magnax1
1yr ago
This is pretty spot on, but I have one thing to add--I think far more than people believing ideas that confer social status, they believe things that benefit their role in society. For example, professors almost always believe things that would elevate their role in society--some sort of technocratic socialism/marxism being the obvious historical example along with its descendant cultural marxist philosophies. Likewise, people in industries that suffer from expensive federal regulation, like oil, tend to be libertarian (the koch brothers)
magnax1
1yr ago
Deregulate housing/zoning, cut taxes, increase rural infrastructure, implement a land value tax, and support other policies which would incentivize moving away from the densest urban areas. If you can get something more radical through then the next policy would be something like removing taxes for married women who have 3 children with the same man. I don't think you could get that passed in any country though. You could probably get small short term bumps in pregnancy rates by welfare/paid leave policies but in the longer term they'd crater birth rates harder because it incentivizes or normalizes single motherhood which produces unproductive members of society and all the other social burdens that accompany that.
magnax1
1yr ago
I would bet there is no reliable data in unvaccinated countries. Every country developed enough for a vaccine campaign (except for China) has used the Western mrna vaccines. Also, if there was good data it wouldn't be comparable. Africa's mortality is not comparable to countries where half the country is over 50 (or whatever it is). Especially when you factor in all the excess mortality in Africa from other things (AIDS, untreated diseases that wouldn't matter in the developed world, etc)
magnax1
1yr ago
There's a pretty gaping chasm between "You will have to hire x% women and x% minorities or you'll be blacklisted" and "The payment companies won't let kiwi farms use their services." I don't think payment systems should be weaponized, but blacklisting kiwi farms was not about wokeness, diversity quotas, etc.
magnax1
1yr ago
He was successful precisely because he's a new money/guido type not a blue blood type like Romney. He also was willing to say whatever benefited him most, contradicting his previous stated beliefs quite regularly.
magnax1
1yr ago
Some are easier than others. Mass shootings are a very easy problem to dismiss. If you are less likely or roughly equally as likely to be harmed by something as a lightning strike, then it is a non issue in my view. Mass shootings are within the rough range of lightning strikes. Children drowning in pools is a much bigger issue, albeit also a total non issue in relative terms.
Other problems are indeed more complex. I don't really want to go into detail on global warming right now (I've spent way too much time on here today, I need to get work done), but I think it's quite easy to see that if you do a very pessimistic estimate of economic and technological growth on the timescales where global warming might be devastating (100+ years) and then include the opportunity cost of the measures taken to deal with it (which are all basically growth dampening) then I think it's quite clear that its at best a non-issue and at worst the policies are significant cost to society with little to no benefit. It seems to me very similar to the panic in the early late 19th and early 20th century about malthusian population collapse. It probably would not have taken much of a leap in 1890 to take an extremely pessimistic economic model, look at it, and say "This is fucking dumb, we're going to be too rich for this to matter."
magnax1
1yr ago
Someone should tell Musk that since he sure doesn't seem to care and is the richest man alive.
The nasdaq and banking sector are themselves part of the free market. I also suspect you overestimate the rigidity of these guidelines anyways (someone look up Walmarts board real quick and tell me when they're going to be blacklisted), Either way, the banking sector itself has a lot of competition internationally and internally. Most startups don't finance themselves off bank loans.
magnax1
1yr ago
This assumes there is no such thing as a free market. Sure, a single company can suicide by keeping a significant dead weight in its workforce, but they'll just be outcompeted by companies who don't, or maybe even countries who don't. Markets are just entropy, and entropy always wins out.
By European standards no growth since 06 is excellent. That's second best record, basically tied with France and behind Germany (And Russia, but their economy is trash anyways) Most of Southern Europe hasn't grown since ~1990.
Edit: I'm only referring to the major economies here. There's still limited growth in the nordics and small eastern euro countries.
magnax1
1yr ago
Concept is useful but there is no reason not to add solid writing to a concept. It's very hard to care about "crushing historical trends" when you just don't care about any individuals. That's just how people work. Even history is much more interesting through the lense of a Hannibal, Thutmoses III, or Joan of Arc.
magnax1
1yr ago
White and black Americans have comparable drug use rates, but the black ones are caught more.
This data is self reported, so is very questionable. Even then the self reported rates are pretty significantly different IIRC. Something like 20-30% higher for black people.
The difference in jail time/convictions for drug use is mostly down to a difference in dealing anyways. IE black people aren't actually caught for personal use that much more, but are a disproportionate amount of dealers (or at minimum, dealers who are caught)
Its common for people with extensive previous records or who are involved in violent crime. I don't think that's what people are thinking about when they hear someone went to jail for Marijuana for years.
magnax1
1yr ago
I don't expect that either are outliers. I suspect boards pretty closely match upper middle class demographics of whatever region predominates their recruiting pool. Go google Microsoft's board. I bet it's mostly white people because Seattle is very white. Likewise, I bet Ford is very white because midwestern upper middle class people are almost all white.
magnax1
1yr ago
Earth is nowhere near its carrying capacity, and the human population is more realistically limited by the resources of the solar system on any time scale where the Earth's carrying capacity is an issue. If Human population was about to trend to 40 billion, then Malthusian carrying capacity might become an issue. 9 billion? Not even close.
