rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
No bio...
User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
2d ago
Billionaires and corporations bad are corrupting the free market through anticompetitive behavior and by bribing politicians and judges, allowing them to overprice their products and services and underprice labor. Wealth inequality bad inevitable, but can be moderated by effective policy, all my problems my poor salary and high costs of housing, food, and healthcare are caused by these things, so now they’re just getting what they rightly deserve. Same as the Luigi nonsense.
There's a more realistic steelman for you.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
2d ago
I just happened to scroll imgur over the weekend (no account, incognito window), and one in every five posts was a picture of a flaming warehouse and variants on the quote "All you had to do was pay us enough to live." It is likely that activists and foreign social media manipulators are trying to meme it into a movement for low-class vigilante sabotage. It is also likely that among imgur users (who lean young and left) this is actually a message that lands well, and is probably providing inspiration for other young would-be vigilantes.
On the other hand, with the motivation of the culprit explicitly captured on video, the theory of social media toxoplasma predicts that it will garner fewer headlines in the mainstream media than the UHC CEO shooting, where a lot of the story was people being able to speculate and argue over the killer's motivation for a few weeks. On the gripping hand, there is probably a larger population of would-be saboteurs and arsonists than would-be murderers: Leftist activists in general are not familiar enough with guns, and the personal taking of a life is not a line most would cross.
I will admit a degree of sympathy. Having dealt with a family member on UHC, they are absolutely using questionable strategies to cut off care early, and having a friend who recently bought a modest home, banks in that city are now telling potential borrowers that they require a salary of about twice the city's median income before they will authorize a loan for a "starter home" price. (And given that the bank has title on the property as collateral on the loan and requires borrowers to pay for insurance against default if they have insufficient downpayment, that must leave borrowers with a very high risk of default.)
Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders. Enforcing the anti-monopoly laws already on the books as written would probably be enough to improve many sectors of the economy, especially those where local monopolies are pushing up prices, like homebuilding and dental care. Removing principal-agent conflicts of interests in healthcare (the employer wants to pay for the cheapest plan) would be another good reform. But neither of these will happen. If there has been a single guiding principle since Clinton, it would be that the ruling party will do what is good for shareholders, and enforcing anti-monopoly law would help small businesses at the expense of shareholders. In its stead, I would predict that there will be more security expenditures for high-profile CEOs, at least until the predictive panopticon is complete.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
16d ago
283: 55/60 Computational, 49/50 International, 68/80 Cultural, 40/50 Aesthetic, 22/30 Literary, 39/40 Technical. Not surprised that I'm low relative to the average Motte poster, nor surprised that I'm weak in the humanities.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
16d ago
I've heard that videos under ~5 minutes become shorts which don't get monetized, so the incentive is to make longer videos. I guess videos under 10 minutes are also getting downgraded now because they get less engagement / fewer ads?
I have also noticed that most of the recommendations on lightly-used logged-out browsers are now are now shorts of the simp-bait variety or long-form videos of the "show something rage-inducing and offer light, brainrot commentary from the corner of the screen" variety - Asmongold is the epitome of this, and I always regret clicking. To add to this, I suspect most of the history and food video recommendations I get are wholly AI-generated, and most of the topics that would be interesting are obvious clickbait. It's gotten to where I can pretty much only watch people whose channels I intentionally search.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
17d ago
Looking for anti-woke books on parenting, preferably secular. How does raise children to not be woke? How does one teach them the gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice? How does one handle the hypergamy question? How to balance tolerance with an appropriate level of caution around "inner-city youth"?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
23d ago
That's an interesting perspective. I'm angry not because of the lockdowns, but because of the ignorance, politically-motivated thinking, and the incompetence.
As some choice examples of incompetence, I remember when the CDC and FDA blocked independent PCR tests, requiring that all coronavirus samples be shipped to Atlanta for testing. Then the "public health professionals" and the "medical ethicists" decried individual screening, as people cannot be trusted to interpret test results for themselves.
The CDC argued against testing symptomatic individuals in the general population for "wuhan flu", then declared that there was "no evidence of domestic transmission". The NPR listeners in my circles twisted themselves into knots explaining why private testing for novel diseases of pandemic concern is bad, actually, and also argued that the CDC was being intentionally hobbled by Trump.
Then the CDC required that private tests be validated against their in-house test suite - which contained faulty reagents.
Then the CDC rescued a bunch of Americans from Wuhan, put them together in group quarantine for 2 weeks, and didn't test them for a disease which spreads very well in confined spaces and has a 1-2 week incubation period. If a single person had been infected, they would have infected the whole group, then promptly been discharged into the population. We don't know whether this happened, because they were never tested.
