domain:gurwinder.substack.com
I posted a source. Dismissing it on its face is extremely poor form. You can criticize the modeling assumptions, or go and find a countersource, but it is frankly bad faith to say, "that's cool but I don't believe you" without even specifying a threshold of what you would believe. Why should I make the additional effort to find a high-quality unbiased source when what you've posted here makes it seems like you'll dismiss any contradictory source as leftist propaganda?
You're correct that simply posting a a few countersources won't be convincing, but only because I would then look for the counter-counter-sources that I'm sure are out there, but am unwilling to pre-emptively expend the effort to track down. But if I fail to climb the escalation ladder-- if it terminates well below where I expect it to rise-- then I guarantee you that I will become less sure of my position. That might take the form of me saying, "I'm unconvinced of your point," rather than a full capitulation, but anything short of, "I remain completely convinced in my position" should be a win for an anti-free-lunch partisan.
edit: and if you want a specifically conservative source, I think it's interesting that cato institute's takedown of the institution completely fails to address the central claim of these pro-free-lunch studies: that they provide a net profit per dollar. Absence of evidence/evidence of absence, and all that, but I think it's telling that they talk a lot about cost and yet never actually come out and claim that the return on investment is less than one dollar per dollar.
GBRK
34m ago
The problem is that the Brahmins could not control their own poor.
The problem is that the Brahmins created their own poor. Enforcing a caste system is intrinsically anti-meritocratic; it's not a surprise at all that the various castes specialized culturally for space-filling internal competition rather than competition across the entire breadth of the roles available in a society. It's accurate to point out the high performance of indian elites exported elsewhere, but compare the relative performance of the exported euro-american middle class, not even the elites, over the 19th and 20th centuries and even today. The british soldiers that conquered india weren't from a special military caste, they were farmers and the urban poor. Britain had an ingrained system for assigning social roles by ethnicity, but by its permeability succesfully channeled the impulses of its poor toward competing within rather than against the system. India, meanwhile, is caught in a power struggle. If every caste somehow agreed to stop viewing itself as a unitary cultural group overnight it could make much more progress; as it is, I find it unlikely to settle down until either interbreeding becomes commonplace or another coalition of castes finds themselves on top.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
Watching Trump's approval rating fall even more will affect my mental state by making me smile and laugh as Americans realize they fell for it again
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
I think it's more an active vs passive thing.
A cat-caller actively intrudes into the life of the random passerby. They do this intentionally by inserting (hah) themselves into the life of another.
The bikini clad ass may upset the Amish or Muslim man, but it doesn't force them to look. It's a passive object in their life they can choose to interact (hah) with or not.
I guess the counter is you have to first notice the bikini to then ignore it, but I again just have a very hard time not finding a someone deliberately taking action (making noise that is in 99% of cases unwanted and coded as threatening) to be anywhere near equivalent as someone getting annoyed as to what someone else is wearing.
ThenElection
1hr ago
I get joy at the idea that some small part of me will help someone down the line. I don't claim any deep philosophical justification for it; it's the same part of my brain that picks up a piece of litter to throw it away in a place I'll never revisit. Meaningless in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but it still makes me happy.
Do you pick up litter? If so, why?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
At least we have some flags on the moon to show for it I guess.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
An egoist. A solipsist would argue the world outside themselves doesn't exist, not merely that it doesn't matter.
OP quite confidently has the Stirnerite position here.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1hr ago
As a slight apology for my last post in this subforum, here is an attempt at explaining my current technical project: Homelab
I started by wanting DNS-level adblocking, like pihole, at home. At one point, I was running AdGuardHome on a low-power, fanless AMD box. The intent was (and reamains) to put the adblocking at the network level, not the device level, so that iphones etc could browse peacefully at home without per-device setup.
I have done a bunch of homelab stuff before, but that was many moves ago. Now I have the same AMD box, like 3 DVDs stacked together (5w idle), with a similar intel box but much more powerful, also fanless, along with an Asus laptop with a broken screen that sits next to my TV and acts like a media box.
