domain:kvetch.substack.com
zeke5123a
56m ago
I read him to mean older mothers are likely to have less intelligent kids because egg and sperm quality degrades as humans age. Not sure if it is true though it seems plausible. I’m not sure I would really trust the science here since the result is clearly politically salient.
zeke5123a
55m ago
I think the argument is that it increases overall utility; not money. So whilst kaldor hicks efficient it may be hard to compensate the losers with a tax on the winners if there is less pecuniary wealth.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
51m ago
IMO at least some of that should be back-loaded. For example, count child-rearing years as median income or last earned income (whichever is higher) * number of children for the purpose of calculating social security benefits. Advantage: selects for low time-preference. Advantage: Defers payout contingent on future taxbase able to support it. Advantage: Provides the long-term spousal independence that women seem to crave.
zeke5123a
50m ago
This is where fathers (and to a lesser extent brothers and uncles) are supposed to provide that safety net. I need to be wealthy enough to take care of my girls if they get into a bad situation with a future husband.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
49m ago
I'm not sure how to bridge our different reading of the statute, but I don't agree with that summary at all. The text there [emphasis mine]:
§ 14‑12.7. Wearing of masks, hoods, etc., on public ways. No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State. (1953, c. 1193, s. 6; 1983, c. 175, ss. 1, 10; c. 720, s. 4.)
This seems really clear to me that intent aside, the effect needs to be concealing the identity of the wearer. For example, the proverbial immunocompromised patient going to a hospital - we know they're not concealing their identity because their actions require the people they're interacting with to know who they are! It's true that determining whether someone's "face is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer" requires some degree of interpretation on the part of police and prosecutors, but I think that's just an unavoidable part of criminal law. The change here isn't actually a change to the need for contextual interpretation, it's just removing health as a fully general exception.
If someone wanted to take the principled stance that you should just be allowed to conceal your identity, I think they could probably make a pretty reasonable case for that, but it would be a pretty different argument than what we see the legislators and newspapers running with.
I would agree that in my example that funny hats at the mall are now banned. What I wouldn't say is that funny hats were generally banned. You can wear your funny hat to a lot of places! You just can't do it at the mall anymore. In the mask case, people that have some actual medical reason and aren't concealing their identity shouldn't really bump into much of a problem. The one area of overlap that I could see this actually being a thing is someone that insists it's medical getting into a conflict with a business-owner that just hates masks and wants them to take their stupid mask off. In the hat analogy, I would think it was weird if someone was super pissed about the funny hat change when what they really don't like is the loitering rule at the mall.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
49m 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.
pigeonburger
49m 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.
Spookykou
47m 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.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
43m 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)
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.
JTarrou
36m 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.
ares
29m 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.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
29m 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.
RegularlyExpressed
19m 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
18m 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?"
stav
6m ago
I think the answer is pretty obvious. This is what happens when you get Indians, blacks, South Americans, Arabs etc. in large numbers. Their culture is just like this and it's obvious if you look at the countries they come from. Every one of their countries are low trust societies. Now you get Indians taking advantage of food banks and then saying it's racism when people are upset: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/indians-abroad/story/indian-student-canada-food-bank-racial-bias-wilfrid-laurier-university-student-visa-2531694-2024-04-25
For the shrimp, why couldn't they just say it's for one person? My guess is they were almost always black and scared of being called racist.
Bartender_Venator
3m ago
Manchester United's 2023-24 season
Glutton for punishment, huh?
I don't think the trust problem is a response to the selfishness problem, because just saying "people are being selfish" has no explanatory power. Are people more selfish because of genetics? Have all the selfless people selected out of the gene pool?
On the other hand, if you present selfishness as a rational response to a society that they don't trust will repay pro-social behavior, you get a lot further with explanations that match observations. Trust is downstream of shared identity, experience and culture (see: Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone). If I think of my fellow citizens as being somewhat similar to me, I can easily imagine them coming to the same pro-social conclusions as me. Shared identity, experience and culture are impacted negatively by multiculturalism and by emphasing diversity. Hence why high trust societies are typically homogenous societies.
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