domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
2rafa
6m ago
It was by no means extraordinary anywhere. It may seem extraordinary to many youngsters, I suppose, because they compare a world of fancy touchscreens of all sorts, social media, the laptop class lifestyle etc. to a world of stagnant socialism without any of those, and conclude that there must have been a huge improvement in the average quality of life, when in fact there was no such thing, and it's all just self-delusion driven mostly by Russophobia.
There was a huge improvement in average quality of life. The number of Western countries that saw similarly rapid transformations is very small. Ireland is probably the only one that wasn’t communist before 1989.
SSCReader
14m ago
But if I do look, open my door step out and you deliberately speed up to hit me, I still take the liability seems entirely unworkable.
Because now, we have legalized tit for tat, you hit me, if I survive I wait outside your house and wait for you to try and get into your car and hit you.
Its entirely unworkable.
freemcflurry
16m ago
He'd pay a small amount of income taxes on his Uber earnings, assuming he exceeded the standard deductible. But Uber doesn't provide health insurance to drivers and since he was over 65 he was very likely on medicare and the cost of that would exceed anything an Uber driver would ever pay in.
haroldbkny
22m ago
with their usual mix of complete cynicism and complete idealism
That's a great way of putting it. My least favorite arguments I've had with the woke are the ones in which my opponent argues in this way as an attempt to excuse their worst aspects, like "every movement bends the truth, it doesn't make social justice bad just because we lie, too" or "so what if the woke encourages nosy busybodies and wokescolds? The conservatives do it, too". I've never known how to argue back other than just insisting that they should be better than stooping to low techniques then making excuses.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22m ago
The core financing system is savings-based - everyone in Singapore contributes 37% of their income (some of this is formally an employer contribution, but the incidence is on the employee) into a forced-savings fund. There is a complex formula which determines how much of that is allocated to the HSA "pot" (Medisave) but the effect is that most people end up with $1 less in their retirement pot for each $1 they spend on healthcare. This is backstopped by a government-subsidized catastrophic insurance fund (Medishield) and an indigent fund which is made deliberately unpleasant to claim from (Medifund).
But it looks like the secret sauce of how the system works is on the provider side - most Singapore hospitals are State-owned but commercially managed, and the Singapore government generally runs State-owned enterprises well. There is also a very deliberate class system - if a Singapore citizen stays in a class C ward (nightingale wards with no facilities and deliberately inferior food) the government picks up 65-80% of the bill and if they use a class B2 ward (similar but with 6-bed bays) the government picks up 50-65%. Class B1 patients get 4-bed bays, decent food, and phones and TV at the bedside and get 20% subsidy. Class A patients get a private room and pay full freight (including an extra $200 a night or so on top of class B1 to cover the room itself). Medisave and Medishield only cover the class B2 fees so you have to pay cash for B1 or A.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
29m ago
Feminism is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is more fundamental: human want. People want nicer houses, nicer cars, nicer food. They want financial security and control over their own lives. Human wants are unlimited and they are the fundamental force pushing towards the efficient utilization of human labor.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29m ago
Please tone down the outgroup-booing. This is waging the culture war, not discussing it.
Folamh3
34m ago
If you emigrate to a country at the age of (say) 61, you are almost certainly going to be a net drain on that country's resources for far longer than you will be a positive contributor, even if you work for a few years.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
35m ago
No_one
37m ago
Same thing essentially, there might be some biochemical downside but a tablespoon a day is far below typical intake in a western diet so..
sun_the_second
38m ago
Restating your opinion in the form of a wojak picture doesn't make it more true.
No_one
40m ago
This is an unwarranted response, I think.
I'm generally suspicious of CS_CA but he's right here.
Skibboleth
40m ago
NYT exit polls indicate the opposite. Also, a 2022 House Exit Poll for another example of the GOP winning high earners.
I'm far too lazy to run around aggregating a bunch of exit polls, but it doesn't really matter that much because whatever the exact tilt they're all pointing the same way. Namely, that the spread on voting by income level may be electorally significant (not hard when margins are so low), but it is not demographically substantial (i.e. if you were to get a random sample of any of the strata, roughly half would be voting for each major party). Thus, my initial point remains the same:
either major party trying to position themselves as the party of the poor/working class is typical American posturing where everyone wants to be rich but no one wants to be Rich.
