SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
1d ago
My feed is also full of asses and boobs, but not that kind.
SerialStateLineXer
1d ago
There been dragons.
SerialStateLineXer
2d ago
How many tabs do you have open, that closing 10% merits inclusion in this list?
SerialStateLineXer
2d ago
I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
Is he saying we should practice eugenics?
Not that I'm opposed, but...he knows about heredity and the poor track record of educational interventions above and beyond what we're already doing, so what else could he mean by "creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society?"
I believe it originally referred to the leaders of Scottish clans.
Maybe? But there was only a 1.1-point difference in SNAQ score (range: 4-20), so I don't see how that could lead to such a large adjusted difference, nor does it explain the discrepancy between baseline, end value, and "change from baseline."
SerialStateLineXer
4d ago
I meant that more in the sense that anything is legal if you don't get caught. The idea is not that people who think they pass would be encouraged to violate the rule, but that those who actually do pass would in fact get away with it, just as people often get away with violating many other laws and rules.
I'm not even commenting on whether it's a good policy, just pointing out that the idea that we'd need to have a genital-checking guard for enforcement is either stupid or in bad faith (one can never tell with Ocasio-Cortez).
SerialStateLineXer
4d ago
Can anyone make sense of table 3 in this study? As I read it, none of the numbers add up. For example, in the "PAL: total no. errors" section, they claim a large difference between placebo and intervention with p < 0.001, but the change from baseline looks about the same in both groups. Also, the change from baseline in both groups is about 8 points, but they report about 5.
I've read a lot of scientific papers before, and I can usually make sense of them, but I have no idea what's going on here. Is this some kind of error, or are they using a convention I don't understand?
SerialStateLineXer
4d ago
Due to diminishing marginal utility, quality of life is even more equal than consumption. The difference in utility between a $100,000/month home and a $1,000/month home is not 100 times as great as the difference between a $1,000/month home and living on the street. A meal at a three-star restaurant may cost a hundred times as much as a cheap, nutritionally adequate meal, but the difference between them is less important than the difference between the cheap meal and starving.
Anyway, the monetary value of goods and services are important, because, unlike income, wealth, and subjective quality of life, consumption is rivalrous—it reduces the availability of goods and services for others to consume. The monetary value of the goods and services you consume is a measure of how large a share of total output you consume.
SerialStateLineXer
5d ago
the study I dissected was on novel evidence suggesting semaglutide decreased incidence of Alzheimer's
Mechanistically, this seems plausible, given the evidence implicating insulin resistance and systemic inflammation in neurodegenerative diseases. Was that all, or did the study incorporate epidemiological evidence?
SerialStateLineXer
5d ago
"Cost-effective" does not mean it saves more money that it costs, if that's why you're surprised. It means that its net cost/benefit ratio meets a certain GBP/QALY threshold.
SerialStateLineXer
5d ago
It's been working in practice for generations.
The average person's intuitions about what a "reasonable" wealth distribution should look like are totally unmoored from reality. Imagine a country full of people who all earn the same income, save the same percentage of it, earn the same return on their investments, retire at the same age, spend down their retirement savings at the same rate, and die at the same age. Literally just people living the exact same life with staggered birth years. Show the average subject in that "Sweden" study a pie chart of that wealth distribution, and he'll say it's way too unequal.
I could go on for pages and pages about how stupid wealth inequality discourse is and how little sense the way people think about it makes.
Dan Ariely, the lead author of that study, was recently at the center of a huge fraud scandal for some unrelated research. The data he used were definitely manipulated, but I guess he managed to convince the investigators that someone else did it and he didn't know. I have no basis on which to doubt that finding, but I haven't seen the evidence.
Wealth inequality is a made-up issue. To the extent that we care about economic inequality, our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters. The whole point of accumulating wealth is to allow you or your heirs, or the beneficiaries of your charitable contributions, to consume more in the future. Consumption is what you've taken from the economy, and wealth is the difference between what you've contributed and what you've taken.
For various reasons that should be fairly obvious if you think about it, consumption inequality < income inequality < wealth inequality. That is, in any given year, consumption is most equal and wealth is least equal. Lifetime consumption is even more equal than consumption in a given year, because at least some of the inequality in consumption is just due to life cycle effects. This is also true of income, and even more so of wealth.
Egalitarian ideologues started out talking about income inequality, because it's easiest to measure. At some point they should have realized that it makes more sense to talk about consumption inequality, but instead they went in the opposite direction and started talking about wealth inequality.
Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize. The top 1% might do 5% of all consumption in the US, but they earn 20% of all pre-tax income, and own something like a third of all wealth. US billionaires may have more combined net worth than the bottom 50% of the population (If you say this, a lot of people will incorrectly assume that it means that billionaires own the majority of wealth, which is why Oxfam releases a statement to this effect every year), but they probably consume less than than the bottom 1%. There are fewer than a thousand US billionaires and 3.3 million bottom one-percenters; to consume more than the bottom 1%, billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita. If the bottom 1% each consume $20k per year, that's about $70 million per capita for billionaires. Likely some of the richer billionaires hit that at least some years, but $70 million is quite a lot to spend in one year if you only have a net worth of $1-2 billion.
So if you're trying to promote hatred of the rich and build a consensus for more redistribution, obviously you want to talk about wealth, and not consumption, so that's what we get.
SerialStateLineXer
6d ago
The talking point about the lack of an enforcement mechanism is silly. The enforcement mechanism is the same as the one keeping regular men out of women's bathrooms: Mostly voluntary, but the women can call security if there's a problem. If you pass well enough that nobody notices or cares, you get away with it.
SerialStateLineXer
6d ago
I was just joking about the name. Lord Zir is not actually canonically non-binary.
SerialStateLineXer
7d ago
Well, not a fast mass suicide.
SerialStateLineXer
7d ago
I can't figure out whether Diablo IV is woke because it has a non-binary boss (Lord Zir), or anti-woke because ze's monstrously unattractive and ill-tempered.
SerialStateLineXer
7d ago
It's consistent with what I said, but adds more details. I think it further weakens the objection to the original post as well: Every game on the list is either Japanese or made by a team small enough not to be infested with entryists.
SerialStateLineXer
7d ago
Note that all of those but Slay the Spire come out of Japan.
SerialStateLineXer
11d ago
1mg is a good dose, you cannot come off it ever btw, once you start.
Sure you can. You'll start losing hair again, but it's not like you become dependent on it.
SerialStateLineXer
11d ago
I've never failed a test before :(
SerialStateLineXer
16d ago
Outside the bounds of prescribed behavior. It's a highly proscribed behavior, unless the fentanyl is prescribed.
SerialStateLineXer
18d ago
Thanks for doing your part to fight dysgenesis.
How do we distinguish the effects of COVID from the effects of the anti-standards and anti-law-enforcement movement born out of BLM?
More options
Context Copy link