domain:forecasting.substack.com
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Take Europeans to Buccees. Everything is bigger in Texas, indeed...
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
He has no way of knowing that.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
It's actually even a bit brighter than you think- red tribe whites are on track to have the highest TFR of any major group in the next year or two(currently tied with hispanics, blacks are a distant third) and that looks to be durable.
No doubt many motteizeans would prefer yankees to be the durable demographic core. But hispanics are reliant on immigration to keep their demographic growth; that will inevitably slow from declining populations in Latin America.
I agree with you that the better parts of Mexico, Brazil, etc are extremely recognizable as a worst case scenario for America and are broadly 'fine' in global terms.
Gaashk
6hr ago
Third rate universities have programs like lumberjacking, which do require manual labor. My father got an English degree from a third rate university, then went on to become a cook for the next decade, like his father. He worked on the campus grounds crew, and pointed out various dumpsters when I visited. Then he went on to teach high school when the kitchen became too Spanish heavy and they stopped paying for cooling or letting them take breaks because the illegals would put up with that crap.
It's pretty permeable.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
The very poor in America do not eat meat. They're not eating rice and beans either, mind- it's a diet of ultra-processed food, made of vegetable oil, additives, sugar, and white flour combined in various forms.
doing homeschooling successfully would be much easier than it actually is, and it would be much more common
If the parent's smart enough to educate their kid correctly with homeschool, and the kid inherited enough of that intelligence to get the benefits of having an intelligent teacher, the parent is also more likely to understand the opportunity cost of leaving their 6-figure job to do it and that private school and tutors aren't that expensive (and you can fire them if they do it badly).
So it makes sense that most homeschoolers are going to be average parents (or maybe slightly below average if they're doing it for religious reasons), teaching average children, and getting average results.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Prediction- the GOP retains and increases its dominance at the national level due to a confluence of factors, some structural-constitutional and some by being blessed with insane enemies. Their performance in government is consistently lackluster; the solution to the exploding debt continues to be inflation and lying, the ideologues migrate to state level politics and the national US government becomes increasingly corrupt due to one party dominance. The long term trend in by-group TFR continues where the red tribe takes, and holds long term, status as the highest-TFR major group. US population peaks in the 2040's, and social security's decline in real dollar amounts becomes unfixable. This leads to a real estate price decline as seniors tap into their sources of wealth.
The labor market remains strong for blue collar workers but experiences ups and downs, and slow wage growth, for white collar workers. The population concentrates in a relatively smaller number of cities; for status seekers, this timeline sucks. For second tier cities, it's awesome.
Jiro
6hr ago
The worst case scenario here would be that Epstein makes public statements accusing everyone from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump to The Man in the Moon of bangin underage girls on his private island. But as I mentioned earlier, there would be no motive for him to do so at that point other than spite.
Being harmed by revelations isn't an all or nothing thing. Fingering well-connected people probably would have some effect, even though since they are well-connected they won't be harmed as much as people who aren't well connected.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
Assuming Trump doesn't run for president, he could still run for something else, Welcome to Moosewood style, and then lose.
aqouta
6hr ago
What we ought to have is an app where everyone ranks the field from day 1 of the campaign and can change at any point. Then we could get real time feedback on messaging. Of course the end problem is even if you were made godking of the docratic party you still have to implement a system like this where 95 year olds who can't handle technology more complicated than a television remote or deal wit the disengenuous claim that poor black people don't have cell phones.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
This is because when democrats can articulate positive visions they're hyper-unpopular('defund the police' 'protect trans kids'). Trump, for all his faults, is very good at articulating ideas that are popular, even if they're bad('no tax on overtime').
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever)
? Trump's not running again. It's impossible for someone else to beat him in an election.
There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence.
Biden was, and is, personally a moderate strongly aligned with the black political machine and not on the best terms with the progressive wing of the party. That is, uh, not how he governed.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6hr ago
Death. With no immortality of any sort, athiesm promises an end to delusion and suffering.
aqouta
6hr ago
He was a populist promising improbably handouts to the kinds of people who dominated the social media sites when he was running. Really not surprising he appeared popular.
Gaashk
6hr ago
I wasn't enjoying the comments about women all that much either, but shrug, people here are interesting. They often say interesting things. I can just not read the threads that are mostly complaining about large groups of people.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
7hr ago
When the working class get turfed out of their working-class jobs, they don't smoothly transition into managerial or knowledge-economy jobs. Their communities died and once independent and hard-working people all slid into the welfare-and-fentanyl pit of despair.