USCIS started implementing epidemiological questionaires for people on planes, but there was no enforcement of quarantines, and the illicit means to walk across the borders were still available. I think the combination of pro-"open borders" with pro-"epidemiological controls" is a type of doublethink, but I'm the outgroup.
Then CDC and "public health experts" insisted that the disease wasn't airborne, despite strong epidemiological studies from other countries demonstrating airborne-only transmission: spread between members of a choir who had been religious about handwashing, examples of people infecting each other by walking past each other on the underground, a Daegu call center and a Daegu restaurant where probability of being infected was highly correllated with air handling direction rather than surfaces touched. Despite this, masks were not recommended.
Probably because the Chinese diaspora had already raided all the available mask supply in the continental U.S. and "public health officials" were afraid of inciting racism. I was friends with a member of the Chinese diaspora working for an American subsidiary of a Chinese manufacturing conglomerate. They spent most of late January to early Feb 2020 procuring masks from U.S. retail and hospital supply chains and shipping them back to China.
Then seemingly in April 2020, NYC hospitals were overflowing with positive cases, so they shifted positive cases into nursing homes. I may remind you that even then we knew that "CoViD-19" primarily killed the elderly.
And of course in May we learned that protesting was a public health risk, unless it was protesting for BLM. And in California restaurants and hair stylists were forced to close, unless you were friends with Gavin Newsom.
A lot of these closures would have been unjustifiable were it possible to track and trace efficiently, but there was a "shortage of qualified nurses" and "lack of budget" to do contact tracing as late as August 2020.
At risk of doxxing myself, I was in Korea at the time. In lieu of lockdowns, the Moon administration implemented effective procedures for figuring out who had been exposed, and effective tests to detect illness. (TBF, there was one short lockdown in Daegu before tests were available.) Instead of taking nurses out of patient care and being short on contact tracers, local government administrators were retasked into disease tracking. (Admittedly, this is a lot easier when there is a universal civil service exam: Local government administrators in Korea all pass some threshold of competence.)
Exposed people were identified by credit card purchase databases and CCTV (which were examined by the above administrators), and those individuals got texts asking them to quarantine at home if they were suspected to have been exposed. Breaking a quarantine order was a crime, but also the local government would leave two weeks of food and supplies outside your door so you didn't go hungry or run out of toilet paper.
Instead of banning private testing, the Korean government encouraged private companies and labs to develop tests. We had effective testing by late February, and by late March PCR testing was widely available enough to be required (for free) if you were showing symptoms. Exposed individuals were tested at the beginning and end of their quarantine period.
All people entering the country from abroad were required to test and quarantine, and this was remarkably effective at delaying the entry of new variants until they had evolved lower lethality, and until old people could be immunized.
The highly effective tracking and tracing revealed events with high chances of superspreading: raves and dance clubs, church choirs, "coin-room" (phone booth) karaoke, drunken gatherings. Events with a history of superspreading were banned, but if you weren't a fan of large or drunken gatherings, life mostly went on as normal. (A friend of mine got married in 2020. There was no reception and the audience was limited to 100 people, but the wedding happened in real life and the happy couple has a bunch of unmasked photos.)
In lieu of allowing the Chinese diaspora to buy and export all the available medical masks, the government requisitioned Samsung to quietly buy a few thousand tons of meltblown fiber, and banned export when it was becoming a problem. Starting in March/April, everyone in the country could visit a pharmacy with their national ID to receive two N95 masks per week. This was actually effective at minimizing transmission on the subway, and hospital staff were able to get their allocation, too.
In late 2020 there was a presidential election, and it was held in well-ventilated outdoor tents with free gloves and masks provided instead of by legalizing mail-in voting and the resultant loss of trust in voting systems.
It wasn't perfect: masks were required in parks / when outside, which is not a time of high transmission. Kids still did school on zoom. Workplaces installed infrared cameras at the entrance, which wasn't very effective. Daily epidemiological questionnaires were required to pass newly installed turnstiles at my workplace, and those access controls have persisted and made visiting old coworkers impossible. The rest of the testing and tracing Orwellian panopticon was only easy to dismantle because it was expensive and time consuming, and I think people were justified in their concerns that it might not be dismantled.
But I guess my point is that the US (and the UK) completely fudged it up when it came to lockdowns. There were demonstrated means available to achieve both disease control and functional life, but the US government is too incompetent, ignorant, and (likely) corrupt.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1mo ago
That quote doesn't seem so bad if true? It is much easier to hit missiles on the pad than to knock them out of the air.
