rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
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User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
12hr ago
For countries which are not China, it seems that there is a bit of a "market correction" for tariffs: high US tariffs reduce demand from the US, tanking the exporting country's exchange rate to the dollar, which makes those imports more affordable, after which point the prices don't seem so high anymore even including tariffs. The Fed estimated that this feedback loop reduces the effect of tariffs by about half. Trump's recent announcement of tariffs on Korea and Japan increased the exchange rates there by about 2%, which is the TACO-inclusive correction.
In the case of China, though... well, they tend to try to peg the RMB to the dollar (although it hasn't been pegged directly since 2010), so I imagine the effect will be much worse for them.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
11d ago
SIS
Sorry, but what is SIS? Neither a search for "SIS homelessness" nor "SIS NYC" turned up anything related.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1mo ago
Very interesting post. I'm not entirely convinced, but let me turn it practical: where was the safest place to live when Rome turned from a Republic into an Empire, and where is the best place to live now? I've been worried that the Pax Americana is coming to an end, our Republic's core can no longer maintain its security, and that the international shipping lanes are seeing a lot more instability than before. But if Trump is to be our Caesar, then we will lose our Republic well before the point when our Pax Americana breaks down.
My focus right now is in settling and raising a large family, so where to settle in Roman times? I think "in Rome" proper is out: the city saw numerous riots and insurrections during the political chaos at the end of the Republic, and one does not want one's family caught in the chaos. However, the benefits of being a citizen of Rome were vast, with increased legal rights, commercial rights, and freedom of movement, so one probably wanted to raise one's children within the Empire (Saint Paul as a citizen of Rome was able to walk all around Modern Turkey unaccosted.) One also wants the benefits of industrial civilization (toilets!), so life outside the Empire is also not recommended.
What about the provinces? It depends a lot on the province. Some of them were subject to regular warfare and raids. The marker of these was that they were highly militarized and the risk of invasion was known. The provinces in the "middle ring" of the Empire were probably the safest place to be.
The other major dangers of industrial civilization are subfertility and industrial contaminants. The cities of Rome had poorer sanitation (more plague), high poverty, and greater rates of lead poisioning. Fertility among the elites was also much reduced in Rome due to later age at marriage and smaller family size. The provincial fertility rates were so much higher that the elite became more provincial toward the time of the Late Empire.
So, what would this mean in the modern day? Avoid the core cities due to low safety and low fertility: New York, London, DC, SF. Avoid the threatened periphery due to risk of invasion: Taiwain, Poland, Korea, and states with lots of military infrastructure like Nevada and the Great Plains states (Map of Nulear complexes 1 Maps of silos and predicted fallout patterns). It looks like the winning strategy is to settle the prosperous provinces: the eastern Midwest, Southern canada, Southern France, or Scandinavia.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
4mo ago
So the Trump administration has made an effort to limit "indirect" research costs, those research funds which institutions charge on top of a research grant to pay for expenses which cannot be attributed to an individual research project, for items like building maintenance, grant writing staff, and administrative staff. The new policy, effective February 10, 2025, caps the indirect cost rate at 15% for all NIH grants, both new and existing. People in my social circle are watching the court battle over this with baited breath. One of their institutions charges 55%, and another one charges 70% (which appears to be the legal maximum). From this perspective, 15% seems very very low, but it appears the average is around 27%.
I recently talked to some of my Korean researcher friends, and in Korea indirect costs are capped at 17% (and come out of the allocated grant money, so they are considered during grant proposal submission). Of that 17%, the institution even sets a few percent aside to give "miscellaneous funds" to Professors. My friend (a former Resident) said that these miscellaneous funds (which are completely unregulated) were critical to keeping medical professors on the job after an anti-corruption law banned them from taking "gifts" from patients: they were frequently spent on personal items, team dinners, and alcohol. In my experience they were used to purchase high-end computers for data analysis. But the point is that 17% leaves the institution with a surplus.
I'm left wondering if indirect costs in the US (now two to four times higher than those of Korea) are a result of perverse incentives. The NIH negotiates these after grants have been granted. If the US had counted these expenses against the grant value prior to grants being granted (as Korea does), would professors have been incentivized to lobby their institutions against administrative bloat?
I tried to find how these costs have changed over time, and it looks like they have risen by a few percent in the past decade, but every grantmaking agency has different numbers and it is a mess, with more variance between agencies than change over time.
As with anything sociological, an examination of the Korean situation is incomplete without an economic background.
- Wages have historically been low in Korea.
- Korea is a cutthroat meritocracy.
- Men (or their parents) are still mostly valued as "providers".
- Housing prices in Seoul, the only city worth living in, have almost tripled since 2018.
- This generation of women is the first generation to be fully entering the workforce.
- Buying a house is a precondition to marrying under Korean social norms.
