wlxd
2yr ago
This probably played a significant role in the creation of the interstate highway system, but I think it is far from accurate to say that this is what interstates “are for”. This consideration plays really rather marginal role today. DoD certainly is not funding or managing the Interstates.
wlxd
2yr ago
Interstates are not what people think of when the talk is about rural roads. Interstates are big, because they usually carry significant traffic. I-94 is literally the only interstate going through entire North Dakota. It is not serving local rural Dakotans, it is serving every single resident of ND who needs to get some stuff from elsewhere in the country by a truck, and also people in Minnesota and Montana. How many other two-lane roads are in North Dakota?
I mean, the argument here was that in US, everything (emphasized in the original) has to be best, and what would be a windy shabby road elsewhere is a 2 lane each direction, smooth and straight in the states. You don’t get to claim that and then provide Interstates as an example: these are uniquely unrepresentative of rural roads in US. I think this argument is utterly false.
Where are those smooth 2 lane roads in rural areas? This certainly has not been my experience in Washington state. Most of the roads that are yellow on Google Maps, except actual interstate freeways and certain non interstate freeways in urban areas (like 520 or 169) are single lane. Overwhelming majority of US 101 highway over the Olympic Peninsula, for example, is single lane. Almost all US 2 is single lane. All major highways in northeastern Washington are single lane. One counter example I can come up with is highway 97, which has passing lanes for most of its course, but beyond that, it’s mostly single lane roads except in busiest urban areas and actual Interstates. These are some of the most important roadways in the entire state, the most important ones in their region. Is it any different in other states? Where exactly rural roads are made to be two lane?
edit: found another counter example, highway 395 is double roadway (so two lanes each direction), and given where it’s at, I can’t imagine it getting a lot of traffic, but overall, very few of rural roads in Washington are double lane.
wlxd
2yr ago
One example of the WWII shenanigans you allude to is Warsaw Uprising in 1944. It was timed by Polish underground resistance to coincide with Soviet advance, and initially achieved success in wrestling control from Germans. However, when the Soviets arrived to Warsaw, instead of joining the ongoing combat operations, they just camped on the other bank of the river, allowing Nazis to regroup and reinforce, and ultimately defeat the uprising. Red Army just stood by and watched how Nazis crushed the resistance military, and murdered something between 100-200 000 civilians in mass executions.
wlxd
2yr ago
It might also be Ukrainian accident, not necessarily a false flag: there have been plenty of documented cases where Ukrainian air defense misses the target and hits something on the ground, this kind of stuff is bound to happen. In those cases, Ukraine typically claimed that it was Russian rocket (because why not), but if this was the case here, Poland would actually prefer Ukraine to come out and say that this was their air defense rocket. This way, NATO doesn’t need to intervene, so that it’s not risking credibility loss.
wlxd
2yr ago
Okay, and do you have a concrete story for today? Say, all votes are on paper, the scheme is that everyone take home a carbon copy of their own ballot. What problems do you expect it to bring, today?
wlxd
2yr ago
These seem to me concerns of marginal importance to election outcomes. They might happen, but I can scarcely imagine that making vote verifiable will make these significantly worse than they already are. Like, what do you mean by “power differentials”, in concrete terms?
wlxd
2yr ago
I think bribery to be an overblown concern. You can already bribe people today, without them being able to prove that they voted the way you prescribed. Sure, some of them will take money and still vote the other way or not vote at all, but this does not make bribery ineffective, it just pushes up the cost of buying a vote. Ability to prove who you voted for would affect the market price for a vote, and so would probably increase amount of bribery on the margin, but is by no means required to make buying votes an effective strategy.
wlxd
2yr ago
The one I gave as an example was particularly easy, as there was only one question with two possible choices.
However, for a better analogy, in the national “local” election (555 seats to provincial assemblies, 6,244 seats to county councils, 32,173 seats to commune councils, and 3,162 local government heads, close to 40 000 elected seats in total) in 2018, the official results of Sunday election (and the elections are always on Sunday in Poland, by the way) were announced on Wednesday afternoon.
wlxd
2yr ago
Here is an example of how it works in Poland, a country with a population size close to California.
