domain:academic.oup.com
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
Yes, when young Africans talk about this they often call it the "Black Tax". It makes the kind of low-level capital accumulation necessary for growing a black middle class almost impossible, outside of people willing to move to the city or to a different country and cut ties with their family - a very difficult and painful thing to do in any culture, but particularly in African cultures. On the other hand, it's good for Malthusian survival.
ThenElection
1hr ago
Do you know any good books on this? I know about "peasant studies," but the peasant studies books I've read tend to be highly sociological/politicized.
She was going through pre-marriage counseling with her local Catholic priest. She was bemoaing the fact that, on a questionnaire she had her fiancee had to fill out, it asked "who will be handling the household finances?" "Tollbooth!" She steamed, "What am I supposed to do? Just stand barefoot in the kitchen all day with a baby on my hip?"
She was over-reacting, but it's not graven in stone that the man handles all the money. Plenty of traditional households had the women doing the budgeting and the man kept an allowance out of his paypacket.
It's a very important question, because if you don't have an agreement on that before you get together, there are all kinds of nasty surprises lying in store. Using the example of a family member of mine, they didn't have a pre-marriage course/church wedding. Husband handled all the finances. Except he didn't, and wife only found out when the tax demands etc. started coming hot and heavy. The kids' college funds had to be used to pay off all the debts and taxes and rent etc. he was supposedly paying, except he wasn't. And she never questioned him or tried finding out for herself how much money was coming in and were the bills being paid, because he used to get very huffy and upset about that. So by doing things like taking the kids' college funds and help from family, they got out of the hole.
And then a few years down the line, he did it again.
That's a marriage that needed someone to go "so who will be handling the finances?" before ever they got hitched, and if there was no agreement about "we'll share all information, there won't be secrecy, if I ask you did the rent get paid I am not nagging and belittling you", then no marriage.
Trad Girl needs to have that talk with her fiancé about "so do I run the household budget, do you, do we both? joint account, separate accounts? savings? names on deeds or other property ownership?" That's not "corruption of her modern mind instead of the traditional values she claims to hold", that's plain horse sense.
EDIT: Also Catholicism, even traditional (I'm not sure about capital T "Traditional") Catholicism isn't the same about headship and the wife must submit to the husband as (Evangelical) Protestantism. There's a more complementarian view where the wife rules in the domestic sphere and has more authority, in some areas, than the husband. So jokes about choke holds and managing new brides don't quite ring true. Managing the husband is more the reality 😁
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
For at least half of these, a scientist could point to real data, but they misinterpreted or fudged the data. That’s different than believing the claims of supernatural religion, which do not require a scientific intermediary for interpretation. Why would it be gullible to believe in “growth mindset” if there are studies on it, but then later studies disproved it? The issue here is that the common person is led to believe in the findings of popular science, because schools teach that.
If I make a claim like “prayer works” or “God does miracles”, even someone with a very low IQ can tell that prayer does not work as claimed, and that miracles appear to have stopped around the same time that scientific instruments and recording came along. The issue of superstition is an enormous stumbling block that prevents tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, from ever considering religious activity. Because they don’t like to be tricked. And trust in science similarly suffers when people realize they are tricked by science. But trust in reasoning doesn’t normally suffer.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
What about a general guide on the process? How do I structure my prompt, what kind of parameters do I tune, how do I plug in a style I want? A basic conversational-style prompt gives me residents of Innsmouth.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
Not sure what you consider semi-prominent
That's why I left it so open!
Ezra Klein, while he is disastrously wrong on many fronts, does display charity and love
Hmm, maybe the better way to ask my question would be: how ideologically bounded is the charity and love?
What sticks in my head about Klein is supporting Yes Means Yes while being entirely conscious it's a terrible law, and the Sam Harris debacle. He displays charity where his compatriots allow, and the boundary is distinct and ideological. I am open to having missed the days of his better angels, though.
Right now some fraction of the left is going on about displaying charity and love for a murderer far more than the victim. I suppose in some sense that's better than the Dreherian alternative, but it's hardly a heart-warming display of charity in my book.
Many Christian writers on substack with smaller followings display charity and love
If you think they're worth sharing, I'm all ears.
