domain:x.com
faceh
5hr ago
Hi, one of the 'actual lawyer' denizens speaking, you're doing great, please keep that up.
Being able to summarize legalese in human-readable terms is probably the most immediately useful part of being a lawyer.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5hr ago
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
Apologies if you find the metaphor specious. It's deliberately extreme, of course. Although interestingly an inability to draw these kinds of conclusions about the actual mafia is apparently wreaking havok in Germany.
But given that everyone making the "leap of logic" to assume it is true just happens to be someone who hates Jews, I find it reasonable to be skeptical and demand more evidence
Doesn't it make at least as much sense to reverse this? I suggested before that the main factor determining whether one believes or disbelieves in foul play about these kinds of incidents is:
- Do I have a prior that individuals belonging to Group X are extremely influential?
- Do I have a prior that individuals belonging to Group X often use their influence inappropriately to benefit their ingroup?
Then it would make total sense that individuals who hold both these beliefs then dislike Group X. It would be kind of weird not to. Chicken, egg. Egg, chicken.
The Princeton site does have individual report card data in JSON format. There is a download button slightly inconspicuous.
How gerrymandered is difficult to score in a single metric, but the largest tell tail is probably a step jump in the "District by average partisan win percentage" chart. It is evidence that the districts are being arranged to isolate one party in fewer districts. Especially if the jump spans the "competitive" line. Shape irregularity is the most common "look at this map it must be gerrymandered," but is not a necessary or sufficient condition to show a map is gerrymandered. That video cites openprecincts(dot)org, but it seems to be down now.
Some of the step jumps are also simply the results of people "gerrymandering" themselves. e.g. Drawing a box around metro-Miami could be chosen based off of pure geographic considerations, but if all the Ds in Florida move to Miami they have secured on "safe" district but given up contesting every other district. It seems this a natural result of choosing to draw the boundaries based on geography, but there being clear partisan differences in geographic distribution. Maybe someone has a clear counter example, but shouldn't there be a trivial lemma as a result of Arrow's impossibility theorem where you just substitute candidates with candidate map. Essentially saying there is not perfectly "fair" map. Or if you substitute candidate representation system for candidates to show that there is no perfectly "fair" representative system.
Edit: To add an example of why you can't just take the grade from Princeton. VA gets an A because it is fair in the sense of proportionate. The jump around the competitive zone on the average partisan win percentage chart is still there. This is probably so that the vote is proportionate for court intervention prevention, but locks in a strong gerrymandered incumbency advantage.
benmmurphy
5hr ago
i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period. i assume one problem with this is people would try and simulate the rules in the future and try to choose rules that would benefit them. i guess maybe the current districting is so ridiculous that it would be difficult to come up with rules that can handle that as an initial state and be somewhat stable.
TheDemonRazgriz
5hr ago
Not sure I'm following you correctly -- do you mean the turning point of average people's trust in the lockdown regime? If so, that's relevant, but not really what I was trying to get at.
I don't think there was any one singular turning point as relates to the public's trust in science & medicine writ large, more of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario. There were countless examples of public-facing scientists, and crucially actual public health officials either blatantly making things up as they went along while pretending they had a plan, or outright lying for naked partisan gamesmanship. I suspect I don't really need to remind you of these times. And every time an official said something obviously false it killed the institutional trust of another chunk of average everyday people. Add this up over many, many examples of lying and flagrant idiocy and you get the crisis of trust we have today.
A lot of scientists and doctors at the time (and seemingly a fair number still today) seemed to believe that because they were trusted by the public, they could make pronouncements on social issues and be taken seriously, basically lending their gravitas to the cause of the day. This started relatively rationally with the pandemic measures and then rapidly metastasized into the "racial justice" situation. The problem was they had the flow of authority exactly backwards. People trusted scientists and doctors because they were apolitical. The trustworthiness of scientists comes from their being fixated on their particular field of interest -- "those eggheads might be weirdos, but they sure know their stuff when it comes to biochemistry/astrophysics/[insert niche interest]" is the longstanding popular image of science.
The whole point is that they're dealing with something way over the head of Joe Sixpack, but it's clear that they've devoted their lives to it, so they can be trusted when they talk about that particular thing. This trust does not -- and in fact cannot -- generalize outside of their one particular domain. If anything it anti-generalizes. In other words if a bunch of chemists start talking about structures of intersectional oppression instead of chemistry, people start to question how much they really cared about chemistry in the first place.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5hr ago
Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board.
People sometimes do show up for those things. The boards then move to private session or otherwise make their decisions where the public can't interfere. Or on some occasions have people arrested for trying to speak; consider the infamous beating and pantsing of the Loudoun County VA father who spoke up against his daughter's sexual assault in school. People don't show up because they correctly conclude that if their showing up could change anything, it wouldn't be permitted.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.