I am personally much more interested in the consequences of the Iran war for nuclear proliferation. For potential dictators, the lesson of Libya, Ukraine, and North Korea was that your leadership cadres will be secured in power if they can get nuclear weapons, but that giving up a nuclear program is asking to be harrassed by your neighbors. The winning move for Iran was thought to be the nuclear progam, delaying Israeli intervention until enough weapons-grade fissile material could be covertly manufactured.
This war in Iran flips the apparent incentives. The bombing of capital ships and leadership greatly increases the costs (both military and personal) to leadership discreetly pursuing nuclearization. The new rule effectively seems to be "running a nuclear program is not enough to secure your power: you'd better complete nuclearization before you are detected." This seems like it will be a successful means of deterrence against nuclear proliferation, which benefits everyone. I strongly approve.
It is also especially interesting that this is now the third time that the US is has committed surgical strikes against leadership cadres instead of full-scale ground conflict. In the short term this provides strong motivation for leaders of other states to capitulate to US demands, and reduces casualties for everyone who is not in leadership cadres. In the long term, localizing the effects of wars close to the people who start them seems like it will be great for the achievement of world peace. I wonder if the strategy here is asymmetric in favor of the US (Iran having a higher population of Israeli informants than camels), or if the defensive game is hard enough that this opens up US leadership to threats (Iran does have a large military drone sector, but Trump is just old enough that he doesn't care).
One must also wonder what would have happened in Iraq if Saddam Hussein was droned and his replacement was told "behave, or you get droned, too." Talk about aligning incentives.
I would strongly disagree with the claim that "The people being dispatched by this sort of propaganda don't hold coherent beliefs." Many people (including Scott) have noticed how woke wraps itself up in concepts which make it easy to fall into and hard to reason yourself out of ("intellecutal superweapons"). A classic example is the statement that "We live in a patriarchy."
For a rationally-minded person like me, I naturally ask "How would I go disproving that statement?" A statement that can't possibly be experimentally disproven has no possible truth value.
My observation has been that the existence of the patriarchy is not disprovable. Men suffering under the system? "The patriarchy hurts men, too." Women succeeding more than men, on average? (postsecondary degrees, for example) "It's our turn now." Women controlling most purchasing decisions by value? "They are just being forced to spend money by the patriarchy - women's products are too expensive, and this is extra bad because women don't earn as much." Society prioritizing womens' lives over those of men? "They are being treated as property."
The point is not about patriarchy per se (I find a plutocracy more likely). The point is that you see this broadly in woke discourse. Trans people are told that their liberal family members deadnaming them or misgendering them are being hateful and bigoted, and that they should seek supportive communities. Racial minorities are told that every negative interaction they had with white people was because of white racism. Obese people are told that their doctor being concerned about their weight is fat-shaming and fat-phobia.
These are totalizing worldviews. They don't stand up to detailed scrutiny and don't capture the nuance of the world. But they are self-consistent.
To go back to your main point, I think a useful analogy would be to look at cult deprogramming. People stay in cults because they get something out of them, whether that's a sense of purpose, social belonging, or power. Sometimes we (non-culties) get lucky, the marginal benefits of being in the cult wane, a trusted figure points out some inaccuracies, or some residual doubt becomes significant enough to warrant seeking external counsel. Other times they ride their cult to the grave.
My parents had an odd philosophy about this: benevolent patience. The culties will come around eventually, so be friendly and be there for them when they come around. I'm not sure I have that much grace to give. It works in the long term against weak cults, but hasn't worked to prevent family members from going deeply woke. I'm not sure it would be a winning move against the other things that estrange people from family: abusive romantic partners, fentanyl, or gang membership.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
2mo ago
It definitely has that chatgpt voice, which is suspicious enough that I have trouble skimming through all of it. To be charitable, maybe he learned to write from chatgpt, or maybe it was proofread/rephrased by the LLM (I have noticed LLMs getting more aggressive at "proofreading" my writing nowadays. It is getting harder to ask for only minor edits.)
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
2mo ago
In Korea, "retail" or daytraders are called "ants": individually stupid and not a lot of money, but they can overwhelm other investors when they all move in the same direction.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
This is important, because it's a hint to state of mind.
I don't think it is, because he was hit by an SUV. It isn't possible with the information we have to differentiate between demonizing her in his head because she was an activist and demonizing her in his head because she hit him with her SUV.
We should be emphasizing higher standards.
