing returns).
if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five
How about you just place your kid in fun math contexts for 3 hours a day, and then an hour a day of challenging practice, and then the rest is for enjoying life and maybe some exercise? They will be better at math and they will have more free time. They won’t know about ovaries, orangutans, Ontario or Othello, but they will be better at math than anything else you could do. If they want to read a good book, they ask someone. If they want to know the capitol of California, they look it up. Seems perfect to me, just requires each specialist human to trust the other specialist humans. Adirondacks sound nice though. He can go there on vacation with the time and money he has saved up from not knowing about colonial period.
we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world
Well you haven’t really shown why that is so certain. If my beloved friend is a trucker, I know that specializing in trucking at an early age will be better for his health, reduce accidents, reduce stress, and increase his earnings. I can’t think of a line of work that wouldn’t be aided by specialization.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
I was just reading about a woman who loved novels and wanted to be writer but was pressured into going to an elite school for mathematics. That was Maryam Mirzakhani —
Maryam was not particularly interested in mathematics as a child (although she noticed that she could solve the homework problems of her older siblings quite easily). Her passion was reading novels, and her dream was to become a writer. Things changed when she moved on to middle school […] A specialized Farzanegan middle school for girls gifted in mathematics was opened in Tehran, and Maryam enrolled. She was initially taken aback by the steep jump in difficulty. Her first year was not great. But she persevered and realized that she could make fast progress when she made an effort.
The problem with whim is that it’s whimsical. For every person who ignores their passion and regrets it, there’s one or more who ignored their passion and thanks God for it. For every person who wishes they continued trying to be a famous actress, there’s a person who curses their life that they focused on something they aren’t good at, and there’s someone who loves their life because their parents told them not to be naive about an acting career. For every “society has gained a good mathematician, but has lost a great writer”, there’s “society has gained a mediocre writer, but has lost a universally important mathematician”. In college I knew someone who wanted to be a personal trainer. He studied for four years, and after graduating he suddenly hated it. I met him when he returned to do a new four-year degree as a computer science student.
we corral every child into is exposing them to various activities so they can make this choice for themselves
This does not take the thousands of hours of training we administer. This takes, like, three hours per subject. And I support that. Kids should try lots of things to find what they are good at and what they really like. And then they should attempt to balance the two. IMO it’s better to look what one is good at, find what is bearable, and then see if you can’t find enjoyment from it. If there’s still no enjoyment, then they should make a switch. But there are so many people in the world who enjoy making music but are terrible at it, and then there are excellent performers who actually dislike performing. There are writers who hate writing, then there’s a shitty novella published every hour by someone who should just work at a library. Life is weird.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
I think chess requires creativity. But if business requires exceptional creative cross-domain understanding, then that “cross-domain understanding” should be included in the specialization training. It’s not every domain which enhances business aptitude, right? It’s unlikely that knowing Shakespeare, the hormonal cycle, and dinosaurs will enhance your business aptitude. Steve Jobs was exceptional because he took design philosophy and applied it to technology, but that’s actually hardly an everyman type of knowledge, it’s the conjunction of two skills which he mastered. He didn’t need to know about early American history, and it would even have been better if he read less eastern spirituality (resulting in his untimely demise through woo woo dieting).
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
It is true in the sense that people organically want to make money, and want to master what will make them the most money, and the most visible needs of society are (often) financially rewarded when supplied. I would also say that the right kind of training can make someone enjoy otherwise boring work — there are people who can make excel exciting, for instance. And then I would make a separate point that the education of youth should involve reality: the reality of one’s capabilities, the reality of which jobs will fit them, and the reality of what one is expected to earn according to their performance. Current educational models divorce the youth from reality whereas simply eliminating education altogether (though not my proposal) would immediately make reality salient. A 10-year-old working at the mall instead of studying at school sounds awful, doesn’t it? And yet that entire time he is learning the reality of life, that work and money are requirements and that skill and performance matter. When exactly does a kid saliently learn that in school? A 45-min documentary their substitute English teacher plays? That’s not “I am working six hours stocking a shelf” levels of salience and realization and motivation. But that point is an aside and not my proposal, but we should find a way to deeply persuade the youth about reality by the age of 10.