Saying one party is the party of the working class because slightly more than half of voters go for the other party while slightly less than half go for the same seems like it's drawing too strong a conclusion from too little evidence. Whichever poll you reference, characterizing the conflict as one of pure class comes across as slightly farcial. It is, however, consistent with my theory that the liberal-conservative conflict is sectoral (in particular, merchants and gentry versus professionals) and normative.
less charitably: the "realignment" is conservative wishcasting that more reflects how suburban conservatives would like to see themselves. It's part of the broader populist-conservative 'just a little guy' routine where Trumpists pretend that they have no power or influence. Admitting that they're actually well-off and influential would puncture the fantasy that they're rebels against the empire instead of engaged in a peer conflict.
TitaniumButterfly
41m ago
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
If you take a plot of land with a healthy ecosystem and burn it all down, you'll create farmland that is incredibly productive for a few cycles, after which it becomes a barren wasteland in which nothing can grow.
Feminism is civilizational slash-and-burn.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
42m ago
Yeah.
Hell, we saw it with Queen Elizabeth, who’s got a much better reputation in the U.S. than either of those.
I’ve got a theory that one of the signs of a…good? healthy? site is people willing to say the boring thing. Small talk. Socially acceptable responses. Stuff that real humans would say to other real humans’ faces. Those make it more like a community and less like performance art.
Sometimes we do a good job of it. I like that.
No_one
46m ago
Yes, it's a morass of propaganda. Some things, such as social media casualty counts done by the other side using an open methodology allow us to glimpses of how things are. E.g.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/07/10/bring-out-your-dead
Other things - like pre-war information etc also.
And then you've got the amputee numbers:
upwards of 20k. There's another article saying 'around 50k' by some amputee charity person.
That's 200k dead if we assume Ukraine is slightly worse at casualty care than US in GWOT. (~6 KIA per amputee).
pigeonburger
47m ago
I would guess there's a lot more sponsored immigrants that are/will be economically productive (spouses and children) than there are elderly sponsored immigrants, making it not worth writing an exception around, especially when there's a pretty compelling compassionate reason to allow the relatively few cases.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
49m ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
49m ago
What do those numbers look like for white-collar work?
Cause I don’t think the pool of immigrants picking fruit in the Central Valley (or cleaning toilets in Google HQ) are really driving prices, no. In a supply-choked market, the wealthier buyer is more important.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
51m ago
The solution is simple. If the state wants women to give up their careers, their education, their financial independence so that they will have and raise children then the state needs to adequately compensate those women for what it is asking them to give up. No state on earth is prepared, or could afford, to do this, which is why functionally all efforts to increase fertility fail.
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
Why could this work historically? Partially because much more of women's labor was needed inside the home (and so unavailable for work outside the home) and partially because there were actual legal restrictions on the work women (especially married women) could do outside the home.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
57m ago
An urban growth boundary would be a terrible thing. Letting people build on farmland they own is no different to letting people build on urban land they own.
Without this, how would you stop white people from moving out to the suburbs again?
curious_straight_ca
59m ago
The kind of woman who would be 'impure' a few hundred years ago is one who went against the explicit desires of her family and culture. The kind of woman who is 'impure' today is one who does what the culture guides you to do. The supposedly deontological choice is just selecting for something very different today. Nothing is absolute, and not being pure is, if it's a negative signal, necessarily a weaker one today, and not one worth trading off against everything else. Just like a culture with deep traditions about planting and harvest times need to modify those traditions when they move to a new climate.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
59m ago
there are a million ways to cut red tape besides allowing multiple family building in single family zones", but for some reason these organizations are ONLY focused on ways to increase density.
Really? Here's California yimby's policy page.
https://cayimby.org/resources/policy-framework/chapter-1/
Here's the red tape they want to cut that's not just up zoning.
Create a state-level board of appeals for permitting.
Direct HCD to conduct a review of international building codes.
Direct HCD to create rules and guardrails around nexus studies.
Direct HCD to provide guidance on representative "community input" models.
Direct the Law Revision Commission to study existing housing law and provide recommendations for simplification.
Reform environmental review for housing.
Standardize the post-entitlement process statewide.
In fact it's most of them. And I certainly don't see anything about enforcing urban growth boundaries.
Mostly 6-story residential vs 2 as the default. You don't see many single-family homes with garages in Paris proper.
For comparison, SF proper is 800k people at 19k/square mile, Inner London is 3.4 million at 28k/square mile, Paris proper is 2.1 million at 52k/square mile, and Manhattan is 1.6 million at 75k/square mile. SF is mostly 2-story single-family houses. Inner London is mostly 2-3-story rowhouses. Paris is mostly midrise apartment buildings, Manhattan is a mixture of midrise and highrise. You can see an almost perfect linear relationship between building height and population density.
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