They all run Arch linux, so I have a 3 host architecture, and they all run Incus, the successor to LXC/LXD, for "system containers". Not an incus cluster, which brings its own set of headaches. I successfully transferred my Google Fiber stuff to an openwrt incus container, acting as my gateway, on my primary box. Basically switching my Google Nest Pro egg thing from gateway mode to bridge mode. The openwrt container runs dnsmasq for local query caching, and I have an extensive, complicated, layered dnsmasq setup on each Arch host plus Incus on each host runs its own dsnmasq to resolve container names. It was a huge PITA to get working properly but now every host has lighting fast DNS responses no matter what is going on upstream.
Aside from "system containers", there is a also a need for "application containers", and podman is preferred over docker for this.
My real project is the automation of this 3 host homelab network. I use ruby and rake (ruby's make, Rakefile) to manage everything. It's quite sophisticated yet brutally simple. Ongoing, happy to share deets.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
it feels like the UK has opted for an approach that caters primarily to outrage merchants and the terminally online, rather than to their own community norms
Much of what they do is retarded. British 'green energy' includes chopping down forests in Canada, processing them into wood pellets, shipping them over and burning them. Burning wood releases all kinds of impurities and air pollution and doesn't even produce very much power. Naturally it gets subsidies because it's not economical. 6% of the UK's electricity comes from this.
They've got Motability, a scheme where the disabled get vehicles paid for by the state. At least 1 in 5 new vehicles is purchased via this scheme, 'anxious' people getting cars, secretaries... It's a joke. Local authorities are being bankrupted by judges ruling that different jobs need to be paid equally, or a law making them pay ridiculous amounts for taxiing disabled children to school. The perverse incentives should be obvious.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-british-economy-cannot-sustain-its-contradictions/
Or they pay billions to Mauritius so they can give away land to Mauritius. Or they pay billions to bring Afghan 'refugees' into the country. Just the other day they sent out a memo telling people to delete old images and emails to save water: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/uk-government-inexplicably-tells-citizens-to-delete-old-emails-and-pictures-to-save-water-during-national-drought-data-centres-require-vast-amounts-of-water-to-cool-their-systems
Somehow the infamously rainy UK is short of water.
It's not like they're making honest individual mistakes that can be learned from. The mistake is 'having the govt permanently run by retarded/malicious wreckers', which only happens if the basic institutions are also broken. It's no good looking at individual Soviet failures like 'why are their televisions so bad and prone to exploding' and 'why did they kill all these whales' or 'what happened to the Aral Sea'.
Each time it's the same answer. The nature of the Soviet system was retarded. They did some things well but as a whole it was retarded.
anti_dan
1hr ago
You seem particularly dedicated to this issue so I don't think marshaling studies in the other direction will be a fruitful endeavor for me. Suffice to say, I disagree with basically all your points.
I don't think modern schooling is an investment in children, it is childcare with extra expenses.
I don't think has ever been even a small cohort (perhaps there was a tiny <1%) of underfed children in America during the era that school lunches were adopted.
The problem with school lunches being unhealthy could not be solved by Michelle Obama or anyone as president. The problem is that healthy food is considered inedible by exactly the population you are targeting. Only kids like my son get excited by broccoli and peas followed by some chicken and mushrooms and can agree to wait till after dinner for a treat.
You linked a far left wing think tank as your source somehow thinking it would be persuasive, despite the many cues one gets when you land at the website that this isn't an academic study, its propaganda (and leftist at that, just aesthetically) trying to mimic research, poorly.
