domain:web.law.duke.edu
cae_jones
4d ago
The upper class in Qing China had some ritual involving a square of white silk, which was supposed to come out bloodstained as proof. Or so I've read in a historical fiction which may or may not be accurate (in which the newly weds deliberately faked the results so they wouldn't have to have sex the first night).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
Speak for yourself!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
Yep, I link people to that book all the time.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
No, she has to be white or at least east Asian.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Einstein said that with hindsight being a plumber would have been a better day job than being a patent clerk because it makes you tired in different ways, so you are more able to do physics in the evenings.
Not sure if he was true, and of course it relies on plumbers making enough to put food on the table in 40 hrs a week (then, as now, not a problem for plumbers specifically, but an issue for a lot of blue-collar jobs that would otherwise make good day jobs for struggling intellectuals).
georgioz
4d ago
As other people point out, it's unlikely that an african war will cause a truly large migration surge to the US
This is just variation of "everything will be as it was so far". Syrian war caused mass immigration, despite other wars such as Iraq-Iran war or any number of other wars not causing the same. When the first Congo War happened, the country had around 40 million people mostly in incredible poverty of $1 per day. There were no cell phones, these people could not afford to pay $10k to get into US or Europe. This changed rapidly in 21st century.
No, african famine is likely to cause migration surges
This has it backwards. What truly caused WW1 in Europe was a population boom. German population increased by 50% between 1860s and 1910s. Russian population increased from 70 million to 170 million in the same timeframe. France had almost no increase from 37 to 39 million. Of course it caused pressure on resources, including multilateral Thucydides traps.
What most people do not realize is that up until colonization, Africa was malaria ridden hellhole of death and despair. In 1900 the whole population of Africa was 140 million, which was less than Russia alone. By 2050 the population of Africa is projected to grow from 1.5 billion currently to 2.5 billion - an order of magnitude larger than EU or US population. Of course this growth will cause tensions - as it did in every place and every historical period. The West does not know what will hit them if a continent of 2.5 billion people gets caught in a war unleashing other horses of apocalypse in conjunction. And in my estimation it is not if, but when. And that when is measured in years or decades, within our lifetimes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
I'm strongly suspect that Obama claimed to be foreign born in his application to Columbia, and I would guess he was accepted in part because of that status.
Ridiculous. US-born blacks who can keep up with Ivy League-level classes are harder to find than overseas blacks who can, and therefore more valuable to Ivy League admissions offices.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
David Sirlin's Playing to Win is the canonical essay on this point. His day job was balancing console fighting games, but he also develops viciously competitive two player board games as a side gig.
Do you think that the school does that in 12 + 4 years? The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed). I was able to read and write at age of 5 - and i was hardly among the most gifted. To know programming you only need to understand recursion, pointers, boolean algebra, hash tables, monads and O(n). That takes an afternoon. I think you really overestimate how much does it take to be mediocre at something - and mediocrity is what schools aims for. And kids are pretty good at investing in stuff that really interests them and becoming gods. Check games.
When people were having problems with integrals in Math 101 in college - I was just explaining to them - it is just the area of a function. Guess what - they understood it in 15 min.
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
The school is a combination of daycare and job program. This is why it is so inefficient.
For some reason unknown modern society severely underestimates kids intellect and overestimates their wisdom.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT
This doesn't work in the Ivy league, where you are admitted without committing to your major. It is a big deal at Oxbridge, probably the last surviving rich-kid backdoor.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
Back in the day, elite career paths included an early training job that was supposed to force you into contact with the reality of working-class life in a way which reflected your status as a potential future ruler. Leadership with training wheels, effectively. The canonical example was sending young officers into the field with an experienced platoon sergeant, but something similar was happening in old-school corporate life where the wet-behind the ears graduate management trainee would be given a shift manager role in their first or second rotation where they would work alongside an experienced foreman.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
(but then why have representatives in the first place?)
The good answer used to be "because the infrastructure doesn't exist to do direct democracy on a greater-than-city scale".
The okay answer with major caveats is "because unitary executives are more effective at getting shit done than a Roman system". This obviously only applies to the executive branch.
The bad answer which I suspect is like 80% of why we still have parliaments is "there is no procedure in most nations for abolishing a parliament without the parliament's own consent, which 100% of its members are strongly incentivised not to give".
JustAGuy0
4d ago
Was Mossad actually implicated in this? Or is it just that Epstein was Jewish and had friends who were Zionist Jews (a viewpoint shared by the majority of Jews in the world)?