I agree. Law enforcement should not be made "absolutely immune", and activists should obey the law. Frankly, it seems to me that left-wing orgs are not being properly educatng their members on the law. In the past year I have been told (via chain emails) that "an ICE "warrant" is not a warrant," to "not open your door to an officer", and that "you have the right to remain silent". These are all technically true, but if an immigrant is legally in the US, their residency is usually conditional on cooperation with immigration authorities, and those here on conditional permanent residency are required to open their home for inspection by immigration authorities to maintain their status. Let me say that again. Left-wing orgs are giving out advice which if followed will result in immigrants losing their green cards, because it will inconvenience ICE.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
OT, but are state taxes significant? Were you trying to synchronize to insurance renewal dates or something?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
I originally read Rittenhouses' "crossing state lines" to be about "crossing state lines with a firearm", which would have potentially put him in legal jeopardy. But many uses were also implying malicious intent. You're right that the same rhetoric could be used here: "she crossed state lines with a weapon to attack ICE!" would be a maximally uncharitable interpretation of her actions.
The definition of a scissor statement (or event) is that both sides are very confident in opposite interpretations. What you are quoting is falling on one side, and you are very confident in your interpretation. Thank you for representing that perspective. Let's start with your last paragraph.
All this to say I am horrified at some of the upvote-downvote patterns in the threads this last week and I'm not lying, it hurt my faith in humanity a bit, and the Motte specifically. Are people really so wrapped up in the culture war that they have lost empathy for a dead mother has a child who's six years old and an orphan because she's on the 'other side'? That the officer did nothing wrong? Quibbling over "domestic terrorism" definitions as if that's in any way the way you'd describe it? She blocked half a road for likely five minutes in her local neighborhood because ICE was hanging out around schools to nab immigrant parents as their kids get out. She said stuff like "I'm not mad at you" and "I'm pulling out", and those are not the words attempting to murder a federal agent. For fuck's sake, someone (possibly Ross) called her a "fucking bitch" not two seconds after she was shot, which cuts the other way. Again: none of this requires you to think Good's wife, for example (!), or nearby protestors, or Good, are virtuous, only to think that the cop did at least something wrong. Something is wrong, and it's the attitude here.
From my perspective, my political philosophy is very much not defined by empathy. I try to look at the system: motivations for behavior, what people on each side are thinking, what our society has decided is right to do (via tradition and via the law). I was raised to believe that Justice should be blind; the tragedy in Minnesota should be no more or no less tragic and no more or less justified if a middle-aged, childless man was driving and a mother of three was shooting. (In practice I admit that I do value mothers' lives above childless mens' lives.)
I also recognize that people are irrational in the moment and have their own interpretations of events. From the driver's perspective, she was fleeing an attempted kidnapping and probably didn't see the officer. Fleeing was irrational. From the officer's perspective the agents had initiated an arrest, the suspect was fleeing, and the car was coming at him (and he had been dragged by a car before). Shooting was irrational.
Lets start with where we agree:
- I agree that it is a tragedy when people die.
- Federal agents do not, or should not, have "absolute immunity," and giving the executive branch immunity is dangerous. I'm unsure, but AFAIK they have "qualified immunity". (I'm unsure because this might have changed with a recent Supreme Court ruling which expands immunity to the office of the President.)
- I agree that the "domestic terrorism" accusations are hyperbole. The goal of these particular anti-ICE activists was to slow down and interfere with ICE operations, not to terrorize their political opposition (or ICE agents). (However, there is a population whose goal is to terrorize ICE agents, which is why ICE wears balaclavas now.)
- I agree that law enforcement officers shouldn't approach vehicles from the front, and find it plausible that this is against policy.
- I think this situation was likely due to bad driving habits rather than malicious intent. By chance, just this weekend I saw someone reverse out of a parking space, change gears, and turn the wheel while accelerating with wheels pointed at a pedestrian who was crossing past the parking spot. Classic bad driving.
- Shooting at the driver is likely an ineffective way to get a car to stop.
- People should not have to cower in their homes if federal agents are in the neighborhood. Law enforcement should minimize the
- It is not good for law enforcement to wear masks. Law enforcement should be mostly transparent and accountable.
- She was intentionally blocking the road to block ICE prior to the incident.
- Two of the shots went through the drivers-side window.
However, there are some things that you/your video deemphasize which I think are very important.
- From slow-motion video, the tires of the vehicle start spinning (on the icy road) when they are pointed straight, and the car is in front of the agent. Pressing the accelerator when someone is in front of your vehicle is at a minimum negligent, even if you are saved by manslaughter by the spinning of those wheels atop a patch of ice. [Footnote one]
- From slow motion, we can see both feet of the ICE agent slipping backward on the icy road as the car pulls forward while his torso remains upright. This implies a force being applied to push him backward. Given that he had a cell phone in one hand and a gun in the other at this point, he was not pushing off the car's hood himself. The transcript (NYT?) phrases this as "it does look like the agent is being struck by the SUV" and "we can see the agent is not being run over." This is deceptive wording. While he was not "run over", we have it on video that he was actually struck by the SUV.