If I can predict your point, it’s that a kid who ought to be trained as a construction worker will opt to attend a school specializing in programming because of the possibility of higher wages. But I think you can persuade the parents + the child that this is not in their interest because reality says it is unlikely, in the same way you can persuade people not to gamble. Note that, if the quality of life for construction workers rises because they get to work earlier in life and are less stressed, then the looming threat of working blue collar is no longer a threat, it’s just a different choice. You will still make money and start a family, etc. I think also just taking money from the super-wealthy and giving it to the employed lower classes is also a great idea which would propel efficiency for a similar reason, that people will opt into specializing in this work because it’s not “the end of the world” being employed there. Classism and over-competition actually winds up reducing efficiency as people opt into chasing the prospect of higher wages when they are better fitted for lower wage professions. But that’s a totally different topic.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
You don’t need to make it hereditary, or fully hereditary, as you can test the child’s own aptitude and interest. But I also don’t know if we have evidence to compare “hereditary profession in meritocracy” versus “free choice in meritocracy”. In American history, choice and “hereditarian influence” coexisted, as elite children historically pursued a similar field as their parents, with slots always open for talented newcomers. (Consider the Founding Fathers, or our presidents, I suppose). When Britain was dominant in history, there was a hereditarian aspect, as well as when the Ottomans were dominant, or Rome, or France. I can’t really think of a “free choice” nation in history that was dominant, can you? Artisans produced artisans, unless the kid was precocious and gifted.
What do we do with the mathematical equivalent of a Ballerina who gets too fat?
If the child who is on the math specialty regimen simply isn’t good, then they should be pushed to something else, and this can occur before the age of 8. We could feasibly design a national index to ensure we don’t raise up too many mathematicians. But if the student trains in math and then randomly begins to hate math, well, that’s a problem that occurs today already. It occurs today because our training environment (school and university) is divorced from the work environment (reality), so we produce doctors who realize they like studying rather than practicing medicine, teachers who realize they hate dealing with children, etc. A rather dumb system. But anyway, if the math-trained realize they hate math, they work somewhere else; we say “that sucks”, and give him a less skilled job somewhere else, perhaps where counting is involved. We want this to occur as early as possible though, and today it occurs quite late.
[elbow injuries in baseball]
Those kids aren’t getting injured because of some cosmic law thay you ought to diversify activity. They are getting injured because they overtrained a particular muscle through an unnatural repetitive physical movement. There’s nothing to generalize here. Practicing a skill every day is still the rule of thumb for mastery. While that kid is resting his ligaments from the unnatural pitching maneuver, there are still many ways they can be practicing baseball: watching tapes, jogging, improving endurance and diet, or just resting really deeply. But personally, in my ideal world there would be no serious competitive sport, definitely nothing subsidized by schools and the state — sports should be something you do for fun with friends, like a game of Call of Duty, lightly competitive but not neurotic. Sports should be a game about improving your health and having fun, not stats-maxxing.
Olympians
I think it’s possible that the physical training was so intensive that it left a long distaste for exercise after the fact. I think this is possible. But that has more to do with the training being coercive. There’s lots of people who ran track in high school who now love running as a routine. (Two great books I loved about running, “the loneliness of the long distance runner”, and “what I talk about when I talk about running”, depict a more indulgent and purely positive type of running). It’s also possible they they have an addictive personality and substituted competition for food, or that genetics are involved.