GoofyGoose
2hr ago
Maybe if we didn’t keep increasing the minimum wage and other benefits to workers, we could have nice things. That’s the price we pay for equality. Although people will still complain.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Not sure what you consider semi-prominent, but frankly yeah a lot of the left at least try to display it and often do convincingly, despite the fact that they're wrong. For instance I think Ezra Klein, while he is disastrously wrong on many fronts, does display charity and love.
Many Christian writers on substack with smaller followings display charity and love, though I'll admit they aren't necessarily prominent or even semi-prominent. I suppose anger and fear do sell.
anti_dan
2hr ago
My thoughts exactly. But this case is simply illustrative. I work with engineers in my law practice. My brother is an engineer. I swear, these firms treat age 50 as if it is death, and 45 as pushing the reaper. If someone in mid/mid-sr management on the engineering side gets laid off and they are over 50, they might as well just start their own model train shop right away. There simply is no appetite to hire them, even at 1/2 rungs below where they were let go from. This is why people in the industry have such skepticism about the whole model of immigrant labor. Companies inevitably ignore dozens or hundreds of qualified domestic candidates, often accompanied with a very specifically worded job posting. That then gets forwarded to the H1b agency that takes a half dozen even less qualified foreigners and writes them perfect resumes for the position (regardless of the truthiness of those words), and now you have 3 engineers for the price of 1! Or do you? For some reason the project is always "going well" or "coming along". But deliverables always seem lacking, often the claim is they are contingent on someone else's work (who is often some recent StateU grad, and "his work" is the whole project).
Sure, but the phoenix and the pelican in question are pretty crazy creatures to believe in. If they believed these creatures existed based on testimony, and believed it for centuries, then they had a default level of gullibility that has been lost since the advent of science.
Efficient central planning.
Iron laws of history.
New Soviet Man.
Sluggish Schizophrenia.
Lysenkoism.
Sparrow Extermination.
Rape Culture.
Stereotype threat.
Growth Mindset.
Structural racism.
Gender Identity.
Masks stop the spread.
The wage gap.
The science of Criminal Rehabilitation.
How long do you think we could make this list if we actually tried to be rigorous about it?
No "default level of gullibility" was lost with the advent of science. The overwhelming majority of people do not understand science and do not base their beliefs on scientific rules. Not even the overwhelming majority of scientists do this. I am skeptical that even a slim majority of scientists do this even with regard to the science they themselves personally conduct.
Goodguy
2hr ago
American fruits and vegetables are really bad. I'd say that it's because they're selected for what they look like on a shelf and for how well they store in a warehouse or refrigerated truck. But that's the case in other countries too. And in my experience even locally grown "straight from the farm to the market" fruits and vegetables in America tend to taste flat and empty. So I don't know what really is the problem.
It's no wonder that Americans stereotypically dislike fruits and vegetables. The fruits and vegetables here tend to taste like mildly flavored water. I have a strong hunch that the lack of taste correlates with a lack of nutritional value.
Tretiak
2hr ago
When you know people that put ketchup on burritos, this one doesn’t come far out of left field.
Definitely had me fooled.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
3hr ago
Speaking of the tweet and its comparison of virtuous white "will do" promise and craven black "will try" promise, it strikes me that the latter is more realistic and honest. No one can actually guarantee to a hundred percent that a course of action will be carried out.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3hr ago
Have you considered that your main complaint with the contemporary US seems to be the culture war, yet your vitriolic hate for Fauci (and apparently Tim Walz?) is itself, culture warring?
If this is how culture war is defined, it's too broad to be a useful phrase. By this standard how would you have separated civil rights from culture war? Or would you consider them together?
...why?
The "white guy tacos/black pepper is too spicy" thing. The "code talking to white guys" thing. He was self-consciously a DEI pick because Harris or somebody advising her apparently thought she needed another generic old white guy for racist reasons, and they played it up too much. And, frankly and shallowly, I found his mannerisms deeply offputting. Awkward and unserious. Yes, tbf, Trump is also unserious.
I shouldn't hold his wife's comments against him, but the smell the burning tires thing was too weird. Riot fetishism.
They'll have significantly more opportunity than I ever had should they choose to pursue it.
