MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Neurotypical people with high IQs learn how and when to pretend to be stupider than they are very early - I can see my 4-year-old son (who has a diagnosis, but is noticeably less autistic than his brother or either parent) doing it already. So if you did meet a 160-IQ neurotypical, they would come across as being as smart as necessary under the circumstances, not as smart as they actually are.
You would identify that person because they have enjoyed improbable success in multiple different g-loaded activities, not because they are scarily bright in person - scaring the normies is, after all, stupid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Nate Silver's analysis is upstream of the Polymarket prices, in the sense that everyone who trades serious amounts of money on Polymarket is reading Nate Silver and either agrees with him or has a good reason for disagreeing.
Both polls of superforecasters and prediction markets are ways of aggregating a range of information including the opinions of bona fide subject matter experts (which Nate Silver is), not a substitute for subject matter expertise.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
To be precise, a degree is a good investment because it signals the discipline you don't have (alongside a mid-tier or better IQ), allowing you to get certain types of entry-level jobs which require it.
If you have the discipline problem you say you do, then getting a generic degree will cost you more than most (that is necessary for the signal to be credible) and benefit you less (because you will suck at graduate jobs and be miserable until you are fired).
If you are doing a typical blue-collar job (solo trades jobs are different obviously), you are checking in with the boss multiple times a day. If you are doing a graduate professional job, you are checking in with the boss 2-3 times a week. (Scrum requires a daily check-in, but is only acceptable to programmers who see themselves as white-collar professionals because the daily Scrum call is explicitly not run by a manager. When the daily Scrum call is used as a tool for beating up slow developers, the Scrum team stops producing code and starts producing resumes). You can be productive with much less discipline if you are working closely with your boss.
If you are able to hack physically tough blue-collar jobs like construction, then your personal graduate wage premium is much smaller than it is for the average college attendee, who is a woman.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The California Coastal Commission are pretty equal opportunity assholes, to be fair. I wouldn't be surprised if "Rocket Man Bad" was the excuse and general pigheaded misanthropic NIMBYism was the reason.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Exactly - the Dublin regulation says that if an asylum seeker illegally moves from one EU country to another, then they can be returned and, critically, the EU country with primary responsibility is obliged to take them back. If a genuine refugee, they don't cease to be a refugee (the country with primary responsibility considers their application for asylum in the same way as if they hadn't crossed the second border), and they can't be sent back to a dangerous country. There is a similar arrangement between the US and Canada. There could probably be a similar arrangement between the US and Mexico if the US offered the Mexicans a large enough bribe - probably in the form of a large number of visas for Mexican citizens.
The reason why the US can't just deport every Salvadorean asylum seeker who entered through Mexico back to Mexico is that Mexico is a sovereign state and doesn't have to accept them. A huge part of the problem with modern-day refugee law is that every country with a lot of refugees inside its borders is by default trying to get them to illegally enter another country so they aren't their problem any more. (The reason why the US can't just deport them back to El Salvador is a matter of American laws implementing the Refugee Convention).
Involuntary relocations of refugees from one safe country to another (negotiated between the two countries) were a common part of immediately-post-WW2 practice, and are explicitly contemplated by the Refugee Convention in certain situations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The Byrds of Virginia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia are not related. Strange but true.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This version is not quite right historically. Japan was on the Allied side in WW1, but didn't do much fighting.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I like this argument, although I prefer the inverse "I may be more neglectful and cause more damage because it doesn't belong to me." There's a reason its generally not advisable to buy a used car that was previously a lease or a rental.
FWIW, the big car rental companies (Hertz etc.) get premium prices on the second hand market because they maintain their cars better than private owners. (Most ex-lease cars are sold "approved used" through franchised dealers so they command premium prices for a different reason)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Of course it is. We can declare anyone to be anything. We could declare them to be attack helicopters and ship them off to the front lines in Ukraine. But we would be lying if we did that.
Under both the ordinary English and the technical legal meaning of "refugee", a refugee does not cease to be a refugee if they illegally cross a border from one safe country to another - they just become a refugee who has committed the crime of illegal immigration. The countries that ratified the Refugee Convention said that we were taking "deportation to a dangerous country" off the list of possible punishments for refugees who commit ordinary crimes. (The Refugee Convention includes an exception for refugees guilty of a "particularly serious crime", although judicial interpretations of ECHR Article 3 and, as far as I am aware, the US Constitution don't).