A non-trivial number of these are effectively required to exist by the Civil Rights Act.
birb_cromble
6hr ago
This reminds me of the mountain lion in the Eastern US.
The official stance from the federal and state wildlife agencies is that, excluding a small relict population in Florida, the mountain lion has been extirpated from the East Coast and has been for decades.
Despite this, local sightings persist and at least two have been struck by cars in the last twenty years. I have a relative who claims that one was hunting his sheep. He called the local game commission who told him that it didn't exist and that shooting it would be against the law. He claims to have taken a shot at it and winged it, and nothing has hunted his sheep since.
He's also an inveterate story-teller and drunk, so take that with a grain of salt.
range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.
I remember stories about 30+ pound black feral housecats in the outback. Is this related?
Under US law, sentencing serves four specific purposes: deterrence, incapacitation, retribution (or just punishment), and rehabilitation.
In the context of the death penalty, the US Supreme Court has held that mentally disabled offenders are not smart enough to understand deterrence and are inherently less morally culpable as regards retribution. These rationales date back at least to English common law.
I can't comment on non-Anglo countries' sentencing systems.
Thoroughlygruntled
6hr ago
I think it's also worth pointing out that even FIRE and the other libertarian groups are essentially part of the Republican coalition. Both their personnel and their legal arguments draw almost entirely from the right side of the political spectrum. They have been totally and completely frozen out of left-wing institutions, most dems outside the abundance movement refuse to have anything to do with them, and even the abundance dems are embarassed and try to downplay the relationship as much as they can to their fellows.
With the exception of now-irrelevant dinosaurs like Ira Glasser, pre-2025 calls for free speech, tolerance, and academic freedom came exclusively from the right, and even now that Trump is in power the only people maling principled arguments in that direction are still disproportionately right-wing activists.
lollol
6hr ago
The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against
Is there a ranking of states and how gerrymandered they are somewhere that you would recommend? I briefly looked at https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/ and wasn't able to find like a CSV or something.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
It's one thing to make inferences. Some inferences are reasonable, in the absence of evidence. But "leaps of logic" land you into assumptions based on the presumption that your inferences are accurate.
I think your Mafia/Zionist comparison is rather specious,
That's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. Can you know stop falsely portraying the other side's argument?
Thoroughlygruntled
6hr ago
Having lived next door to both, I can assure you the random MAGA was a far better and more pleasant neighbor than the elite college professor. The MAGA person was fun, invited people to barbecues, always offered to help out, always had his kids running around playing outside. The professor hardly ever interacted with the community other than to harangue someone for some petty slight. Most college professors I've met have been either awkward and socially stunted or actively unpleasant to be around.
IQ is not the only measure of quality.
Do you have any local cryptids that haven't worked their way up to the national stage? Do you think they have a plausible natural explanation?
In and around the Blue Mountains in New South Wales there's the Lithgow panther, over 500 sightings of which have been reported in a 20-year period. Big cat sightings have been reported around the region for about a century, and there are a range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.
This is actually a more interesting story than most of the cryptids that often make their way into local folklore because there have actually been government enquiries into the subject - four in fact - a number of which actually state it was "more likely than not" that a big cat lived in the area based on scat and hair study. The most recent report, written in 2013 by an invasive species expert, concluded no evidence of a big cat in the Blue Mountains, but he later privately disclosed to the ABC that the existence of a small population was possible. Wiki article here.
Now this one isn't local to me, but there's also the obvious example of the thylacine, where the idea that it may still be extant in remote parts of Tasmania persists with many sightings of it to boot. There are even sightings reported on the mainland, in some cases. Some of the sightings in question are by zoologists and other experts, with the most famous being Hans Naarding's assertion in 1982 that he did see a thylacine and that it was unmistakeable. This analysis of sightings suggests it may have persisted until the 1980s and that there is still "a small chance of persistence in the remote south-western wilderness areas" of Tasmania.
Really I would say these examples of cryptids are actually... fairly plausible, as far as cryptids go. As for me? I'm still a firm skeptic, but of all the cryptids out there, these are the ones I'm most likely to believe in.
charlesf
6hr ago
There have been a few books that were especially well written that I read twice. The first time I'm too consumed with finding out what happens, plot progression, resolution of tensions etc. I overwhelmingly am interested in how the story ends, which distracts from some of the finer points of the writing, sub plots and characters that weren't critical to the main storyline etc. During a second read I already know how these things are going to resolve and can more enjoy the total quality of the writing. Most books aren't actually good enough to warrant this though. I can usually tell when I'm going to reread a series pretty soon after I start it too. Steven Erikson's books are a first example I can think of.
