domain:aporiamagazine.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#Table
Seemingly not as of 2021, though it depends whose measures you use, IMF or CIA. Perhaps it's the case today but even then Botswana would be poorer in a real sense than Ukraine. If the economy is diamond mines and a bunch of subsistence farmers it rather stretches the limits of what GDP PPP per capita is supposed to mean. Ukraine has minerals but also produces drones, guided missiles, tanks, jet engines, software, video games...
Botswana’s extreme poverty rate for 2023 (13.5%) is more than four times higher than comparators at similar GDP levels. Unemployment rate remains high at 23.6%.
That's real extreme poverty, about $3 a day, that basically does not exist in white countries. The GDP figure is high but much of the rest that one expects to come along with the GDP isn't there.
Lewis2
15hr ago
I don’t want to publicly accuse anyone (especially since I didn’t make the connection myself), but isn’t Darwin still with us under another alt?
Gaashk
16hr ago
My local schools are not as conservative as Mississippi, but they're in that ballpark. Their two main SEL initiatives are associating emotions with colors ("I'm in the red zone" instead of "I'm really angry and freaking out", or "we need to get in the green zone to be ready to learn"), and Character Strong words of the month (kindness, gratitude, courage, etc). I'm not completely sure what they're trying to accomplish with the color zone stuff, I've never heard the kids actually use it that I can recall. The Character Strong words seem fine. Pretty generic. My daughter's SEL teacher gave us a list of books she'll be reading with all the grade levels, I haven't gone through it yet.
Quantumfreakonomics
16hr ago
I saw a viral tweet this week of white guys doing roofing work, and I couldn't get the glaring OSHA violations out of my mind.
Of course, the dirty little secret is that basically no roofing company is compliant, but these guys aren't even trying.
Quantumfreakonomics
16hr ago
The guy who drafts big names from five years ago way too early, and acts like he can't believe they're still on the board
Zach Ertz is still good goddammit. Can't believe I picked him up for free last year.
Totalitarianit
16hr ago
what other low-hanging fruit were there from the administration?
Sam Brinton, Karine Jean-Pierre, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Rachel Levine, and just general DEI out the ass. Vaccine Mandates paired with fear-mongering/demonizing White House statements directed at people refusing to vaccinate. Pressuring social media sites to toe the prescribed line. Phoning a convicted felon's family because he was black and shot by the police (while committing a felony). Having a literal crackhead of a son appear alongside the president in public settings while other crackheads sat in prison for the same crime. Expanding protections for asylum seekers that allowed millions of people to flow into the country and rush the border. Attempting to, and almost succeeding in imprisoning their primary political opponent. An entire media apparatus going to bat for nearly cause the Democratic party supported. There was so much of it going on that if they had done less it might have stood out more. But, because the ideological insanity was such a regular occurrence, it all just blended together into one cloudy nightmare of political correctness and "accountability" toward those who had dissenting views and opinions.
Maybe these things weren't low-hanging fruit to the average person, but they were to me.
There is a lot of material to work with when it comes to MAGA and the Trump admin, but that is the cost of taking necessary actions over "appropriate" ones. The optics are terrible when viewed through liberal eyeballs, I get that. But our country's fatigue with political correctness has gotten to the point where drastic action feels inevitable.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
16hr ago
In the early Greek manuscripts of Luke
τοῦ ἡλίου ἐκλιπόντος / tou heliou eklipontos— “the sun was eclipsed.”
