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Hyperbole is bad
1d ago
If @SomethingMusic had only said it was a waste of government spending I wouldn't have made my comment.
Instead he said the government was subsidizing migrant labor by $350/day, so I did make my comment.
Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.
I recommend you go to prison in New York City. They make 4 times as much per day.
Comparing government spending and personal income is not meaningful at all. The government's ability to burn money without increasing social welfare is legendary, so unless you want to argue that the government is actually giving $350 of value to each migrant per day, it's dishonest to pretend like that's $350/day of subsidy.
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2d ago
Advocating for race-conscious policies so that racial groups with lower crime rates don't need to deal with the consequences of living in a high-crime environment seems like an extremely narrowly scoped argument. Should men between the ages of 15 and 25 be excluded from low-crime neighborhoods too?
Focusing on race, rather than gender, income, age, or (heck), criminality seems rather odd -- where's the post advocating for banning all felons from your city?
Are you arguing you'd prefer the New York school system to use racial quotas? Or that you'd prefer if principals could exclusively hire $race $gender teachers and be protected by freedom of association?
The current system of "hey, try to let the requirements of the job drive the hiring process. Sorry that we can't give you a perfect checklist that guarantees you won't be sued" seems far superior to either of those.
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3d ago
Yeah that's fair. IME out-of-college interviews tend to be very general, algorithms/data structures stuff (e.g. I did a general interview, and was offered a spot on a computer vision team and on a software engineering team). But if you're hiring somebody with industry experience, especially at a senior level (L5), questions will be geared more to their specialty. The pay scale is still the same though, afaik.
The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test
Obviously it correlates with IQ and G, but it’s not an IQ test.
The point of an IQ test is to measure something “intrinsic”, and so they try not to rely more than necessary on education (e.g. they tend not to include calculus questions), as this confounds your attempt to measure something intrinsic.
In contrast, a genius who has never programmed a computer or taken a CS class is going to fail a technical interview, which is literally by design.
This doesn't seem like a nit when the debate is around what tests are legal, illegal, or legally grey.
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3d ago
Seems sort of similar to the kinds of friction you get in big companies. Google has teams that require very in-demand skills and teams that require very out-of-demand skills, but front or back, iOS or Android, C++ or JavaScript, everyone gets paid on the same ladder and has to pass the same interview.
But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.
It seems to me there are two axes here: vague versus concrete legislation, and restrictive versus unrestrictive. Complaining that the current system is too restrictive (or not restrictive enough) for private companies (or public organizations) seems like a fairly interesting debate. But I really really don't think you want to be asking for concrete legislation that irons out all the ambiguity, like "only these 5 industries can ask math questions during interviews", "you can only require applicants to write essays if their job involves writing more than 4 essays a year", etc.
Passing the buck on to judges is how systems try to avoid insanely idiotic edge cases that inevitably comes from extremely concrete legislation -- judges are the political organ trusted with discretion and judgement.
Yes, that makes the legal system less predictable (which is bad), but the alternative is not "incredibly concrete legislation that doesn't have any terrible edge cases". The alternative is "iron-rules bureaucracy that follows a brain-dead flow chart" -- i.e. precisely the system that people on here like to complain about.
Granted, "prove x is true" can be incredibly sane or downright impossible, depending on how sensible your judge is. I just don't think there is really an alternative here that isn't worse. Similarly, note that the rules on this website are also pretty open to interpretation, and you may get different rulings from different mods. Nonetheless, trying to simply write more concrete rules could never actually work.
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14d ago
Unfortunately exaggeration is a very efficient way to burn through the charity of people who disagree with you :/
Where did I endorse affirmative action or lying?
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20d ago
I'm making the specific point that "Why do you care if HBD if true if you got yours?" is an insane response to somebody talking about how belief in HBD shapes their view of their community.
Imagine if OP was talking about how his family has a heritable disease and half of them die before they're 40. It'd be insanely callous to say "Why do you care? You tested negative for the disease, right?"
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20d ago
No but "your community and all their future generations are condemned to poverty and violence" is decidedly more depressing than "your community was hurt in the past due to no fault of their own, but is slowly building a better life, generation by generation".
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20d ago
I’m guessing OP cares about their community’s well-being, not just their own intelligence.
It literally doesn’t matter whether it’s statistically true, (though, yes, it’d be nice to see you at least verify your sneers are accurate).
Sticking a “and also he’s probably fat” at the end of a paragraph is clearly intended to be insulting, not to advance your thesis, and “it’s okay that I said that, since most Americans are overweight” is not a defense.
As ZorbaTHut has recently reiterated the first rule is
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
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20d ago
Now I suspect that the president of a university black student alliance is getting an education in something extremely low value
Couldn’t resist booing the out group?
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24d ago
No, calling Biden “his excellency” definitely involves intentional spite.
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24d ago
Yes, but issuing the formal proclamation and ignoring that Obama already made March 31st a federal holiday for Cesar Chavez, from the Democratic president who was Obama's VP, is not the usual state of affairs
You mean in 2021?
