sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
That is indeed my point - housing costs in Houston were well under control until 2012 at least. In Canada they were not. This is not a matter of "Canadians forgot to build more", because the explicit policy of the Canadian government is that housing prices must increase.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DAXRNSA
I'm seeing nearly zero gains from 2000-2012 and up 70% from 2012-2019 (and of course all hell broke loose during covid). At least for a while it seems like housing prices were under control in DFW.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
So does capitalism. One difference is that communism in Czechoslovakia came about due to a Soviet supported coup followed by a military invasion 20 years later to crush a popular uprising.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
The problem is that the government will not let house prices fall as a matter of policy. People who have bought into the housing Ponzi scheme ladder can't be allowed to lose their shirts. Solve, as they say, for the equilibrium.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
I don't think it's overdetermined that NVidia and SpaceX are American companies. It seems plausible to me that the leaders in these fields would have ended up Chinese in an alternate universe (not that America never would have invented graphics cards, but that Chinese competition may have leapfrogged American firms, as Japanese cars did American ones).
The "Great Man" theory is a theory, not a fallacy, and I think it's pretty clearly correct at least in some cases (would Shmalexander the Great really have conquered all those kingdoms?). Whether it's true or not in these cases is hard to say.
Ironically, rejecting it entirely seems to be close to what I see people here accusing the left of, that is, "treating people as fungible economic units".
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
There's a reason that we're in this situation, and it's because it's not an easy problem.
I think the thing that sets Musk and Huang apart from the average H1B is the entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps there could be a way to admit people like that selectively for them to start businesses bere, but note that Huang's success is at least partly thanks to the guys he met at his second job.
It's entirely possible that you have to either err on the side of letting in too many or too few, although there may be some obvious gains by cutting down on clueless imported cognizant employees. At least, I am not aware of any cognizant H1Bs that went on to do great things.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
If you think that every ivy league (or more?) diploma should come with a green card we can discuss that.
I agree that your average Cognizant H1B holder is probably not worth admitting into the country, however I don't think it's true that you can figure out who is a top talent a priori, before they've done something world changing (after they've done it they probably wouldn't want to emigrate unless they really hate their country).
The other important point is that top talent should be allowed to start their own ventures (as Musk did illegally) and they will probably not reach their full potential working for the man. This is another shortcoming of the H1B system.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
Surely these geniuses would be included in the 15,000 year elite carveout.
I doubt it. Let's check, as they say, the Early Life.
Huang:
- Born in Taiwan
- Son of a chemical engineer and a school teacher
- Dad visits the US for some training and decided to send Jensen (who doesn't speak a lick of English) and his brother to live with their uncle (I have no idea how this is legal)
- Parents sell almost all their possessions to afford private school
- Parents move to Oregon, Jensen works as a busboy at 15
- Jensen graduates with his degree at 20 from OSU, begins to punch the clock at AMD
- Jensen hears of an interesting position at LSI Logic in Santa Clara working on early graphics cards. The project is a success and two of the guys he met leave with him to start NVidia.
Would you have let Jensen or his dad into the country? Is there anything here that indicates either of them is a top 15k tier talent? If, against all odds, he was able to start NVidia in Taiwan, do you think he would move to the US, or keep running his company in Taiwan, as Morris Chang (who left the US due to frustrations in getting ahead at IBM) did?
Elon Musk:
- Born to a dietitian/model and, uh, electromechanical engineer/emerald dealer/property developer
- Graduates Pretoria Boys High School with unremarkable grades
- Uses his mom's Canadian citizenship to dodge Safrican conscription, moves to Canada to work at lumber mill and do other odd jobs
- Admitted to the University of Pennsylvania, graduated with two degrees in five years
- Possibly overstayed his visa at this point, although Musk claims he was an H1B despite (AFAICT) not having an actual job
- Founds zip2 with his brother (possibly also in the country illegally) in 1995 which sells for $300M in 1999
- He rolls his $20M proceeds into x.com, which gets acquired and merged into paypal
- Musk cashes out $176M, repeat until Musk is the richest man in the world
Again, would you let this guy into the country? A Saskatchewan sawmill operator who overstayed his student visa? Is this what elite human capital looks like?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
but have no clue about the high level of insulation needed to stay warm in the Canadian winter.
