domain:academic.oup.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5m ago
Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees
They've been telling their employees NOT to interfere with robbers, this isn't a matter of penny-pinching. Plug 'employee fired for obstructing theft in store' into your search engine.
Nor does law enforcement care to crack down on basics like robberies, car theft, vagrants, drug dealing and so on (unless of course Xi Xingping is coming to town). See the open air drug markets in US cities, or how some US train stations are used for enjoying narcotics rather than travelling by train: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains
It's not just corporations, it's a breakdown in society generally. The corporations don't want theft of their products but they're clearly more afraid of inconveniencing criminals, just like every other institution.
sliders1234
13m ago
I am actually not sure if this economists is blind. I think he might be asking the question when he can’t say the answer.
They do discuss this paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292198000191
And he eventually says this.
"How different countries deal with race and ethnic differences more broadly" is very much an example of the cross-country differences I think are interesting!”
I am updating my priors to he knew he was posting bait in a completely innocent way. My guess is he’s not woke. He chose Buenos Aires for the comparison when I think he could have chosen many other comparisons. Even I think Mexico City would work as I know plenty of rich Mexicans who live there. Argentina even seems to the average person to have some Nazi/fascists connotations.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
14m ago
How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?
This was an unnecessarily antagonistic comment in an otherwise fine post.
ser
21m ago
What product/service has had significant impact on your quality of life? For me, it's was a nice standing desk and a nice office chair (Herman Miller Embody). I don't even stand much at my desk, but being able to make minor adjustments to its height has been very useful since most desks are too short for me.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
32m ago
The peak of US crude oil production seems to have been a few months ago, but as far as I can tell "wtf happened in 1971" style rhetoric is still in full effect.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=m
ResoluteRaven
40m ago
I work in tech, but my employer explicitly forbids walk-ins and will throw out anyone who tries. Which did happen once.
As for the social consequences of getting rejected, it’s kind of circular. I was on the internet in 2010 and feminist websites did pretty much say on behalf of frustrated gamer girls everywhere, “asking out a girl without her explicit permission in advance is literally sexual harassment and me and my friends treat it as such”. In retrospect, that was a narrow subgroup of crazies but without experience, how is a young, naive man supposed to work that out? Then MeTop comes along and, yup, the wrong pass can destroy your career.
Is it any wonder that people got afraid to date except on an app where she’s explicitly expressed interest by swiping right?
iprayiam3
46m ago
Sure but can you be slightly more specific? What market is it in? What class of problems does it solve? Is it entertainment? Is it business focused? Is it for everyone? For girls? Young people? Technical people?
ResoluteRaven
48m ago
Two somewhat related examples are liberals who believe that "the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice" being confronted with what in their mental framework are inexplicable political reversals such as the election of Trump or the repeal of Roe v. Wade and (I imagine this one might be a bit more controversial here) economists who don't connect the economic malaise in the US after 1971 with the peak in domestic oil production and subsequent higher energy costs because their thinking has become almost entirely divorced from the actual material inputs that drive the production of goods and services.
hydroacetylene
50m ago
A warship almost certainly had the ability to sink their crappy wooden boat before they could surrender.
Corvos
50m ago
Thanks for the serious reply.
The country is England, just for the sake of clarity. I might be wrong, but Somerville looks like a pretty standard suburb to me, I think we’re already building in at least that level of density in most areas. Here is a randomly chosen town street. It is nice, though :)
We seriously lack accessible green space anywhere near the big cities, which are constantly expanding. And big chunks of land are rock moorland and difficult to build on (including most of Scotland).
hydroacetylene
51m ago
Mormons in the 2010's had a TFR of almost 3.5, and tradCaths today have a claimed TFR(yes, the internal data is not very good) of 3.6. Both of those groups use technology and the internet.
hydroacetylene
53m ago
It's not a drive for status. It's a terror of being dependent on men. Mormons, tradCaths, Amish, etc have gotten around this by convincing their women and girls that their men will treat them well, it's the ones outside, out in the world, that you should scared of. Obviously that's harder to do on a society wide scale.
