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Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners...

While I expect the answer for Hanania specifically is that he's reaching for whatever weapons are available, there are some very serious problems, here:

  • Full-time workers are spending about a third of their waking lives at their workplaces, a sizable portion of their Dunbar-sphere will be made of coworkers, and under current law employers can be liable even for after-hours and off-campus behavior by employees. In many career fields, it's common to spend months with little chance for a social life outside of the office at all. Maybe the 20% of couples just meet up right outside of work, but I'd expect that we're not so lucky, and at least some aren't getting BATNAs.

  • Worse, the modern rule isn't just 'don't fuck your employees/coworkers', but against wide breadths of discussion and behavior adjacent to sex or gender stuff. Enforcement is hilariously inconsistent even in places where employers care (and the number of bullshit lawsuits are Known enough that normal people are often hesitant to bring genuine ones), so people can act as though a lot of this stuff is still allowed, but once you get above a certain size of company you start getting insurers/lawyers/politicians peering in and insisting that your workplace complies so that enforcement Won't Be Necessary. As a result, a lot of spaces for vertical transmission of knowledge about matters of sex and romance no longer exist, or have been thoroughly commandeered into a state-favored presentation.

  • Avoiding the appearance -- or possibility -- of impropriety has serious and significant costs. I'm not sure how much I trust the specific numbers for 'MeToo made men afraid to mentor women', but the end result of that policy ends up meaning I've got a Fun Ethics Question when my workplace has me share a hotel room with a (afaik straight, not my type) guy. This isn't taking all the fun out of workplace socialization, but it's a big and vast set of constraints, often ones heavily dependent on local social norms.

The end result of a sexless public space for men... well, we have examples from other spheres that had to move sex to fully private spaces, and the alternatives that they've developed kinda work, but they come at tremendous cost. Online dating started out rough, and it's since vanished up its own backside in a mix of borderline fraud and unrealistic standards. Bars and mixers have come coincidentally along with a hefty incidence of alcoholism and other abuses.

For Scott:

When I think of wokeness, I think of the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015... Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but The Closing Of The American Mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.

Again, Hanania might not have an answer because he doesn't care enough to think one necessary, but there's a pretty easy and obvious one.

The Civil Rights Act was intended as written under a hilariously narrow scope for all of its wide claims. That lead to hard cases, and even as late at the 1980s the courts were struggling with matters like whether it was discriminatory if an employer (allegedly) raped an employee, and into the late-90s if it would be discriminatory even if the victim was male. There weren't just hard cases in that they involved sympathetic victims and extremely bad behavior, or even whether they could be arguably within the intent or text of the Civil Rights Act, but because they were also near-universally around things that were separately violations of common state laws that had existed for quite some time, at a time where and when the public was unwilling to allow businesses to wash hands of bad acts by their employees. Government advocates and private lawyers had a pick of both clear violations of the text of this law, or arguable cases for this law that shocked the conscience.

((Scalia delivered Oncale, for example.))

But to do so, the CRA1964 had to establish an industry around fighting racism. The EEOC isn't not five commissioners at a table; it had around 350 employees in the 1960s, which grew into the thousands by the late 1990s. Nor was it alone; other offices downstream of or expanded by the CRA include the Commission on Civil Rights, the (various) Office for Civil Rights, the Office for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, DOE Civil Rights Division, so on. And then around that, built up an industry around selecting and prosecuting private lawsuits, and training people to do this, and training people to train. Now, when the law and interpretation was constrained, and overt discrimination (or bad-for-other-reasons-argued-as-discrimination) cases had the pick of both plaintiff and employer, most cases kept close to the core.

That changed. Some legislation made it easier (eg, the 1991 revision allowed some vaguely-defined set of suits with a theory of discrimination that could not identify specifically discriminatory policies or actions, or to get attorney's fees and thus cases on contingency without proving damages), but the grander problem is that you now had thousands of people who's job was to find discriminatory actors, who were trained to notice the most subtle hints of it, and in no small part who believed in the mission. An increasing number, by the close of the 1990s, had literally never known a world without an EEOC and the norms it wanted to apply across the country; many had been trained by those who worked up through the EEOC's wishcasting of policies it wanted.