The biggest issue right now is that modern welfare systems are basically ponzi schemes. The eventual solution will be obvious--drastically cut spending, but that's difficult to achieve in democracies where the people paying are outnumbered by the people being paid.
magnax1
1yr ago
Fantasy and reality often have a sheer chasm between them. There definitely is some truth to the fact that some girls enjoy some level of non-consensual encounters, but there is also a wide range from "I said no, but if he ignores that it gives me cover to not feel bad about cheating" to "Some random stranger held a gun to my head and forced me to blow him."
I don't think many, even those who have non-consensual fantasies, would enjoy the latter.
magnax1
1yr ago
Very few to none. Almost all significant jail time for marijuana is for intent to distribute. Most states which haven't made it legal decriminalized it in small quantities or don't actively prosecute cases as of decades ago.
Material conditions of Americans require them to outsource most of the parenting to the State.
Considering how little effect what school you go to has on you and how big of an effect the makeup of your family has on you (how your parents interact with you, divorce, single motherhood, etc) I think this statement is a probably just outright wrong. In terms of time commitment it might be true that the state/schools are a bigger factor (although considering school holidays I'm not sure its actually true) but in terms of effect I don't think the evidence suggests anything like that.
Also, I suspect much less individual care from parents was given to children on average in the past. I actually remember a study that suggested this (IIRC mothers spend about as much time on a child as they did in the past but fathers spend far more) Of course, I didnt save the link.
Really, I don't think there's any evidence for most of your claims. If it is true that children are mainly raised (in terms of effect) by the state, its probably mainly true in cases where social institutions fail (again, mainly divorce and single motherhood)
Edit:also, the claim that mothers work stressful jobs, relative to the past, seems almost entirely the opposite of reality. Almost all women through history worked on small farms toiling at housework day to night. Hunger gatherers societies were ultra violent and incredibly unstable. The current era is by far the lowest stress for anyone, mothers included, excluding the sort of kazcynskian over socialized sense of stress.
magnax1
1yr ago
Why would gene selection technology be limited to the .01%? I can see a case it would be limited to developed countries, or be limited to the very wealthy in those countries for a short period, bit fundamentally technologies like crispr do not require significant resources to use other than the initial investment required to learn how to use them.
I'm not criticizing anything. You don't have to be a 3rd world hell basket to have poor data. It's a pretty common problem. Detroit has poor data tracking and is not anything approaching a 3rd world hell basket, even if it's crime is pretty close. There are pretty big swathes of most countries which don't track data well. For example, its pretty well established that China probably isn't quite sure what it's exact population or GDP are. The specific problems in China are likely different (incentives for people collecting data to lie) but the problem as a whole is pretty universal.
EDIT:I'm not sure why you wouldn't just compare US vaccinated vs unvaccinated. That's basically what the trials did, and the data is public.
https://eua.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/providers/clinical-trial-data
magnax1
1yr ago
Religiosity doesn't seem to have much correlation in general. There are exceptions (mormons, like you said, but even they are trending down fast) and the most religious countries in the world, the Arab peninsula states, have low birth rates that are trending down fast.
magnax1
1yr ago
I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think.
I don't think they're separate. Like I said-
the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden
But civil rights suits and so on are not the biggest burden. It's one of many burdens, and the burdens become bigger and more arbitrary the bigger the company.
magnax1
1yr ago
I think its good to make a fuss. I just think this is all a bit exaggerated. There are specifics which are more or less problematic.
magnax1
1yr ago
Most top European talent also immigrates out. Its impossible to start a new industry upending business in Europe because of regulation. Spacex, Uber, and many others could never have started anywhere in Europe because they would have been regulated out of existence.
Russia and France modernized post WW2. Qatar is currently modernizing and therefore is only just now dropping below replacement. It's where France was in the 50+ years ago in the cycle. Obviously modernization is the main trend here that dominates all other, but Qatar doesn't seem to be an outlier at all. UAE is already sub 1.5. Saudi Arabia seems to be behind on the curve, but its still quickly trending below 2.1. It may be the case that in 20 years Qatar's TFR will still be 1.80, but it doesn't seem that way.
The only explanation I can make of this is that Paul Pelosi has dementia, or was so drunk that he couldn't make out what was happening. His 911 call sounds a lot like someone who has dementia. The male prostitute theory makes absolutely no sense--why would a prostitute break in?
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