Once more confirmation you people think whites are an inferior race incapable of competing with Guatemalans. I have a much more positive view of white people.
There is no feasible way for the entire working class to move up into the managerial class for all the immigrants you seem to think are more suitable for these jobs. They are the losers of a world of open borders. They're not economic deadweight, they're your countrymen, for God's sake!
They don't exist, as the unemployment rate confirms.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Eventually lasers will render this obsolete again, I suppose.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
7hr ago
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
There are lots of views posted to the motte which are offensive to various sorts. I don't understand why your offense at racism should be privileged?
Actually, let's take a broader view- society tolerates, and even encourages, lots of views which are very offensive to me. Why is your offense at racism worse?
roystgnr
7hr ago
Switching voting systems would help a little bit with the issues with sequencing too. Right now, typically a handful of states decide which handful of a large candidate pack are "serious candidates" for Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday knocks it down to 2, and everybody else just gets to pick between those 2. With something like approval, the ordering of votes still matters (because you still have to vote tactically, and what that means depends on who the front-runners are), but it can be hard to impossible for an earlier state to "knock out" a candidate who's more popular in a later state. If the race's narrative and polling all looks like it's A vs B, but everybody in your state would prefer C, with plurality it's not safe to vote for C unless you don't have a preference between A and B, but with approval you can turn your A vote into an {A,C} vote without risking getting B elected, your opponents can turn your B vote into a {B,C} vote without risking getting A elected, and C can actually win.
On the other hand, running a campaign is expensive. If the early states like A and B, but later states would prefer C, even if you have enough C voters to make C the winner, you have to hope that C knows this and is willing to risk the expense of waiting on all of you. You're right that everything would be driven by polling.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
· Edited 6hr ago
Or lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly, especially if they have some sort of bias.
I mean, this is basically just saying "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth". And, okay, this is not actually impossible, but it's not very likely, especially in the long run. COVID is the obvious recent example of people trying this shit and it blowing up in their faces.
More generally, you say "I am not sure why rationalists cannot understand this argument". Notice that if you're not sure why somebody doesn't accept something, one of the possible answers is in fact "they understand it just fine, but there's a counterargument that they understand and you don't".
Spoiler alert: there's literally a Yudkowsky article from 2008 about this. And another. Probably others I haven't read or can't recall offhand!
Goodguy
7hr ago
I found WhiningCoil's comment to be unpleasant, but that doesn't invalidate the site for me. My opinions about black people are much much more sympathetic than that WhiningCoil comment and they often get a decent amount of upvotes too. Sure, there are many racists here. I mean actual racists, not race realists (I don't think there is anything bad about being a race realist). So what? If you don't like those comments just skip them. This site gets enough posts per day that the mods are simply not capable of policing all content that breaks rules such as "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument", which WhiningCoil's comment certainly does. I think the mods do a decent job given how few of them there are.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
7hr ago
I had over 100k posts on the Misc. section of an mma message board where we all basically did what we do here, with a much lower base IQ.
Not once did anyone’s insults start with the Qing dynasty and the forum was much less because of the lack.
crushedoranges
7hr ago
You don't seem to understand the basic shape of a pyramid.
When the working class get turfed out of their working-class jobs, they don't smoothly transition into managerial or knowledge-economy jobs. Their communities died and once independent and hard-working people all slid into the welfare-and-fentanyl pit of despair. But you don't care about that. The fact they yearn for the old terms of their social contract is somehow a moral failing and poverty fetishism on their part, according to you.
There is no feasible way for the entire working class to move up into the managerial class for all the immigrants you seem to think are more suitable for these jobs. They are the losers of a world of open borders. They're not economic deadweight, they're your countrymen, for God's sake! You owe them your consideration, more than any immigrant or foreigner.
You can imagine Iskander Al-Turok, Qatari sheik, smugly and arrogantly say that Qataris are above the enfeebling drudgery of taking care of infants and washing toilets, as he locks his Bangladeshi maid's passport in his wall safe. What's the difference? What's the difference between an UAE princeling letting his hirelings die in the desert heat building soccer stadiums without a water break and a Californian farmer overseeing his Mexicans work sixteen hour work days?
If the people doing this work were their countrymen, they would not be treated so pitifully.
Why is this evil necessary?
With all due respect, given the choice between your respect and your contempt, I'd pick the latter. I know who you adore and admire: to be put amongst the ranks of those men would surely damn my immortal soul.
I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
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