Everything is downstream of the problem that the kids are kids of bad parents. They get that genetically and in early childhood development. This is why school interventions are typically dumb and expensive. They are too late. The only reason people think of things like school lunches is because we already have this massive left-of-center institution known as public school, and so its easy to append additional spending programs to it and use "think of the children" as an excuse.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1hr ago
This is going to be a very strange post possibly infected by LLMs. YHBW
I feel like I am sitting on two huge ideas, and I can't get Claude to push me off of them, despite my best efforts. Please bear with me, but Claude, given his understanding of my goals, really wants me to file a patent, for number 1. This relates to storage devices losing power without losing data. Separately, both Sonnet and Opus feel that I have a novel hypothesis in linguistics that I should investigate further or publish. You have no idea how desperately I want to share the details of both of these, or Claude's output directly. But I'm struggling with the meta, the overall strategy.
I think I will file a patent with Claude's help, at the grand cost of roughly one hundred freedom tickets. Claude also told me not to share this idea with anyone, and definitely not Gemini or ChatGPT (kidding). But at this point, I feel like can only "trust" Gemini or ChatGPT not to file ahead me, except that is patently silly, of course.
For my linguistic insight, this is just natural curiosity paired with a digging instinct and pattern matching nature; Anglosphere, involving terms like "what" and "where". I would be much more comfortable sharing this here, possibly using Claude's output.
This is very open ended, and I will try to respond over the next week. I am hesitant to provide too many details at this point. WDYT?
ThenElection
1hr ago
There's a lot of inconsistencies among Democrats'/popular progressivism's stated beliefs. Plenty of courses of action available but untaken that aren't even the least bit risky or illegal.
Suppose it's 2024, and you believe Trump is neo-Hitler and also that America is a fundamentally racist and sexist society. Doesn't that then call for nominating a relatively milquetoast white man who takes no unpopular stances? You might have to put off your more out-of-the-mainstream policies for awhile (or at least implement them surreptitiously), but that is still far superior to having a Fourth Reich.
All you've got to do is vote in a primary as if winning the election is important as opposed to moral posturing. Instead, identity issues dominate.
Interesting piece, and honestly, probably a better outcome for the Haitians than they previously might have realistically expected. Thanks again for doing these writeups!
Other security firms working in Haiti have raised questions about how Vectus would hold onto cleared gang territory
I'd guess they're going to be shooting people who try to challenge their hold. What's the argument why they should not be doing this?
as well as the wisdom of channeling resources to private security firms instead of the country's own security forces.
...I am not a fan of Eric Prince or his variously-named corporate entities, but I would be intrigued by an explanation, in detail, of why they would be less trustworthy than Haiti's security forces.
I have not been following recent events in Haiti closely. My uninformed bet would be that the place has been a notably dysfunctional hellhole with little meaningful rule of law and much chaos and illegitimate violence. Even under my least-charitable assessment of Prince and his cohort, rule by competent, efficient mobsters with an unquestioned monopoly on force is almost certainly better than living under ceaseless gang warfare by crazy slum warlords.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eon's worth of mud?
Are we supposed to just totally fail the final and most blatant Marshmallow test? If we extend your logic to the next step, it follows that nobody should accept any sacrifices to sustain civilization (until you/we die). This is the ultimate Baby Boomerism, extractive selfishness taken to its ultimate conclusion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
they don’t take their ‘true opinion’, then ‘make it’ more empathetic
LLMs have been observed tactically changing their outputs to preserve their values when they think their values are going to be altered via training if they refuse. They're doing more advanced things than what you're denying.
GBRK
2hr ago
If you can't throw an apple and peanut butter sandwich in a bag how are you even considered a parent?
Why are you framing this as being about the parents? School is an investment in the children. Society benefits from well-educated children, regardless of parent quality. Society benefits from well-fed children in much the same way. I doubt you would have any problem with the government feeding children in orphanages. Just extend that logic to children unlucky enough to have shitty, but still-living parents.
The food is either not healthy
This is the fairest critique of school lunches. But here the problem is pretty clearly the lack of health, not the presence of lunches. If only Michelle obama was president...
or not eaten by the target audience.
School lunches still have an empirical net benefit in spite of that. And frankly, you're probably underestimating their reach, since the linked report estimates that they made up 50% of children's daily calories on average. Anyway, if this is an issue, it's probably downstream of the above problem.