That's how you get a lawsuit with an appeal's court opinion released in 2010, about a complaint first pushed in 2006, revolving around the sort of "general civility code" that Oncale specifically disavowed. It's how you get related cases that similarly emphasis a general theory of Bad Person. And it matches the timeline far closer than the standard motions around college campuses or SomethingAwful refuges.

Yes.

No. SGOV dividends (as well as treasuries) are taxed as ordinary income at a rate of up to 40.8%. Add in state taxes, and you're paying nearly half of your already paltry income. It's a very bad deal.

BOXX is taxed as capital gains and only when you sell. If you hold for a year, the maximum rate is 23.8%. Note that this is a somewhat novel product so there might be ruling against it in the future, but in theory it works.

Perhaps you are confusing SGOV for a muni, which is generally not taxed at the federal level. These have other downsides, such as higher risk and lower yields.

In any case, lending money to the government is a pretty awful deal. They dilute you constantly and charge you extortive taxes for the privilege. In the end you're much better off owning a shiny rock (might write a post about this later).

I think the question becomes why has the gender war not turned hot in Japan, which has similar economic factors?

I think wokism as culture and wokism as law and wokism as anything else are all a positive feedback loop. There isn't a single definitive cause that, if you cut that out, all wokism is gone forever. But the book convinced me pretty well that certain executive orders and judicial decisions and bureaucratic policies played a major role in expanding wokeness.

I mean, I don't agree with the conclusions here but his fame outside of football is absolutely manufactured. Though, that doesn't mean it wasn't built on something that exists.

But I didn't know he existed until last summer when suddenly he had a documentary, started dating Taylor Swift, hosted Saturday Night Live within like six months. Not to say that most people that are famous aren't manufactured in some way as well, that's the game. It's just personal PR but it's certainly not coming organically. I had no idea who the last like (insert number) of whatever boyfriend's Taylor Swift had before this so it can't just be that. Nor were there personal stories inserted into non-gossip publications dedicated to them simply being Taylor Swift's boyfriend. Maybe it's a convergence of things and simply luck, that they decided to run more stories about this relationship than the previous ones, but it's still manufacturing fame.

I think it's simply a fact that any given person's idiolect contains a mixture of metaphors they understand from experience and archaic ones that they have absorbed from the broader culture without fully comprehending. Learning how language was used in the past is one way to help sharpen your own thinking and ability to artfully express yourself, but communication is a two way street, so however much I like using e.g. metaphors from chemical kinetics to describe social and political processes, I have to adjust my vocabulary based on context.

To answer your last two questions, linguistic evolution is a natural process that you or I have little power to influence, but I certainly think it adds something to a child's understanding of the world to know that for instance the word "broadcast" is a term borrowed from farming, at least insofar as it drives home the point that early 1900's America was an agrarian society where everyone would understand such terminology. Learning a foreign language is helpful in a similar way, particularly one that uses a completely alien set of metaphors and historical references.

This is lovely. Please do more. Had no idea Pittsburgh was hilly.

A few questions.

Does CMU being the best CS university in the world affect the day to day of the average person in Pittsburgh? For example, the JHU's excellence at Medicine or Clemson at Automobile Engg. defintely seems to affect the economic makeup of their respective cities.

Does Pittsburgh ever feel like a college town? Upitt + CMU makes for 50k students not that far from downtown.

I've seen Pittsburgh compared to Seattle wrt weather, hilliness, whiteness and having tech. How fair is the comparison ?

It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?

People often are, particularly about personal preferences.

And, of course, we could see the same thing on the left as well. We've at least seen resistance to listening to SCOTUS, and things like marijuana "legalization" seem not all that different.

