guajalote
1yr ago
What kind of world do you imagine where cultural change doesn't happen? Even if all migration was completely halted worldwide, the internet is constantly transmitting culture worldwide. The kind of world you seem to want to live in would require a literal return to the dark ages. And of course cultural mixing was still happening back then too. The reason we're speaking a language without gendered nouns is because Viking settlers "corrupted" English. The reason I used the word "do" in the first sentence of this post is because Celtic languages "corrupted" English.
I doubt it contains many rare earths!
Most valuable things, including the examples you raised in your post (CPUs, GPUs, drugs, and surgical equipment) don't contain rare earth metals. Of course, rare earth metals are indeed important and I am not claiming otherwise. But you'll notice that the countries with large rare earth metal deposits aren't necessarily the richest countries on earth -- some of them are among the poorest. This seems to be in tension with your claim that the wealth of nations is derived from natural resources.
All kinds of 'coordinators', 'inspectors' and 'consultants' that didn't seem to be needed at all. What is the point of them, then? No real wealth is being produced from people who make others fill out forms, check paperwork and refuse approvals for other people to go and create wealth.
The jobs that are truly not needed are, by and large, jobs that exist as a result of useless government regulations. Either government jobs, or private sector "compliance" jobs. It's true that many of these specific types of "service sector" jobs are dead weight and serve no purpose. You have correctly observed that government regulations are often pointless or counterproductive.
It does not follow, however, that service sector jobs are generally useless or fail to create wealth. In fact, as I laid out above, the vast majority of the wealth of modern economies derives from service sector jobs. Just not the specific class of useless service sector jobs you have identified.
The EU couldn't manage to send a million artillery shells to Ukraine, North Korea could.
The simple reason is that NK has a bunch of artillery shells lying around, whereas the EU doesn't. This is a pretty extreme case of special pleading. If we're talking about literally anything other than artillery shells (cell phones, eggs, insulin, toilets, tractors, etc.) the EU has far more of it and far higher quality versions of it than NK. And if the EU wanted or needed to, it could surely close the artillery gap with NK as well. This has almost nothing to do with natural resources and everything to do with intangibles like human capital, rule of law, markets, etc.
guajalote
1yr ago
They believe it’s important to explain their reasoning to their kids.
I think it's really valuable to explain your reasoning to your kid whenever possible. My parents did to me all the time. However, they made it clear that my obligation to obey them was not contingent upon my agreement with their reasoning.
guajalote
1yr ago
This is a relevant variable to the feeling of "immigrants are using up resources that should be going to the native poor".
Sure, this is a valid argument, but it's an argument against welfare, not against immigration.
guajalote
1yr ago
There is nothing new about that. Even in the Bronze Age, it was true that a house made of wood was a lot more valuable than a bunch of logs lying by the side of the road.
The only thing that's new is the magnitude of the effect. Raw materials represent an ever dwindling fraction of the value of the good.
But I would argue that in a sense, the contract law is actually itself quite tangible because cops and their guns are very tangible.
Sure, but once you start counting the cops as tangible now you're agreeing with my point and negating the premise of the original argument I was responding to: people and the activities they engage in are far more important than natural resources to the wealth of a nation.
guajalote
1yr ago
In my experience, things like low housing costs and a robust economy are far more conducive to poor people's standard of living than a robust wellfare state. Houston, for example, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. The country of Canada has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents, with cities often much higher than that; for example in Toronto the rate seems to be in excess of 322 per 100k.
So while I would agree that Canada is more "concerned" about poor people, it's not at all clear to me that Canada is actually providing a better standard of living for poor people.
guajalote
1yr ago
It exists on real physical machines that exist at specific places in the real world.
Add up the cost of all the raw materials present in those physical machines and you'll get something on the order of $10. All the additional value and wealth represented by those machines and the programs they contain comes from intangible things.
guajalote
1yr ago
I admit that there are areas where my model breaks down - my Steam library can't really be considered physical, it barely touches the physical world excepting that CPUs and GPUs are needed to make use of it.
I think your model breaks down all over the place. Obviously raw materials are not irrelevant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the wealth of a modern developed economy.
Go dig up a shovelful of dirt in your backyard. That dirt contains most of the raw materials needed to build a CPU. But there are many, many orders of magnitude difference between the value of that dirt and the value of a CPU. Almost all that value comes from intangible things:
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The knowledge and time of skilled electrical engineers and chemists figuring out how to design and fabricate CPUs.