- Koreans, in comparison to Westerners, don't like to violate social norms.
What 1 (low wages) + 2 (cutthroat meritocracy) imply is that Korean men have to work hard to get promoted to management if they want to support their family. This has historically taken the form of 60-hour work weeks (8 hours plus "voluntary" company dinners, Monday to Saturday). As women enter the workforce, the culture of company dinners has been pared back, and now it is 8 hours plus unpaid evenings if one wants to have a chance at being promoted to manager. (Women don't on average put in those hours, since 60% of them plan on leaving the workforce when they are married and have kids.)
Adding 3 (the social role of men as providers) means that their value is measured by the thickness of their wallets, and their wallets are on average not very thick, because 1 (wages are low) and their wallets are getting thinner, and less valued, because 5 (because women are entering the workforce).
Now owning a home is a precondition to marriage (and childbirth) in Korea, and this means that it is mostly the upper middle class which can afford to have kids. So you get a whole generation of women who were raised by their mothers in houses where their fathers were working 60-hour weeks to be that upper middle class. They grew up in material luxury, but their fathers would home drunk late at night after these company dinners and pass out immediately. They see their mothers working thanklessly in their home, barely time for a conversation with their fathers, and want none of it. Thus the mythology is born. "Korean men suck."
These women in the upper middle class have gone onto college, where they major in the humanities and are exposed to the imported concepts of third-wave feminism. Men are the oppressors, women are victims, and life sucks because of patriarchy. Life does suck. They try going into the workforce and see that wages are low and the culture sucks. Must be the patriarchy holding them back. (To emphasize the point, men in their cohort who enter the workforce had their mandatory military service counted as work experience and so enter at a higher pay level.)
Growing up in the upper-middle class with material opulence, these Korean women have high expectations for their quality of life, and instead of finding a marriagable high-status husband, their age-matched prospects are only poor men who are struggling to get ahead in the rat race. Then when they are looking for a husband, none of the available young bachelors have any money or free time. Nobody is buying that house! If they are schooled in third-wave feminism, the message is clear: "Korean men suck."
These feminist women go into jobs like journalism, where they write tons of articles about how terrible the men are, with no consideration for the economic constraints that got the entire society into this position. They hit age 30 (or 35) and are forced to marry by social forces (and that ticking biological clock). If they are marriageable, they end up settling for a man who they are not happy with, read HuffPost, and inhabit "mom cafes" online where they post screeds about how terrible men are. If they have poor personalities, they write screeds even more vociferously about their bosses and the men who rejected them. Somewhere, they read that foreign men are feminists and get the idea that foreigners will support them. (And boy the stories I have of what happens when they actually meet foreign men!)
(Women who were aware that their fathers were making sacrifices for them see the feminists going off the deep end and no longer feel comfortable calling themselves feminists.)
Young Korean men, on the other hand, see their fathers working 996, and instintively understand that their fathers are working as a sacrifice to provide material wealth for the family. They see that the women of their cohort (especially the self-proclaimed feminists) do not appreciate these sacrifices, and especially don't appreciate the sacrifice they made in lifetime to keep the country safe from the North Koreans. The women appear thankless and shrill. The men put their heads down and try to work harder to get ahead. If they are responsible, they save every last penny to buy that house when they get married.
The left-wing Moon administration rejiggers the housing market to try to lower housing prices, and ends up adding fuel to the fire and doubling housing prices in three years. The left/feminist wing also hushes up several cases of sexual assault by the left-wing mayor of Seoul, who commits suicide when the allegations become public. The right-wing candidate vows to abolish the "Ministry for Women and Family" (English translation: "Ministry for Gender Equality"), which is seen as a think-tank and jobs program for these radical feminists. In response mostly to housing prices but partly to the MfWaF who hate them and the hypocricy of the leftists covering up sexual assault, men in the next election vote for the right-wing candidate.
Korean journalists - especially ones who know enough English to write for foreign journals like CNN and the NYT - are largely drawn from those upper-class women who went through college in the humanities and were radicalized on third-wave feminism. The election of a right-wing government is portrayed by these Korean journalists (who never studied economics and don't want to talk about the rapey left-wing mayor) as a sign that Korean men hate women. (The actual surveys show that they hate "feminists".) Western media comes to believe that Korean men are sexists engaged in a gender war, as everything available in English is filtered through the lens of Korean feminists.
Edit: And as my Korean friend points out, Korean journalists frequently cite foreign (CNN, NYT, etc) articles about Korean gender wars to assert that these things are real, without thinking about the filter effect and the fact that the foreign journalists' friends are all upper-class English-speaking Koreans (i.e. filtered for feminists).