I certainly am much more aware of how things work and can guide them better than my family could.
You act like the people have no agency or responsibility for themselves.
Do you really want me to start ranting about public health and certain populations? I think people have agency. I absolutely think people should take responsibility. What I'm asking is that "experts" also have to take responsibility.
People absolutely have agency. It is unfortunate that the people used that agency to reply to incredible hubris with incredible stupidity.
Either experts have consequences when they're wrong, or you're asking that the lowly public trust them, forever, no matter what, that trust can never be harmed by failures. That is not a reasonable request.
I think that the right's fixation on Fauci as a figurehead betrays a near-complete lack of understanding of his actual role/function and is largely a character assassination downstream of resentment about lockdowns.
While I do blame him specifically for the mask thing and some degree for his role in GoF funding, I am aware that the singular focus is overblown by most people and that's why I try to consistently specific that I'm using him as a convenient synecdoche, not a sole scapegoat. Whatever I think of his failures during COVID, they were not his alone and he did do good work with PEPFAR; I'll avoid using him as a synecdoche going forward.
The attacks on me are attacks on science things was a self-own, though.
If you do, it will look like this.
All our conversations and you think I'm on the EA side? It has been too long since we've chatted, hoss.
I'm pretty fond of the current NC AG and I have hopes for his future. He's won multiple elections so far!
Can you imagine the CCP cutting funding from Tsinghua or Peking university?
Back to the conversation about information control, I can't imagine Tsinghua and Peking hosting significant anti-Xi demonstrations while denying other protests, or... well, I'm not aware of a group that occupies quite the same spot Jews do in American/Western society to draw a good parallel.
I can imagine the CCP cutting funding if they considered the university to be acting against the interests of the Party. Or maybe the specific professors would just disappear for a while and come back singing a different tune. Trump is not so competent.
without realizing it was their own retarded policies that got them there.
Yeah definitely, kind of like people that refuse to understand why public transit it so unpopular outside of a tiny group of big cities in the US.
Justice would be the next democratic president coming in and cutting subsidies to farmers, trade schools and other red-coded industries who are trying to fuck over mine.
Vengeance is mine, thus saith the Raptr!
Thankfully, I doubt that would ever happen contrary to what you and Iconochasm think about retaliation from the left.
Yeah, they'll just reintroduce all the unconstitutional race and sex discrimination, restore the appropriately gerrymandered speech allowances for elite universities about who gets to assault whom, and go back to paying NGOs to bring people into the country illegally without ever normalizing their statuses.
I remember once upon a time we had happier conversations. Can we get back to those? If you've got the time and interest, I've got two questions I've wondered your input on.
One, how can scientific institutions regain the public trust? Do you think there's anything they could do to meaningfully communicate some degree of awareness?
Two, I'm pretty sure we disagree on the topic of affirmative action and how left-racism plays out in the public sphere (media bias, etc) but I wanted to ask anyways. Do you think the left (defined very loosely to include even sane liberals; the phrase used as a matter of convenience rather than strict party lines) will ever change regarding their at-best indifference and sometimes encouragement of anti-white racism, or is that just permanently baked in and people are supposed to take it on the chin?
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
Yes, I certainly agree specific groups can be evil and pointing it out on specific basis is not only not racist but also entirely correct thing to do, even it it concerns people of some specific racial background. What I object is a blanket characterization like "Asians form groups that do evil things". It loses specificity to the point it becomes useless and stupid.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
3hr ago
I don't think free access to furry porn is the basis of technology. But will a society that limits their sons' access to the newest technology (and especially if it requires either a blanket ban or the parents' active involvement) reach the heights that are equivalent of going to the moon?
bonsaii
3hr ago
Even without shoplifting, fresh fruits and vegetables are generally more affordable and easily available in the US compared to Japan.
Syrup was an (in my opinion, mild) exaggeration in reference to the dressings I've seen people use for their salads.
I was partially referring to the ingredient quality in the US as well. I don't know enough about the food industry to have a definitive explanation for why (I suspect it has to do with optimization for mass production and shelf stability over flavor), but when I compare eating almost anything in the US to its equivalent in Italy, Japan, etc., all of the food feels somehow flattened or hollowed out. It's very difficult to describe, but I've spoken to many people from other countries across Europe and Asia who agree that there's something very "off" about the food here. I think this is most obvious with breads and meats. The US tries to compensate by setting sugar, fat, and salt settings to 11, which only makes the experience worse.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3hr ago
But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.
