marinuso
9mo ago
raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible
You don't want that anyway.
Someone's got to clean the toilets, and it would be better if that person weren't an 150 IQ would-be rocket surgeon who only isn't a rocket surgeon because he lost a politics game. After all, only so many people can be rocket surgeons, and if everyone is smart then the losers will have to lose for a different reason.
It wouldn't even be a good reason. Then you have a mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top. You think it's bad now, you just wait.
marinuso
1yr ago
Is English your mother tongue?
It isn't mine, and I don't know how to spell English words. I'm somehow capable of it, but I don't remember how I learned (it must've been at school but I don't remember anything about the method other than that they had us copy words a lot), and I could not describe the rules.
Dutch spelling is regular. The method of teaching kids to read essentially hasn't changed in over a century. It involves learning the sounds that letters make and then sounding them out, but that's a lot easier when it's pretty much always the same except for loanwords.
I'm confident I could teach a kid to read without any pre-made teaching materials at all, even though I have no training other than my own literacy - in Dutch. Not in English though, even though I'm personally just as literate in English. I couldn't teach a cooperative English-speaking adult to read. I have no conscious idea what I'm doing when I write in English.
marinuso
9d ago
A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media.
And industrialisation.
Whether you were a peasant in India in 1750 or a peasant in Britain in 1750 didn't matter all that much as far as living standards go. Whether you're a peasant in India in 1980 or even have a minimum wage job in Britain in 1980 however, matters a great deal.
Western governments see the way out as importing foreign 'fungible economic units'; young tax payers that their source countries have paid the cost in educating that they can brain drain off to grow the tax base and act as workers to prop up the economy and service the aging population.
Here's a graph from a report from the Netherlands. (Here's the full report, but it's in Dutch.)
The Y axis is how likely an immigrant is to leave again within 10 years, the X axis is how likely an immigrant is primarily on welfare after 2 years. There is an obvious relationship: people who want to build what we'd call a proper life, don't want to stay here.
And honestly who can blame them. You'll get taxed half to death, and harassed and robbed in the street by the people your tax money is going to. If you're not born here, why would you put up with that? If you're already moving, you may as well move to a nice place. It's only the people with ill intent, who intend on becoming the harassers and robbers, who'd want to stay here long term. They lead decent enough lives, better than any honest members of the working class.
Of course, this means that immigration is a net drain on the tax base, as every report has shown and every policymaker must by now know. I'm sure it's the same in the rest of Northern and Western Europe. Bringing people in because it's good for the economy is not even a good excuse anymore.
marinuso
1yr ago
If the police did their jobs , events like 2020 would have not happened at all (probably blame the media, lawyers, and politicians for that).
Over 200 black people are killed by police each year in the US. (Though they seem to have stopped recording race recently.) It follows that George Floyd-style protests aren't actually caused by cops killing black people. There would be several riots per week.
The media are much more of a causative factor here. They're the ones who decide when and onto what to focus attention.
It also follows that better policing won't solve it. Police will always remain human. The number will never be zero. Even the number of dumb mistakes like grabbing a gun thinking it's a taser will never be zero. And even one is enough in principle.
You could cut police violence across the board by 7/8ths (imagine that), and there'd still be room for two George Floyds a month, whenever the media should desire another. There isn't the desire for that many, so cutting the police violence by 7/8ths would probably not change the frequency of large scale protests/riots at all.
I wouldn't say the New York Times editor is all that elite as an individual.
He's part of a powerful group, certainly, but the only power he exercises is on behalf of the group and in conjunction with the rest of the group. He has little individual decision making power and is not a mover or shaker in his own right. If he goes against the group, he's out. And he's unlikely to have significant pull within the group on his own either. He may have DoJ officials on speed dial, but he certainly can't call in favours on his own personal behalf and he will be in trouble if he attempts. He's a cog in a machine.
This is in fact reflected in their income which is ~$76k a year on average. That's certainly not nothing, but it certainly isn't fuck-you money either. It's enough to live comfortably, but it's not going to allow you to build a serious buffer so you can pick fights later.
The car dealer may be further removed from national power in a 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' sense, but he has more money. If he, as an individual, wants to try and get something done, he has more money to try it with. If someone picks a fight with him, he has more money to defend himself. As an individual, he is in a better position than the NYT editor.
On a national scale neither is elite, their individual influence can both be rounded down to zero. But don't forget that in small towns, people like this successful car dealer are often the ones who rule the roost. The car dealer's words will have measurable weight there, if he wants them to.
marinuso
9mo ago
It is a luxury to be able to avoid spontaneous human connection, to only have it when you specifically want it and shut it out otherwise. Americans are so rich that this luxury is available to most.