TIRM
55m ago
Okay. 3 years to be eligible for permanent residency and then Google says 5 more to be further eligible for citizenship. So 8 years from stepping foot in Canada to possibly getting citizenship.
I would have gone with 8 then. But they went with the time to permanent residency.
aqouta
55m ago
I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.
Surely the play is to give her a portion of her offspring's income, no?
hydroacetylene
56m ago
It seems far more plausible that Red Lobster unleashed unlimited shrimp as a last stand to stay open, hoping it would be a loss-leader that would enable them to pay off whatever debt they had to go into to run it, and that they were in dire straights to even consider it. If unlimited shrimp was the only problem they would have simply revoked the deal and moved on.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
We can know that the "justice" they'll face in their homeland (or Yemen) will probably be unjust,
Why is executing pirates unjust?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
Interestingly enough, the one author I ever link on this site recently did a series of articles talking about his interpretation of some of the same phenomena.
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-lenocracy/
The word I came up with is “lenocracy.” The first part of that word comes from leno, the Latin term for a pimp. Yes, what the word means is a government of pimps.
Let’s unpack that phrase a little bit. If, as the saying goes, prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then pimping must be up there in the oldest half dozen or so. What makes a pimp economically interesting is that he adds no value to the exchanges from which he profits. He doesn’t produce any goods or services himself. His role is wholly parasitic. He inserts himself into the transaction between the sex worker who provides the service and the customer who wants it, and takes a cut of the price in exchange for allowing the transaction to happen.
This kind of parasitic interaction is far from unusual in economics, but it’s not always as common as it is now. There are societies and eras in which most economic activity is mediated by pimps of various kinds, and other societies and other eras in which such arrangements are relatively rare (and often harshly penalized). Right now, in the modern industrial world, we live in an economy where nearly all exchanges are subject not just to the exactions of a single pimp but to whole regiments of pimps, each of whom has to be paid in order for the exchange to take place. Furthermore, this orgy of pimping is sponsored, controlled, and mandated by government at all levels and by the holders of political and economic power more generally. Thus, lenocracy.
I think that this is actually a separate phenomenon to high/low trust societal changes. That's definitely happening and we're seeing the impacts, but I think the idea of lenocracy provides more explanatory power in this case.
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
It's eerie to see a twitter thread like that one these days that isn't overflowing with noticeposting. It's easy to forget that the Austrian School focus on individual human motivation and action is by no means universally held. To see concepts like "white flight" or "the car lobby" tossed out as explanations as if they are fundamental forces of society, and not simply the aggregate preferences of individual actors, is jarring. The real questions are, why are the white people fleeing? and why was the car lobby so popular?
2D3D
1hr ago
good people have learned to no consider the frameworks that are explanatory
Disparate impact is the metastasized final form of the academic postmodernism/marxism cancer that festered after the students of the 70s survived to be the administrators of today. The powers have a set view and anyone that goes against the Message is to be shut down, see the unpersoning of Roland Fryer for the best example.of this.
As @jeroboam states, blank slatism is prevalent and the mirror to blank slatism means that all outcomes for all peoples must be equal with the same inputs. The end effect is that anything that has a race or class component show up anywhere must automatically presume the unequal outcome is because of SOMETHING LARGER that maps back to greater discrimination of some sort.
This is super funny because obvious answers become deliberately ignored. Urban communities in the USA could not keep blacks out, and as the blacks came in so did crime and therefore diminishing property values + white flight. Urban communities in Argentina and other capital cities with high crime have private police to kick out criminals, criminals who have no champions at the top to force society to accept them. That the criminals are black/mestizo is irrelevant: no one gives a shit about racial sensitivities and so the criminals have no free pass.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I've definitely seen girls playing foursquare spontaneously among themselves, and I think I've seen them playing soccer.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Whither the way of the Boomer; or, Where Hydro rants about the Gosh-durned millenials
The dominant trend of the new generations is to replace the boomer's functioning social technology with actual technology that doesn't work and then justify it with orgiastic doomerist neuroticism.
