jake
10mo ago
fewer immigrants increase cost of living
A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class. The idea of foreign laborers as beneficial because they make goods cheap is somewhat reversing causality. Goods have to be cheap because we have so many foreign laborers. If people couldn't afford the staples, they wouldn't buy them. The outcomes from there are: goods cost less, or workers are paid more, or revolution.
"Cheap goods" are an illusory benefit. You shouldn't be thankful big ag can bring in >100,000 H-2A workers so your strawberries are only $5 a pound. You should be furious that your compensation hasn't scaled proportionally so you can afford strawberries at $10 or $15 or $20 a pound; you should be furious at the greed of banks and corporations, at the incompetence and corruption in government, that has allowed the rampant inflation from the probably $0.50 a pound strawberries cost in 1970. Or the $0.25 for bread and the $1.25 for milk.
Your stresses over cost of living are the direct consequence of these three events:
- The frontier was settled, no more pioneering, the supply of labor only rose
- Women entered the work force, the supply of labor was effectively doubled
- Since the late 20th century, >100 million more people are living and working in this country than it would have produced naturally
Also bankers being bankers, amidst all that.
(And if you want to argue that, explain why even Trump still hadn't gotten rid of it.)
This should be an entire post. In brief, the wealthy have too much to lose by the ACA being repealed, and the #1 way to improve healthcare in this country is to deport >50 million people.
jake
10mo ago
That he propositioned or made lecherous remarks at the girl's sister, the girl brandished, he started recording, changing to intimidating and taunting them to goad her into brandishing again, now on video, then he uploaded the video to TikTok.
jake
11mo ago
The situation is clear, only @ArjinFerman has asked the right question: "Why am I seeing this video, did Dumana upload it?"
Fatos Ali Dumana, 21, says he came to Britain legally from Bulgaria and he and his wife have an eight-month-old-baby
The self-styled 'digital creator' ...
... He moved to Dundee in June 2021 and now lives in a council property
Right.
The scenario where Dumana is the good guy is if he didn't upload the video, if it were the police or third-party via release from the police. It seems the order is the video went viral, then the girl was charged, and he calls himself a "digital creator" so we know his motive. An adult man who "legally" migrated to the UK to live in council housing, who posts videos of tween girls for internet clout, is factually and essentially in the wrong. Factually, again, he was recording tweens for clout; essentially, because he was exploiting for gain the most vulnerable members of the population of his exceedingly gracious host. His responses in the article offer further insight.
'If she's only 12 why was she messing with me and having weapons?
'I was going to the shop and she was stopping me going on my way.'If I did hurt the girl, why didn't the police arrest me?
'They have done nothing to me.'
No empathy, no expression of concern for greater order, innocence via appeal to authority rather than "Her behavior concerned me so I made the video in case I had to show the police." Repeated "I didn't touch her, I didn't hurt her," right, what did you say to her? That wasn't in the video. Convenient.
On the question of weaponry, it bears repeating that it is illegal in Scotland to carry anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon for self-defense.
What bears repeating more is a 12 year old girl can do literally nothing to physically defend herself from a healthy man unless she has a gun.
The weapons are extra, they tell you she doesn't know what she's doing. The hatchet's a joke, she's not even getting through a t-shirt with that. The knife would pose a problem if it were small, but it was a kitchen knife and it's the UK so it's a rounded tip, right? If he gave her a free shot, if he let her wind up and stab his bare abdomen with both hands, she still only might break skin. It tells you she doesn't know what she's doing, whether she's a "ned-to-be" she doesn't know violence at that moment.
