domain:worksinprogress.co
sliders1234
3m ago
This tweet from an economists caught my eye.
“One of the biggest gaps in economics is explaining why outcomes differ across countries.
Why is homeownership lower in Germany? Why do the rich live the center of the city in Argentina, but in the suburbs in America?
We don't have great frameworks to answer these Qs.“
https://twitter.com/arpitrage/status/1786042798275277144?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Is this a question we really don’t know the answer to or a question that good people use the frameworks that are explanatory? I feel like the white nationalist and the woke can easily answer this question. One side will say racisms and the other side will say diversity is not our strength and people fled from crime.
Wikipedia has the Great Migration occurring 1910-1970. And White Flight as occurring 1950’s-1960’s. Cities largely built before then have dense urban cores . Those cities built after are endless suburbs. Of course cars took off as a middle class thing around this time period too. Argentina might be a higher percent European ancestry than any country in the world.
How many other question have solutions to them that aren’t analyzed because the researcher starts with the wrong frame.
DradisPing
7m ago
One of the major complaints against the progressive elites is that they are shielded from the consequences of their ideology. Victor Davis Hanson writes about it often.
For instance, the 9th circuit is in San Fransisco. However the employees that matter can afford homes in safe areas and don't have to park on the street. So it's easy for them to write off things like car break ins as no big deal. They see the situation as overprivileged whiners complaining, not failures of their policies.
People at Stanford view air conditioning as a decadent luxury, because it never gets hot. People in Fresno swelter in the heat due to high energy prices supported by those Stanford profs.
Trump support is a hard sell because Trump is in many ways a reaction to California style policies. Widespread acknowledgement of failure would need to precede Trump support.
But many of the key early Trump supporters were from California. Steven Miller, Mike Cernovich. I could find a lot more but I've spent enough time on this.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9m ago
I think like all things, the dose makes the poison here. The modern diet has so much processed food and sugar in it that it’s a toxin in that high amount. We probably eat and drink more sugar in a day or two than a farmer in 1500 would have consumed in a month.
I have some observations that support the idea that modern flavors are hyper palatable and probably not only encourage overeating at the time, but also make a normal human diet unappealing. I don’t think olive oil and water actually do anything, my personal suggestion is to simply eat bland unprocessed foods until you get used to tasting the subtle flavors of normal foods.
I think the same is true of entertainment— if you don’t do the hyper-stimulating games and tv shows and so on and just do things that people would have done in 1900 you’ll find books, magazines, board and card games, and radio dramas just as interesting as video gaming.
Hyper stimulation is a real phenomenon and I think it’s generally good to occasionally “fast” from those things, and learn to slow down and get back closer to the kind of lifestyle that was normal for most of human history.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10m ago
Generally agreed. We certainly have the ability. I assume there is some sort of treaty with each (functional) country. It’s devilishly hard to search, though.
Good story, by the way.
ares
15m ago
I don't disagree with you, but I feel like you're glossing over the parts that make this a complicated issue. Extradition treaties are complex, and don't exist between all countries. In many cases I'm glad that the more-free West can be a sanctuary for political "criminals" from the East. If Yeonmi Park jay walks, I don't want her sent back to North Korea to be executed, and I'd go so far as to say that yes, we do have an obligation to not send her back. But if she murdered someone in a State without the death penalty, should we put her in jail for life? What if it's reckless homicide? Or a refuge whose political persecution is less clear? I don't know where the lines should be drawn, and would love a good mistake-theory discussion about it. What we seem to get from the US government, though, is conflict-theory soundbites arguing for all-or-nothing solutions.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
19m ago
Ireland is moving to recognize Palestinian statehood
In what borders?
So... when is the right time to start taking TRT? Are you on it? What's your take?
I'm in my mid-40s. The biggest sign of decreased T to me is decreased sex drive. I don't have performance issues during sex, I just ... don't crave it as much and it seems to have downstream effects.