https://www.textkit.com/t/luke-23-45-eclipse-or-darkening/15248/4
Footnote A here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2023%3A45-47&version=NET
Luke 23:45 tc The wording “the sun’s light failed” is a translation of τοῦ ἡλίου ἐκλιπόντος/ ἐκλείποντος (tou hēliou eklipontos/ ekleipontos), a reading found in the earliest and best witnesses (among them P75 א B C*vid L 070 579 2542) as well as several ancient versions. The majority of mss (A C3 [D] W Θ Ψ ƒ1,13 M lat sy) have the flatter, less dramatic term, “the sun was darkened” (ἐσκοτίσθη, eskotisthe), a reading that avoids the problem of implying an eclipse (see sn below). This alternative thus looks secondary because it is a more common word and less likely to be misunderstood as referring to a solar eclipse. That it appears in later witnesses rather than the earliest ones adds confirmatory testimony to its inauthentic character.sn This imagery has parallels to the Day of the Lord: Joel 2:10; Amos 8:9; Zeph 1:15. Some students of the NT see in Luke’s statement the sun’s light failed (eklipontos) an obvious blunder in his otherwise meticulous historical accuracy. The reason for claiming such an error on the author’s part is due to an understanding of the verb as indicating a solar eclipse when such would be an astronomical impossibility during a full moon. There are generally two ways to resolve this difficulty: (a) adopt a different reading (“the sun was darkened”) that smoothes over the problem (discussed in the tc problem above), or (b) understand the verb eklipontos in a general way (such as “the sun’s light failed”) rather than as a technical term, “the sun was eclipsed.” The problem with the first solution is that it is too convenient, for the Christian scribes who, over the centuries, copied Luke’s Gospel would have thought the same thing. That is, they too would have sensed a problem in the wording and felt that some earlier scribe had incorrectly written down what Luke penned. The fact that the reading “was darkened” shows up in the later and generally inferior witnesses does not bolster one’s confidence that this is the right solution. But second solution, if taken to its logical conclusion, proves too much for it would nullify the argument against the first solution: If the term did not refer to an eclipse, then why would scribes feel compelled to change it to a more general term? The solution to the problem is that ekleipo did in fact sometimes refer to an eclipse, but it did not always do so. (BDAG 306 s.v. ἐκλείπω notes that the verb is used in Hellenistic Greek “Of the sun cease to shine.” In MM it is argued that “it seems more than doubtful that in Lk 2345 any reference is intended to an eclipse. To find such a reference is to involve the Evangelist in a needless blunder, as an eclipse is impossible at full moon, and to run counter to his general usage of the verb = ‘fail’…” [p. 195]. They enlist Luke 16:9; 22:32; and Heb 1:12 for the general meaning “fail,” and further cite several contemporaneous examples from papyri of this meaning [195-96]) Thus, the very fact that the verb can refer to an eclipse would be a sufficient basis for later scribes altering the text out of pious motives; conversely, the very fact that the verb does not always refer to an eclipse and, in fact, does not normally do so, is enough of a basis to exonerate Luke of wholly uncharacteristic carelessness
But in the above, it seems to me copium to interpret that word as other than a real eclipse in the context. The natural reading is that it was an eclipse, which is why Origen went so far as to say enemies of the church inserted the word in to scandalize the church among the intelligent
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16hr ago
All the "virtue-based" banners and signs in teachers' rooms when I was a schoolchild always struck me as very silly. Lots of transforming "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." into an acronym, lots of "At our school, home of the Bears, we are Based, Effective Altruist, Rationalist, Sapient" or "Everyone here C.A.R.E.S." standing of course for "Courteous, Achieving, Responsible, Excellence, at School on time"... I don't know that any of these did anything, but I'm sure there was some sort of state or federal grant money involved in "teaching ethical citizenship and public service" to children, for which these useless banners played a role.
Hieronymus
16hr ago
I agree. But the various steelmen Scott got in reply convinced me that there's no way to rescue that framing that lets you discuss intended and actual consequences at the same time, let alone different levels or stages of intent. There's got to be a better set of terms to discuss those ideas.
Hieronymus
16hr ago
SEL (social emotional learning)
What's your take on this? I remember some pitchforks and torches raised a few years ago by socially conservative parents of grade-school kids that it amounted to a program of socializing students into the teacher's ethics while framing it as a skills thing. I haven't looked into it enough to understand it.
I do remember when a bunch of placards sprang up in my early '90s public elementary school listing all the traits they expected to develop in students. It read like a list of virtues as conceived by a committee of bureaucrats.
My reaction was more or less, "What qualifies you to teach me virtue?" I must have been a very humble child.
I got hit by the tail end of the new math. The way I was taught to do subtraction is definitely closer to Tom Lehrer's second method than the first; we would say that the two "borrowed" a one from the four, so the four got crossed out and replaced by a three while the two became twelve, and twelve minus three is nine.