It could be she was trying to impress somebody, but even if you're right, that is an incredible reach. She correctly viewed Dumana as a creep, she "brandished" the weapons as a threat, and the most reasonable explanation for why she had the weapons is because this was not the first time a man has creeped on her and her sister. The appropriate response would be to have a talk, maybe check out her home life, see if her mom has a scuzzy boyfriend, but that they've charged her is grossly wrong--unless, I guess, charges don't carry the same weight there, and it's just the bureaucratic of "We have to do this for the paperwork to check out her home life." A 12 year old girl doesn't ever carry a knife because her government failed to tell her she can't.
jake
11mo ago
Nice. I'm a bit of an architecture nerd, especially for houses. Within the last year or so I came across Cliff Tan, aka "Dear Modern", famed internet feng shui expert. I had no opinions on feng shui before watching his videos, or the closest I had was Frank Lloyd Wright's epithet against interior decorators as "inferior desecrators." But watching Tan redraw floorplans, or make perspective drawings of rooms he then modifies to have harmonious feng shui, the work speaks for itself and I'm a believer. I wouldn't say in energy flow as such, but energy flow as a phrase to describe the ineffable feeling of a living space that's just "right." And it's repeatable, anybody can follow the rules of feng shui to rearrange their living spaces. I'd already mostly arrived on it intuitively, but those slight touches work, and I did it for the sunroom at my parents' house and my dad immediately said it was better.
I have a couple MagicaVoxel models I worked on just for fun around the time I started watching Tan's vids. The first was an idea I had before that I'd gone through a few versions of before starting over with some of the ideas of feng shui. The kitchen is both too open yet claustrophobic, I was thinking of it as something like an architectural challenge. I had the idea of you having to enter a courtyard to even reach the main entrance of the house, and I wanted a kitchen on the courtyard, but as you can see I weigh symmetry heavily so that resulted in me putting the kitchen as the main entrance, and that's bad. The rooms on the other side of the courtyard are bedrooms, the halls on them have slightly better flow, though the bedrooms should be like a sitting room and an office, and the blue rooms on the halls are bathrooms and should be flipped with the doors beside them for best flow, and then the doors to the left and the right of the kitchen removed in favor of windows. Of course what would be actually best is for the courtyard to open to a small foyer, then a sitting room, then I'd personally put another courtyard with halls on either side to reach kitchen/dining . . . if I return to this it will be to start over again.
Which I kind of did back then, when I realized I'd modeled myself into a corner, was go to just modeling a room.
jake
11mo ago
Cartoonist/lay theologian/general esotericist Owen Cyclops had this to say in response to MrBeast posting such a picture:
once again we must review that normal people are now exposed to things every day that would, literally, previously have only been madness inducing items from fairy tales and ancient legends.
Yes. Don't create the Torment Nexus, etc. I wonder if you could package it to the masses by calling it a pocket-sized Mirror of Erised. But give it another 20 years and people will be able to climb inside the mirror. What then?
The wonderful dream of what might have been only becomes a cognitohazard if you wake up, I suppose.
jake
11mo ago
If you're looking for another person for editing, feel free to message me. I can provide a sample from my own writing if you'd want to see my bona fides.
jake
11mo ago
In a coincidence of timing, I've spent much of the day going through the telegram channel "Palestine English News Updates" (gazaenglishupdates) in another round of my continuing effort to locate video of the alleged mass murder of civilians. Content in the channel is only very rarely blurred, so if any of you plan on opening it, be warned: it contains extremely graphic images and video. I found a single video of the moment an individual was shot, and none depicting the moment where a group was shot at or attacked with explosives, but I relied entirely on search terms, and in a channel going back to Oct 23 that has 10K images and 20K videos, that's plenty of chances for me to miss one or several hundred.
What I didn't miss is the plentiful video and images of starving children. While the cause might be up for debate, that children are starving isn't. It's intuitive anyway: not easy to feed people in a warzone, the only food is coming in from the outside, people and especially children are going to die from malnutrition and starvation.
Israel might not "intend" (apply as heavy caveat to that as you wish) for civilians to starve, but starvation walks hand in hand with war and death. They knew it would result from the start, and it is strictly true that if the IDF stood down and withdrew, fewer people would starve. Should they? Good luck finding an impartial answer to that.
jake
1yr ago
Probability estimates, anyone?
I don't know who Candace Owens is, and although I've seen her name mentioned online, I deliberately refrained from finding out more because I don't have the time or inclination to go down those rabbit holes. But now the Stupid Edgy Internet Shit is mainstream news
Consider that you, in American spaces, only knew vaguely of Owens before news of "Sued by the wife of the President of France." Why is the French First Family taking this so seriously? It's witch-hunt logic but given that no matter the result of this lawsuit, millions of people will become new believers in Brigitte being a man, the only winning move is not to play.