- The video emphasizes shots through the window, but the first shot went through the windshield.
Also, I believe it is relevant to quash some of the hysteria about ICE intentionally killing protestors:
- This activist had been impeding ICE vehicles for at least 3-5 minutes prior to the incident, as revealed by videos. Others alledge they had been doing so for more than half an hour.
- Impeding a federal immigration enforcement operation is a felony. (It has to be a crime because we don't want organized crime to delay immigration enforcement agents while victims of human trafficking are moved elsewhere.)
- We have on video that this activist was under law enforcement instructions to exit the car. This was an arrest in progress.
- By attempting to execute a three-point turn, this activist was fleeing arrest.
- Therefore, other activists will not meet this fate (arrest or shooting) if they find non-impeding or non-vehicular ways to protest.
The mirror to your focus on children and stuffed animals is the legalistic perspective, which shows we have an individual fleeing arrest in commission of a federal felony, who strikes one of the arresting officers with their car. At low speed and probably out of negligence, but legally that's an assault.
So I find that I probably have to agree to disagree with you about whether the officer was justified in the moment or should be charged with a crime.
He's able to get out of the way of this car, which is the number one priority. Deadly force may not be used solely to prevent the escape if you think the subject is just escaping. You can't use deadly force. Running from the cops is not reason enough to use deadly force. You can only use it if no other reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle, which he already did. He can and did move out of the path of the vehicle.
There is a strong incentives-based counterargument here. If activists find that they can use their vehicles to block ICE, and ICE officers cannot cross paths with those vehicles when they are in "drive" (or go behind them when in "reverse"), then activists will use their knowledge of these rules to more effectively impede ICE. If activists learn they can drive away instead of being arrested, they will flee arrest in their vehicles. If activists are legally permitted to accelerate vehicles toward ICE officers and ICE officers have a duty to get out of the way (and are not allowed to retaliate), then we are incentivizing activists who intentionally use their vehicles to scatter ICE agents. This seems like very dangerous behavior.
Finally, there are several things you emphasize which just don't matter:
- The activist was a mother of three who had just dropped off her kid at school.
- Stuffed animals in the car.
- The officer swearing after the incident.
- "she was a mile from home." (Additionally, I'm not sure this is true. Her car had Missouri plates.)
- Another shooting in Portland. (It seems the Portland CBP shoot was against two gang members who used their vehicle to ram officers while fleeing arrest. The situtation is sufficiently different that it doesn't show evidence of generalization.)
- The officer "casually strolling away" from the scene. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, people can go into shock, and it is not uncommon for people to walk away from accidents only to discover broken bones later.
- How many shots were taken, and that the third shot was a "kill shot". Once the decision to use deadly force was made, the number of shots does not matter, as long as they were within the time of a reasonable human's OODA loop.
- Frankly, all of this discussion about whether the officer should be charged is unnecessary. I still trust a Grand Jury to make a good decision based on what is bound to be a lot more footage and careful thinking than is available to the press.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
Not really. But marriage rates are increasing monthly and births are "way" up, large companies are starting to give 6 month maternal/paternal leave (+ 2.5 years unpaid), and everyone knows the issue is critical.
However, there is also a lot of government support for young families now, from special housing options to support for ultrasounds. I think my local district office will provide ~$800 in medical vouchers and folic acid supplements when a pregnancy is registered. $800 is probably enough to pay for the absolutely necessary medical expenses for delivery if the mother is on national health insurance, but I don't think it would be enough to cover electives like NIPT or first-trimester blood testing.
So on further consideration, it might be cultural change driving financial incentives, or financial incentives might make motherhood more high-status.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
Thank you! I'm also eyeing old media, although one has to be careful that the censors haven't had a pass over it.
There seems to be a roaring market in old (used) children's books.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
One of the things that the constant opining about low TFR has done in Korea is to make childrearing high-status again. Marriage rates and childbirth are both on the rise. It's too little too late for Korea, but it does show that there is a social dimension which cannot be neglected and is hard (but possible) to intentionally change.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
Where do you find good cultural influences for your daughters?
I like the way both you and @Amadan are approaching this problem, but as long as we are restructuring society, I propose working from the following first principles:
- One goal of family formation is the raising of healthy, resilient, intelligent children.
- It is best for children if mothers are not drinking, smoking, or toking. Even caffeine is suspect (although research on caffeine is heavily confounded by mothers who drink coffee also smoking.)