There was a second round of presidential election on July 12th, 2020. The poll station closed at 9 pm. Next day, on 13th, the national election committee, announced the results.
https://pkw.gov.pl/uploaded_files/1594724319_obwieszczenie-pkw-20200713-1915.pdf
There were 20 million votes to count, almost all cast in person (out of 30 million eligible voters). No machines were used to cast votes, all of them were done on paper. No machines were used to tabulate them, all tabulation is done manually. Nevertheless, the official results are announced less than 24 hours after the polls close, and unofficial results (ie, enough stations reported results to give 99%+ confidence in election outcomes) are available around midnight the same day.
There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.
wlxd
2yr ago
In Xenophon (iirc, it might have been somewhere in Plato, it's been a while) Socrates considered dancing the best preparation for war, and advised it over boxing/wrestling which he thought made men too bulky and hungry to make good soldiers.
In Republic, Plato (through Socrates) only recommended music and gymnastics, not dance. I don't remember his stance on wrestling.
And I'm not trying to be dismissive. It doesn't have to be your own analysis - do you have a pundit who can do better? An organization? A MIT professor?
Cochrane, whom I linked, has been predicting inflation way back in 2020 and early 2021, purely as a result of massive fiscal stimulus. Lawrence Summers did the same at the time, and was widely ridiculed. I mean, shit, I did it myself, and I benefited from this prediction.
The problem here is that if I point to people who predicted inflation at this time and turned out to be correct, you'll say "yes, but they predicted 8 out of last 2 inflation spurts", and, indeed, you'll be correct. Nevertheless, this attitude:
The question is not "is this prediction correct", the question is "can you do better".
is just terrible. Just because I can't do better doesn't mean that I somehow logically have to accept shit predictions.
Just as Nate Silver can predict elections "wrongly", the market can get predictions "wrong" - but that doesn't mean I have a better source of future predictions or that a better source even exists.
Of course, but you know what's the lesson here? Just ignore Nate Silver. I cannot predict who will win the Super Bowl any better than my crazy uncle, but that doesn't mean that I have to listen to my crazy uncle, if he has terrible track record.
wlxd
2yr ago
The market expectations for inflation might expect it to go down, but they also didn’t expect the inflation to happen in the first place. These have been consistently wrong for past year, why should we believe these are correct now?
See for example the nice graph in this blog post.
wlxd
2yr ago
Not really, twins raised apart are rather too rare to be practically useful. Instead, one typically compares identical twins vs fraternal twins or non-twin siblings, or biological siblings vs adopted siblings.
wlxd
2yr ago
One typically compares outcomes of identical twins vs. fraternal twins (who are as related to each other as regular siblings). If the correlation between identical twins is the same as correlation between fraternal twins, it means that it’s probably not genes that are causing the outcomes. If, instead, outcomes of identical twins are more highly correlated than outcomes of fraternal twins, that suggests that the casuality is genetic. This is because both fraternal and identical twins are sharing the same home environment (of, say, middle class home with two parents), so if it was the shared environment that was causing all of the outcomes, you wouldn’t expect the correlation between outcomes of identical twins to be different than that of fraternal twins.
wlxd
2yr ago
This is probably the lousiest attempt at making an argument that I have seen here. The only way you could have made it worse is if you waved a credential.
wlxd
2yr ago
What about purging people like Turkheimer, who explicitly put their ideology above science? Are you giving them a pass, and instead prefer to focus on those who inappropriately address your methodological pet concern?
Look, to me, you seem to be more interested in purging people and silencing the discussion, instead of in using science to learn about reality and have these learning inform our behavior and policy. You can’t even provide any example why your pet concern is relevant for me at all! I think you are wasting everyone’s time, and I think this behavior should be purged from the discussions. If you don’t like your pet concern being ignored, you should make sure to understand it.
wlxd
2yr ago
I am not asking you how things morally ought to be. What I am asking you is to provide an example of a peril that awaits HBDers if they ignore your pet concern. Is there any?
