tikimixologist
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User ID: 257
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Phonics and DI aren't "silver bullets". They are merely interventions that reliably perform better than all known alternatives. Their inability to solve all problems is not a reason to give them up.
Also teaching outcomes are quite straightforward to measure, thanks to standardized tests.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Why can’t we make a giant metropolis in Oklahoma? And build it to 30 million people.
Or better - why can't we make a giant metropolis in Silicon Valley? The current population density of the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area) is 1.1k/sq mi and it has 7.7M people. The density of Brooklyn is 38k/sq mi and San Francisco is 18k/sq mi.
If we increased the density of Silicon Valley to that of Brooklyn, we could fit 266M people there. We could fit 21M people alone in Santa Clara (San Jose plus a couple of suburbs) if we increased the density to San Francisco or Cambridge levels.
If you want to do it on unoccupied land, there is literally unoccupied land the size of San Jose directly adjacent to San Jose.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
There have been similar protests that included a small amount of illegal behavior every time a Republican has been elected president since 2000.
https://wgntv.com/news/hundreds-of-peaceful-trump-protests-overshadowed-by-violent-acts-arrests/
Some of these anti-Republican protests were even organized by foreign powers: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358025-thousands-attended-protest-organized-by-russians-on-facebook/
Did those people not, in some way, think their actions might lead to Trump being deposed? Their explicit statements to the media suggest they too were engaging in a coup attempt:
“Trump is illegal,” she said. “He is in violation of the constitution. I am doing everything I can to prevent his presidency.”
tikimixologist
1yr ago
followed by... the Dixie Chick controversy?
Just a reminder that no one called for the Dixie Chicks to be censored, and they weren't. Here's George Bush on the topic: "The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind...That's the great thing about America."
Sweden has a population of 10.5M. Eyeballing the numbers on country of origin, it appears to have about 500k of the migrants people are concerned about, i.e. about 5% of the population (from much lower numbers on a roughly 2010-2020 time scale).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden
More plausibly, since this is a fairly recent issue, the complaint is probably about the "Syrians". Note that Europe faced a flood of immigrants claiming to be Syrian after their civil war but it's widely believed that many are not.
Assuming they are 5x as violent as natives - along the lines of African Americans in the US - that would result in a 10% increase in crime overall. That would not show up in the graphs you chose to post.
I did notice one graph you did not choose to post which shows a 5x increase in sex crimes over the period of "Syrian" migration.
https://bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/sexual-offences.html
In any case "there are very few migrants so even if they do lots of crimes per capita they don't do many in total" is a poor argument for importing more.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Republicans spent all 8 of his years burning political capital on opposing Obama, to the point of government shutdown.
Govt was shutdown for 27 days under Clinton (2 separate shutdowns), 16 under Obama, and 38 days under Trump (also 2 shutdowns). Clinton was impeached, Bush was not (in spite of many calls to "Chimpeach the Chimperor"), Trump was impeached, Obama was not. I'm not sure that things did get more heated under Obama - it's not like Bush Derangement Syndrome wasn't a thing prior to that.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
If you actually look at nuclear development, electricity deregulation made it impossible to do the long-term funding to build nuclear reactors, because the time to get your money back is such a long tail.
Depends on whether you look at the cost before or after the government imposed regulations that make it impossible for nuclear to be cheap, specifically the "as safe as possible" standard (as opposed to "meet X bar of safety as cheap as possible").
It's perhaps worth contemplating who was president at the time of the price spike.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Another explanation for this is the following: it's really hard for a CEO to maintain focus across an organization, and most can only do it with very simple messaging.
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"This year is about growth!"
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After several years of :arrowup: "This year is about good growth, we won't lose more than $X per new customer."
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2022: "This year is about cash flow positivity/profitability/not dying."
I work at a company where I'm dead certain the CEO and many execs understand all this at a very quantitative level. Nevertheless, the actual messaging that reaches us regular workers is just the bullet point. And the net result is that the way it plays out, $1 from CEO bullet point > $1 from other method. If you're pushing "get $1 via careful cost cutting" in a growth year, your project isn't funded and if you do it yourself it doesn't look as good in a promo packet.
Net result is that me and my manager - two PhDs of Quantitative Subject on a Quantitatively Make Money Team - pick our projects based as much on alignment with CEO messaging as we do on an estimate of how much money we'd make. Or alternately, we do the same projects (make the growth vs ROA efficiency frontier move outward) but our summary slide reports a horizontal shift (more of profit per customer-ish metric) instead of a vertical one (more growth at the same profit per customer).
