domain:dualn-back.com
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11m ago
Unitarian Universalist if they are "spiritual but not religious" but still like to go to church, United Methodist if they consider themselves Christian.
dasfoo
11m ago
National review has basically said this is BS (but Trump did himself no favor with bad legal counsel). That is what establishment republicans think.
I'm essentially a NR republican of the Jonah Goldberg Remnant variety. I am anti-Trump in that I think he is cultural poison and I will(have) never vote(d) for him. I agree completely with the NR consensus on this.
The problem with the "This will kill Trump" viewpoint is that it sees Trump in a vacuum, as a uniquely corrupt outlier. My view is that is he is the "naked" exampled of the corruption already pervasive in elite politics. Everything he does or tries to do or wants to do is completely routine and no more dirty than what the Bidens/Clintons/Pelosis have been doing for decades. And probably the Bushes, Obamas, etc.
The difference that Trump offers is that he is simultanously pettier/dumber/incompetent at everything he does AND he has none of the friendly institutional cover afforded to the elite club and their competent lawyers and knowlegable operatives. They have a system that they know how to navigate, litigate and obfuscate, and Trump doesn't know that he needs to know how to work that system to succeed.
So, when the proposition comes up: Does this change your opinion of Trump? The answer to even mainstream Republicans is, "This makes no difference, because the other guys are just as bad, and maybe worse because they're good at being that bad and getting away with it."
If Trump going down is the draino that unclogs the swamp and he takes them all down, this maybe isn't so bad. If he's the only one who makes it through the drain, this is a sort of travesty of selective justice.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
14m ago
Accurate. Me and most of my Blue tribe circle would check at least half those boxes.
AvocadoPanic
19m ago
they're paying low six figures at best and there's 10+ meetings a week
I've had this job. The 'meaningfulness' wears off. Now I look for meaning in myself and family, not my work.
At work I trade my time for money to fund the meaningful part of my life.
AvocadoPanic
28m ago
The distracters aren't really effective if there's not a plausible argument for them. That's largely the point of distracters. The goal is to identify the best answer.
You are productive when you produce stuff. The question details 4 types of items and 2 crops that are produced. The crops are also produce.
They lived by hunting and by growing corn and squash.
In your reply, you focused on hunting but what about "growing corn and squash"?
Busy? Yes. But exciting? In what galaxy could you say growing corn and squash is exciting? That's a resounding no, to me. That significantly downgrades B as an answer, IMO.
What this is though, is productive. (We even call it "produce" in stores)
Some of these things sound dull or dreary, but I'm just not seeing how you can call doing all of these things dull and dreary. Beautiful pottery? Fine sashes? Turquoise jewelry? The picture the author is painting does not really communicate dull and dreary to me. I can see how they might be painstaking and hard, but they're still describing fashionable and pretty things. "Dull" is very much downgraded as a choice to me. What about hunting? Really hard to think dull and dreary here as well.
What all of these things have in best common is they involve producing. Fine jewelry, container chotchkas, or hunting or growing food to eat.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
Sure, but "they continued this way until 1200 AD". That should put you in an old timey frame of reference. I don't know much about the time before 1200 AD but I bet baskets that hold water would be hella clutch.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
31m ago
Hokkaido, I believe. It was a long shot though, thanks anyway!
AvocadoPanic
42m ago
Me too. Tech before / during the dot com bust. Finance / investment banking, managed services, defense.
I think I may be seeing some geographic selection effects too. It could be the median candidate in London, UK is better than the median candidate in the Boston suburbs.
felis-parenthesis
49m ago
The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age; there are cases to be made for B and C and a nit to be picked about D.
B The author depicts the Anasazi as doing fine weaving. Both by using the word, in the case of sashes woven from hair, and implying it in the case of basket, with a mesh without holes. fine is more work than coarse. Doing all that work will keep them busy. The child is probably dragged round the supermarket on shopping trips. Meat comes from the chill cabinet. Perhaps neighbors go hunting, but the child is discouraged from asking to go too, because guns are scary and dangerous. Hunting sounds forbidden and dangerous; certainly exciting. Hunting long ago, with a bow or s spear sounds harder and more dangerous. harder speaks to the Anasazi leading busy lives. You hunt, you catch nothing (you cannot just shoot your prey) so you hunt again the following day. You are kept busier than people today who can guarantee to get the whole weeks shopping with one car trip to the supermarket. dangerous might stand alone to the adult mind, but a child will pick up the message that the Anasazi lead exciting lives. B is a contender.
