As a new parent with a 3-month old baby, I'd be interested in this too.
My totally unscientific intuition, sort of based on how heritable everything is, is that as long as you don't totally fuck up (feed him, don't keep him locked up in a dark room, have him socialize with other children and adults) it doesn't really matter/whatever an upper-middle class person would naturally do is fine. My wife initially fell victim to tons of the baby gear marketing, but once you realize that your baby is equally happy in the $50 generic amazon swing as he is in the $300 fancy swing, you kind of apply that lesson to child rearing writ large.
It's probably more important for his happiness to make sure he breathes through his nose than it is to play Bach by his crib while he sleeps or put him in one of those Russian math programs. We'll try, as much as possible, to avoid a burnout-inducing, intense middle school/high school, although that's hard where we live because a lot of our neighbors are that type. In my job I see plenty of kids coming out of grueling East Asian-style schooling and it absolutely puts them at a long-term disadvantage.
Hopefully the kid will be interested in something and we can nurture him to go deep in that direction, and hopefully it's as straightforward as just exposing him to a lot of things and seeing what he likes. The main thing I'd be at a loss over what to do is if he was just passionless and wanted to watch esports all day or something because I'm not like that and it'd be hard for me to understand and intervene.
Probably if you are hell-bent on raising a chess prodigy you should teach him chess early but that and related things seem like totally pathological goals to shoot for with your kid.
Tomato
11mo ago
Mortgage credit in the US in particular is very weird became almost all loans are insured by quasi-governmental agencies, and they have a very simple cut and dry rule for the insurance fee. You have FICO, you have LTV, you find where you are on this prescribed grid and that’s how much it costs. It’s already subsidized, it’s already not a market price, it already doesn’t accurately reflect the underlying risk, and this is all sort of on purpose because it’s one way the government wants to encourage homeownership. Messing around with this stuff on the margin is sort of second order compared to the fact that this entire edifice occupies 80% of the mortgage market.
Tomato
11mo ago
Consumer credit access and rates in the US are typically determined by a combination of credit score, loan to value (how levered the asset is), and debt to income (how manageable are the debt payments relative to how much you make).
Tomato
11mo ago
They are for consumer stuff though. What are you gonna do, some huge financial analysis for every guy who walks in wanting a credit card or mortgage?
Tomato
11mo ago
Quality increases show up by reducing the price index, making real GDP higher.
And even supposing these things are systematically missed and we are in fact much better off beyond what GDP reports, they should be apparent in measures of happiness or quality of life, and they are decidedly not.
Tomato
11mo ago
Yeah. And beyond that the whole “tech revolution” didn’t show up dramatically in any aggregate economic stats like GDP or productivity growth. My model for what happened is basically, we used to do a bunch of tasks using a red widget. Someone invented a blue widget that does those tasks 5% better (but they’re super annoying to use). As a society we switched en masse from red to blue widgets. The way people do their tasks is now very different and so it feels like there must have been some dramatic upgrade, but in reality:
- we do essentially the same tasks
- we use blue widgets instead of red widgets
- economic output is a tiny bit higher because the blue widget is a tiny bit better
- were all stuck living in blue widget world where everything is more annoying but anyone who uses a red widget gets outcompeted
- the guys who invented blue widgets got incredibly rich in the (in aggregate, marginal) transition from red to blue widgets and now they’re on Twitter peddling some exhausting reskin of Ayn Rand.
Tomato
11mo ago
how popular e/acc has become
This is either a bad larp or you need to get out of your bubble. When you show anyone outside of a tiny naval gazing tech bubble what e/acc is it induces extreme cringe, and the libertarian mechs piloted by a squad of John Galts are at least a few decades away.
People won’t accept rule from a tech techno-king and would kill someone who tried to force it. The average person thinks of Steve Jobs, the most widely respected tech person, as a weird nerd who made their phone a bit better. People would turn on him in an instant the minute he tried to be more than a friendly salesman. And the average tech person is much closer to Zuckerberg than Jobs in terms of likability and charisma, and look at how much the public respects big Z.
And no, money won’t implicitly do it. The impact that a trillionaire will have on my life is basically null except indirectly through whatever makes him a trillionaire (eg if Bezos becomes a trillionaire the biggest impact he’d have on anybody is the $1000 worth of value that Amazon brought to everyone’s life.) You can’t really convert money into power in a functioning society beyond the incredibly limited scope of making your own life comfier.
Tomato
11mo ago
If you’re okay living in a society of pets who sway docilely in whatever geopolitical winds come their way until some energetic bully shows up and displaces everyone, fine. I wouldn’t want to live in a society like that, and neither will most of the talented and ambitious young people. This creates a vicious cycle where your society becomes full of old people and spiritually sedentary young people. Sclerotic societies aren’t healthy for most people except for the most sclerotic, and you don’t want to live in a society full of them.