- It is best medically for children if they are breastfed to age 1 or so. (Failure to do this leads to improper palete formation (mouthbreathing, dental issues), and greater incidence of leaky gut.)
- It is best psychologically for children if they are cared for by their parents nearly fulltime to age 3 or so. (Failure to do this leads to ADHD and attachment disorders.)
- It is best for children if they are raised by their biological parents (non-biological parents have a much higher rate of child abuse) and their families are stable.
- Women are hypergamous, and so stable families will be those in which the father has above-average social status and/or the woman has limited opportunities to meet other men with higher social status.
- Men are promiscuous, and so stable families will be those in which the man has limited opportunities to meet other women.
- Overall biological fertility is dropping precipitously (-2% per year), and it looks like the drop is due to environmental factors (food contaminants, screens, poor sleep), especially exposure to estrogenic compounds in utero around gestational age 6-8 weeks.
I propose the following interventions for maximizing fertility and child wellbeing:
- As a society, we desperately need to re-taboo drinking, smoking, toking, and adultery.
- We need to ban estrogenic compounds everywhere the modern consumer is exposed to them. (Which means in everything from plastic food containers and airborne pesticides to polyester carpeting.) We should take a precautionary approach to new compounds rather than the "generally recognized as safe" approach.
- Marriage should be encouraged and divorce should be strongly discouraged while there are minor children in the home.
- Women should be forbidden from working (or part-time WFH only) while they have children ages 0-3. I agree with @Amandan that this should be funded by fathers.
- We should re-segregate society so that married men and women are no longer exposed to temptations outside of the home. (Which includes gender-segregated social circles, workplaces, and social media.)
- Married workers should be discouraged from jobs involving heavy travel.
- Biological fathers should be forced into shotgun weddings. Single mothers should be shamed. Widows and widowers should be supported on the public purse, but forbidden from marrying/dating while they have minor children.
- Fathers should be paid more for their work to compensate for interventions (3) and (6). This should be paired with commensurate increase in responsibiliites.
Overall, I think that interventions 4-6 mean that married women are going to be doing more WFH jobs, married men are going to be doing more field jobs, and the unmarried will be doing more travelling.
Of course, this has no chance in hell of being a popularly selected policy. The game-theoretic self-interest of hypergamous women is to vote for social support so they can have more babies out of wedlock with cads (paid for by taxpayers), no matter how much having babies out of wedlock harms the children.
In order to counteract this failure mode, I suggest the following initial (moderately sneaky) political platform:
- uniform paternity testing in hospitals (can be mandated under testing for genetic diseases)
- expand maternity leave to 3 yrs from the birth of the child at half- or one-third pay (probably quite popular?)
- legalize sex-based segregation and discrimination in the workplace
- reduce economic support to "single mothers"
- increase child support burden based on (1), if married
- build more mini (sub-1000 sqft) starter homes, depressing housing prices to make childrearing more affordable
- gradually license more doctors, nurses, and midwives, depressing medical wages to make childbearing more affordable
- make divorce legal only in the case that it serves the best interests of the child, and make divorce cases self-represented like small claims court to remove the economic incentives of lawyers to promote divorce. Compensate existing divorce lawyers with large sums for their early retirement.
The effect of (1) and (4) will be to make life harder for cheaters and cads. The effect of (2) will be to depress hiring of mothers, and the effect of (3) will be to raise wages for men and limit mixing of men and women outside of the home. (1) and (5) will increase the prevalence of "shotgun" weddings. (6) and (7) are attacking cost disease to make marriage more affordable. (8) is to reduce the rate of divorces to those that are really necessary for child wellbeing.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
4mo ago
I think you are slightly but not significantly confused.
- On HBD, you seem to attribute state success to National IQ: "Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great." Were you to look at most of these Asian Nations in the early 20th century, you would have seen extreme poverty, floundering industry (lots of rice farmers paying taxes in-kind), and lower IQs than the West [1]. Given that the Flynn effect was much higher for these countries during their period of industrialized, urbanized, and instituted public education[1], one must wonder what it would look like if the same policies were successfully carried out in some of your less desirable countries.
Note that this doesn't conflict with the larger point about immigration: the Flynn effect works over generational time, and I will not dispute that emmigrants from war torn states where blood feuds over cows have been evolved into law[2] are less likely to contribute to the success of recieving nation than emmigrants from industrial states who are leaving their homes because starting engineers in the US make 2~3x (PPP)[3], and I do find it plausible that Western nations will be more successful if they focus on importing engineers rather than carving out asylum categories for people who are fleeing blood feuds [4].