C "baskets woven tightly enough to hold water." is a strange claim. The child might have been paying attention when history covered the Spanish Armada. Sir Francis Drake Singed the King of Spains beard. One historian emphasizes burning stocks of seasoned timber, needed for wet cooperage. Wet cooperage is when a cooper makes a barrel so well that it is suitable for storing water. That is much harder than dry cooperage and needs seasoned timber. Burn that and there are no new barrels for storing water on board ship. No barrels, no Armada. What the attentive child knows is that holding water is a major pain under earlier, lo-tech conditions of life. The author is depicting the life of the Anasazi as difficult in two senses. First they do impressive feats of basket weaving. That is technically difficult. Second, they are likely forced to do this by a lack of technology (though what has gone wrong with their pots? Why aren't they holding water in pots? Unsuitable clay? Lack of glazes?). We would ordinarily summarize the problems posed by lack of basic technology by saying that life was difficult.
The author talks of beautiful pottery and turquoise jewelry. The thirteen year old boy answering the question knows just what the author is talking about. It is the fine china that lives in the cabinet, and the Meissen figurines, with their boring pastel colors. The limbs are not articulated, eliminating any play value, and you are not allowed to play with them anyway because of their impractical fragility. Turquoise jewelry is stupid, girly crap. The author is implying that the Anasazi lead lives that are boring as fuck. dreary is one of the polite adult words for this, difficult and dreary. C is a contender.
D Since the author uses the word peacefully, the use of the word peaceful immediately makes D a strong contender. The problem lies with the word productive having two conflicting meanings. A school pupils perhaps learns the school room notion of productivity from history lessons on Luddites and weavers. Power looms made weavers more productive. A lot more productive. It made those who wore clothes better off by bringing down the price of cloth. That is a lot of people and a big price fall, so a huge gain overall. On the other hand, weavers who expected to be better off, because prosperity comes from productivity, were shocked to find the surplus of cloth and the resulting price falls more than offset the gain in the amount of cloth produced. productive is an output measure, not an input measure. productivity is a specific measure of output: output per hour of labor.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
The alternative meaning of productive lies at the intersection of pastoral romance and the Protestant work ethic. You are unproductive in the taverna, drinking Ouzo and playing Back Gammon. You are productive when you return to your farm and tend your olive grove. It is not about the fertility of the grove or the price of olives. You are unproductive when you play a video game; you are productive when you write the program for a video game (but why would any-one buy a video game if playing it is disparaged as unproductive?)
Since I'm middle aged and middle class I'm acculturated to school as a center of pointless busywork that keeps children off the streets. The devil finds work for idle hands, and we use the word productive to praise keeping those hands busy with the right kind of pointless busy work (such as making beautiful pottery that doesn't hold water, and turquoise jewelry). It contrasts with the word unproductive which disparages the forms of pointless activity preferred by younger persons or those of lower social class.
Answer D is checking that the children are picking up the correct meaning of productive. Are they well on their way to being middle aged and middle class? We wouldn't want them saying that the Anasazi are "unproductive and peaceful". We prefer them to have a fashionable sense of "Ted Kaczynski"-lite, and ignore the crassly industrial notion of productive.
I'm in a pickle. I don't know what my comment implies. On first reading I'm defending the intelligence of Illinois 8th graders. They are not stupid, the question is bad. On second reading I'm trashing a question, chosen by a clever person, to illustrate a point. That is to say, chosen by a person who is clever compared to other people. But the question is still trash, so even "clever" people are smug and stupid and we as a species are ultra-doomed :-(
AvocadoPanic
50m ago
I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to the religious schools unfortunately many are sponsored by denominations that have embraced idpol or alphabetism. Also my wife would likely need to return to work to pay the tuition.