I... like it? It makes a lot more sense than the first method. We didn't get taught that the four is actually four tens, since it's in the tens place, and that you are substracting ten from the forty and adding them to the two, but hearing him say it makes it obvious in retrospect that's why the algorithm works.
Tom Leher says "the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer" like it's a joke, but I actually agree with that. As my calculus teacher said "your only advantage over the machine is your ability to think. Once you lose that, I prefer the machine. Calculators are faster and make no mistakes".
Anyway, we also did simple sets in elementary school. No non-decimal bases, though; I learned that on my own reading about computers, because binary and hexadecimal.
MachineElfPaladin
17hr ago
You have to pick the same number for the multiplication and division, but other than that 2 is picked just because it's a small, easy number to do division and multiplication with. (You could think of it as "taking" the number out of the one you're dividing and then "putting it back in" to the one you're multiplying, so the whole problem has the same numbers in total, just moved around.) Since 8 isn't divisible by 3, 3 isn't very useful - unless you really like fraction mathematics, I guess - but 4 works equally well:
4 x 7 = 28
8 / 4 = 2
28 x 2 = 56
Or, for the way I would do that last line in my head:
(20 + 8) x 2 = (20 x 2) + (8 x 2) = 40 + 16 = 56
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
I mean, the onion making fun of biden’s age was a recovery of their old charm; their article on him greeting dead European leaders was absolutely hilarious and I’m surprised South Park had nothing like ‘I see Jaques Mitterand regularly, beckoning me into the light’ given its reputation.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Iirc Botswana’s purchasing power per capita is higher than Ukraine or Moldova. Not high bars to clear, but it’s achieved solidly normal Latin American economic success that the two worst white countries do not have.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17hr ago
The comment about Hell’s brimstone might be referring to his devious satire, The Screwtape Letters, in which Screwtape, a demon experienced at tempting, writes a series of letters to his nephew Wormwood advising him on the best ways to snatch the faith from one of their Enemy in Heaven’s mind and thus soul.
I would pay a pretty penny to have it read by John DeLancie, who specializes in this sort of character.
Gaashk
17hr ago
There's little overlap between the schools discussing gender all the time and the schools posting the Ten Commandments.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17hr ago
Interestingly, Lewis and Louis are derived from Levi, the tribe of priests. Little bit of nominative determinism, considering how highly many lay Christians regard C.S. Lewis.
HereAndGone
17hr ago
As you say, you came along long after all this row. So any improvements that occurred before you started working in the UK are invisible to you. I don't know if the lurid accusations were true but they were certainly made:
Of the hundreds of families who submitted testimony of their loved ones’ experiences on the pathway to the independent review chaired by Baroness Neuberger in 2013, many referenced hydration and nutrition. Some patients’ families had been shouted at by nurses when trying to give them water. The panel also heard how opiates and tranquillisers were sometimes used inappropriately and in too strong a dose as soon as the LCP was initiated, which made the patient drowsy and incapable of asking for food or drink. The Neuberger report quotes a particularly shocking example of someone who suffered a painfully “slow death, attributable in part to dehydration and starvation”.
...One case study in the 2023 report refers to a 21-year-old woman named Laura Jane Booth, who was admitted for a routine eye operation in 2016. Three weeks later, she was dead. Booth, who had the genetic disorder Patau’s syndrome, was initially deemed to have died of natural causes on her death certificate; a 2021 inquest, however, found that there had been a “gross failure of her care” and that “malnutrition contributed to her death”. Her parents said that she’d been denied food for weeks while in hospital, and that they’d had no idea she was put on an end-of-life pathway. The report for LCFCPG said this is one of seven cases in which doctors failed to take a patient’s mental capacity into account, in clear breach of the Mental Capacity Act 2005.
...We spoke with Julie James, whose dad David was a respected Liverpool musician and cancer survivor. James drove himself into Aintree Hospital in May 2012 with constipation. After originally being told a simple procedure would remove the blockage, he contracted pneumonia and sepsis and became more seriously ill, eventually requiring a tracheostomy and ending up on a critical care unit. At first, he did not recognise his family.