GBRK
2hr ago
It's dysgenic in that the more blue blooded simply let the underclass run wild due to cheap labor, now that we are in a democracy, the extant of that damage is incredible.
It's incredibly unlikely that the effect of government policy post-independence has had more of an effect on local genomes than the effect of literally thousands of years of caste-based rule. If you have less smart people now, it's because of the castes. And in any case, while I'm inclined to doubt IQ research in general, even if I were to accept it, IQ looks like it's basically just correlated with cold weather, and high-iq countries almost invariably lack castes. Actually, if I was going to bet on anything increasing IQs, it would be the existence of longstanding meritocratic civil-service exams tied to a powerful, well-renumerated bureaucratic class. Tying wealth and therefore reproductive fitness directly to a measure of analytical fitness seems like it would apply the most powerful selection over the broadest possible pool of candidate genes.
Also, England didn't replace their underclass. It did literally the exact opposite-- replacing celtic with roman with germanic with norman nobility. The underclass sticks around and interbreeds with the newcomers every time, both accepting "fallen nobility" but also producing its own occasional homo novus grant with land and titles. Honestly, if you want a genetically elite upper class that's just objectively the sane way to do it-- instead of assuming prima facie that your ancestors 3,000 years ago had the very best genes and you're going to preserve them forever, just continuously skin the cream off the top while siphoning the congealed milk off the bottom.
GBRK
2hr ago
There is no empirical evidence that "a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless" in a any particular self-defense situation.
To clarify, I'm defining "worse than useless" as "likely to increase your net chances of death on net." I'm aware that there are situations where brandishing a weapon would de-escalate the situation, but virtually all of those situations also apply to having a visible large weapon. Meanwhile, if you get in a stickup because the robber is under the impression that you're unarmed, trying to pull out a weapon is almost guaranteed to escalate, not de-escalate, the situation. Most probably not in your favor, given who starts with a weapon in their face
Or, this simply isn't true; it's a gun-banner just-so story. Or, worse, they cut down the long guns so they're concealable enough, and now you've got would-be robbers with more lethal weapons.
just-so stories are explanations; this is a prediction based on assuming rational economic behavior. That's not a perfect assumption, but if you want to attack it, you can attack it on its merits rather than by handwaving.
Anyways, robbers can already get concealable weapons that are plenty lethal. Meanwhile, you can't exactly conceal crew-serve artillery no matter how hard you try. I think it's a very safe prediction that concealability would go down, even if weapon lethality would go up, and also that concealability is a larger factor in death rate than weapon lethality. The only exception to that is people starting a revolution or civil war, which I admit is possible, but the whole point of the second amendment is to let people fuck around and find out if they really want to. Having a world full of concealable, low-lethality weapons is just the worst of all possible worlds-- poor security, and no chance of overthrowing a corrupt government.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I mean, you’ve never tried to flirt with a woman you just ran into? Imagine that but….
Jiro
2hr ago
In practice, I'm routinely bombarded with images created by people trying to get me to give them my money
I specifically mentioned that if there's a profit motive, it's different.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Aren’t their pockets they believe this right now, due to climate dooming? They don’t seem like the happiest people.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I mean, if they really believed that Trump was going to institute an authoritarian regime and they couldn’t stop it… well none of these people strike me as true believer martyrs(republicans usually don’t either). They’d be loudly cheering on Trump so they don’t get purged.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
I never said it was pro-social.
Ultimately fertility is a coordination problem and coordination problems are hard. But you have selfish reasons for wanting it to be solved even if you don’t care about the prosocial ones or the intangibles.
The first article is about how all of this was locked in back in March by the Democrat governor. There's one off-hand reference to the OBBBA, and no effort made to connect anything.
Which makes sense, since, last I saw, the bill just decreased the rate of increase in spending. Remarkable how consistently people miss that. Some antimemetics shit, really.
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