P(Woman) is highest if they'd never acknowledged it. It's inherently undignified for any woman to "prove" what they are, it's a debacle for the French First Lady.
P(Man) increases with threat of litigation, and I'd argue it probably increases further with the actual filing of suit. Owens' defense could argue for medical testing. It's the point of the lawsuit and Owens will argue the documents were forged and that justifies tests. In the fictional court-of-perfectly-principled-justice Brigitte might be ordered to be tested, in the real world there's not a judge in the US who will order such testing for the wife of the President of France. It would be itself an instant international incident beside the separate incident of a US court rejecting the authenticity of French government documents. Point being here, P(Man) is superficially but not actually reduced by taking the matter to court, even US courts where truth is an absolute defense.
Another is P(MSM Emmanuel) and P(Emmanuel's Behest). Doesn't take much to find him in some very homoerotic pictures, and maybe that's a French thing, genuinely. If it's not and he is a man who has sex with men, this could be his closeted overreaction. Although now that I think about it, I wonder what would happen if someone with reach alleged this with Melania Trump. Does Don bring the hammer down? But Macron and Trump are very different men.
There's also P(Third-Party Plot); a US faction seeing an opportunity to financially crush Owens and the Macrons assisting an ally, perhaps not entirely willingly. This is an enormous reach but it still makes more sense than the First Lady of France suing a gauche American for calling her a man.
The others are right, chess at its highest level doesn't feed into anything but itself. If your daughter had that rare acumen and you wanted to support her and she made WGM, chess would be her work and her life. I think you might wonder if this would be so bad. WFM Anna Cramling is the daughter of WGM Pia Cramling and GM Juan Manuel Bellón López. There's this video of her watching as her mother plays an amateur at a chess bar in Paris, and it's idyllic. Titled chess players also generally come from moneyed families; there are worse people to fall into crowd with.
But there are examples of highly successful non-career chess players who were good at it, namely Stanley Kubrick and Peter Thiel. I'm not attributing, obviously it's that the traits that made Kubrick a superb filmmaker as an adult, saw him interested and successful in chess as an adolescent, same with Thiel. Maybe chess is the nascent flame of something much brighter in her future, why not encourage it?
If you want to brush up yourself, IM Jeremy Silman wrote the best general book: How to Reassess Your Chess
Edit: linked the wrong vid, updated the link, the old vid is below
jake
1yr ago
This implies adequate compartmentalization of intel, and we know that doesn't happen. Were there something substantive that indicted Trump and also indicted a bunch of boomer dems, one of the dozens of bright-eyed young socialists in all those retinues would have seen it and said "Fuckin' two birds" and dumped it to the press.
Even the righty wet dream scenario where the DNC itself would cease to exist from >90% of its major personnel being indicted still demands an answer to the question of why a radical in the lower ranks doesn't release it. They aren't all ruthless realpolitikers, plenty are true believers in socialism as a winning platform and that the DNC only loses elections because they aren't radical enough. That's means and motive.
The last challenge point was the election. That nothing was released after November 6 is proof nothing substantive exists.
jake
1yr ago
CPT apropos Epstein is the easiest way for frothing antisemites, e.g.; Andrew Torba, to cloak their animus in something ostensibly reasonable. Torba is clear about what he thinks, it's his motivations he gets to hide. Today he's playing panican on X. He isn't mad because he believes in a general sexmonster conspiracy being swept under the rug, he's mad because he believes jews orchestrated that sexmonster conspiracy (as if American politicians were famously free of deviancy before) and if unmasked we could finally begin expunging their influence and usher in a new American golden age.