And everyone does this. A year ago at my work, Internal Bureaucracy Team saved some money by building a no-code app in AirCodaJiraForce instead of renting the relevant SAAS product. No one cared. Also a year ago, Engineering Platform Team picked a >$100k hosted SAAS product with cool visualizations over OSS Project that only renders tables. As far as I know no one has used any visualizations. Now the latter choice is being rethought mainly because messaging changed.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
GRRM purportedly told the showrunners exactly where the show was going. But because he didn't flesh it out at GRRM levels of detail, the showrunners had to fill stuff in and didn't. Why did Daenarys turn evil? Clearly GRRM told the writers it's because all the people she loves get killed and she suffers a lot. But if he were to actually write it, he'd realize that Missandei getting killed isn't narratively sufficient.
It's the same reason that a lot of "software architect" type people are kind of disastrous - if they actually sat down and wrote code instead of making diagrams and saying "fill in the details", they'd realize where the actual hard parts live.
GRRM could probably have made it work, though maybe 2 books would have become 4. The TV writers couldn't.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I don't understand this complaint about the death penalty specifically. The alternative to the death penalty in most cases is life imprisonment which barely seems better. Why are false positives with life imprisonment ok, but the false death penalties not?
Moreover, life imprisonment lets us pretend that we'll fix the false positives later on, even though I see little evidence we actually will.
Overall this argument seems like an isolated demand for rigor.
Or are you suggesting that most proponents of blank slatism vs HBD are not arguing as a result of an innate desire to see people justly compensation for their work?
I would make this argument.
Here's a trope of environmentalist interventions. There's a hypothesis that some part of a selection process is preventing people from being justly compensated for their work. Then we directly fix that process by modifying it so that bias can't enter, and it has no effect or even makes the gaps bigger. The blank slatists then get angry and, if it turns out bias went the opposite way, advocate against fixing it.
Examples:
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Gender blind hiring in Australia is scrapped after it turns out people were biased in favor of women rather than against.
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Similar results in tech, and now gender blind hiring is out of favor. Ideology tests during the interview are popular, however.
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SAT was originally meant to (and did!) nullify the bias inherent in high school grades. What if teachers were biased against lower classes, colored people, Jews, etc? They might give lower subjective grades and the SAT could find hidden talent. It worked great, but the hidden talent is predominantly Asian so now they want to scrap it.
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Leftists oppose civil service tests of by the book firefighting skills, because blacks don't pass them. Instead they favor an oral exam where bias could creep in. ("By the book" means "according to the firefighter manual, which saw blade should be used to cut concrete". To be fair, the test in New Haven was badly copied from the NYC test and included a few questions about NYC geography which I guess is racist and invalidates the test somehow?)
There are a huge number of cases where leftists directly oppose changes that result in people being more justly compensated when that results in selecting fewer members of their favored groups. I can't think of any cases where they support it. Can you?
Can you link to leftists who openly acknowledge the "rapefugee" problem (not necessarily using that term), the disproportionate welfare consumption and the overall net drain on the public finances? I'm curious to hear their arguments.
A notable fact I'd love to see them recon with: if in fact the harm caused by immigrant communities is the result of a small minority of criminals and welfare users, why not just deport that small minority and solve the problem? I.e. suppose 90% of Somalian immigrants are $10k net positive, but the average Somalian contribution is -$19k (this # is actual). That means the bad 10% of Somalians cost an average of $280k/each (per year!). Why keep them around?
tikimixologist
11mo ago
We have plenty of crazy high $$ figure lawsuits on non-medical topics also - e.g. Tesla not being aggressive enough in firing people who might have said "nigger" but they aren't really sure.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case
tikimixologist
11mo ago
If I were a criminologist, I would spent my career studying how HK has eliminated most forms of crime, without usually feeling like a "police state"
The problem is they already know and hate the answer to this: to make a city with Kong Kong levels of crime in the US, all you need to do is get 99.2% of the non-Asians (and 100% of the blacks) to move out.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Is "lets take selfies while illegally wandering around and vandalize Pelosi's desk" based on a plausible model of how an election could be overturned?
From what I can recall the goal was to persuade Pence to do some maneuver of questionable legality, much like the protest attempts directed at vote counters/courts in 2000 and 2004. But those weren't coup attempts.
Anyway glad to know that the crux of the issue is how hopeful the mostly peaceful rioters feel.
P.S. There were literal death threats directed at members of the electoral college, also in an attempt to stop Trump. No arrests for that "coup attempt" that I can find either.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Perhaps significantly, Gene Roddenberry (and maybe Carl Sagan) was the type who could at least recognise the value in different visions of the world, even if he thought that American liberalism was superior.