It's not at a crisis or anything. It's just like, if we have sex it'll be a solid week of dead feeling before I start to get flirty and affectionate and want to have sex again. I understand some drop-off in interest is normal in long-term relationships, but my long-term relationships in my 20s (with someone else) were more like me being a sex pest who was constantly physically affectionate and craving sex from my partner 5-7 days a week. A huge contrast to now where 2-3x a month is my norm.
This feels especially urgent to me because there's my partner's impending menopause to consider. It seems like the next ten years will be the time to get most of our sex in. Should I try to get on TRT to make it really count?
Or is this a bad trade? I fully believe the first 6 months of being on TRT is awesome. What about 6 months to ten years out? What about ten years to the rest of my life out?
sliders1234
37m ago
It’s probably about $4 trillion to just pay to raise tfr to 2.3. (75 million roughly 0-18 years olds now) and a 30% increase gets to about a 100 million. Times 40k = $40 trillion. Plus whatever tax income you lose from women not working.
Men provide two things. Sperm and financial support for mothers raising children. If you cut out financial support then it’s just sperm and females would maximize for whose sperm has the highest probability of creating talented children.
Jiro
40m ago
We don't have any obligation to keep them from being executed by their home country under other circumstances. Requiring that we keep them from being executed if they commit crimes against us is Copenhagen ethics.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
48m ago
How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?
Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.
They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.
And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.
In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone.
Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?
To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.
Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.
These corporations are subsidizing dishonesty, and then hiding behind moralistic bullshit pretending that we're becoming a "low trust society." Horse-hockey. The corporations are the ones creating a world where theft is a zero-consequence problem.
2rafa
49m ago
What they need to do is guarantee mothers the same career income they would otherwise have. So, eg. if a female doctor aged 28 has three children, she receives $2m in cash over a certain number of years. If a shop assistant of the same age has three children, she receives only $200k. No country subsidises kids to the extent that an even moderately successful woman would notice the difference.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
56m ago
True, I was thinking marginally so the first would be much higher. I am highly skeptical women would only sleep with the top 5% of men.
Bartender_Venator
58m ago
Manchester United's 2023-24 season
Glutton for punishment, huh?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1hr ago
This is a fair characterization, though I'd note that "Committing a crime" is a broader field than "drinking alcohol in the park."
Probably your third example is most apt. Carrying a firearm to intimidate others creates a very broad category of potential violations. Especially in a 2A unfriendly jurisdiction, it's a constructive ban on carrying a firearm in a holster. What constitutes intimidating someone? What constitutes "carrying a firearm to (for the purpose of) intimidating others?"
RegularlyExpressed
1hr ago
I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')
Pretty soon, I imagine. First thing you'd probably hear about is a lot of people dying in hospitals as the majority of nurses disappear. Or you'd see most activity in the retail sector comes to an abrupt halt because few stores have enough staff on hand to handle purchases. A huge recession as public demand drops due to half the adult population suddenly finding themselves without a source of disposable income. And so on.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1hr ago
I'm honored to be summoned.
Assume I know that what I really need to do is eat less, exercise more, and be happy. I agree.
But I'm now in a place I want to solve problems with money and convenience instead of hard work.
I'd view this formula more as a process: Spend Money To >>> Make Things Convenient So You Can >>> Eat Less, Exercise More, Be Happy
Target places in your life where you can use a little bit of money intelligently to improve your life outcomes, and don't be ashamed to spend it. Buy books, spend a little on going out in the right places, don't be afraid to buy a more expensive item when it's the right one.
Fitness wise, Home Gym Master Race is for me. I'm aware I could have bought about 1/5 of the things I have purchased and stuck with them, I don't really need a rack and barbells and kettlebells and a landmine and a moonboard and a rowing machine and an AirDyne bike. There are people who got fitter than me without most any of that. I often go months, or even years, barely using different items. But I come back around to them when I'm in the mood. Rather than having a barbell and forcing myself to stick to it even if I'm hating it, when I get bored of one thing I switch around. I climb for a while, then switch to working on my deadlift, then try to hit a KB pentathlon, etc. Obviously I'd be better at any one thing if I stuck to it, but I don't know that I would stick to it.
