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
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.
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
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
Society won't collapse because a few companies might lose out to French, Japanese or maybe Chinese companies, and then have to reform, create new organizations, or limp on as a second rate economy (like Europe has been doing for 50+ years without a sign of collapse). The gap between where the US is now and collapse is monumental. It is the most powerful, rich, and culturally dominant nation in human history. It basically has to conjure up boogiemen to create competitive incentives. Undoubtedly the US will collapse someday, just like every other civilization or nation ever, but woke won't be the cause.
Btw I'm not saying woke stuff is good. It's just an exaggerated threat to terminally online right leaning types. You could realistically go a month in a wealthy suburb living out your life and never have it affect you at work, home or your kids school's. One of the actual biggest issues in America right now is a huge gap between the perceived importance of a problem (Global warming, school shootings, woke, or whatever) and actual significant problems.
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
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
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
It's required to tell what excess mortality means, which is the whole point of this discussion.
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
Being boosters, they are inherently looking at the effect vs the previous dose.
Its a bit ridiculous to ask for something so easily accessible on google as moderna vaccine trials.
magnax1
1yr ago
My bad. I'm just working off memory of Russia making a big deal over it years ago.
magnax1
1yr ago
Definitely not true, because I'm a YIMBY and am totally opposed to dense urbanification. You could call most of the republican party functionally YIMBY (anti construction regulation) but anti urbanification, they just don't use those terms. There's a pretty clear connection between how red an area is and its lack of housing regulation.
magnax1
1yr ago
Yes, the anti-individualist argument would be against allowing them to take hormones, dress up, etc. I'm not aware of any significant cohort who wants to do that in North America.
magnax1
1yr ago
Would you trust data from Peru or Hungary? I sure wouldn't. I suspect even US data is quite fuzzy.
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
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
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
As a big fan of scifi and an aspiring writer myself, I feel the need to point out that a lot of "classic" scifi that won awards is actually probably much worse than this. A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development. It was often a vehicle for a concept more than a story. The only modern scifi writer who gets away with that now is the "three body problem" author, Liu Cixin. Outside of his original book, the three body problem, which is a masterpiece, his other books are total dumpster fires. (EDIT:I probably shouldn't have said the only one, but having a good concept and nothing else and finding success is rare now)
So you may be right about this book (I havent read it) but your insinuation that writers couldn't have gotten away with this poor quality in the past is definitely wrong. In the past scifi novels catered to young men with little exposure to good writing, and it showed.
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.
The excess deaths are probably caused by the after effects of Corona. Myocarditis and other heart issues are moderately common in people who didn't even have severe cases. Most of the people who have these issues probably don't know they have them. Then there are the severe cases, of which there were a lot, where people were stuck on ventilators and likely had all sorts of complications. Those people often aren't long for this world. There's also a case to be made that isolation caused by the pandemic has increased all cause mortality, bit that's pretty foggy and may not be true. It's also possible that the data is just off.
If the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there. Also, hiding a health issue caused by a drug is so outside of the FDAs historical behavioral pattern that it's really ridiculous to lean into some conspiratorial coverup. Remember, when 2 J&J vaccine patients had heart issues out if millions (a rate which is far less than the rate in the random population) the FDA pulled the vaccine immediately. Yet they're covering up mass sickness from other vaccines?
This is one of those conspiracies that's really hard not to be condescending about because it's just so thinly supported.
More options
Context Copy link