This is really above the pay grade of your average hammer swinging construction worker. People who design houses need to be aware of this (and the million other housing code regulations) and presumably have to be licensed.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
Considering that the upside of high skill immigration (e.g. Musk, Jensen Huang) is absolutely enormous, I'd be curious to see the math showing high skill immigration to be "negative sum".
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
I don't really know much about the history of plate tectonics. Wikipedia says:
His hypothesis was not accepted by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics.[4][5]
So it sounds like there was some more evidence that was required for everything to really fit together (heh).
Of course crackpots can sometimes be right. However, the hard part is to figure out a priori which crackpots are right. Since I haven't taken physics since college and I don't have the time to comprehensively evaluate every crackpot physics claim I come across, going with the base rate of ~0% seems to be the most reasonable approach.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
The only mention of gold and silver in the Constitution is:
No State shall... make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts...
Which plainly doesn't bind the federal government to any particular course of action.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
Indeed, there's plenty of crackpots with all kinds of theories. The key difference with fission bombs is that fission itself was already published in Nature years before the Manhattan project began. Fission was emphatically not a crackpot theory.
Nuclear fission was published in a journal four years before the Manhattan project was started. Szilard described a fission chain reaction in a patent six years before the project. The fundamental building blocks for the atomic bomb were publicly known, accepted physics already - where are the accepted fundamental building blocks of antigravity technology?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
How much has your pet insurance paid out? Seems that unless you're having major procedures regularly, self insurance is the way to go.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
Where did 3 million come from? There's only like 600k H1Bs in the country. https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-continue-to-exploit-the-h-1b-visa-program-at-a-time-of-mass-layoffs-the-top-30-h-1b-employers-hired-34000-new-h-1b-workers-in-2022-and-laid-off-at-least-85000-workers/
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
No matter how you slice it, this is clearly measuring something beyond the central case of Pakistani men rapping teenage girls en masse.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
Concerning, but I don't think that it's quite the same as OP's claim. Presumably not every girl that gets groomed (I couldn't find the definition they are using here) actually gets raped. There's also this line which makes me think that I don't understand what they are measuring:
In high-profile cases such as Rotherham and Rochdale, perpetrators have been much older than their victims, but police say peer-on-peer abuse by teenagers from the same school or area is more common in some areas.
In what sense can a child "groom" a peer? Or is that just a vanishingly small number of cases? I guess we'll have to wait for some kind of official report.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
The big short still won "best adapted screenplay" along with 25 other accolades (a list with its own Wikipedia article).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
So where is the number from?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
11mo ago
So 1 in 6 is just in Rotherham. Okay, that seems correct (though I wish you had said "affected city" to be more exact) and has nothing to do with the "hundreds of thousands" figure.
Where is "hundreds of thousands" coming from? Clearly that's not just Rotherham, so where is this number from?
As far as I can tell that labor MP basically made that number up based on nothing in particular.
most estimates put it between 100k and 500k.
Which estimates are these
The 1 in 6 or 1 in 3 is taking the 1400 confirmed Rotherham rapes
The 1 in 6 and 200k numbers you quoted were not restricted to Rotherham alone (there are not enough people in Rotherham for 200k girls to be raped). What is the relationship between "1 in 6" and "hundreds of thousands"?
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of white girls raped with the assistance of their own government... between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 girls age 11-17 in the affected cities
Hopefully you get a response in before the inevitable ban - what is the evidence for this claim? As far as I know the usual estimate is closer to 1,400. It's pretty clear that 200,000 white girls would be way more than 1 in 6 girls age 11-17 in Rotherham (population 100k) and other cities.
I seem to remember you had great doubts about death toll estimations due to the Holocaust, so I hope that you went over these numbers with similar scrutiny.
AFAIK it's much easier to build seismically sound structures out of wood than brick or concrete.
Also while the walls of stone buildings may still be standing, considering the absolute devastation of the insides, it may have been better for them to burn to save on demolition costs.
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