We're supplementing homeschooling with weekly foreign language (my wife's native language) in a classroom environment and The Russian School of Math.
I was identified as gifted in elementary school, the GATE program in the district as kooky as it was made school much more engaging.
dr_analog
razorboy
52m ago
Then again, I don't think that solving this sort of complex problem with a timer over your head is empathetic or reasonable. In reality, when I come across a system constraint I have to engineer around, I at least have hours (if not days). My gut feeling was that many people failed because of the pressure and nerve aspect as opposed to the ability to solve the problem in a reasonable timeframe.
I've been doing hiring off and on for about 20 years so I feel confident offering two quick thoughts.
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Have you done mock interviews with the rest of the team to try these questions out? How do your own people do?
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Is failing to complete the problem in time that big a deal? In general I find the journey of problem solving more important than reaching the end in the allotted time. You usually know after an hour if someone is too much of a dick to work with, or if they could finish if you gave them another 15 minutes. OTOH, if you and the candidate spend an entire hour struggling with what you thought would take ten minutes, that's probably bad.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
54m ago
The moral-scientific realization that humans are equal is not in the Bible
I'd say Matthew 25:40 gets pretty close.
Throwaway05
56m ago
is a meme. Is there any evidence that experts by and large find that the NYT misrepresents findings in their field?
It's absolutely a thing.
Any time a NYT article pops up on Meddit you'll see tons of discussion about how incredibly inaccurate the medical content is, often to the point where we can't figure out what the hell is supposed to be going on or what they are talking about.
And I'm not talking things that are political or if you squint have political content (although that stuff always happens) I'm talking full on "they are saying this patient was upset about her cancer but what they are describing isn't a malignancy???"
Cook
57m ago
I don't disagree. I think this is the thesis of Garrett Jones' "Hive Mind" book, but I haven't read it.
It would have to be genetic engineering, or embryo selection, or something like that. But selecting for intelligence is thought of negatively for arbitrary reasons.
Nope. Want me to explain why not?
Aside from that, you are making a fully general argument against trusting any sort of institutional reporting, ever. I wouldn't blame you for not reading the article - it's long - but I don't see how you can be this critical in good faith without having read it.
As for the NYT, it gets plenty of details wrong, but it's better than most other American institutional media, and most of its bias comes from selective omission and overt editorializing. If the NYT says that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, I'll believe them. If NYT says that Trump fell down the steps and hit his head and died, I'll believe them. If they print a quote saying "Trump will take the vote away from women", I'll believe them that someone said those words, although the person might have been reading from a script provided by the reporter.
Why do you think they said that? I certainly didn't say that, and I don't recall them saying it either. But again, it's a long article, maybe it's in there somewhere. Someone would have to read it again to find out.
Again a fully general counterargument with no reference to any details.
This isn't new, or unique to Israel. It has a history in America, although it's harder to see with our FPTP system incentivizing 2 parties, and the increasing nationalization of politics is destroying it, but I remember people who lived in it. It didn't always have the religious angle, but most were close enough. There've been political machines, one-party counties, locally dominant religious groups, political dynasties, and in general, groups of people who vote one way because that's just what people like them do. The ones I'm most familiar with are varieties of "yellow dog Democrat" types in the South. They voted for a particular type of person, for particular reasons. Some of those reasons were more innocent ("I don't like my home being burnt to the ground") and some were not.
And a relevant similarity is that some people categorized as this group were also associated with low-grade terrorism against a disenfranchised population. That is, the various incarnations of the KKK, other similar groups, and independent actors. You can think of it as concentric circles. The circle of people who actually went out and did terrorist stuff was small. The circle of people who provided support and aid was larger. The circle who did neither, but approved of the results of the terrorism, was larger still. And largest was the circle of people who didn't participate, didn't help, didn't even approve, but still provided cover and stonewalled any attempt to stop the terrorism. Because they were still members of the group, and loyalty to the group is a high virtue, and you don't betray members of the group to outsiders.
And that's exactly what the article reminds me of. (Notice I didn't say that the article said that?)
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