You need to understand that for me and many people, the entire point of research in this (and many other) area is to guide our real world behavior, policy making, and to answer questions like “if we want to achieve X, will doing Y work? If not, what will?”. Can you provide any non artificial example of a scenario where naively taking heritability as representing “direct biological” (whatever one understands by that) casual mechanism, will lead us to substantially different policy than when one observes that genes only actually act through phenotype, and it’s the phenotype that interacts with the real world?
wlxd
2yr ago
But so what if it is due to people treating you phenotypically? This is still genetic causation. It might indeed be interesting to some to figure out exactly through what mechanisms differences in genes result differences in income, but how exactly is this relevant for our ability to predict real world outcome of our policies? Can you show one example where “naive” (according to you) HBD would get some real world application seriously wrong, compared to approach informed by your phenotypic casual pathway correction?
wlxd
2yr ago
There is also one thing I forgot to mention: that promo to senior in 2-3 years? You can get it tomorrow if you switch companies, a nice diagonal promotion. Happened to me and many people I know.
wlxd
2yr ago
Consider this: your comp went down, because of a double whammy of cliff and stock market crash. You should now be in a steady state, with each annual refresher replacing the previous expiring one. You expect your compensation to go back up, because you expect the stock market to come back up. But that means that you will make much more if you switch companies now. Here is why:
When you were getting refreshers for past 4 years, the amount was determined by assigning some cash value to it, and then dividing by the current (at the time) stock price to get the number of shares. For example, if you were making $140k in base, and the company wanted you to make $160k a year in stock. Assume the stock price is $100. In a steady state, you have stock vesting from four refreshers, so each refresher should provide a quarter of $160k, ie $40k. Thus, they take $40k, multiply by four year to get the total value over four years to get $160k, and then divide by stock price of $100 to get 1600 stock units as a refresher size.
Now, in the steady state, if the stock suddenly jumps from $100 to $200, your comp is now $140k + 2*$160k = $460k, so you’re happy. However, your next refresher will be only 800 stock units. Conversely, if stock falls to $50, your total comp falls to $220k, but next refresher is 3200 units. The point is that if the new stock price is stable, in the next 4 years, your total comp will converge back to $300k, with $160k in stock.
Now here is a thing: if you switch companies right now, your total comp should converge to $300k immediately, because with the big new hire grant you’ll be obtaining, you’ll compress 4 years of refreshers into it. Moreover, if the stock goes back up slowly over time, the new hire grant will be worth more than 4 refreshers, because it will entirely be granted based on the bottom stock price, while the refreshers will be granted at consecutively increasing stock prices.
This also means, by the way, that your current company will likely offer extra out-of-cycle grants to good performers in order to retain them, so that they don’t simply jump ship. They will not announce it publicly, but if you ask for it privately, you might just get it. I recommend first getting a competing offer though.
wlxd
2yr ago
NYC is disgusting. The subway is dirty, and it smells bad. The sidewalks are dirty with the effluents of the trash bags left right outside, without even putting them in any kind of bins or containers. Americans are, as a general rule, dressed and groomed like slobs by European standards (not to mention high frequency of obesity, which is disgusting in and of itself), but in the busy places of the metros, you additionally have a lot of hobos and crazies, behaving erratically and generally presenting disgusting sight.
New York City is probably one of the worst places to tout as a high example of classy first world. It does have a lot going for this, and, to be fair, is much nicer inside the buildings than at the street level, but clean and nice it ain’t.
wlxd
2yr ago
Comparing this to total revenue does not make much sense. Instead, you need to look at the profit margin on this incremental revenue.
How much extra does it cost to run this paid checkmark scheme vs not running it? If, for example, operating margin of this individual program is, say, 50% (and this is in my mind underestimate, given that they already implemented the check feature, and the anti spam and prioritizing feature is extension of the rating and recommendation system they already built anyway), that $400M in revenue is $200M in additional profit, which would increase their operating profit by something like 80%. That’s a huge increase in profit on equity.
One must always be thinking in the marginal terms. Given your finance background, I was rather surprised by your comment.
wlxd
2yr ago
Yes, I did not mean to imply that the current doctrine is incoherent or is standing on the shaky basis (as did, for example, Roe v Wade decision, or still does most of the federal regulatory apparatus based on the unintended interpretation of interstate commerce clause). My point was simply that separation of church and state, contrary to what many people seem to believe, has not been one of the founding principle of this country, and in many states, quite the contrary.
I am pointing out that the example provided to support the argument is clearly false and does not support it in any way. Not sure what you are getting at here.
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