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
2mo ago
The judge can order El Salavdor to comply. If El Salvador fails to comply, start seizing Salvadoran assets in the United States. Seizure of foreign nations' assets in the United States has been done before.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
The "TikTok" ban covers any social networking app controlled by a foreign adversary with more than one million American users, and at the discretion of the President. So if Red Little Book (the actual literally translation of Hongxiaoshu) picks up a million American users at the discretion of the President they can also be forced to sell or be forced off the app stores.
Also AFAIK this is only being kicked off the app stores and being forced to not do transact with American businesses. Existing installations will keep running, albeit with no ad revenue from American businesses.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
If you are going to get the AI to rephrase something, could you ask the AI to keep it short?
The fundamental problem with AI is that it produces text very cheaply, and far faster than I can read. Thjs is the general problem of the internet, but if you write it yourself, then I know you care enough about a topic to write about it, which signals that you think it is worth your time, so I will take a look.
If you farm it off to AI, then it isn't worth your time to write, so why would it be worth mine to read?
But thank you for leading with honesty. I do respect that you respected us.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
Needs several large defense conglomerates to be broken up. In the 1980s there were hundreds of defense contractors. Now there are a handful.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
It is worth noting that for short-term travellers the US has "visa waiver business" (VWB) and "visa waiver travel" (VWT) programs. VWB can accept honoraria (montary payment) for giving guest lectures (limited to 5 presentations in a 6 month period). VWT cannot enter the country with the goal of receiving payment, but they can still give guest lectures and accept payment if the honorarium was offered and arranged after they entered the US.
I was under the impression that honoraria were a small deal, maybe $300 for a seminar (the legal limit in Korea), but the University of Washington has procedures to cover honoraria of over $10,000, and host visiting scholars for up to nine days. Maybe I need to get on the professional seminar circuit.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
An app store or internet hosting service that continues to enable distribution, maintenance, or updates for a banned application could be subject to civil penalties of up to $5,000 multiplied by the number of U.S. users who accessed, maintained, or updated the application. A foreign adversary controlled application that fails to provide user data as required could be subject to civil penalties of up to $500 multiplied by the number of affected users.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this.
Unlikely. There were 80 mph (120 kph) winds before the fires started, but it was dry for many weeks beforehand without incident, which suggests to me that winds blew down power lines (or equivalently, branches next to power lines), and sparks from shorting cables are enough to get dry brush started.
Humans naturally have a tendency to search for intention in chance events, but here rumors of bad actors deflect blame from the likely cause: mismanagement on the part of PG&E and the local forest/parks service, so I expect those rumors to be encouraged in the media.
I also see people reaching for the Global Warming explanation, but to me this is a series of proximate systemic failures in administration and in holding individuals/companies accountable. Which just about captures half my complaints about the state of American governance: too much consensus-building, not enough action or taking accountability. Definitely a loss of Mandate of Heaven moment.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
If Elon only wants 15,000 of the best of the best, then the current EB1 and O1 visa processes should be sufficient. EB1 is a green card "for highly skilled foreign workers who have extraordinary ability, are outstanding professors or researchers, or are multinational executives or managers" with a quota of 40k per year, and O1 is a three-year, extensible-until-end-of-contract nonimmigrant visa for "people with extraordinary skills" which admits about 20k per year (22,430 and 23,680 people admitted in 2014 and 2015).
So it sounds like Elon is lying, and wants more than 15,000 individuals. I presume his incentives would be in the direction of having more employer-dependent skilled labor visas like the H1B, but having a higher quota and making them more predictable (remove the lottery, approve faster). This puts him at odds with MAGA.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
Well, you still haven't actually read the EO.
DOGE is established as a renaming of the US digital service to US DOGE service, with a temporary suborganization called US DOGE Service Temporary Organization with teams of Special Government Employees.
And USDS's new mandate is a Software Modernization Initiative, not technically a budget directive, so the mission of USDS has not changed.
Finally, the president does have authority to share classified info with anyone at any time. The President and only the President is the ultimate classificarion authority (because classification is justified under constitutional provisions for foreign policy, I guess).
Whether this EO gives Elon the right to dismantle USAID is probably subject to controversy, but on the points you are pushing the Trump Admin has already thought of and dismissed your objections.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
Back surgery works for severe disk herniations, but the mechanism is that it removes pressure on the nerves. The nerves die under pressure resulting in partial paralysis if surgery is not done within 48 (ideally 24) hours. Nerves don't regenerate/grow after age 30 or so.
I'm reading a lot of stories on reddit of people whose back surgeries were delayed 2 to 6 months over insurance stating that a surgery would not be paid for without a diagnostic MRI (which is fair), and a diagnostic MRI would not be paid for without weeks of physical therapy first (which is unconscionable).
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.