As for supplements for working out/QoL, if you're done breeding you should probably skip the minor leagues and just get on TRT at some point. I've fooled around with supplements and will probably continue to, but I'm aware that I'm nibbling around the edges while leaving the big money on the table. Because of that breeding thing, mainly. I did find that Collagen pills tended to help with minor finger injuries from climbing. The biotin in them also causes hair growth/health to improve, but for me it only seems to impact the unfortunate areas of hair (nose, pubic) rather than the ones I'd actually want.
I will say on a prior recommendation from TheMotte, I ordered a shit-ton (for me) of Modafinil online, and I've found it super useful in that I can just decide not to sleep one night, or power through a day when I didn't sleep the night before. I take half of one pill, 50mg, before an all night party or when I'm spending all night reviewing contracts. This happens maybe once a month, but when it does it's a lifesaver. But that's just me, I happen to have the opposite of whatever the alcoholism gene is, so the risk profile may be different for you if that doesn't hold, I know some people online report problems with it but they're using it a lot more than me.
ares
1hr ago
When I was a young SWO on deployment to the Horn of Africa for anti-piracy operations, we regularly came upon skiffs in open waters with a dozen Somalis crammed on. We'd drive our big warship close, then our VBSS team would take a RHIB over to see what they were doing. They always had one or two fishing poles and a few rotten fish aboard, having jettisoned their weapons as soon as they saw our big warship approaching. "We're fishermen" they'd tell us through a translator, in open ocean on a 12-foot boat with 20 men onboard. Well, one day one group of Somalis decided that they were not going to jettison their weapons, and instead opened fire on one of the ships in our ARG. They launched at least one RPG and somehow completely missed the giant, boxy, unmoving ship that was right next to them. The VBSS team shot them until they surrendered. We zip tied the Somalis, brought them onboard, and gave them a fair bit of medical care (and not just for the holes we'd seen fit to add to a few of them). So now we had these Somalis onboard, locked in our medical spaces (because while the US Navy apparently takes inspiration from jails when designing their berthing, they don't actually make any of those rooms secure for holding criminals). This was back when the US didn't recognize Somalia as a country, so our State Department was having the darndest time figuring out what to do with these guys. We drove around for a week, maybe more, before a deal was brokered to give them to Yemen. They were dropped off and (according to the scuttlebutt) promptly executed.
This was almost 20 years ago, and I still think about it regularly. Should it have gone different, from the moment the Somalis surrendered? Would have been a lot cheaper and easier to have just shot them all there and sunk their skiff, with the same outcome. But that's morally wrong, and not in keeping with the rules of war. We shouldn't've given them to Somalia; they're not a real country (still aren't, IMO) and they government would most likely use the pirates' lives to extort bribes from whatever warlords or families they could, and then free or execute them (flip a coin). We shouldn't've put them into an American jail or Gitmo because they weren't worth it.
The conclusion I keep reaching is that the Somalis (and, to bring it back to the point at hand, immigrant criminals) are a time when "don't flip the switch in the trolley problem" is the best answer. We can know that the "justice" they'll face in their homeland (or Yemen) will probably be unjust, but it's not us doing it and that absolves us of some of the moral responsibility - enough to make it the least shitty of a bunch of shitty choices. We remove them from our control and return them to a place where a government will claim jurisdiction over them, and if that government doesn't afford all the legal protections that we do for our citizens, well... that's on their government. And I know there would be extreme cases when we shouldn't give them over to the other government, like shipping our Jews off to the Nazis or our Lienz Cossacks to the Soviets (oops). But those seem like the extreme cases. As a rule, I think "make the other country deal with their citizens" is the right answer. Our State Department has the power to make every country on Earth do that, assuming we have the political willpower. I worked closely with the State Department later in my career, and there is no doubt in my mind that they're capable of brokering that deal. If the US is ever told by another country that they won't take possession of their citizens who have committed crimes in the US, it is only because the US State Department has decided against spending the effort/money to convince the other country.
JTarrou
1hr ago
You're right, but time preference and discipline are not randomly distributed, and half the population will be in the bottom half of it anyway.
