SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
The radical DSA councilwoman retired, and was replaced with the "more conservative" of the two choices
This was due to a redistricting that pretty much guaranteed she would lose, right?
We have these:
- Non-technical Universities
- Black underclass, where a large percentage of the men are dead or in prison.
Edit: This was supposed to be a response to that comment speculating about the effects of reducing the male : female ratio. I'm not sure what happened.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
And large-scale genome sequencing has demonstrated that intelligence and other cognitive and personality traits - things that contribute to income, life success - are quite ([roughly] 50%) heritable.
This is not quite right. For one, adult intelligence is more like 70-80% heritable. But also, we know this from twin studies, not from genome sequencing. Due to insufficient data (partially due to the inherent difficulty of collecting reliable IQ and genetic data for millions of people, and partly due to ideologically motivated obstruction of such efforts), current GWAS models show only a fraction of the true heritability of IQ. IIRC the best models predict only about 15% of variance in IQ.
Twin studies are the gold standard for estimating heritability; the advantage of GWAS is that it can give us actual models to predict IQ from genetic sequences.
I changed your "~50%" to "roughly 50%" because the site interpreted a quoted tilde as markup for strikethrough.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?
My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'
No, this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and flatly contradicted by multiple streams of available evidence.
First, there's the historical example of East Asian and Jewish Americans. Yes, recent immigration from East Asia has been selective, but East Asians had already pretty much caught up with whites by the late 60s, before selective immigration really got going, and I don't think there was ever much selective immigration with Jews, who were already so overrepresented at top universities that Harvard imposed quotas in the 20s, when antisemitism was still a very real problem.
Second, poverty just isn't that sticky. The intergenerational rank-rank elasticity of permanent income (i.e. lifetime earnings) is about 0.4, meaning that on average, the children of parents at a given permanent income level will regress about 60% of the way to the 50th percentile.
Note that that 0.4 elasticity is not purely due to the stickiness of exogenous poverty, as much of it is due to the heredity of cognitive and personality traits. The true exogenous effect of parental income is considerably smaller than this. What this means is that we can expect regression to the mean in just a generation or two. This is commonly observed with truly exogenous poverty, e.g. with Vietnamese refugees.
Finally, rapid regression towards the mean was observed with black families during and for approximately one generation after the Civil Rights Era. And then it stopped, and has now been stalled out for two generations. We now see downward mobility of black men born into families with permanent incomes above the black mean, even when below the white mean. In other words, black men regress towards a lower mean than white men. It's tough to pin this on the the intergenerational stickiness of poverty (even ignoring the aforementioned fact that it's not actually that sticky), but is exactly what we would expect to see if there were a genetic basis for the achievement gap.
Raj Chetty says that this isn't consistent with a genetic basis for the gap because black women don't exhibit the same degree of downward mobility, but the case of women is more complicated because the shortage of reliable black men means that black women are more dependent on their own incomes than white men. Furthermore, black women from middle-class families are especially well positioned to benefit from affirmative action because they're less likely to have criminal records than black men. Finally, black women still do not exhibit the upward mobility that we would expect to see if their parents' poverty were truly exogenous.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Yeah, those guys, or whatever similar breed is in the video linked from the OP. The dogs in the 1910 video look a bit healthier to me. Their modern descendants seem to have been bred in a way that grotesquely exaggerates those features.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
I do not get the appeal of dogs with small heads and long faces. Those things creep me out.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Do you normally celebrate your birthday on February 28th, or March 1st?
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
A video contains roughly 30 frames per second, each frame a picture.
A frame of video will, on average, differ only slightly from the previous frame, and be worth much less than the thousand words a single picture is worth. This is why videos can compressed at much higher ratios than still images with minimal perceivable loss of quality.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
HR reps have talents they can shop around, too. Lots of companies have HR departments, probably more than have in-house software departments. But the people who can do those jobs are more abundant, relative to supply, than software engineers.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
With programmers you can get some degree of bilateral monopoly power, where a long-time employee of a firm has a lot of firm-specific knowledge, which is very valuable to the firm but not to anyone else. This the programmer has something unique to offer the firm, and the firm is the only one willing to pay for it.