Public transport is a great example. It's true you won't get stabbed or robbed on the bus in most of Europe (though with all the migration this is starting to change in places). But there's still the teenagers with the obnoxious music, the people yelling at their cell phones, the loud and messy eaters, the couples all but having sex, the other couples fighting, the screaming little children, the occasional beggar. And the people who won't take showers, and of course the fat guy who insists on sitting next to you even though there's an empty bench available. It's a lot of spontaneous human connection, and all of it negative.
And if you can afford a car you can avoid it all. What you're really buying is isolation, and it's worth quite a lot. (Well, that, speed, and reliability.)
There are times when you need it, of course, especially when you still need to establish yourself and need to get into contact with a lot of people to find openings. Americans have college campuses, which of course have their own problems. Europeans tend to just use the city as a whole for that purpose. But once you've established yourself, mostly the negatives remain, especially since should you need something you can draw on your existing circle. The commenter above has a wife and a kid. What does he need to find out in the wild, another wife?
Europe has its suburbs too. They don't always look like American ones because people can't afford McMansions (rowhouses and apartments are more common), but they serve the same purpose. To be far enough away from it all to offer its denizens some isolation.
marinuso
11mo ago
I don't think the high rates of gay and trans identification among Zoomers is at all the result of indoctrination (though I think at times policy can reinforce it), I think it's the result of teenagers being teenagers and doing the I'm trying to find myself, maaaaaan thing that many of the now-conservative Boomers did before them, which is what happens in a world focused on consooming and defining oneself.
There is a difference between teenagers now and the Boomers in their time.
As far as I can tell (though I haven't been a teenager for a while so I could of course simply be missing it), there's pretty much no real teenage rebellion. I don't see them doing much that the powers that be aren't supporting and encouraging. E.g. declaring yourself to be something LGBT-esque is supported and encouraged, becoming a climate activist is supported and encouraged, etc etc. It leads me to believe that if the establishment were supporting and encouraging different things, they'd be doing those things instead.
marinuso
1yr ago
Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood than their ostensibly superior and racially homogenous opponents.
They didn't. Losses on the Allied side were way, way, way higher. Especially on the Eastern front, where the Russians eventually won because they quite simply had more peasants than the Germans had bullets.
Germany and Japan are relatively tiny, with few natural resources. The Russians had essentially limitless cannon fodder, while the US and the British Empire combined had essentially limitless natural resources. Any war becomes a war of attrition if it goes on long enough. As the Finns also found when fighting the Russians, you can kill the enemy ten to one, but that's no good if the enemy always has an eleventh man.
As far as HBD is concerned, Germany's biggest blunder was an anti-IQ move. The persecution of the Jews caused a huge brain drain, both of e.g. Jewish professors and intellectuals themselves and of their colleagues, long before the Holocaust proper started. The Nazis kicked out people like Albert Einstein, who went over to the US. It's thanks to the smarts of people like those, that the US managed to develop the nuclear bomb and force Japan to surrender. Without it, it would certainly have taken a lot longer.
marinuso
10mo ago
Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.
They found a bunch of large natural gas deposits in Eastern Ukraine and in the sea off Crimea, in the early 2010s right before everything kicked off.
marinuso
1yr ago
OTOH, I almost hit a cyclist when going home today because I didn't see him because all I saw was lights in the darkness.
If the bots manage to get something done about the megawatt floodlights on rich people's cars nowadays, then I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
marinuso
1yr ago
It's fairly predictable which neighbourhoods vote for whom. The return address is plenty of information on its own. A rogue mailman could make the votes disappear before they even formally make it into the system.
On top of that, even normal letters get lost or delayed in the mail all the time. It doesn't even need to be malice. If there were only postal votes, pure standard negligence operating procedure would likely cause a fair bit of difference all on its own.
marinuso
1yr ago
If this were in any other country, the UN's election monitors would cry foul. And not entirely unreasonably. Even assuming that the election is entirely legit and no one involved at all means badly, with a process like this, what reason does anyone have to believe that?
Ultimately, you can't have a functioning democracy if you can't convince the losers that they lost a fair game. In order to do that, it is imperative not to have procedural problems during the elections, let alone systematic procedural problems.
marinuso
9d ago
Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history.
Is that so? Medieval Europe at least did not have slavery in any great amount. That is actually fairly unique for the time period and for the kind of societies they had. The Roman Empire had chattel slavery of pretty much the same kind that would later be re-introduced to the European colonies in the Americas. It seems to have been an old pan-Mediterranean institution, that died out in Christian Europe and was reintroduced basically by cribbing from the Arabs, who had kept it.
the guidance and computers are the expensive parts.
Computers aren't at all expensive anymore in the grand scheme of things.
