HaroldWilson
7mo ago
I can't imagine you'll see many comfortable BMWs unless the UK has a very different used car market than the US right now.
There actually are even under 10k BMWs with under 15,000 miles on the market online right now. Autotrader is very good for this sort of searching.
Huh. I definitely didn't know there was an association between age and driving a sedan. That's very much not a stereotype in India. Sedans are aspirational, and so are SUVs, though not as much as the States.
Yeah it's really hard to understate the dominance of hatchbacks among young car drivers, which is partly driven by their relatively better fuel consumption, insurance grouping, price etc. than bigger cars of course, but still, perhaps downstream of those factors there is a general cultural association of hatchbacks as young peoples' cars. Not exclusively, older people do drive hatchbacks often too, but virtually every young person drives a hatchback. Saloons/sedans are - at least in my impression, maybe other Brits would disagree - pretty deeply uncool for a young person and associated with balding professionals. Not necessarily a reason not to get one, if you don't care what other people think (and I have no idea how young you are), and it's not like it matters that much, but if you do something to be aware of. Also bear in mind that among some elements of the middle classes 'looking' aspirational is not necessarily a good thing, though again this doesn't really matter and no-one will care about your car much anyway.
Sedans just aren't that popular full stop, as they get outcompeted as family cars by crossovers, estates and SUVs which are more practical, and without either young people or families it doesn't leave a huge market.
A premium I'm willing to accept. I'd call it a deal breaker really. While I did/am learning to drive stick, I consider it a nuisance, even if I'm sure I'd get used to it like everyone else. I likely will be at best ok at driving by the time I'm in the UK, I'm resuming my driving lessons and do actually need to pass them, but even with our questionable roads, I doubt I'd be entirely comfortable. Still have to make do, if I leave with a driving license that earns me 2 years of leeway before I have to apply for a British one, which is much harder to get.
Fair (though I've got to imagine that even if the test is harder driving in Britain is much easier than in India), but bear in mind that if you do the test in Britain in an automatic you will not be allowed to drive a manual under any circumstances, which might be annoying if you ever need to drive a rental car/van/friend's car/whatever.
Overall, if you are looking for an automatic in the £10k range, you will be able to get a considerably lower mileage, more economical, newer car if you do go for a hatchback. For that price you can get a virtually new 2023 Corsa at the moment and you would struggle to get any low-mileage sedan that wasn't old or uneconomical.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
10-15k is a fair bit higher than you really need to spend to get something decent imo, if 'every penny saved helps'. Hatchbacks tend to provide much better value than other body types, and imo for a relatively young person look better anyway. Saloons are very middle aged. Automatics command a premium too as you doubtless know, and after a while driving a manual it really becomes second nature.
Still, even if you do want an automatic it's hard to beat a Vauxhall Corsa for value - yes it's a hatchback, but all the 2010s ones look good. There are automatic versions with <40k miles for less than 6 grand on autotrader.
If you really do want a saloon, a Volvo S40/60/80 might be decent value and pretty reliable? There are S40s with <30,000 miles in the £5-6k range, a handful of them automatic.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
It really is superb. The range and importance of the interviewees is astonishing. There are good quality versions of every episode on Dailymotion iirc.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.
Which is not a landslide at all. Trump's cap is at best 322, realistically 312 (MN the difference), hardly above Biden's 2020 result. To go any higher he'd have to start pulling some pretty preposterous states out of the bag. In any case, Trump's polling margin even in true swing states is low single digits, the economy has 6 months to get even better and Trump still has his trials to contend with. It's way, way too early to predict a 'landslide'. A week is a long time in politics, six months is an eternity.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.
Well maybe but that's sort of the point. If this is simply a right-wing reddit that doesn't say a great deal for it really.
Would you have a reference of a discussion of these results? I really wouldn't know where to look for something like that.
Some stuff here; https://cepa.stanford.edu/educational-opportunity-monitoring-project/achievement-gaps/race/
For example the development in race relations which caused the end of segregation has been having an effect on the genetic structure of the 'black' population
I don't think this can account for the 1970s and 1980s improvement in black performance. By 1980 black inter-racial marriage rates were a whopping 5%, a figure which increased only quite slowly and gradually over the following years, not really compatible with the quickest convergence being during those years. There is the question you raise about changes in identification, but again I don't think that was occurring - not in most of the country anyway - to any significant extent during the fastest years of decline (during the years to which that data goes back).
It's possible that the way some of these institutions work is influencing the measurements of the outcomes
That doesn't seem too likely given the nature of the data. It's from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, who administer their own nationwide tests to students, which are (obviously) the same for every race. Could there be some increased level of teaching to the tests etc. from teachers/schools in order to boost their numbers. Maybe? But again if this were so you'd surely expect the strongest effect of that to be now, when the schools are under pressure to improve equitable outcomes etc., not in the 1970s. And wouldn't we see that reflected across the board, not just in black students? If this was a case of schools/districts marking their own homework, no pun intended, then one might be more suspicious but I don't think it is.