I think Epstein was an op, just one that equally implicates multiple nations. Pizzagate was something entirely separate, but the righties have their wires crossed thinking these were all one thing. Epstein's Island involved 16/17 year old girls, and rarely 16/17 year old boys, being paid to have sex with various wealthy and powerful men. Pizzagate involved high-power dems and DC figures, among others, raping children who were then probably quite often murdered. One involves an activity legal in all of Europe where the problem they would have is that money changed hands. It is a simple taboo that we should punish as it functions as a critical test for good socialization, I just can't pretend there's anything actually unusual about a man wanting to have sex with a 17 year old girl. The other, as we all know and as Greer notes here, is a problem universally agreed upon as solved by woodchippers. They're not on the same planet of severity.
jake
1yr ago
When I was in high school I spent a couple summers lifeguarding for my city's public pools. My parents suggested it but they didn't require it, and it was largely my mother's doing. I've always loved swimming, I never did it competitively but all the time recreationally, and my mom also loved swimming, and I think she recommended it because she had a sense about these things, obvious as it is, that her teenage son would enjoy getting paid to spend summers at the pool.
I did. I never thought of it as work, I still don't. It's very funny to me how it does not parse at all in my memories as a job. I was hanging out with people my age, or girls just a bit older than me who were all thin and attractive and in skintight lifeguard suits. It was also a nice pool and this was the 00s so most people going were thin, other than the classic fat dad or chubby mom. It's lifeguarding so it built responsibility, and I think I'm a better person for it, for all of it. As far as summer activity options for high schoolers, lifeguarding must be high on the stack for socialization and peer esteem. I'll fully recommend this to my kids, but as with my parents, not require it, and for the same reason as I suspect from my mom. Work ethic, get in touch with the working class? The pocket money is nice, but nah. Hang out at the pool, socialize, exercise, flirt with girls. That's just a good summer.
jake
1yr ago
I think if you have two largely identical groups, where Group A reproduces below replacement and Group B reproduces in excess of replacement, Group A, from a purely materialist and natural reading, is a biological phenomenon whose function is as a genetic terminus, i.e.; here, the humans of western civ are in the process of selecting for genetic predisposition to specific rather than generalized religiosity. ("What kinds of things you believe but can't prove.")
- Amish: >6.0 (Mennonites also appear high but I couldn't find recent data)
- TradCaths: 3.5/3.6 (3.6 anecdotal, "Kloster 2018" cited for 3.5)
- Mormons: 3.4 -- According to this link from @Crowstep below, 57% of Gen X Mormons have 0/1/2 children
- Muslims:3.0/3.1
- Evangelicals: 2.3 (All following numbers use this citation)
- Catholics: 2.2
- Jews: 2.0
- Mainline Protestants: 1.9
- Atheists: 1.5
- Agnostics: 1.4
Religion will interact with the US culture war effectually, as the nonreligious population largely selects itself out of existence. This will swiftly accelerate with the wifebot and the half-right to reproduction, where it's mostly religious families buying the half-rights of mostly nonreligious sellers. Especially Mormons, when it becomes socially viable for them to pick polygamy back up (Smith and Young, laughing). Catholicism and Mormonism, there's your Western future.
jake
1yr ago
Would mark as "bad."
Everything following "The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero" is charity extended to my interlocutor. With sub-1% chance of death and sub-1% chance of a voluntary stop, the probability of it being Ghislaine Maxwell is already over 90%.What's the probability alone of someone incorporating a bit of personal information into their reddit username? 5%? How's it change when our options for maxwellhill are Ghislaine Maxwell and person who probably doesn't exist?
jake
1yr ago
(Also plausible: he didn't intend for it to be successful but rather a 'cry for help' suicide, banked on the guards finding him in time and then he'd maybe be moved to better conditions or his lawyer could argue for clemency from the court due to his mental distress, but it didn't work out for him that way).
This is the (darkly) funniest possible explanation. Yeah, I can believe that completely. Will share.
manually reposting links across Reddit to farm karma
To continue her work in the giant psy-op that is reddit. This isn't a trivial affair. Reddit a bastion of progressivism and a key component in their narrative machine.
For my money, I don't view Epstein as a Mossad op. I view it as a joint operation between multiple countries' intelligence services where they each found benefit.