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The university system that educated them and provided the foundational knowledge they built upon.
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A legal system that enables companies to enter into and enforce contracts with one another in a reliable way
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Systems of IP protection that incentivize R&D expenditures in CPU development.
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Consistent law enforcement and property rights that allow companies to invest billions of dollars in semiconductor fabrication equipment without worrying a government or criminal organization will take it away from them.
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Financial institutions that will lend money to these companies if they don't have billions of dollars sitting around to build semiconductor fabs.
On and on. It's intangibles (almost) all the way down.
Healthcare is about using physical goods like surgical equipment and drugs.
Like CPUs, surgical equipment and drugs are mostly made out of cheap-as-fuck raw materials that are then synthesized into useful things. It's engineers, chemists, biologists, lawyers, etc. that make it possible for this stuff to exist. And of course much of healthcare is made up of other sorts of intangibles, like medical training. Surgical equipment isn't of much use without surgeons.
Yes, you need to have ways for savings and loans to be allocated - but savings and loans are just claims on real goods.
You act like this is trivial, but it's not. There exist countries in the world today where you can't trust banks to hold your savings and the average person can't get loans because the economy is too unstable and risky. These are the so-called "shithole" countries, and they're shitholes not because of a lack of natural resources but because of a lack of the kinds of intangible goods I've been talking about.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think you are conflating two issues that are mostly unrelated. Housing costs are probably being driven up slightly by increased demand due to immigration, but the effect is tiny compared to the supply-side problems caused by excessive red tape that makes housing expensive and difficult to build. The population of Houston, Texas is about 20% foreign-born immigrants, yet housing is extremely affordable because there is no zoning, no rent controls, and few regulatory hoops to jump through if you want to build housing.
Nobody worries about immigrants buying up all the food, or all the cars, or all the cell phones. If demand goes up, the economy will just produce more of these things to meet demand. It doesn't make sense to worry about immigrants buying up all the housing either, unless there's a problem on the supply side that makes it impossible to meet demand. Fix the supply side problem if you want to fix the housing problem.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think Sam Harris would say both sides' theologically motivated claims are bullshit, but that support for Israel nevertheless makes sense from a utilitarian perspective.
guajalote
1yr ago
Could you call it a "taboo" if most people were capable of calmly and dispassionately discussing the topic? By definition, what makes something a taboo is that most people will have such a strong emotional reaction to it that rational discussion is impossible. I'm surprised that you're surprised to see people behaving this way.
We live in a world of complex issues that demand thoughtful consideration, yet it appears that a significant portion of discourse is reduced to emotional outbursts.
Because we live in such a complex world, most people are not capable of giving due thoughtful consideration to most topics. Taboos are a way of preventing people from reasoning on first principles about certain topics and arriving at socially harmful conclusions. Not all taboos do this job well, but I think some do. "Don't commit murder" works better as a rule than "don't commit murder unless you're able to determine that doing so would increase the net wellbeing of society." "Don't commit fraud" works better than "don't commit fraud unless you believe you can get away with it and you plan to donate your earnings to effective charities, thereby increasing the net utility of society." If people are allowed to engage in "thoughtful consideration" on these topics, they will often find ways to justify bad behavior as being for the net good of society. Because this kind of reasoning is so often self-interested and unreliable, it's sometimes better to just have a "no exceptions" taboo that forbids any reasoning about the topic.
guajalote
1yr ago
Anecdotes can trump statistics in the context of a specific type of argument, of the following form: "I don't give a shit about how 'the economy' is doing, I care about how me and my family are doing, so aggregate economic indicators are of no interest to me when I have my own lived experiences." Similar types of arguments could be made about other subjects, like policing.
I think quite often, even when people don't explicitly make this argument, it's what they're really saying. For obvious reasons, most people support or oppose policies based on how they think those policies will impact them personally, regardless of whether the policy is "good" or "bad" in the aggregate.
The reason this works is because it's much easier to come up with a false theory that agrees with existing data than it is to come up with a true theory that appears to contradict existing data, so contradiction provides much more useful information for updating priors that confirmation does. And if your theory is consistent with all conceivable data (i.e. is unfalsifiable), then the theory doesn't have any predictive value because it is consistent with all possible outcomes.
What I don't understand is how she thought this one random dude isn't "really" non-binary on the basis of his toxic mansplaining, but a trans woman who commits a violent crime (up to and including raping a female person) is still a woman.