Better access to more competent teachers ('white' ones)? Passive diffusion of so-called 'white' values from the 'white' pupils to the 'black' ones?
Well to be clear, if it were either of these that would validate the Brown decision, because it would prove that segregation was lowering the relative quality of the education received by black students.
General lowering of expectations as a consequence of the ruin of society brought about by the same forces that ended segregation?
What forces do you suppose these to have been? I would put the Cold War and WW2 pretty high on the list of things that ended segregation, not sure they brought about the ruin of society though.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
education of African-Americans is any better today?
Relatively, yes. Unfortunately comparable data seems only really to go back to the 70s - though desegregation of schools took a while to get going in earnest - but since then the black-white achievement gap has been closing at a fair clip - convergence stalled in the 90s but got back on course in the 2000s. State-based data which would allow us to look just at the South only goes back to 1990 disappointingly, so we don't know what component of convergence is accounted for by non-Southern states - still though, the overall picture is of a gap closing post-integration, and in 1970 still over half of African-Americans lived in the South.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
that integration doesn't make the negro child equal to the white child.
That is irrelevant, whether or not it is true. Segregation need only to have adversely impacted the education of black children in any way, and to any non-zero extent, in order to be impermissible (and, also, one cannot criticise the Brown decision on the basis of putative information not available at the time). There was every reason, and still is now, to believe that segregation ipso facto prevented the provision of an equal education. For one thing our prior should be very high that segregated education impacted outcomes - would it not be quite astonishing if integrated and segregated systems merely happened to produce the same outcomes? In turn, the African-American was always going to come off worse in the latter system. Put it this way. Is there anywhere in the South you can point to that had established a reasonably equal segregated education system by the time of Brown? If none of them achieved it within well over half a century, it was quite plainly never going to happen.
The (pretty well unanimous) conclusions of research conducted prior to Brown into the issue of the impact of segregation and institutionalised discrimination on the development of black children is well summarised here, from p. 139 on.
https://archive.org/details/personalityinmak0000midc/page/138/mode/2up
it was chosen by the voters, as is their right to do in a constitutional republic
Segregationists did not give a damn about rights in a constitutional republic, nor about the will of the people, hence their systematic attempts to disenfranchise black voters. The South has only itself to blame - segregated education was never going to be equal when managed by unrepentant racists. Segregation may have been chosen by the (white) voters of the relevant states, but its abolition was likewise chosen by the nation's voters at their federal elections, as is their right.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
If the cachet of a PhD is that it is something relatively few people can do
The cachet of a PhD might be that, but that doesn't mean that's why one ought to be proud of it. It's only correlated. You should be proud of it because it's hard, and not many people can do it because it is hard. But you shouldn't be proud of it because not many people do it, that's getting the chain of causation the wrong way round. Hence;
If everyone gets a PhD with their box of cornflakes, is that an achievement to be proud of?
No, but not because everyone has one, but because you didn't have to do anything to get it. Which again are correlated - everyone has one because it comes with their cornflakes - but not the same thing.
Here's a perhaps clearer example. If I decided to learn to a very basic level some conversational phrases in an ultra-obscure language for a couple of hours, that would already get me to a level of knowledge rarer in the the general population than having a PhD. But that obviously doesn't mean that I should be prouder of the former than the latter, if for instance I had both.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
Hell yes
Why not?
in direct opposition to the citizens, and their elected representatives
It is not the Supreme Court's job to reflect the will of the 'citizens and their elected representatives'.
read into the law what had not been written.
This is the more relevant criticism, however I don't think it's fair at all. That segregated education denied African-Americans the 'equal protection of the laws' would seem to me pretty obvious. After all, if there really was no difference in the education being received, then why was segregation necessary? Even the lower court whose decision Brown overturned conceded that segregation ipso facto entailed an unequal education.
Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system
Simply following the text of a law through to its logical conclusion and then applying it is not 'reading into the law what was never written' - or rather, it might be, but one must also read into a law what is logically implied by it.
Lies and propaganda, mostly. They said it wouldn't change the character of the nation, and on that basis, it was unopposed
If this is true, then why, when immigration did increase substantially in the following decades, was the backlash, all things considered, rather muted?
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
If that's true, then why, when migration did increase significantly from non-European countries, were there few electoral consequences?