- On global competition, the Jews will be important, but I think that the differential success of the West is less about their Jewishness, and more about how their home countries showed intellectual elites the door. I have heard WWII summarized as "our Germans were better than their Germans", and a history of the Cold War would not be complete without a history of the soviet diaspora to Israel. It seems likely the West will pull the same gambit in the 21st century, and "our Chinese" will be "better than their Chinese". Accepting refugees turned out well for the West when the principal victims of our geopolitical enemies were the elite and well-educated with high-class values. It will continue to work well for the West as long as totalitarian societies continue to alienate their intellectual elites (i.e. China enforcing capital controls) ... but it might also reverse if, say, European online speech controls become implemented across the West.
[1] The Flynn effect in Korea: large gains. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.022 [2] The Evolution of Blood-Money for Homicide in Somalia, by Paolo Contini. Journal of African Law, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1971), pp. 77-84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/744600. See also https://www.academia.edu/25376232/EARLY_LEGAL_SYSTEMS_IN_SOMALIA. [3] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-level/locations/korea-south [4] https://www.euaa.europa.eu/coi/somalia/2025/country-focus/1-profiles/15-individuals-involved-blood-feudsclan-disputes-and-other-clan-issues
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
4mo ago
That doesn't quite square with their militarization of Antarctica, claims on Korean research outposts in the Yellow Sea, opposition to THAAD in South Korea, and aggression towards India and Bhutan. Not to mention how expansive those "disputed islands" are. Most of them are geographically closer to the Philippines. The "nine-dash line" lies 30 km off the Palawan coast.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
4mo ago
It's not about just health insurance, it is about financers and monopolists who own the insurance companies, the hospitals, and their supply chains. (Also a nitpick: the health insurance industry average profit margin in 2020 was 3%.) 34% of health care costs go to pay administrators, so a lot of it is having armies of staff disputing every charge at the insurance company, who in turn pays the hospital to have armies of staff fighting the disputed charges. Insurance companies also can have shared ownership with the hospitals that they pay, as well as with the PBMs and pharmacies where prescription medication is dispensed, and investors can even own the land the hospital is sitting on and rent it back to the hospital at unsustainable rates. Even the suppliers of online after-visit surveys are doing very well indeed. So all along the chain it is monopolies extracting value from the insurance companies, hospitals, and patient, along with a lot of coordinated greasing of palms and inside dealing.
Which is not to mention that the hospital prices are set such that they can cover the costs imposed by freeloaders and insufficient insurance/medicare/medicaid reimbursement. It's the dystopia of Americans being happy to pay more for declining quality of service and inefficient systems, while all the profits go to financiers and all the costs go to the taxpayer/honest payer.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
4mo ago
Oh thank you! So much nostalgia! Now https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.htm returns "404 Page not found." but https://alljapanesealltheti.me/ works.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
4mo ago
- Decide if you want to learn PRC (Mainland) Chinese or ROC (Taiwan) Chinese. Taiwan has its own phonetic writing/typing system which is not pinyin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo), and uses traditional hanzi rather than simplified characters.
- Decide what your goal is. Do you want to speak, write, or pass a test? If the goal is only speaking, learning ideographical writing will bog you down. All the official textbooks out of PRC/ROC will tell you to learn writing, but if speed is the goal, you can learn to speak at an elementary school level without Hanzi. HSK requires you learn writing. Choose your goal, at least for the first six months.
- If speaking/listening is part of your goal, decide which dialect to focus on. Most resources teach "Mandarin" (again, PRC or ROC) but there are also a lot of resources for Cantonese.
- How motivated are you, how immersed are you, and what is your timeline? If your timeline is less than six months ... prepare to learn a few travel phrases and have a bad accent. If your timeline is more than a year, you can reasonably expect to learn to understand simple spoken language or written text (but not both!) or learn to speak in simple phrases without any accent at all.
Motivation, immersion, disclaimer
I have not learned Chinese. I have learned Korean to fluency and then tried to adapt my method to Chinese. After a few years my personal circumstances changed so I completely lost interest. I feel much happier now focusing on Korean again.
Back when I started learning Korean, the core of my learning strategy was adapted from AJATT. It seems the website is down now, but the core of it is summarized here: https://learnanylanguage.fandom.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_Time
The core idea is that learning language properly takes a lot of thinking about the language and thinking in the language, so it is a motivation and immersion game. Studying is hard, so you need to motivate yourself through fun (throw out any resource which gets boring), immerse (in fun things!), and use spaced repetition to optimize your memorization (while deleting any boring flashcards).
A tangential idea from AJATT is that you should only take advice from people who have already "walked the path" (or less politely, don't take dieting advice from a fat person).