To the degree that the behavior of those with poor decision making skills, short time horizons, impulse control problems etc. should be controlled, the question becomes then at what level of society to accomplish this control, and what are the upsides and downsides of each?
Gossip is relatively low stakes, but can lead to larger consequences, and isn't that reliable.
Mass public shaming campaigns ala DARE tend to be ineffective at best and counterproductive (DEI) at worst.
Institutional norms are good if you can keep them, a sort of sub-legal process of who gets to have what sort of job, or any job at all. Lots of problems with due process and hypersensitivity to public pressure campaigns, which do work on corporations better than teenagers.
Or you could just sort of build it into the legal structure, don't actually ban the behavior just barrage it with legal inconveniences like smokers or gun owners.
But ultimately, every society has a lot of people who are not going to do the pro-social thing reliably in large enough numbers unless their behavior is..... controlled is a strange word. Perhaps "averaged control" is better. Some people always swim against the current, and some amount of that is good.
The real rules of every society are always enforced. How well they work and on what percentage of the population fluctuates widely.
You are talking marginal pricing. You would also need to pay everyone for the first 1.7 tfr. The costs would be 4-5x plus less income tax collected.
This would take like an additional 30% VAT. That every man needs to pay. And since women are getting funded by the government they would only mate with the top 5% of men. A literal slave state for the other 95% of men.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
I am not sure if a 40-day ice storm can be compared with years of chronic stress occurring pre-pregnancy, during pregnancy, and in the post-pregnancy years crucial for childhood development. Table 2 in your study shows a .24 effect size for cognitive development due to ice storms however. What I do is plug in “maternal stress [serious problem]” into google scholar and consider those results. I have never come across a study that attempted to unify all of the different provlems caused by stressed mothers. We have:
-
autism: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aur.1830 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-019-01745-3
-
obesity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/obr.12951
The above are for prenatal stress, and so don’t factor for stress during motherhood, breastfeeding technique, extent of breastfeeding (huge differences in yr+ exclusive feeding and gradual weening)
Spookykou
1hr ago
Personally I do not really model governments as 'entities' that take action based on some sort of game theoretic rational self interest. Governments seem to be collections of people who are generally following their own individual incentives which can very easily lead to governments doing things that are not really in the interest of the government as a whole, if one was to think of it as an entity.
To the specific question, I think there was a very effective march through the institutions which caused woke/progressive ideas to reach fixation in the university system to such an extent that 90%+ of college graduates to come out of the last 15 years (give or take) are 'true believes' in as much as mid-wits can truly believe anything. One of those true beliefs is that crime is (almost?)totally down stream of societal oppression, and specifically that the criminal justice system is a sort of negative feedback loop that creates and then punishes criminals and that the cruel impositions of the criminal justice system upon the 'criminal class,' is an untenable injustice. I think once enough young professionals filter into the various DA offices of the world who hold these beliefs and similar you eventually get to a point where they are able to coordinate action and push through soft on crime practices based on the idea that contact with the criminal justice system is toxic.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
That's for a spouse, the situation I'm familiar with. I checked again, and for parents and grandparents, the sponsor vouches for 20 years (except in Quebec where it's 10 years).
If I had to make up a number I'd go for at least as long as it would take for them to qualify for citizenship.
The number would be 3 years then. The requirement to qualify is being a permanent resident and having lived in Canada for 3 years in the last 5 years.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1hr ago
We have about 74M women that are the denominator for our TFR calculation. According to the World Bank the United States has a TFR of 1.7. That means if all those 74M women had 0.5 babies (or half of them had 1 baby) that would raise US TFR by 0.5 to 2.2 (woops, I said 2.3). I assumed we'd pay each of these women the US median income as a stand in for knowing their actual income distribution. So the cost is 74,000,0000.540,480=1,497,760,000,000.
I think it has something to do with scarring from multiple c-sections, and longer recovery time. My mother said that one of the big reasons she never had a third child was because the first was a c-section, and at the time they just automatically recommended it for subsequent births, and then the second was harder to recover from and she didn't want to do it again.
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