You continue holding the idea of these people behaving in predefined ways. They don't. You think they wouldn't use an account with their own last name. Yeah, they would. I wouldn't even say it for the tin foil "Triple bluff." No, they just don't actually think about these things. Opsec is often comically bad, it just sort of works out anyway because nobody gives a shit and people are actually really good at keeping their mouths shut. Though for what it's worth, what you are describing is in fact perfect opsec, because you've convinced yourself it couldn't possibly be her.
It was. Your priors are wrong, probability has her dead to rights.
jake
1yr ago
The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after
It did not. maxwellhill's last post was June 30, 2020. Maxwell was arrested July 2, 2020. I would wonder if claims of harassment preceding maxwellhill's disappearance were propagated from the mods who claimed they were still active in modmail when, obviously, they weren't.
"Coincidence" has no explanatory power. "Reddit-type" is just wrong. If the account were made in 2014 it might, the account was made in 2006. This indicates a different category of person. It indicates someone very savvy in tech, which Maxwell is. The probability also isn't low. Bayes favors Ghislaine. The name is one bit of information, her lapses in activity is two, or four. It's true these examples could be cherry-picked, but the question isn't only how much the stopping coinciding with her arrest increases her probability, but how much it decreases the probability of it being someone else.
For Ghislaine herself, assuming the number of all users on reddit in 2020, which best I can tell was 600 million, the probability difference ranges from being >5 million times more likely to >150 million times more likely. The lack of probability for the others says enough. But we're not looking at everybody, we're looking at a specific subset of all people who stopped using reddit. For the definition of the power-user, the most probable explanation is an involuntary stop. That means death or incarceration. If it's incarceration, it's Ghislaine. If it's death, then we consider the probable causes for death for a user who posted every single day then abruptly and completely stopped. That's an instant death. Heart attack, blood clot, accident, manslaughter, homicide, suicide. That would narrow it to deaths on June 30 and July 1, but let's say we expand it out to a week, just because. That's 5500 people.
The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero. We can round way up and say it's exactly one person. Ghislaine, or Rando, and with two options, their probability sums to 1. What's the probability Rando would be savvy enough to register an account in 2006? Probably high, given their acumen. What's the probability vs Ghislaine they would name themselves "maxwellhill?" Let's say indeterminate. What's the probability they would show similar interests? Again, probably high. What's the probability they would also have prior lapses in activity that could be tied to specific outings? Very low.
It's not 50/50, but even if it were, it's Ghislaine. It's 90/10 her favor. We rounded up so realistically it's 99/1. Super-realistically it's 100/0, which I know you can't actually say under Bayes. Fortunately in this little area of reality, we can say. It was her.
jake
1yr ago
She made the account in 2006. It has her last name but connecting that would be tenuous without knowing a lot about her. Her name also isn't the meat of the allegations. It's that a weird, politically active and well-connected account had repeated lapses in activity that could be tagged to events in the life of a similarly weird, well-connected woman, the activity halting completely when that woman was arrested.
jake
1yr ago
I think a point you stake a claim on doesn't necessarily withstand scrutiny.
Epstein wasn't a pathological liar. He was a sociopath who lied when it suited him, that's not the same as compulsive lying. For your examples, he was lying to ingratiate himself with higher social circles. He also maintained his fortune, and as you said, he left it in the hands of professionals. That's proof that he had an honest assessment of himself, not one overblown as we would expect from other sorts of behavioral pathologies. It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.
You then stake on the idea of intelligence agencies not working with liars and conmen, that's exactly what they do. Treachery, betrayal, is considered the gravest sin. The lowest circle of the Inferno, the ice is full of traitors. What has the US done, time and again? Turned spies against their country of origin. If the US government can find a reason to trust someone who commits the gravest sin below treachery to God, no doubt with as little slack as they're given, they can find a reason to trust a guy who lied at parties and fumbled around early in his career. It's an idea from how the world should be, or an idea from how the world operates in fiction about spies. None of what you describe of his background is specifically disqualifying for his use as an asset. The question is the link, whether his connections make sense, or the impact, whether blackmail makes sense.