I believe that was intended to be a disparaging euphemism for salad dressings.
Tretiak
3hr ago
The world after modernization moves so much faster and is far more competitive than the world before it. Makes sense why people are so mentally drained, tired and stressed out. You have to grow up with a lot of grit and be used to difficult environments to live there and be truly happy as opposed to surviving and being content at best.
Jiro
3hr ago
Apparently one main reason for white affluence in Rhodesia was that even when blacks and whites were paid the same, social obligations to family members caused problems for blacks. If people who make money have to give it to their relatives, wealth becomes useless and it's impossible to save or invest for the future.
Tretiak
3hr ago
Florida would be a relevant comparison in this context. A huge pillar of its domestic economy is tourism.
Fruits and vegetables are cheap here in America too. We call it “shoplifting.”
Food anywhere else is surely more healthy than ours. But I find American food is more tasty and agreeable to my palette than a lot of other ethnic foods simply because I was raised on it. Chinese and Mexican food I have a very weak spot for. But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.
then why is it good to cap them artificially?
Because importing foreign workers in massive amounts have costs. Assimilation capacity is not infinite. And breaking assimilation processes - and the host culture - has societal costs that everybody is going to pay. Cultures have value, and breaking them has costs. Immigration is not quantity-neutral. One immigrant is not going to cause any significant strain on the system and in general case will contribute to the society and increase general welfare. One million of immigrants, brought synchronously into the country are going to cost non-linearly more, and may cause profound changes in the society, which may not be for the better. That's why you need an "artificial" cap - it's only artificial if you don't consider externalities. The process is not linear and not neutral towards time scales - it's like I asked you to drink 100 gallons of water. If it's over a year, you probably would be healthier for that. If you try to do it all at once, you will die. It's the same water, but not the same rate.
but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs
I am not sure that's actually true. Even for the market I have the most experience with - computer programming - looking for a job, if you aren't ok with shitty job that pays peanuts, it is a very frustrating and nerve-racking experience. Having to answer the question "why should we pay you X if we can hire a cheap foreigner for X/2" does not make it any easier. And in my experience, getting cold-hired by a company that does mass outsourcing, without knowing somebody on the inside, is next to impossible now. In most cases, they won't even bother to talk to you. Even if you know you are much better worker, the people who make hiring decisions just don't care. They tell the public they have massive shortage of talent and need thousands of H1Bs, but try to send them your resume, and they won't even bother to read it, it goes straight to the reject pile. Sorry, I don't believe it anymore, I think it's a con. H1Bs are just cheaper and easier to handle, that's all. I can only imagine how much worse it is in places where prices are the only thing you can compete on.
we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it
You're saying it as if any of the key industries have a slightest idea about how to measure efficiency. I know for a fact in my industry, nobody has a faintest clue how to do it. It's either "if we hit the deadline - which has been invented arbitrarily based on what some marketer promised to some analyst bigwig because they had one too many cocktails while golfing - then we are golden" or "we're making money? Cool! Let's make even more money!". There's no some "efficiency" science behind it and nobody has a slightest idea how to make it. It's all done by the seat of one's pants, and people that by either luck or talent can pull stuff out of their asses that is better than other get billions and people that are unlucky don't, and that's how it goes. Let's not pretend we have some science behind it, nobody does.
But that's a discussion with some hard tradeoffs is it not?
Yes, but not in a way you present it. It's not uniform, as I mentioned. Accepting a small amount of immigrants is almost always going to be net positive, especially if selected by any sane criteria (skin color is definitely not one of the best, but even that could work up to a limit). With increased quantity, costs raise non-linearly and the tradeoffs become more and more hard. There is a wide area where the net is still positive, but this area is not infinite. Eventually it comes to a point where a select few players reap all the benefits and the rest pays massive, sometimes society-breaking externalities. It's not uncommon - a lot of modern politics is based on emphasizing benefits for select few and covering up externalities for the rest - this is one of the prominent examples.
...bro :)
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