I haven't actually seen anything beyond Epstein himself bragging about it (while also being a pathological liar) and being tangentially connected to people who may have been but were not confirmed to be connected with the intelligence community. All second and third-order connections.
aldomilyar
4d ago
Why would I want to let my gifted kid nerdsnipe themselves into a track with likely minimal real world applications so they can then be runover by academic hiring affirmative action after accumulating their paper qualifications?
pbmonster
4d ago
Dota is arguably one of the multiplayer games that deals best with this - just by cranking the complexity up so high, it takes the min-maxers weeks or sometimes months after a patch until the meta has settled completely. And even then, individual disposition/skill can still make non-meta strategies very viable, because the game is overall pretty well balanced.
Now, you can argue the game was more fun 20 years ago, when played with 9 friends sitting in the same room, with nobody having any idea what they were doing... but that's probably nostalgia.
RenOS
something is wrong
4d ago
You need to distinguish some things.
First, you need to treat technological and social progress separately. Our civilization has been steadily progressing technologically for several centuries at this point, but it has been one of the biggest lies/self-delusions that the social changes happening alongside were consistent improvements. Some were, some weren't, and mostly it was just a change in the trade-off curve the ramifications of which we still probably haven't fully experienced and can't appropriately judge.
Second, the current state and the pace & direction of change; I agree that western society increasingly seems sclerotic, overregulated and overinterdependent. Nevertheless, the peak we have reached is pretty damn impressive, and even rome took centuries to fully break down, with golden ages lasting decades, long after its eventual fate seemed sealed.
Third, private and public. The reason why conservatives lean happier is that they are, on average, grillers. If you just ignore the public dysfunction, pretend there is nothing you can do about it and focus on ways to improve your own life, it's actually quite easy to get by and be happy. Imo this is the reason why civilizations peak; After reaching some level of prosperity, it's much easier to just pay off dysfunction to not bother you instead of fighting against it. At first it's a great deal, since in % terms it's very little, and there is a lot of inertia about not falling into dysfunction staving off the bad incentives. But what is incentived, grows, and eventually it's "suddenly" substantial, but now so many people depend on it that there is now way of getting rid of it without a revolution. Usually the society is still overall quite prosperous, so they just try to limit the growth at this point, or if you have really competent & conscientious people in charge they may even manage to find a way to slowly whittle down the dependency a bit. But it's a lot of work for almost no return for yourself, while frequently making lots of unnecessary enemies. So, the smartest and most competent at best actively avoid politics & just improve things in small localized ways, or at worst take advantage of the situation to redirect more stuff their way while paying off the important interest groups.
pbmonster
4d ago
Can you elaborate?
Do you really think you can take a random sample of 12 year olds from "playing outside all day" to "enough reading/writing/arguing/calculating to do productive work in the modern economy" - in 4 years?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
MayorofOysterville
4d ago
Most Western Democracies aren't electing either far left or far right extremists mostly the policies stay the same. Wasn't Biden a steady moderate elected by a skittish electorate? It didn't seem to have much effect even if he wasn't demonized the way Trump or Obama were.
Tree
4d ago
I would prefer it if someone was just trying to harpoon an heir or heiress like some Becky Sharp or Bel-Ami. You wish to live on yachts? I respect your moxie.
Some women love you because you have a french accent, or you made them laugh once. I’m told some wives love you because you leave a love note on the fridge for five minutes everyday. But others want the whole 8 hours. Just in a cubicle, being miserable for money, so you can hand it over. It’s as costly a signal of love and commitment as it gets. For the one ‘buckling up’. The requiring party’s love and affinity is more doubtful.
Anyway, nothing against you, obviously it’s a very very common requirement. Some people say it’s hardwired in the female psyche, although I don’t know how nature would hardwire a wealth preference into humans in an ancestral environment where wealth was just ‘being fat’, and some sticks and shells. How could Lucy in the savannah have learned to be turned on by zeroes on a bank statement. By contrast the male ‘gaze’ seems more clearly hardwired to like certain aspects of the female form which have remained the same.
2rafa
4d ago
I’m a soft doomer about the US but much less so than I am about (Western) Europe.
Mass immigration has seen fit to proffer the United States a gentle decline toward a high-inequality, mid-tier country with Some Third World Characteristics but probably with semi-functioning politics and many centers of high economic and industrial development. What is coming for Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Britain, and increasingly also Spain, Ireland and Italy is much, much worse than that.
It's relative. Supporting the NEP was right wing in its time too despite being literally a Lenin proposal. Mao once called himself a right winger when he disavowed the Cultural Revolution. Politics moves and shifts.
Not wanting to tax unrealized gains, destroy crypto or engage in literal price fixing makes Trump the right wing option. I don't make the rules of hellworld, I just live in it.
No - the question is "Can the 30th percentile 20something American man afford these things?" Half the population being too poor to date is a failure condition, telling young men to spend their 20s careermaxing and start dating in their 30s is incompatible with the cisHajnal marriage pattern, and the reversed gender pay gap for young childless people makes things worse.
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