HighResolutionSleep
6hr ago
He sold?
Annouce ze rate couts.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6hr ago
I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count. It’s not a question of getting people upset about losing their vote in whatever form it takes, people honestly don’t care about politics except as a means to amuse themselves on social media or feel important because they’re “informed.” Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board. Politics for the rabble isn’t about making decisions and changing things, it’s about feeling powerful feeling like they’re the good ones for being informed, and yelling at opponents who are “obviously screwing everything up.” As long as those things remain intact and the country is more or less running smoothly, the normies will be too busy watching sports and yelling at people online to notice that the votes the cast don’t matter.
Throwaway05
6hr ago
Exactly! Is that enabling sclerotic politics? Is that perfect for enabling minority representation?
Shit I don't know but it is complicated and not a new political ethics problem caused by modern political division.
aldomilyar
6hr ago
Yeah my understanding is that even in a lot of gerrymandered situations the boots on the ground for the party that's losing out would frequently rather have one ultra-secure seat to enable a 30 year tenure in the House versus 2 55-45 seats in which they've got competition coming both internally and from the other side. Plus more vulnerable to random macro upheavals.
There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.
I don’t know about the chick described in the OP, but in my Lived Experience women are smarter than you (the general you) think. That is, women’s IQs are higher than what their personalities would suggest—as holding IQ constant, on average women are more basic and boring than men.
Men have the burden of performance. Hence women being less (intentionally) funny than men, and women consistently, signficantly underperforming men in knowledgability tests, despite only a modest IQ gap if you’re Hanania-pilled. I doubt, in a hypothetical where their life is on the line, an above-Lizardman’s-Constant proportion of people would pick a randomly selected woman over a randomly selected man to win a trivia game to save their life.
The basicness is amplified for young attractive women, who are generally kind of “retarded” and clueless about the world, even if you know that their grades and test scores are/were high. Talking to a given hot chick outside of her preferred topics such as herself, TV/movies, make-up/fashion, celebrity gossip, or interpersonal drama runs the risk of her finding you WEIRD or—ironically enough, BORING—just as you might talk to a little kid about his or her favorite toys, movies/TV shows, school friends to keep him or her engaged. I suppose there is no reason to be interesting or knowledgable when you’ve been coddled all your life, and people will pay attention to, help, and accomodate you no matter what.
So the IQ gap between oneself and retarded hot chick [X] might be surprisingly small. And thus marrying a retarded hot chick doesn’t necessarily mean dooming your kids to be mid IQ-wise, or possibly retarded themselves.
Your calculations using the input assumptions look correct, but I question the applicability of the inputs to most situations smart young men would find themselves in, given assortative mating and homophilic social sorting (“Different Worlds” and Young Earth Creationists come to mind). A 40-point IQ gap is pretty vast for just an acquaintanceship to be made and maintained, much less a potential relationship.
A typical 130-IQ young man likely doesn’t have that many <= 90-IQ people in his social circle. Even without social sorting/assortative mating, <=90 IQ people are only 25% of a population with a mean of 100 and an SD of 15. If one’s social circle has a still-pretty-modest average IQ of 115 and an SD of 15, this already drops to under 5%. He likely doesn’t have too many prospects from online dating, social media, or IRL cold approaches (each of which would still have some social sorting and assortative mating). Plus, in your hypothetical, the girl’s offspring IQ would likely regress to a higher mean than 100 given her parent and sibling IQs.
I'd pay a lot to have my kids come out with an additional 12 points. I would fistfight a dog smaller than a labrador for a mere five.
If that dog is a near-labrador-sized member of the Breed of Peace: after the nannying experience, you might not still be around to see a given kid come out.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6hr ago
Where does this idea of lowering criminal sentences because the criminal is stupid or trashy originate from? Is this common across many countries? Just an Anglo thing? Recent? Old?
This woman had drawn the genetic short straw; the rest of her family consisted of high-achieving intellectuals.
Then any potential offspring would probably be fine, intellectually speaking at least.
Your kids aren’t a strict combination of you and your spouse - it’s your respective whole families being blended
I would be more worried if she was smart while her whole family were mouth breathers
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
The trial judge convicted Trump of fraud, and on that basis imposed on Trump two separate punishments—disgorgement of several hundred megadollars, and disqualification from serving as an officer or director of any New York business for several years. Disgorgement is, not really punitive, but compensatory, meant to undo any damages that were done. The appeals panel ruled that the prosecutor failed to prove the quantity of damages caused by Trump's fraud, so the disgorgement had no basis. But the punitive disqualification still stands.
I have no opinion on what effect this will have on the prosecutor's reputation.
There have been mathematicians that brag about how their work has no application.
Ironically, some of those were number theorists...
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