Please never work at a think tank
I would never waste my time doing something so ineffectual, so you have nothing to fear. Spending two dozen pages and sixty-nine citations saying something uninteresting, read by fewer people than an average post on the internet, which could be better summarized in a few paragraphs if the evidence is based on compelling common information? I’ll leave that to more grandiose minds. Someone should do a study to see whether think tanks or 4chan have been more influential in shifting political views in the US (was it a think tank that influenced Elon Musk and his influence?) — a perfect study for a think tanker, if you know anyone.
evidence of this is that most prodigies start young
No. The evidence for this is that most elite performers start young across competitive domains. Chess and instrument performance are the most well-known and competitive. Children can learn more efficiently than an adult, so I’m surprised that you disagree with that.
What do you think that world looks like?
I’m glad you asked. We should be focusing on making a world with less stress. If everyone hones their professional skills in childhood, everyone will be less stressed. We should also be focusing on a world with less mandatory working hours. If everyone hyper-specializes, we could get away with reducing working hours due to increased efficiency, entering the workforce at a younger age, and fewer required schooling hours. We also want a world where things work well, which requires experts experting.
The world already has massively disproportionate rewards for the prodigies
Only for comparatively worthless skills, and then also like, 0.1% STEM performers. But my proposal is that whichever career we can reasonably predict you entering, we should train you in those skills at the youngest age. Whether that’s construction, retail, technology, teaching, etc. If you are most likely going to be a waiter your whole life, then we should train you in all possible skills related to that and then send you on your way. Waiting isn’t skill-intensive, but there are still skills (social charm, physical endurance). When trained, why shouldn’t they begin to work at 13? That’s four extra years of work, four years cost reduction in schooling (not counting college), it’s better for the waiter himself, and it increases likelihood of family formation too.
I'll tell you what that world looks like. It's China
If anything, our current system is based off the Chinese imperial examination method of schooling. Every Chinese kid regardless of career destiny is made to study way too much across way too much material. There’s no specialization at all until much later.
gaslighting me into buying more knicknacks or signing me up for more subscription services
I agree but I consider this an ancillary topic. But I’ll give my opinion because you brought it up. I think, if every worker is trained in their specific work, that we will actually have time to instill them with practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is vastly more important than knowing biology, phys ed, history, or even lots of maths you don’t wind up using. And practical wisdom would be all about spotting deception, knowing the dangers of consumerism and the hedonic treadmill, knowing how to spot someone trustworthy, knowing how to find a good deal. If there is one universal skill-set for training every human, it would be this. So something like “hyper-specialization plus universal practice wisdom” would be ideal.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
We already train kids for 8 hours every weekday plus homework, beginning at a young age. I’m saying that that this training should simply be more specialized, not that it needs to be more strenuous. In fact, if you make it more specialized, we could probably get away with making it less stressful.
It’s about creating a strong unconscious distaste for Trump by associating him with the most universally distasteful political “thing”. Its Cue->Response, pure animal psychology. My dog doesn’t leave the yard because she will get zapped; my sibling gets nauseous smelling cinnamon rolls because it reminds them of long car rides; the subject doesn’t vote for Trump because when his name is said by the TV the tone gets grim and they hear the word Hitler. I think that’s it. Vance weird, Trump Hitler, say it over thousands of trials across different contexts and it will stick. There’s no thinking required at all. How did Voldemort and the N-word become verboten? The same process: the word is said (cue), there is an immediate stimuli associated to it (response, the verbal response of others), this occurs over iterations until you are now afraid to utter the word.
Truly believing Trump is Hitler would lead to the moral prerogative to commit illegal acts. Clearly, the vast majority of Dems do not believe he is Hitler, or even Hitler-lite, because they aren’t storing weapons and organizing resistance networks. “The resistance” political meme is like Star Wars cosplay, whereas if they really believed he was Hitlerly it would be like the IRA. You can draw a comparison to abortion. How many people really believe that abortion is murder? The same amount of people spending every weekend protesting it and being jailed in doing so. If the store down the street were massacring children by the dozens every month would you really be watching football on the weekends?
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