I have not walked the path for Chinese, only started the hike and lost interest. I recommend finding some blogs of people who have mastered Chinese fluently and see what resources they found most useful. But here are the resources, strategies, and philosophies I used to start learning mainland Mandarin.
The following assumes you are very motivated and your timeline is measured in years. I was not very motivated for Mandarin, so my studying was limited to 25 minutes per day of non-immersion. After three years, I wouldn't pass a beginner test. For immersion in a language school in Beijing, I hear the timeline is one summer to one semester to learn to hear the sounds and pronounce them accurately. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
Listening/speaking
- Non-native speakers develop a foreign accent because they start speaking before they know what the language is supposed to sound like or before they are comfortable sounding like a native speaker. This becomes a bad habit which they cannot fix. If your end goal is to speak fluently, start with lots of listening (so you know what the sounds should be) and deliberate phoneme generation in a low-pressure environment (so you can generate the sounds accurately). It is much easier to learn slowly than to fix a bad accent.
- I made Anki cards for syallables to learn to distinguish tones by downloading the University of Michigan phonemes database (https://tone.lib.msu.edu/) to create a 2400-note deck for phoneme -> pinyin and back. This was probably a bad idea, because the Univeristy of Michigan tones are really slow and native speakers think they sound funny. Learning to hear the tones was a slow process. It took me two years to finish studying my deck (on my commute time). There are downloadable "quiz" apps with more native speech for learning to hear the tones, but they aren't spaced repetition and don't cover the whole set of possible phonemes. The holy grail would be an Anki or Mnemnosyne deck which has good native pronounciation of individual syllables and covers all legal phonemes.
- Find some good source audio of slow sentences (like from a textbook) and use Audacity to cut it into pieces and make flashcards for transcription and listening practice. Use Anki or Mnemosyne for the spaced repetition. This will give good listening practice and make you more familiar with the intonations. For bonus points, you can "repeat after" the cards, but I wouldn't recommend that until you can consistenly differentiate the sounds you are supposed to be repeating. If using Anki, I would create a separate auto-generated card type for repeating after a card, and have it introduced after listening to the relevant card has been mastered. I often practiced this next to a native speaker to make sure I wasn't forming bad habits.
- Repetition is the holy grail of listening. You can learn the flow and intonation of a language perfectly just with enough repetition. Spaced repetition is most efficient, but any repetition will work. For Korean, I found a single expisode of a good drama with a lot of male lines and listened to it 100 times while doing other things.
- But for understanding, the best method (according to research) is by explicit (grammar) instruction followed by input that is mostly comprehensible.
- So explicit instruction helps with priming what to listen for, and repetition is good for learning intonation and flow.
Writing
- Heisig did a great thing and created a systematic way of learning the writing system which builds up the characters from simple to complicated, using memory hints to build stories about them. It works great for remembering how to write, but the meanings sometimes differ slightly from actual use so as to introduce common characters in memorable ways. So you will need to relearn a bit once you get immersed. (For example, the character that means "of" is memorized with the keyword "glue" in the Heisig system.) Here's a link collection and someone's blog about using Heisig quite aggressively: https://mandarinsegments.blogspot.com/2013/05/heisig-method-remembering-hanzi-full.html
- Heisig will conflict with ROC or PRC-designed textbooks and language aptitude tests, because they have their own system for introducing characters which is based on usage frequency rather than making conceptual connections. But it looks like the guy in that blog learned 500 characters in 18 days and 1000 characters in 46 days. So maybe you can delay the textbooks for a month while you focus on the basic characters.
Meaningful reforms are the more important part of that sentence. If reforms are rejected until you get to the point of populist demands, those will likely be hijacked by special interests, as you note in the case of housing.
The princial-agent conflict I was thinking about was "my insurance is paid for by my employer, who has no incentive to limit total costs to me or to provide good coverage," but adding market consolidation adds additional problems: health insurance companies withholding payment from independent doctors to give the providers incentive to
sell outjoin their affiliated provider network. Ditto health insurance companies owning healthcare providers, PBMs, and pharmacies. It gets even more pernicious. In the case of my family, UHC was hiring staff out of clinics as consultants, who then acted as medical professionals to assert that continuing care wasn't necessary. There were at least two backchannels between these consultants and people working as care providers in the clinic, and there was some exaggeration of the recovery going on in the official medical charts, which the consultants then used to argue against further care. What's a little favoratism between friends?I agree that contract reform is nice, but it is only putting a band-aid over the fact that we went from a vibrant market with ~200 major defense contractors to five. As we see in space, merely doubling the number of options the buyer has can vastly change the incentives driving market participants.
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