You can declare that you are not going to grant any kind of legal long-term residence to refugees who illegally enter your country from another safe country (and the UK tried to do this) but it won't be effective unless you can find another safe country to deport them to (as the UK tried and failed to do with Rwanda), or violate the Refugee Convention by deporting them to an unsafe country.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Wouldn't SpaceX rockets be Jones Act compliant anyway? They are built in the US, owned by a US company, registered in the US, and (in so far as they are crewed) crewed by US citizens.
The idea that wet Jones Act shipping between Miami and Puerto Rico costs more than space Jones Act shipping between Starbase and a US Mars Colony is scarily plausible. So is the idea of angry longshoremen trying to fix this problem by picketing Starbase and being zapped with Elon's latest death ray.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The laws say "you must apply in the first safe country" - doesn't happen.
Slightly oddly, the Refugee Convention doesn't say anything about applying for asylum at all - it assumes that everyone already knows who the refugees are and that they are already in their destination countries. This makes sense given the historical context, which is that the Refugee Convention was written to cover the specific situation of post-WW2 refugees who couldn't be repatriated for various reasons. The Refugee Convention was never fit for purpose as the a forward-looking instrument and the body of refugee law that has built up around it is incoherent as a result. I have an effortpost planned on this point once my sons stop bringing viruses into the house.
The idea that refugees have to apply for asylum in the first safe country comes from a misreading of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which says that refugees can't be penalised for illegally entering a country if they are crossing from a dangerous country to the first safe country. But a refugee doesn't cease to be a refugee just because they illegally cross from one safe country to another - the second safe country can prosecute them for illegal immigration but this doesn't solve the problem that you can't (without violating the Refugee Convention) get rid of them without finding another safe country willing to take them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The fact that you are lumping together masks (a reasonable public health intervention that had, in fact, worked against OG SARS but which authorities had continued insisting on long after it was clear that they did not work against COVID-19) and vaccines (a personal health intervention which dramatically reduced your chance of death or serious illness if exposed to the virus, which authorities made a misguided attempt to mandate based on secondary public health benefits) says more about you than mask compliance says about the masses.
Blue tribers with room-temperature-and-above IQs did not “bend over” for the vaccine like NPCs - they agentically sought out vaccines for their own selfish benefit (and were right to do so, as shown by the differential mortality and morbidity in red and blue states which only shows up after the vaccines are available). See this accout of highly agentic behaviour, both by the VaccinateCA volunteers and the people using the site to chase vaccines as an example.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Washington, notoriously - which is why the US doesn’t have Presidents-for-life.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
By contrast, the sense I get from Blue Tribe is not "the process has succeeded, we have discovered his crimes and punished him for them", but rather "we've barely scratched the surface, he's obviously guilty of a thousand times worse offences, and the fact that he isn't in jail is an indictment of the system."
From a sane anti-Trump perspective, Trump's worst crimes are the rapes (where in a non-clownworld justice system he unfortunately gets off because of the statute of limitations and the he-said she-said lack of evidence), the unlawful retention of classified documents on a grand scale, and the various frauds committed as part of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election (of which the fake electors scheme is the most clear-cut crime). Both Jack Smith federal indictments (one for the documents, one for the election) are stalled because of legally dubious rulings by Trump-appointed judges. The Georgia election indictment is stalled because Fanny Willis couldn't keep her legs closed, which isn't the same but probably feels like it to people who have been brought up to believe that slut shaming is BAAAD. In none of these cases did the case get far enough for Trump's guilt or innocence to be relevant.
So the Blue Tribe position is "We caught Trump, we nailed him, and he is getting off because he successfully corrupted the US justice system before leaving office."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.
Most countries have partisan press - the UK obviously, but also France (Le Figaro vs Le Monde at the quality end), Germany (FAZ vs SZ) etc. America had partisan press for most of its history (Citizen Kane is about this), and does so now. The idea that there is one respectable paper per major city, and they all form an ideological monoculture such that you can talk about "the Press" as something that should eschew political bias, is what is weird and is driven by specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century. I don't think "there is no single newspaper and/or TV station which is generally accepted as impartial" makes a country less democratic.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I just don't see how asking the same question twelve times is better than asking it three times. Has anyone ever answered a question on the fourth time after dodging thrice?
If you like seeing politicians humiliated (and who doesn't?) it makes better TV.