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
Might I gently suggest that in case of a nuclear war the finer points of hate speech laws and college campus environments may no longer be a particularly urgent concern.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
If you want to practice blind allegiance to a sacred document, go to a church/mosque/synagogue. That is no way to run a country.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
No-one is disputing this. I think the point is rather that, if you dropped 30 Romanians or Finns into this school, they would probably self-segregate together as well, at least as strongly as the American students of different races.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
That rather depends on what happens in the future. History casts a long shadow. While you can undo slavery, if you create a enormous racial underclass you can't expect to wipe away three centuries of that history in a short amount of time. I don't just mean this in a 'systemic racism' way, but also in the broader cultural heritage of slavery - thinking here of Ogbu, 'acting white' etc.
If these differences are inherent though, how have swathes of African-Americans been able to become - in all but colour - indistinguishable from their white neighbours, friends and colleagues? Until very recently, the black-white wealth gap was on a long-term downward trend. The crime/imprisonment gap is also on a downward trend.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
without legislative authority
What is this even supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that the Civil Rights Act (and other related pieces of federal legislation) were unconstitutional?
it's the royal court who have decreed it, and the country then gets dragged along behind.
If the country was being simply 'dragged along' in matters of race and immigration, why did Hart-Celler poll so well (70% approval)?
If Americans got to choose, they would have chosen white
They did get to chose. It's called representative democracy. At any time they could - and can - elect a Congress with a white nationalist majority.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
how much effort it takes to produce
This has nothing to do with how many other people can do it. It's reasonable for, for instance, someone with some physical disability to be as proud at completing a comparatively short run as someone else is at finishing an ultra-marathon, if equal effort was demanded of them. If swimming suddenly and totally fell out of fashion as a thing to learn recreationally, such that fewer people could swim at all than had a PhD, that would not then imply that if I went off and learnt to swim to a bronze certificate standard it would be an achievement to be proud of.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
The nice thing about sovereignty is that peoples get to define themselves
I don't see where this gets him. People do get to define themselves, and, say, Britons or Americans have decided to expand who is included amongst 'themselves'.
Anyway this is similarly amusing to the debates between the 9 different factions of Trotskyites which get played out in the pages of magazines with a combined readership of 8. The grandiosity of it all is utterly bizarre for a movement which is - thankfully - so powerless and marginal.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
400 years
Of which well over 200 were spent in chattel slavery, and the following century as a legal underclass.
Try sending your kid to a 90% black school and ask them how easy it is to fit in because everyone eats peanut butter
I suspect it would be substantially easier to fit in than doing so in a school in rural Romania.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
But that doesn’t negate a thesis that they thought it would was good strategy.
True enough, but I don't see why it would ever have been considered a particularly good strategy by anyone in the first place.
mail in ballots
Well unless the Democratic puppet masters also control Utah, Montana, Idaho, Alabama, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Arkansas etc. etc. then it does seem pretty ridiculous to call the expansion of mail-in voting an instance of them being in 'plain sight'. And you are pretty much yourself conceding that this is just a conspiracy with the utterly lame excuse that you can't furnish much adequate evidence because 'you can never prove any theory in this day and age'.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
I know that's the thesis, I'm just saying you can't prove that simply by the fact that Floyd's story was covered disproportionately, since individual cases prompting a much broader movement addressing wider issues is a pretty common pattern that happens without anyone co-ordinating it. A few years before or after 2010 Mohammed Bouazizi might have sunk without a trace, but that doesn't imply that there was any puppet-master of Tunisians.
Plus, it's pretty unclear whether that summer of protests and riots actually did Biden any favours.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
In the long run I agree, but as I said that doesn't help us much now. As in, it's impossible to scrutinise this prediction now, and it's so distant.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
I think the cathedral knows trump is going to win this round
This is rather silly - we are still well more than half a year away from the election, no-one can possibly 'know' who is going to win with such confidence that they would think it not even worth trying anymore. Current head-to-head polls tend to favour Trump but only by a few points, and a minority do have slight Biden leads. Especially with the potential for Trump's criminal cases to throw a major spanner in the works, alongside the ever-improving economic situation, there is no reason to count Biden out, especially for his supporters, or the 'cathedral', such as is isn't.
I'm pre-registering a very optimistic prediction. If it was meant to really be act of war/do damage, why was the attack telegraphed in advance? Also, per Fars, only targets identified by government sources so far are bases in the Golan Heights and one in the Negev desert. This matches the pattern of the symbolic post-Soleimani response - remember when people start talking about ballistic missiles that those were used then too. Am I wish-casting? Yes, probably, but I do genuinely think this is probably not going to be disastrous.
Edit: just seen this tweet from the Iranian mission to the UN saying that 'the matter can be deemed concluded'. Thank god, though the danger not passed if some of the missiles/drones do get through and do some real damage.
https://x.com/Iran_UN/status/1779269993043022053
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