“He was crying out for a drink,” Julie says. “He was very, very thirsty.” Julie says David’s wife, May, asked if she could give him some water, and was told by a nurse that David was not allowed food or drink. When David was finally given fluids by drip, he began to recognise Julie and May again, and even asked for music books to pass the time.
Julie and her family accused the hospital of putting her father on the LCP without his or his family’s consent, so he could pass away “peacefully” and “with dignity”, as she remembers hospital staff saying at the time. The trust took the unusual step of seeking declarations from the Court of Protection to withdraw what they said were “aggressive” treatments, including CPR; they argued that James had little chance of recovering and that trying to resuscitate him would cause him pain. The judge denied the trust’s application, but this began a long legal journey for the James family that led to a Supreme Court battle via the Court of Appeal after James’s death from cardiac arrest.
That is part of the problem: something is done to excess, it gets fixed, the people who come along later have no idea of the history and go "well everything is fine as it stands today, what is the problem?"
The problem is, we've seen the days when it wasn't okay, and there's little reason to think that there will not be new and improved ways of going off the rails in future.
Hieronymus
17hr ago
Man, if you're right and this is HIynka then that explains some things, but it makes me feel like we're losing out. There were meaningful insights in his post, but they were buried in a structure that prioritized flame-counterflame rather than laying the groundwork (which was mostly in the post!) first and then discussing the arguments clearly if passionately.
If the style and structure of this post had been within a standard deviation of peak Hlynka, it would have been excellent. Why did the mods switch from year-and-a-day bans to permabans? Were too many folks returning in the style of Darwin, with the bone to pick dominating everything else? Hlynka, when he could discuss his experiences openly and not be cagey about ongoing disagreements, was usually better than this. Yeah, there is a risk of spiraling again – we're all human, and he has a temper. But peak Hlynka was irreplaceable.
Clearly I don't follow meta-level Motte issues the way mods do, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Call this a tentative request to reconsider permabans in general and his in particular.
Gaashk
17hr ago
It seems related to the discussion from a couple of months ago about "The Purpose of a System is What it Does".
HereAndGone
17hr ago
You shall not commit adultery.
Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.
Well of course, they first have to figure out their gender identity and sexual orientation and position on polyamory before they can even begin to contemplate ethical non-monogamy. How repressive to tell eight year olds that adultery is sinful!
Throwaway05
17hr ago
Where is the evidence these people have fabricated studies in an attempt to slander the efficacy of opioids?
That's your claim right?
Otherwise you can find a minority population online saying whatever, but they need to have an impact on prescribing habits and the research you deny.
HereAndGone
17hr ago
I swear, if it wasn't for my late-Victorian educated granny teaching me how to do long division the old-fashioned way, I'd never have learned the way it was taught in school.
The Tom Lehrer (God rest the man) song is funny but acute if you're old enough to have gone through the process when schools were switching from the old way to the new way, and teachers weren't adequately trained yet in the new way.
HereAndGone
17hr ago
See, that's the kind of 'innate understanding from first principles' that my brain just does not have for numbers. I learned my times tables and I'd be lost without them.
I look at that and go "but why pick 2? Why not multiply the 7 by 3 and divide the 8 by 4 if you're doing it that way?" Not getting the underlying patterns means I'm blind as to why "this number rather than that number, this of course is the quadrant of the circle for cos" etc. It's like trying to explain to someone tone-deaf that of course this note from hitting this key on the piano is not the same as this note hitting that key. (I'm bad at that as well, I love music but in music classes at school when we had to identify 'what note was that?' I bombed).
I don't know. There was a peak Darwin, too, and if he's back in a constructive way then that's worth celebrating, even if the ban evasion isn't.
I'd take that as another argument against permabans, although perhaps a mixed one given the reëstablishment of old beefs when his ban expired. But if he was already on an alt by then, maybe the productive discussion was continuing there and the main was just for fighting? I'm just a nerd on the Internet, probably not the best to analyze forum dynamics. But, for that reason, I'd like to welcome good folks back without needing plausible deniability or cloak-and-dagger nonsense.
(I know that sometimes even un-banned folks choose to rotate usernames. And while my life might be a bit nicer if they didn't, I acknowledge that there can be legitimate reasons for that.)
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