Actually, there is probably a pretty good correlation between womens' education and low birthrate. Low birthrate minimizes future humanitarian needs, so stuff that seems quite "progressive" might be a very good investment long term. The devil is of course in the details.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
One of my coworkers is a PhD in computer science with dyslexia. When he reads academic papers he puts them on a screen using a plugin which colors every word a different color. His output is pretty good, so it must work for him. But he also is in the top 5% of extroversion for software engineers, presumably making up for some of that tough paper reading with social connections.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
7mo ago
No it doesn't, because people don't pay anywhere near the QALY value of vaccines to the vaccine company.
Let's pretend we have a vaccine for smallpox (40-50% fatality rate in babies). People/governments pay maybe $100 per dose (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines-for-children/php/awardees/current-cdc-vaccine-price-list.html). The value of a wrongful death is $10M, so you would break even on a $100 vaccine for smallpox at one wrongful death in 100,000, while the vaccine would save 40,000 to 50,000 lives per 100,000.
I actually have to compliment @Quantumfreakonomics here, because until 15 minutes ago I thought liability was reasonable.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
That doesn't look egregious. Build a fire-resistant concrete home, controlled burn the forest behind the house yearly, keep a few cisterns of rainwater in the attic to wet the ground near the home before the next fire, a generator to pump water from the pool when the power goes out, and keep a go bag ready for evac. These are relatively expensive engineering problems, but not intractable if you have the money.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Without doxxing myself, all I can say is that I am immersed in Korean life. My source is mostly synthesis of what people have told me over the years while talking to me candidly and first-hand observation while experiencing the rat race. In my workplace, I saw men putting their children to bed on Kakao Facechat. In my extracurricular activities, I met a few mid-30s journalist women who were writing for foreign-language outlets. I saw friends get married, be disappointed, and turn bitter, and know many who cannot afford to get married.
So you should treat the above as original research, almost anecdotal. I was trying to convey the economic and social forces which push men and women into discontent with each other (well, mostly a subset of women into discontent with men), but also the filtering effect of what gets to English-language media, and the citogenesis effect of the English-language media on Koreans' understanding of their own culture (which I think is despicable).
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
OP didn't write enough to be unambiguous, but in context this is about the OPM, which is subject to a consent decree mandating tests be pre-approved by a court before use. Does the OPM use the wonderlic test?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
Two crazy statistics to think about:
- 51% of Koreans born in 1985 (39 year olds) have never been married.
- 3% of South Koreans are born out of wedlock.
So there is social pressure to not have kids out of wedlock, and more than half the population is deferring marriage until after the fertility cliff. I blame the marriage deficit on high financial expectations on young couples and a culture which teaches that marriage at 35 or later is okay. The birthrate crisis is downstream of the marriage crisis.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Haha. You fell for the bait! Ok, some anecdotes that come to mind now. Might add more later:
-
Careerist girl in her early 30s spent years watching South Park. Gets really good at English (in a South Park drawl!), but remains single for years. Discovers the Man of Her Dreams on Tinder. Spends two months raving about how perfect he is, how Tinder is different in Korea. Then learns he was also dating three other Tinder girls.
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Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.
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Tall (= tough dating prospects) artistic (=open-minded) girl falls in love with a foreign guy. Everything seems to be going well, except he's not very patient about her lack of English fluency. He takes her home to meet his family ... and it turns out they all live on a trailerpark. Relationship survives until he goes on a date with another girl. When she does meet a guy who is patient with her, that's one of the points she brags to her friends about.
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Staunch feminist in her early 30s meets foreign guy. Everything is going well, except that he walks out of a movie when it gets to a particularly girl-power scene. She has a two-week identity crisis over meeting someone so "anti-woman".
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Early 20s reader of The Ethical Slut finally finds the rich foreign gentleman she's been trying to snag. Comes back raving about how the first date was amazing, he must have spent $500 between dinner and the hotel, she's finally found the man of her dreams. A week later he has to go on an international business trip, and stops answering his phone. Oddly, his phone is ringing like it's still in Korea ...
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
Korean pay scales reward seniority, not technical skills. All engineer starting pay is 1/3 to 1/5 the equivalent US starting salary, except Samsung which is 1/2.
But the US is an outlier in programmer salaries and in minimum cost of living. So someone can live comfortably on 40k USD in Seoul. Compare the US where cheap 100 to 200 sqft rentals don't exist anywhere.
Someday I need to post my student budget. I was able to save up 10k USD over three years while making less than 10k USD annually, paying tuition and living in central Seoul.
I'm confused as to what your claim was. I found a banned comment of yours stating that
It seems like @RandomRanger quoted it accurately enough, but source quote you provide in this comment is only very weak Bayesian evidence for this claim.
In fact, the quote you provide is much more consistent with the claim that "Republicans see class instead of race, and migrants fleeing opens up jobs traditionally taken by lower/working class citizens." No need for extra drug epicycles at all.
I may add here that the above classic Republican claim is consistent with where migrants work, but unemployment in those sectors is going up faster than elsewhere, so clearly the story is more complex.
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