In the 1960s they custom-built a computer to send people to the moon. In the 1980s you could buy a more powerful computer for kids to play games on for a few hundred dollars. By now you can buy a much more powerful computer on a tiny chip for 30-40 cents.
marinuso
5mo ago
being spontaneous, doing something crazy, means messing up, and that messing up is unrecoverable.
This actually is much more true than it used to be. For example, my grandfather only went to elementary school and worked in a factory. He was considered poor even then, but he didn't have a bad life. He could raise a whole family on his factory wages, in circumstances no worse than many people today.
Today you would need both parents to hold a decent, respectable office job to have a similar quality of life. Anything below that, you're competing with the entire Third World (either through imports or immigration). Add to that things like stringent environmental laws. The mines are gone, the factories are almost all gone, and the EU is currently in the process of de facto outlawing agriculture. What'll even be left for you to do, if you don't get the respectable office job?
There are many more people, and there are fewer opportunities to achieve the living standards of a factory worker 50 years ago. And so, life has turned into a vicious, high-stakes game of musical chairs. There's no room for slip-ups.
marinuso
9mo ago
I mean, you can't, really, it's not for sale.
The USA could've used its might to pressure Denmark into selling it, if it really wanted to and was willing to take off its diplomatic mask entirely over Greenland of all places. But given that, it could've just as well used its might to pressure Denmark into simply giving it up, or done a Crimea on it.
Or it could've done what it usually does, and put its money and weight behind an "independence" movement (that it could astroturf out of whole cloth if need be), and then simply occasionally remind the new Supreme Leader of Greenland who put him there, who keeps him there, and why.
But it doesn't even need to do that, since the Danish government is already de facto the USA's pet poodle, so there is nothing to be gained.
marinuso
1yr ago
It's not a surprise to me, which is why I can't but assume that it isn't a surprise to the policymakers either.
Therefore, importing "fungible economic units" can't be the real reason.
marinuso
1yr ago
This is pretty much the definition of a coup-complete problem though. Whatever new payment technologies anyone may come up with, they will need to interface with the existing infrastructure to be of any use, and the people controlling the existing infrastructure can just decide not to allow it.
marinuso
1yr ago
A good road diet increases the throughput of human beings going where they want to go because an inefficient use of street space is replaced by a more efficient one.
This is of course a functionally equivalent statement to "good policies have benefits that outweigh the harms". Yes, that's the definition. But that presumes the people who are making the policies are competent and well-meaning, and they never seem to be even one. I would expect a 'road diet' (especially when explicitly named so) to be done by politicians who are at best following a fad, at worst intending to hurt people they think are their enemies.
In the city where I live they banned bicycles out of the (old medieval) city center. Technically cars too, but already nobody drove there (who in their right mind would even try). But the American Democrats are hampering transport so we should also hamper transport, it's cargo cult blue-tribe-ism. To top it all of, official taxis can still go in. So the local hoity-toities can still be ferried to and from their subsidized cultural events in style. To their credit (?) I haven't seen much actual enforcement.
marinuso
14d ago
He'll be 82. There's a very good chance he'll be dead or otherwise incapable. Look at how fast Biden seems to have gone downhill - he seemed completely fine when he was VP during Obama's presidency. It can go quickly at this age.
marinuso
1mo ago
Even from a purely economic viewpoint, international trade is great only as long as there are no supply chain disruptions.
Having at least some industry at home makes sense from a strategic viewpoint. Not only are you better able to handle supply chain disruptions in the short term, you also keep the necessary expertise around. As long as you are making cars, you are also teaching people to make cars, to run the factories and so on.
If the US stops manufacturing cars, and in 20 years' time it turns out the US can't import cars anymore for whatever reason, perhaps a war or something, they will have to restart from scratch. Scaling up is one thing, but if nobody remembers how to make a car anymore and has to dig up old books, and if there are no working factories around, it will take a very long time before anything is produced again, let alone anything of acceptable quality.
You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.
marinuso
4mo ago
It would probably be legit less of an escalation if Trump just had an "accident". At least you're not setting precedent that way. And he certainly wouldn't be the first one either.
marinuso
9mo ago
Well, I doubt that.
The editors aren't there of their own accord, even the chief editor isn't there on his own behalf. They're people doing jobs. Of course any of them could go rogue and maybe manage to get something published once or twice, but they would be swiftly removed from their positions. If their loyalty was in question they wouldn't have been hired in the first place.
The owners could reposition the paper, but then again, no one doubts that the Sulzbergers are anything but elite.
They're nowhere near as screwed as us yet. The EPA is part of the executive branch. The next president can simply order them to change it back.
As for the EU, decision making has been moved pretty much entirely out of the remit of anyone who is elected, and the only legal, democratic way to put a halt to it at this point is if everyone all at once were to vote to install national governments that leave the EU.
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