I agree that if Paxman had known how much time he had left, he would have done better to call out the non-responsive answer and move on to the next topic of conversation. But that would have been much more obviously rude - in practice interviewers who move on normally do so without calling out the non-responsive answer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
"Did you threaten to overrule Derrick Lewis?"
Infamous as the most hardball interview in British political history (and the British are already tougher on politicians than the Americans). The question was asked 12 times, and Michael Howard gave 12 non-responsive answers. Both side remain unflappably polite throughout.
Later it turned out that he was supposed to have been let off the hook, but a technical problem with the next item on the schedule meant that the interview was extended by about a minute without either Paxman or Howard being told in advance.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The return of children transported across borders to their parent(s) in the country of habitual residence is, in general, uncontroversial and has nothing to do with immigration law or politics. The relevant treaty is one of the many confusingly-named Hague Conventions - please, dear international community, if you are going to have a treaty with a long and non-memorable name then sign it somewhere that isn't the Hague.
The Eilan Gonzalez case wasn't an immigration case - it was a family law case where the conservative side wanted to make an unprincipled exception and refuse to return a 5-year-old child to his only living parent because Cuba bad.
Incidentally, this type of bullshit on the part of the country the kid is taken to is sufficiently common that the Hague Convention isn't really working. The US returning a child to the parents in the country of habitual residence in the face of noisy local opposition is unusual globally.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It is archived at Redpill Archive
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is actually good. I may die laughing when Clippy comes for my haemoglobin.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
"Indictable offences known to the police" rose about 40x from the Edwardian period to the 1990s crime peak after adjusting for population. (The 100x is a mistake due to trying to read a horizontal line near zero on a small graph).
The question of how much this is an increase in real crime, how much of it is the creation of new indicatable offences (particularly ones relating to drugs), and how much is increased reporting is hugely controversial. But it is fair to say that crime in the 1990s was at least 10x Edwardian levels, and probably more.
Violent and property crime is now (as determined by victim surveys with consistent methodology) at around a quarter of 1990's levels. The graph used by the neoreactionaries cuts the data off in 2000 for a reason. [This crime drop is consistent with the lived experience of anyone who grew up in the 1990s - it isn't a case of rigged statistics]
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Nobody saved enough money in a blue-collar job to buy enough land to support a profitable farm - which by 1900 was quite a lot of land - smallholder poverty was a pretty universal phenonenon. Where there was an open frontier, the land was given away free. I know this is fictional evidence, but the whole plot of Of Mice and Men depends on the fact that Lenny and George's dream of saving up to buy land suddenly goes from being unrealistic to being realistic when they befriend a guy with a personal injury settlement (who could not use the cash to buy land himself, because his injury would prevent him from farming it).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
If we are comparing the life of an upper class Londoner with servants on the eve of WW1 to the life of a middle class Londoner shortly before the Internet, we are of course ignoring the biggest improvement of the 2nd half of the twentieth century (labour saving home appliances). But I think @BahRamYou is right that if money was no object you could enjoy a pretty modern lifestyle in Edwardian London. (And that Edwardian London is close to the first time and place that you could do so). The big things that you absolutely couldn't do (apart from electronic media) were fast travel (no aeroplanes, trains and cars ran at about half the speed they do now), certain types of fresh food (downstream of fast travel), and antibiotics. The doctor who did house calls was arguably more likely to kill you than save you in 1910.
Also there was no way of avoiding the air pollution if you regularly had to be in central London for business.
We have to pay out the nose for a trip to Broadway to get that kind of experience.
West End shows are a lot cheaper. Nosebleed seats start at £25 and top price tickets are generally around £100.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
With a high-end home bean-to-cup coffee machine, my marginal cost of decent espresso is about 40p per shot:
- Coffee beans 25p
- Machine consumables 5p (descaler, cleaning tablets, water filters)
- Machine major maintenance 10p (a £250 brewing unit replacement every few thousand cups)
- Electricity and water <1p
We pay 95p per imperial (20oz) pint to have milk home-delivered, so a half-pint glass of milk costs us slightly more than an espresso shot, but the milk in a late still costs less than the coffee. You could halve the cost of milk by buying in bulk at the supermarket, but then drinking proper espresso coffee is a premium experience as well.
Whatever you think about their respective congnitive decline, Biden is physically frail in his old age in a way Trump is not.
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