Interestingly, that would probably get Star Trek and TNG cancelled today. Here's a fun exchange from Star Trek:
LINCOLN: What a charming negress. Oh, forgive me, my dear. I know in my time some used that term as a description of property.
UHURA: But why should I object to that term, sir? You see, in our century we've learned not to fear words.
KIRK: May I present our communications officer, Lieutenant Uhura.
LINCOLN: The foolishness of my century had me apologising where no offense was given.
KIRK: We've each learned to be delighted with what we are. The Vulcans learned that centuries before we did.
Remember that episode when Riker hooked up with a transwoman, but then her planet made her do conversion therapy? The federation didn't use centralized corporations/control of the financial system to punish them or anything. Just an explicit anti-colonialist statement from Picard that they need to be allowed to do their thing.
Similarly for the eugenics planet, although they did grant asylum to a few.
It's also not the utopia that everyone remembers, or at least not everywhere. Earth is nice but one crew member is a former drug addict from Space Baltimore.
According to Wikipedia Martha's Vineyard has the infra to handle 85,000 visitors (the difference between MV's year round population of 16k and their summer population of 100k). Quickly browsing travelocity suggests there are easily places for 50 people to stay in their beach front guest houses. The first few results were "beach house, sleeps 6", "resort condo, sleeps 4", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha's_Vineyard
I do not recall anyone calling the National Guard when Obama brought in in 400 celebrities and 200 servants: https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-08-04/barack-obama-scales-back-60th-birthday-party-amid-delta-variant-spread
If you believe that the normal MV guests require different "infrastructure" than summer vacationers and that you can't just drop these guys into some beach houses, maybe you can be specific about what infra they need and why you can't?
tikimixologist
1yr ago
The phrase "Narrow Bank" is the name of an actual bank that the Fed shut down because it did not lend out money and just held 100% safe reserves.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Regional banks do have proprietary advantage - domain specific knowledge of regional industry and real estate as well as local relationships. JPM or BofA need to have fairly uniform underwriting rules and these rules will not necessarily allow them to service some particular industry with weird cash flow patterns (such as startups). Rapidly scaling SAAS is a very good example of this.
Another great service SVB provided is a degree of self dealing/moral hazard - founders can get a mortgage backed by illiquid equity if they do corporate banking with SVB. This sort of self dealing is a problem for startups, but it is not really a problem and is a useful feature for family offices.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
First is because of the Republican's insistence on 'Whiteness & Christianity' being core to the platform.
This is simply false and has been false for decades. Here's what George W. Bush said about the topic on Sept 17, 2001 for example:
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."
Leftists insist that Republicans are racist, and push this meme by misleading media stories. A Bush II example of this was James Byrd (black guy) getting murdered by racists in Texas while Bush was governor. Leftists who oppose the death penalty wanted a hate crime law, Bush said such a law was unnecessary because Texas has strict laws against murder. Texas eventually executed the killers based on those laws.
A Trump example of this is creatively editing a statement to imply Trump described white supremacists as "fine people" when he explicitly said he wasn't referring to them. (Full quotes here: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/ )
Now I fully believe that Indians and Chinese believe this to be true - but their belief has nothing to do with any actual mainstream Republican views. Your second reason explains quite well why Indian and Chinese Americans believe this, regardless of how true it is.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
This isn't just raw bigotry - a person who's learned to do honor culture sparring instead of acting 'reasonably' and signaling disapproval subtlely, who hasn't practiced doing paperwork or writing essays, who doesn't have a support network of other rich people to fall back on, will in practice be at a disadvantage in life, even if they're just as 'biologically' smart as a rich white person.
There is at least one company that attempts to teach intelligent but culturally backward people to do upper class signaling: Bloom School, formerly Lambda. They quite explicitly teach lower class people how to perform class signaling - an example Austin Allred (the founder) gave is that they tell everyone to get a bank account before getting hired, since "just cut me a check" signals low class. They internalize the benefits by charging customers a fraction of their paycheck assuming they get a job that pays at least $50k/year.
It's a popular target of dishonest hit pieces by left wing journalists, near as I can tell for exactly this reason. Journalists are high class, Bloom/Lambda students are low class, and yet Bloom graduates earn more than journalism school graduates.
As for the "why do Jews and Asians succeed then" question...When you're excluded from good occupations by law, your culture will steer away from them and towards unproductive activity or crime,
Every western state of the Union except Washington explicitly included Asians in Jim Crow laws. Southern states did not, probably because the vast majority of Asians lived in the west.