Downstream in the thread- literally the first topic this week- there's discussions of modern dating and the social technology around it. The point I made was that the loss of meeting people in real life didn't happen because of the sexual revolution, because for 40-50 years after the sexual revolution people met in real life. The loss of meeting people in real life happened because of the apps. And of course the apps displaced meeting people in person, and it kinda seems like everyone who actually wants to have a relationship and not just a hookup would rather meet people in person. But the justification for nobody meeting in person anymore was #metoo when people defended the apps, and 'well it would be kind of awkward' sometimes. Usually the latter explanation is male, and when you drill into it with 'the worst she can say is no, why don't you give it a whirl' the explanation is 'because then I won't be able to speak to anyone she knows ever again'. Sorry, rejections just aren't that awkward. And of course #metoo is in its usual formulation also delusionally neurotic.
But I want to talk about jobs. It's time for a nice change of pace. Back in the day, to get a blue collar job you walked in, physically, to a blue collar workplace and asked for one. It's true; ask the old men and they will tell you. And you can in fact still do this; I reckon any one of you can find a job within biking distance of your house if not walking distance by asking around enough, in maybe an afternoon's effort- granted, probably a job as, like, a dishwasher, but the boomers don't regale you with stories of walking into a job as CEO of the company. No, they found jobs as janitors and cashiers and, yes, dishwashers and they got their positions as lawyers and accountants through classified ads. The point is, the zoomers have the same opportunities as boomers to go find employment, at least if you use a big enough scale(Detroit has fewer opportunities than in 1955). No, not as computer programmers, but well-remunerated white collar work has never worked like that. My grandfather(RIP) used to tell the story of how when he first started college he could find a job in an afternoon for his spending money, and can anyone do that anymore? I did it in the 2010's. And it seems to be that the now-hiring signs adorning many stores and restaurants are there with this expectation, elsewise why would they exist? It's just that zoomers won't apply, as any restaurant manager will tell you. Instead there's online applications of the sort that are notoriously shitty when as anyone who's gotten that sort of low-level job recently can tell you, HR just filters it out for not having ten years experience and a masters degree in washing dishes when the store manager would've happily hired you after a handshake. I listen to restaurant managers complain about it all the time, usually in rather different language. It's not hard to draw the connection to millennial dating woes above; if you're too scared to ask a girl out due to paranoid imaginings you're probably also too scared to just go talk to the manager and ask for a job.
Downthread also, there's discussion of 'why do women give up the tradlife when it delivers the things they say are important to them' to the answer of 'because they believe most men will horrifically abuse them as soon as they can get away with it, even though that belief isn't true'. Likewise, this is the same quality of orgiastic doomerist neuroticism. In the fifties, when a large majority of women were totally dependent on their husbands, my great-grandmother was considered singularly unlucky because her second husband beat on her and was an alcoholic. Obviously, these two sets of implied numbers don't match up.
In the breeding of hunting dogs, there is this quality of just going for it which is referred to as grit. It seems our society is sorely lacking in grit. Safetyism is a dominant component of our culture, and this gets used to justify throwing out social technology that just makes things work.
For sure. I was pretty tired while writing my post, so I didn't do a very good job of expressing my overall intent with it. What I had was an extreme, and unhealthy reaction to my girlfriend's normal past.
You hit the nail on the head here. I was definitely struggling with swinging between these two extremes. To fix that, I had to do a lot of work with empathy, understanding why my girlfriend got together with these people and why she left. But I could only start doing that after I got over obsessing about details in the past.
I still try to focus more on how great I am and not how bad they were, as that's healthier. Even its just a crutch to get to the ultimate end goal of becoming fully secure in myself and not thinking about her past any more than a mentally healthy person normally would. Getting older should take care of that. For now, it beats feeling bad all the time.
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