It’s not like people in such a society seem extremely happy, or satisfied. They’re stressed, corralled into a narrow path to social respect, and low-fertility aside, are sexless. Westerners who visit Korea or Japan find it charming and cozy af. But people who live and work there have very different impressions. My Korean immigrant wife came to America when she was 12 and is a scientist in America doing cutting edge basic research. Prior to that she wasn’t very good in following the narrow Korean mold of success and best case would’ve been stuck in some bugman office job at a giant conglomerate.
Also, the assumption that robots will save all the old people from having any young people to look after them is also pretty heroic, and kinda sad.
Tomato
11mo ago
one-night stands
I guess I was a high-risk sex haver but I had probably ~25 one-night stands with no condom and no adverse consequences and my only criteria “does she give off ho vibes,” which seemed to work pretty well. I mean I’ll definitely tell my son not to follow that strategy but I think ho-dar is pretty accurate.
Tomato
11mo ago
Or you just pull out on days where she’s fertile? My wife got pregnant exactly when we wanted her to and not a moment too soon following this time tested method.
Tomato
11mo ago
Americans really don’t appreciate how good we have it in terms of our pool of immigrants. Immigrants in America are awesome. Low crime, hard workers, values that mesh well with the native population. Even our “bad” immigrants commit crimes at the same rate as native whites and are much better behaved after adjusting for income.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime
Some thoughts:
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There are probably many factors specific to the US (and probably Canada too) that make this true, but the big ones are probably (a) geography and (b) extremely positive selection caused by various policies and reputation.
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It’s hard to understand how badly informed most Americans are about our immigrants. Besides the data linked above my anecdotal interactions with blue collar Hispanic immigrants is unbelievably positive. My experience with white collar immigrants is that they’re just like me but with an accent. The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
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Besides the obvious “they’re taking our jobs” economic fallacy (immigration creates more demand for labor too), the whole “elites don’t mind immigration because immigrants don’t compete with them economically” is prima facie absurd. Have you seen the composition of google’s workforce? Other elite institutions?
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US immigration is freaking awesome but Europeans should be careful about generalizing because everything in Europe seems set up to attract a much much worse pool of immigrants, from an ultra generous welfare state (real or imagined) to geographical proximity to regions with lot of emigrating bad hombres.
Tomato
1yr ago
I think Biden's and Trump's domestic policy will look basically identical.
Biden did the painful but necessary task of getting us out of Afghanistan. I guess Trump didn't start any wars but he didn't end any either.
I think Biden has done a great job building international coalitions, particularly as a counter to China, and I don't think that foreign leaders trust Trump to do that (and I also think he's too erratic and untrustworthy).
Tomato
1yr ago
I know all the e/acc people have framed this as small minded safetyism vs. progress but I saw a thread somewhere from the other side that framed it more as banal corporate money making (eg laundry buddy) vs. actual deep progress. That sort of comports my my observation of e/acc people, despite talking a big game, actually being hordes of boring laundry buddy founders and vcs.
Tomato
1yr ago
Why does every guy on Twitter with “e/acc” in his bio run an incredibly boring b2b productivity software startup whose only customers are other identical startups?
Tomato
1yr ago
There were not. My coworkers and I would pass by Zucotti park a lot to get lunch looking very bankery and it was all quite peaceful.
Tomato
1yr ago
Every Muslim I can think of in the US is chill and successful. They’re stereotypically doctors and IT workers.
Tomato
1yr ago
He also misses the obvious point that even if people in Hamas are crazed terrorists who must blindly kill, there’s a lot you can do to prevent people from being crazed terrorists who must blindly kill in the first place (e.g., by not killing tons of Palestinians or conquering their land in the West Bank).
Tomato
1yr ago
I think there’s a legitimate national security issue around people breaking into property used by the president’s family and so I’m fine with them shooting at the thieves even though I would oppose it if it was a regular person’s car.
Tomato
1yr ago
they’ve never been interested in meta level principles
Almost nobody is interested in meta level principles. Tons of the same right-adjacent people who were advocating for free speech and against cancelling were instantly on the front lines of trying to cancel pro Palestinian college students in the wake of the Hamas attack.
Some are self-conscious enough to justify it with slogans like “my rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly” but ultimately a good model of public debate is that people advocate for their side on the object level using whatever weapons they can.
An interview in the New Yorker with settler/activist Daniella Weiss, The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers, is making the rounds on Twitter.
Tl;dr:
- The purpose of West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible.
- Palestinians can remain in the West Bank if they agree to be second class citizens without political rights.
- Israel’s rightful land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile.
- I don’t care about Palestinian children, only my own children.
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
- How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
- The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
- Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
- For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
Whats the actual deal with the Chinese illegal immigrants? Are the numbers actually high? If so are we to interpret this as the situation in China being much worse than we thought, or is it some clandestine operation? The latter seems super implausible. If the numbers of captured people are really that high I can’t imagine nobody would be caught with a suspicious gadget or spill the beans on interrogation.
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