For what it's worth Easter happens on a different day every year (somewhere within a ~30 day interval), while "Transgender Day of Visibility" happens on March 31st every year, was created in 2009 by activists, and was endorsed by Biden in 2021. Easter won't occur on March 31st for at least the next 25 years (sorry, my chart only goes to 2049).
The point being: the only "choice" Biden made in the last 3 years was to continue to proclaim his support for transpeople on a holiday he had already endorsed in the past, rather than staying conspicuously silent. "Democrat politician refuses to endorse leftwing holiday he's already endorsed three times" would certainly be something to talk about.
If "Biden endorses holiday for the 4th time (but this time it's on Easter!)" merits relitigating The Motte's favorite hobbyhorse, that says more about The Motte's desire to relitigate it's hobbyhorse than it does about any novel development in the real world.
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28d ago
I’m not arguing that the author isn’t woke. I’m arguing that the author never says “exercise is bad, don’t do it”, which is what you claimed, and which is not true.
If you think the rest of the article lets you similarly argue that the wokes have lost their minds, then you are welcome to use those other parts in your original post.
Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:
It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.
Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.
Oh dear.
After actually reading "The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness", I'm not sure how you can honestly think that your two extremely cherry-picked paragraphs are representative. The article is decidedly not anti-fitness (despite the click bait title), and phrasing it as
a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023
seems pretty misleading. I'm going to charitably assume you were Google-search-and-skimming for examples of outrageous outgroup behavior, and not deliberately trying to mislead us.
I think somebody being able to write those two paragraphs and also not condemn exercise goes against your thesis that the wokes are crazy, and is a nice example of somebody not being mind-killed.
What counts as a business? How many guns can you sell from your collection before you cross the threshold? How fast can you turn around and sell a gun after you buy without fear of breaking the law? This law is ambiguous on this
As OP writes it, the law is ambiguous. Hence "skirting the law" does not mean "carefully staying inside the bright red lines", it means "nobody knows if you're breaking the law until you're in court".
If you want to argue he clearly wasn't breaking the law then I'd be legitimately happy to read it, but right now I'm leaning towards "law makers trying to make it legal for you to sell your grandpa's private collection when he dies probably weren't trying to make it legal to buy and sell 150 guns, with no extenuating circumstances, in two years".
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29d ago
Regardless of whether EA is "themotte's outgroup" (for whatever sensible definition you want to use), it is really plain that animal EAs are Quantumfreakonomics's outgroup.
"Sneering at a member of the outgroup" seems like an apt description.
Achilles and the Tortoise isn’t a paradox due to building up something from parts. It’s a paradox due to doing it sloppily.
By analogy, there are various “proofs” that 0 = 1 that rely on bad math, but nobody would argue that the problem is with math. The problem is with people incorrectly using math.
For Achilles, the problem arises because, just as the distance covered gets cut in half, so does the time it takes to cover it.
If it takes you 1 second to cover 1 meter, 0.5 seconds to cover 0.5 meters, etc., the fact that this series never exceeds 2 says you can’t pass 2 meters in less than 2 seconds.
The "paradox" is that Achilles will never pass the tortoise, and "how far can Achilles get in 2 seconds" says nothing meaningful about this.
Israel announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Blinken visit
This is particularly jarring after Biden has made more overt moves indicating he'd like to see deescalation, most recently the (failed) UN ceasefire resolution.
Most striking to me, personally, is the overwhelmingly negative sentiment on r/neoliberal.
For those who don't know, /r/neoliberal are very pro-Biden (and anti-Trump), generally pro-free market (and hence anti-anti-capitalist), and (imo) generally see themselves as moderate Democrats. Until today I'd have characterized them as pro-Israel, but this seems like a marked change. A top 1% subreddit changing its political beliefs is pretty rare.
I want to say this foreshadows a change in broader public support, but perhaps I'm a bit late to the party -- Gallup has already shown dropping support for Israel generally:
Fifty-eight percent of Americans, down from 68% last year, have a “very” or “mostly favorable” view of Israel. This is the lowest favorable rating for Israel in over two decades. At the same time, positive opinions of the Palestinian Authority have dropped from 26% to 18%, the lowest since 2015.
(Last sentence is just to give some context: yes support for Israel has dropped, but, it's worth noting, so has support for Palestine)
And, perhaps to be expected, this is most pronounced among young people:
Young adults show the biggest decline in ratings of Israel, dropping from 64% favorable among 18- to 34-year-olds in 2023 to 38%. Middle-aged adults (those aged 35 to 54) show a smaller but still significant drop, from 66% to 55%, while there has been no meaningful change among adults aged 55 and older.
I can't imagine that whatever Israel has gained in the last year is worth the long-term cost of burning its support with the next two generations of Americans.
The discussion about payment processors earlier in the year included discussion of controversial topics (incest, bestiality, sexual exploitation of a minor, rape, non-consensual mutilation), and the change you link to today includes those.
However, the most recent announcement also says the restrictions are "to comply with regional laws", and includes much more general pornography:
In other words: I don't think these most recent changes are driven by payment processors. I think they're being driven by states like Texas making hosting porn more legally fraught (i.e. the same thing that made Pornhub pull out of Texas).
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