I think if you gave her a specific example of a trans person committing a sex crime, she would likely use the "they're not really trans" argument. But because you quoted statistics she can't do that as easily; it would imply large numbers of people who claim to be trans aren't really trans.
Also, as @Pynewacket alludes to, statistics don't hit "the feels" the way anecdotes do, so she didn't have the same emotional reaction to the statistics that she had in the case of her male NB friend. If she doesn't feel the same way about both situations, she won't interpret them as analogous and therefore won't feel the need to be logically consistent. This is a pretty common way for normal, average IQ people to behave. For example, people like this will often reject arguments by analogy they disagree with by saying something like "those two situations are totally different" without being able to articulate why they are different in any relevant way. They simply feel differently about the two situations and therefore refuse to see them as analogous.
guajalote
1yr ago
While I'm just as guilty of using "true" and "false" in a colloquial manner as anyone else, at the end of the day the issue lies in the fact that Popperian notions of falsifiability simply don't work.
You're right that true and false are not binary (pun intended), but falsification absolutely does "work" in the sense that data which contradicts a theory should generally lead to a much stronger updating of priors than data which agrees with a theory.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think your sister's stated explanations are simply an attempt to rationalize her feelings. They're not a description of her actual underlying reasoning.
I think for a lot of everyday liberals who haven't thought carefully about this stuff, the reasoning goes like this: trans/NB people are oppressed, and oppressed people are good and virtuous. Therefore if someone (in my estimation) is not good and virtuous, then they are not "really" trans/NB.
You see this a lot. When a trans person is in the news doing something bad, then they're not really trans, they're faking it. Similarly, if a member of an oppressed minority group doesn't hold the right opinions or vote the right way, they're self-hating or not "really" an authentic member of their race, etc.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think you can find examples of Trump supporters saying Bernie and the far left in general were "right" about certain topics, like tariffs and economic protectionism, that used to be extremely unpopular among Republicans.
guajalote
1yr ago
It seems like everything is political if the standard is "can be interpreted as related to a political issue." Posting a picture of yourself wearing Nikes would be political because Nikes are made in sweatshops. Posting a picture with your kids is political because the decision to have or not have kids is politically salient. Etc.
guajalote
1yr ago
Item 1 seems impossible to realistically enforce. If someone posts a selfie that has a pride flag in the background, is that political? If someone argues that the Bible forbids homosexuality, is that political?
guajalote
1yr ago
In my experience most high-level US politicians have an unreal level of charm in person that is almost impossible to fully describe unless you've experienced it firsthand. I've met several politicians who I intensely disliked from afar, only to find myself instantly charmed by them in person. Never met Clinton, but he probably takes this to another level.
guajalote
1yr ago
I haven't read the full transcript of the order so perhaps I have an incorrect impression of it, but I think it is overbroad, yes. According to the article you linked "Justice Engoron said that his statement should be considered a gag order forbidding any posts, emails or public remarks about members of his staff." Being able to speak out against government officials in a proceeding is an absolutely core aspect of what the 1st amendment protects. The right to say things like "the judge's law clerk is politically motivated and out to get me" should be inviolable, even though in this case it's an incredibly stupid thing to say. If the gag order was narrowly tailored to allow protected speech, e.g., Trump can criticize the law clerk but can't call on his followers to harass the clerk, I would feel differently.
guajalote
1yr ago
I again completely agree with you. Trump's decision to go after a clerk was profoundly stupid and improper. Still, the gag order seems constitutionally overbroad and it would have been wise for the judge to exercise more restraint, given that this is a high-profile case and the gag order involves a fundamental constitutional right. I expect federal judges to exercise more judgment than cops or journalists in responding to these kinds of provocations, even if the provocation is clearly way over the line.
guajalote
1yr ago
I clerked for a federal judge and I agree with your assessment, but it doesn't change the fact that a broad gag order has constitutional problems.
guajalote
1yr ago
How you dress is never an invitation to be mugged, but that doesn't make it a good idea to wear a flashy diamond Rolex in a bad neighborhood. You have every right to do so, and if you're robbed the perpetrator is still 100% at fault, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.
I am a big fan of TW:Warhammer III, but it literally took me a year to feel like I am competent at the game. There is so much hidden "under the hood" so to speak and a lack of good resources online to teach you the intricacies of strategy and tactics. The youtuber Legend of Total War is probably the best resource I've found, but I don't really like getting this kind of information in the form of video content, so I've mostly learned the game by (1) playing multiplayer with a couple friends who are good at the game, and (2) trial and error.
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