wlxd
6mo ago
I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.
This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.
The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.
wlxd
7mo ago
I specifically mentioned the Russian puppet state of Belarus to point out that you can do much better than Ukraine while remaining in Russian orbit. My point was that if Ukraine experienced decades of stagnation while in Russian orbit while Belarus grew, why expect much different outcomes in western orbit?
Poland well the breakup of the USSR made it not possible for them to do war so they had an easier route.
Poland left the Communist Bloc years before USSR broke up. They managed that through diplomacy and negotiations, not western warmongering. Ukraine should try the same.
wlxd
11mo ago
shrinking populations are bad, but producing vastly more welfare recipients is perhaps even worse
Shrinking population produce a lot of welfare recipients. These are typically called “retirees”. Unlike the young welfare recipients, the retirees cannot be made to work very effectively.
wlxd
4mo ago
What kind of negative effects does the excess of women produce? Excess of men is thought to cause violence and unrest, but this mechanism doesn’t work with women, because they are not nearly as aggressive as men are.
wlxd
5mo ago
Do you imagine that a lasting peace is going to be achieved by killing thousands of innocents to get rid of Hamas?
It’s pretty easy to imagine when you look at some historical examples, eg. pacification of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in WWII, which in fact resulted in not only lasting peace, but in fact strong alliance with the former adversary who killed hundreds of thousands of innocents using the same tactics used by Israel today.
wlxd
3mo ago
What you are trying to do here is to use “racist” as a thought-terminating cliche, which eradicates the need to address the arguments being made on their merits. It is not surprising that you do it, as this strategy has worked amazingly well for last 60 years. The problem is that this only works if all sides of conversation share the same assumptions, that being racist is the worst thing ever, and it automatically entails you are wrong. Overusing this strategy has led to many people rejecting this assumption, and being much less impressed by the “racist” card.
Yes, BAP is racist, but the real question is, is he right or wrong?
wlxd
7mo ago
The person I replied to suggested that Ukraine should take western weapons and win the war, and gave Poland as an example of this as a successful strategy. I pointed out that Poland achieved success by peaceful diplomatic means. If the West pushed weapons into Polish hands at that time, that would have been clear warmongering, because history proved that peaceful solution was possible. I did not refer to the recent events in Ukraine as western warmongering, only the hypothetical scenario where west pushes citizens of Polish People’s Republic to war with Soviet Union.
Now, let me explicitly say here that the current western strategy of funding Ukrainian military with the explicit, openly repeated goal of weakening Russian state and military, under the assumption of good ROI in terms of monetary spend/materiel relative to achieved damage to Russia, and with zero concern for Ukrainian blood being spilled to achieve these goals, and disregard for ultimate likelihood of Ukrainian victory, very much is warmongering.
Without the western “support”, the (stupid and evil) Russian invasion would be over with by now, and much less blood would have been spilled, and wealth and livelihoods destroyed, for pretty much the same ultimate geopolitical outcome. However, the West has clearly chosen strategy of slow trickle of support to pull in and attrit Russians as much as possible.
wlxd
8mo ago
California mid century population was a third of today’s official population, probably a quarter of actual one. Moreover, during mid-century, there were more people per housing unit on average, and there were far fewer single person or two person households.
This means that the mid century California housing stock is pretty much irrelevant for the discussion of today’s housing woes, because it’s only a small fraction of today’s housing stock. The working class neighborhoods of 1950s California are places like Santa Clara or Fresno today.
wlxd
7mo ago
Why are Hindus so touchy about this? Brita, for example, do not care much that they are a result of a number of wholesale population replacements.
wlxd
8mo ago
What do Europeans have to do with the discussion? Are you under impression that Europeans ride bicycles a lot, including to work? They don’t, except of couple of places, which is no different than in US.
wlxd
6mo ago
By “residual value after controlling for other predictors”, I meant something like, if you have two pathologists, one of them being black tells you something additional on top of the fact of him being a pathologist, eg. that they are likely to be less competent at their job than their white counterpart.
wlxd
7mo ago
I am quite sure that if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas, that counts as a breach of fiduciary duty.
wlxd
8mo ago
Further, it's very easy to lose contact with the homeless, who obviously will not have regular access to Internet or cellular connection, due to lack of affordability of a mobile plan, let alone a mobile phone.