This is probably more likely to happen at non-tech firms, as tech firms are better at making sure that no crucial software is exclusively maintained by one person.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
I think that academic freedom does have some value, so I'm not sure I'm ready to throw my support behind government stepping in and regulating the research of academics, even at public universities.
However, there are totally reasonable ways governments can regulate public universities that do not infringe on academic freedom:
- Ban ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions.
- Regulate the activities of administrators and the number of staff which can be hired for certain roles.
- Ban the use of DEI statements and other ideological tests and discrimination in hiring.
These are broad principles, not blueprints for concrete laws. I'm well aware that "no ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions at public universities" sessions is unlikely to be an effective law; it needs to spell out the details, and multiple passes may be required to plug loopholes.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Another approach is to bar public schools from requiring or giving pay premiums for advanced education degrees.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
The BBZ wasn't quite as enthusiastic about my plan to devote the NHS's entire budget to improving the health outcomes of trans women of color as I expected them to be. They were concerned about the effect on other marginalised communities.
I flew too close to the sun.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
Don't Catholics always have sins to absolve because of original sin?
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
And mostly they use it to subsidize the American middle class, i.e. the global rich.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
Food poisoning worked for me.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible.
As a parallel, note that woke anti-whiteness is premised on a rejection of the hypothesis that the black–white achievement gap is due to genetic factors rather than oppression.
This is like the Venn diagram meme: At the intersection of the set of those who attribute belief in a genetic basis for the black–white achievement gap to anti-black animus and the set of those who attribute belief in a genetic basis for the gentile–Jewish achievement gap to antisemitism, we find people who do not have a strong need for intellectual consistency.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
As I understand it, heritability can only be greater than 100% if you have negative gene-environment correlation, i.e. if the people with higher polygenic scores tend to raise their children in environments less conducive to increasing intelligence.
Hypothetically you could have infinite heritability if environment perfectly cancelled out genes, resulting in everyone having equal intelligence despite variation in genetic potential.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.
It's kind of surprising. Generally plants that are useful to humans flourish due to intentional cultivation. It's not like wheat went extinct. Though the Wikipedia article does mention some speculation that it may not have been amenable to cultivation for some reason.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
There were reasons for the US to be ahead back then that no longer apply, though. The two World Wars. The greater importance of land and natural resources to GDP back then. The US having a large internal free trade zone.
Currently the US operates with a pretty significant human capital disadvantage from the high black and indigenous population.
There's also a straightforward theoretical explanation for high taxation and welfare spending to reduce GDP level path: Diversion of resources away from investment and towards consumption, plus deadweight loss from high taxes. Why knock yourself out if it's only going to make a small difference in after-tax pay?
I'm not sure it's true that the US spends as much on welfare as Western Europe. I've looked into this before, and IIRC several of those countries spend more. But even if it does, this doesn't contradict the claim that the US is richer because it spends a smaller percentage of GDP on subsidizing consumption.
Consider that if I consistently spend 50% of my income on consumption and invest the rest, eventually I will end up spending more on consumption than my coworker who has the same salary and consistently spends 90% and saves 10%, precisely because limiting my consumption spending to a smaller share of my income has enabled my income to grow faster.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
Use of the specific word "insurrection," which is used in the 14th Amendment but had rarely been used in living memory to describe domestic riots, seems unlikely to have been a coincidence.
SerialStateLineXer
9mo ago
In the immediate aftermath of the January 6th riots, there was what appeared to be a coordinated campaign to get as many people as possible to use the word "insurrection" to describe it.
This never occurred to me at the time, but were Democrats playing the long game here, trying to build a consensus that Trump had engaged in insurrection and thus was disqualified to run again in 2024?
I haven't really dug into the issue, but my recollection is that her recall election was close enough that any loss of supporters due to redistricting would have made reelection unlikely.
But maybe it was more than pendulum swinging back towards the center than the redistricting.
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