Montana: "Negroes, Chinese and Japanese"
Arizona: "Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu"
California, quite famously the location of lots of anti-Asian discrimination: "Negroes, mulattos, Mongolians and Malays"
Nevada was more descriptive about what these terms mean: "Ethiopian or black race, Malay or brown race, Mongolian or yellow race, or Indian or red race"
Oregon: "Negro, Chinese, or any person having one-quarter or more Negro, Chinese or kanaka blood, or any person having more than one-half Indian blood." (Kanaka = pacific islander.)
Utah: "white and Negro, Malayan, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon void."
Insofar as Asians were not explicitly mentioned in Jim Crow laws the courts generally would include them should the matter be tested. For example in California the law specified "no black, mulatto person, or Indian" and the California Supreme court interpreted it to include Chinese: "It can hardly be supposed that any Legislature would . . exclud[e] domestic negroes and Indians, . . . and turn loose upon the community the more degraded tribes of the same species, who have nothing in common with us."
https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state
tikimixologist
1yr ago
If there were a number of minority business applicants who felt looked over in hiring and not adequately promoted, why wouldn’t they want to form their own business?
It's amusing that Goldman Sachs is your example of companies that currently hire Korean PhDs, given that Goldman was originally a company that hired Jews in a competitive marketplace where Jews were discriminated against. At that time Goldman mostly specialized in back office low visibility work - if the Jews get the numbers right, it's fine.
Also in common knowledge that has been memory holed, various popular left wing policies such as minimum wage and Davis Bacon were created to prevent a "race to the bottom" that resulted in greedy businesses hiring negros for cheap.
The general argument against this goes back to Becker, and it relies on a principal/agent problem. Consider a discriminatory firm which is driven out of business by competitors hiring cheaper negros. The former employees of this failed business do not exit the marketplace. Instead, they become employed by other businesses and continue to be racist. This racism may involve things like funneling the best sales opportunities to other white employees, shirking work when on a team project with negros, that kind of thing. The net result is that these racist employees drive down the productivity of black workers. That's the Beckerian theory.
(I use the term "negro" throughout much of this post to emphasize to the reader the time period I'm discussing.)
There's also the issue of network effects which I think is more modern. E.g. if your customers or suppliers are racist, a non-racist profit maximizing employer may put black employees in less visible positions. Literally all of the modern examples of this that I can think of result in discrimination against political conservatives:
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Cloud hosting and other SAAS providers (e.g. Cloudflare) refusing to service conservative businesses (kiwifarms, parler).
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Companies that "own the consumer" (Android store/Apple store) blocking access to consumers for conservative businesses (parler, veritas).
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Passive shareholders funneling non-specific demand for investment to companies that engage in performances leftwing stuff (ESG). A famous example is giving Exxon a higher ESG rating than Tesla. "Indexing is communism" is the economic argument against indexing, but also "Indexing is globohomo."
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Employees conspiring against political conservative coworkers, along the lines of Becker's theory. (I have personally witnessed an attempt by employees at getting a conservative fired, which luckily failed due to rigid company policies.)
tikimixologist
1yr ago
The second example comes from the NPR sting, where Veritas used deceptive editing to imply that NPR executives were very eager to accept a $5 million donation from a Sharia group in exchange for coverage input.
Huh?
The edited Veritas video portrays the same thing as the unedited Veritas video: NPR exec clearly states that they won't let a donation influence their coverage, but also NPR exec is totally sympathetic with and yes-manning this guy. That's even visible in the takedown video you linked.
The plane will consume roughly the same amount of fuel whether it is full or empty.
Airlines stop running flights that are regularly empty.
If you want to travel international,
The environmental alternative is to not travel.
A non-trivial chunk of the contradiction here is that a disproportionate number of environmentalists are upper middle class westerners who refuse to reduce their consumption remotely in the direction of the poverty levels that preventing climate change would require (absent the widespread use of nuclear energy).
Based on the research I did when my wife was pregnant, I came away with the understanding that both this overall fact and the specific causes were fairly well known: gestational diabetes and preeclampsia.
Gestational diabetes is not suspected to be directly racially linked, rather the suspected pathway is black -> (pre-pregnancy obesity, during-pregnancy weight gain) -> gestational diabetes.
Preeclampsia is less understood, but is known to be highly correlated to sickle cell and is theorized to be influenced by sickle cell's recessive form as well. Fibroids (main cause: low vitamin D which has the literal biochemical cause of more melanin -> less vitamin D) are also suspected to play a role.
In any case, if we wanted to actually measure racism as opposed to blame everything for it, the simple way to do so would be to look at the underlying rates of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. Treatment after getting these conditions is susceptible to racism but actually getting the conditions is not. So high rates of (preeclampsia death / # of people with preeclampsia) might be evidence of racism, but (# of people with preeclampsia / # of pregnancies) would be evidence of bad genetic luck.
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