This is super wrong. Overwhelming majority of the homeless have mobile phones, with surveys ranging between 80% and 95% penetration. This is because the Feds, local municipalities and charities have special programs to equip them with phones.
Given the above, why would I put any stock in your critique of the critique of scientific paper?
wlxd
10mo ago
US probably has better law enforcers, but as a whole, Europe has better law enforcement. This is because they have more cops than US, but less crime. Because of this, when American cops must heavily prioritize their efforts, European cops are under much less pressure, and can afford to spend their time on investigating and prosecuting much more trivial offenses. The result of this is that all crime is at risk of being prosecuted; shoplifters know that if they get caught, they face jail, and so do people who do drugs (yes, simple possession is illegal and heavily enforced in huge swaths of Europe). This makes people respect law much more, which feeds the virtuous cycle of less crime -> more time to enforce the law -> more respect for law -> less crime.
wlxd
6mo ago
What videos from Ukraine are you referring to? I have seen a lot of videos with brutal combat footage or savage treatment of POWs, but I have not seen any comparable videos featuring civilians — worst ones are just civilians getting blown up by munitions hitting civilian areas, nothing comparable to Hamas.
wlxd
7mo ago
Peace was never offered to Ukraine. Their choice was subjugation and cultural genocide at a minimum or war.
Peace with concessions is still peace, regardless of how much you insist it is not. As it is, they chose cultural and literal genocide in place of a risk of just cultural genocide. The Ukrainians are being killed by tens, likely even hundreds of thousands. With so many emigres, it is highly likely that even after cessation of hostilities, whatever remains of Ukraine will be permanently demographically crippled. It is ridiculous to argue that Ukraine being completely subjugated by Russia would mean more demographic damage than the war has caused: nothing of the sort happened to other nations subjugated by Russians (in fact, Russian nationalists today routinely complain about how often the Russian Federation acts more in the interest of the minority ethnicities than ethnic Russians).
wlxd
7mo ago
I am pretty certain that you will be unable to provide even a single example where the activists, before accusing someone of victim blaming, check if the person alleged to do so, does nothing else to address the problem.
wlxd
7mo ago
Strange for you to, in response to /u/the_nybbler predicting that the Feds will use overwhelming force to roll over any state resistance, bring up Waco siege as an example of Feds having trouble with serving warrants. Yeah, next time they have troubles, they do another Waco, why not?
wlxd
8mo ago
“Grifter looking for cushy consulting and lobbying gigs” is pretty ridiculous accusation, considering that his career before running for president has been much superior than what you suggest he’s after. You might as well accuse Trump of only running because he wanted to make a bit of money by selling his memoir afterwards.
wlxd
11mo ago
Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served.
This is not so. Men achieve peak of their criminal career between 16 and 30, after that they naturally become more placid. If you keep the worst offenders in prison during that time, you physically prevent majority of the crime they’d ever commit, even if you do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate them. In short, they do not exactly resume their career.
wlxd
11mo ago
What if you look at AP math class literally anywhere else in the country other than New York? How Jewish is it? Does it also have 1400% overrepresentation?
wlxd
1mo ago
EVs share a lot of the parts with ICE cars. Structure, doors, windows, seats, trim, suspension, wheels. If you consider hybrid ICEs, which most car manufactures already have a lot of experience with, this grows even more: batteries, electric engines, regen breaking. Moving to EV only does not require starting anew: you just ditch the drivetrain, and replace it with beefed up version of what you already do for hybrids. None of this is easy, but it’s not $51B of assets going down the drain.
wlxd
6mo ago
Securities law applies to private companies as well, if you take investments and issue equity. That you make a distinction between public and private companies here suggests to me that you don’t have much idea what you are talking about.
What weapons the west gave to Poland that allowed it to beat Soviet military and throw their shackles? What military strategy was used?
Why wasn’t Ukraine on this path before the war? Poland started off around where Ukraine was in early 1990s. It failed to thrive, to put it mildly, and the pre-war trajectory was not optimistic. The neighboring puppet state of Russia, Belarus, has done much better for itself.
If the plan is to build stronger ties with the West, join EU etc similarly to what Poland did, isn’t better strategy to cut the losses, stop the bleed, and negotiate peace with Russia, where you cede some territories in exchange for Russia acceding to your western strategy in future?
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