What is "the DR3 narrative"? All I find on a quick Google is references to an anime I'm not familiar with.

EDIT: I think I've figured it out... "Democrats 'R' the Real Racists"?

It was a thing made up by Scott that is completely unscientific and in my opinion a terrible classification system so I just reject it outright.

I think it's pretty defensible, just in the sense that a lot of people are emotionally affiliated with a cohort of people who vote the same ways, and that this plays itself out more broadly than just in voting.

I don't think it works as espousing some underlying principles, but it does make sense as a way to describe the modern tribes that society has been organized into. There are many things that could easily have been polarized differently, or agreed upon, but this is just describing things as they exist now.

It’s addressed in the link. If I understand correctly: if you reply to a comment, then you “endorse” it by default, allowing people who whitelist you to see the comment. But you can also choose not to endorse a comment you reply to (in which case neither comment is seen, I think).

Props to @NelsonRushton for demonstrating why this is, as the kids say, non-unique.

Where?

It also had silly and dumb rules. I'm pretty sure speech codes were explicitly racist, for example.

SGOV dividends are largely federal tax exempt since it's 90%+ treasuries. I don't think that's the case for BOXX?

Though he could have put that better, I definitely agree that being able to see posting history is nicer. Occasionally I'll really like someone's post and look to see what else they've said, or what their top comments are, or what other things they might care about, so it's not just used in order to attack someone.

It's like The City and the City except libertarian.

It seems very sensible for God to be a utility monster (assuming God exists, of course)? Like, I'd be kind of surprised if that were not the case.

I think this is pretty common among religious people? Or, at least, among those who have thought it through. Do you think the average religious person thinks hell is unjust?

How do you resolve issues where someone you whitelisted replies to the comment of someone you haven't, and vice versa?

Travis Kelce’s manufactured rise to fame

The Chiefs have been in 4 of the last 5 Superbowls (winning 3), and 6 of the last 6 AFCCGs. Kelce has the most postseason receiving yards in NFL history. And Mahomes is famously weird and uncharismatic.

In 2009 I suggested Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists Linking to archived page: project name Outer Circle. It was discussed on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110 My health deteriorated. Nobody else tried implementing the ideas.

Where do I even go in 10 years?

That allows for planning ahead and maybe writing your own version of Outer Circle. The core idea is

Current approaches fail because they try to create a single forum, which requires agreement on what is good.

Shared hierarchical white-lists are a mechanism for allowing "multiple forums" to peacefully coexist with the same "comment base". You don't see shitty comments because you don't white-list them. The shitty commentators don't try to ban you because they never white-list long boring intellectuals and don't know that you exist. But there is overlap. The forums have the potential to reach critical mass, with enough commentators to sustain interest. And "freedom of speech" benefits from all content being opt-in. Every-one can ban any-one for any-reason, and that ban doesn't extend beyond their personal version of the forum.

Any activity level can cause unexpected injury; all it takes is to move something the wrong way. There was a period of time when I was riding my bike about 25 miles a day after work, and 50 to 80 miles on the weekends, and I ended up throwing my neck out while reaching for a drink on the top shelf of a convenience store cooler. If you're repeatedly injuring yourself in the same way after doing the same thing, then I'd stop to reassess my plans or seek professional instruction, but one-off injuries are par for the course for reasonably active people. It's probably more of an "I moved something the wrong way" injury than an overuse injury.

I've been in a bit of back-and-forth on reddit about this article, and also commented on the Substack, which I don't usually do. I disagree with Hanania that the civil rights movement is the origin of wokism. Certainly the civil rights movement has been a vehicle for wokism, at times, but there are many ways to do civil rights, and just as there are radical feminists and liberal feminists, there are radical race theorists and liberal race theorists. But (as Scott seems to imply) Hanania doesn't seem to actually care about which way the causal arrows point in reality, he just wants to dismantle the stuff to which he objects, and sees this as a possible way to do it.