Israel, as a state, knows history isn't over, and they act like it. They're operating from a timeline looking to the end of the century and the next. Having the US as an enduring ally is an existential requirement, just as is keeping every country around them unstable until they have enough of a technological edge to assert permanent regional supremacy. They have reason to run a perpetual blackmail machine, including targeted those who appear to be on their side. Appearing like it isn't enough when the game is whether your country keeps existing. It could be, as @Quantumfreakonomics wonders, that for some it was a carrot, and others a stick. It could be that the stick becomes a carrot. Once they've got you on tape fucking one 17 year old, what's ten more? And on that note, you think the sorts of guys hearing about Sex Monster Island aren't aware of the power of the jews in America? They'd notice if they never saw any other jew. I'm reaching here, but you've also reached in looking for benign explanations. Like with Epstein's death, you start with the frame of suicide, so you make the explanation for why. I would ask, given what we know about his life and how often men like him skirt justice, is it probable that rather than torching literally any VIP he could draw from the list of flights, he instead just killed himself? It's not.
There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?
jake
1yr ago
and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
By the way, and I should have said this back at Christmas, but alas. I'd say the probability of your assessment of Ramaswamy falsely professing belief is very high now. I won't go all the way, not because I mind admitting being wrong, you can treat this as my admission of being on the wrong side of assessing him, but because it's not my place to say on this whether someone believes what they say. "He's given adequate reason to doubt him," yes. I do think one of my arguments holds up, that a more competent actor would have found a way to say it without lying, because he dropped a few poorly chosen words on an issue and got himself banished to Ohio.
You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.
Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.
But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Strictly redistributive. Communist.
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:
- That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
- That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
- That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
- That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate
Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.
Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.
Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.
jake
1yr ago
I know little on autism diagnoses. I have a cousin who might be autistic, and then also one friend who is autistic, she's a former FTM who transitioned ~2011, married a man at about the same time and they're still together, moved out of the country and detransitioned a few years later. She's appreciably different from any of my other friends, especially compared to the ones who describe themselves as on the spectrum, but she and I mostly swap pictures of our dogs and I've had some burning questions, assuming you don't mind answering:
- Did you read much as a child? If so, what?
- You mention childhood hallmarks of social issues, did you have few friends? One best friend? Are you friends still? How long have you known your oldest friend?
- Are you attracted to the opposite sex? When did you first notice?
- And this one's just angled at MLP; have you ever read or watched Japanese shoujo? If yes, had you before MLP?
GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.
HDI is a lagging indicator for what could be called civilization development factor C. C associates totally with homogeneity except in Singapore (75% Chinese anyway) and the US, whose C increased following predominantly European immigration and has consistently declined over the last 5 decades. Those countries with high C reached their peak before accepting significant numbers of non-European immigrants, now their C is in uniform decline.
Economics is a pseudoscience whose total positive contributions to humanity are counted on one hand. It endures because it is useful to power, laundering corrupt motive under the veneer of something scientific. "The GDP is high," they say. They mean "Don't believe your lying eyes."
Only pharmaceuticals stand as a market sector where surplus drives innovation, and there it is intramarket surplus from the profits of optional and less-critical therapies funding research in critical therapies. Abundant plastic garbage has resulted in no innovations, improving the delivery of said plastic garbage is not innovation. Millions of foreigners originating in H-class visas either stifle innovation, in itinerant farmhands preventing automation, or cheap tech roles for workers who, as H-class visa holders, are by definition not innovators. No innovation has resulted from the proliferation of Indian hotel, gas station/C-Store owners and low-class tech workers; among the behemoths, the rise of Indians in Alphabet and Microsoft, among many other corporations, preceded not innovation but enshittification. Amazon may be credited for leading to AWS, but Prime is now the lamprey on the whale of their hosting services. The billions who owe cheap computers for their access to the internet will stand in history as evidence directly disproving the utility of cheap goods.
We reached the moon in the 60s. Beyond medicine, the idea we have become more innovative is laughable. We do have better medicine, we do have better entertainment. Day-to-day life today versus the 60s remains worse. It's no coincidence video games, television, and cinema declined, and now the previous bastion of culture in the left is on the verge of collapse. In the absence of such distractions, we would have already seen revolutionary violence.
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