Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
I dunno, looking at DCI corps beyond the deep south, they seem to have a decent black component - far more than you'd naively expect from just the corps' nominal catchment areas, like Blue Devils in Concord CA (3% black), SCV (2% black), The Academy [Tempe, AZ (6% black)], etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Actually, in the real world, when you ethnically cleanse undesirable populations for having the wrong religion you engender disgust and hatred in the majority of the rest of the world.
Ah yes, this is why Azerbaijan is having so much trouble selling their oil, considering their behavior towards Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh.
And why the world NGO-cracy condemned any attempts to help the Hutu genocidaire refugees in Congo, considering how they kept going after any Tutsis they could get their hands on.
It also explains why Turkey's continued repression of the Kurds got them kicked out of NATO, and why there's massive protests on every college campus about the genocidal atrocities being committed by the Sudanese Arabs towards the Christian and animist black Africans of South Sudan.
/sarcasm.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Yugi-oh appears to significantly over-index for black folks, at least when compared to MtG.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Or women otherwise engaged in home industry, to account for the historical pattern.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument?
Nothing succeeds like success. Nuking the legislative filibuster to make Puerto Rico and DC states, or otherwise passing big reforms that actually do things (not just the IRA with its patronage handouts that aren't even getting spent because of restrictive rules) make you look successful. Whinging and begging for table scraps from a dissident faction of the enemy party (let alone a dissident faction which contains your own party's biggest boogeymen circa 10 years ago) makes you look weak and desperate.
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
Maybe this suggests replacing "sharp-edged" bans with "terraforming" taxes. Only, how do you sell that to the voting masses? In the FDA example, this would have to look something like "instead of making the FDA/its employees subject to legal penalty if they pass some threshold of neglect in approving a drug that passes some threshold of side effects, tie their funding/salary to the volume of side effects"
Strathern/Goodhart's law - Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. You haven't actually solved anything - you've just changed the incentive to "control the number of side effects which get reported, or the number of incidents which legally can be described as 'side effects'."
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
As I said in a downstream reply, this is all a diversion. H1-B visas represent 85K per anum of imported workers.
That's what it is now - this got started in part because there was activism around increasing (perhaps substantially) the number of people admitted on such "skilled worker" visas, in order to fill the claimed shortfall in US skilled STEM talent.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
There's a big distinction between speciation and a nation that didn't even speak the same language in the 1800s. Almost like gross overgeneralizations are full of holes.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
Nationalism which is the english word for ethnos, without ethnicity, doesn't make sense.
Someone tell France that they really ought to be Bretons, Acquitanians, Burgundians, etc. etc. After all, until fairly recently they didn't even speak mutually-intelligible dialects of the same language, let alone share common ancestry! The Bretons are Celts, the Ile-de-France folks are Germanic, and the Languedoc is Mediterranean!
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
Which one of these societies is more successful?
Which one of these socieities would you rather be a part of?
You're missing the parts of these societies that most people actually interact with and care about on a day-to-day basis. How orderly are they? What are the crime levels? Is the government honest or corrupt? Do institutions generally function reliably and legibly in their putative roles, or is everything a mess of personal connections and last-minute improvisation? What about civil society - how common are fraternal organizations? Community organizations? Spiritual/faith-based organizations? What's the Gini coefficient?
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
There's a plausible argument that legalese is like a ceremony where you slaughter a cow and then look at the entrails to take the omens. It makes people feel that ceremonies were observed while having no effect on on the actual outcome. It works especially well on people who are a little dim.
In my experience, the legalese is there not for the people actually signing the contract, but instead for the people trying to resolve disputes about the contract years down the line. You're not trying to snow the other side; you're trying to get the completely unrelated judge or future lawyer to take your side in the future. Many of the strange phrasings are references to standard language which can be reliably interpreted in a particular way so long as the standard remains current, or attempts to cover every possible base and contingency.
LLMs are going to gish gallop the shit out of every lawyer alive today
It's not the lawyers you need to gish gallop, it's the judges. And if you do that, you're not going to like the results. You want courts to be predictable.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Intra-Hispanic prejudice is alive and well between immigrant groups in the US, too.
As an interesting example of this in real life, when the LA City Council got rocked by a leaked recording of some hispanic councilmembers speaking, erm, "bluntly" about racial matters in local politics, the remarks casting aspersions at the city's Oaxacan community (a Mexican state heavily dominated even today by fairly unassimilated Nahua, Maya and other indio groups) had just about as much impact as ones making fun of the city's black political elite. See, e.g. news coverage here.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
something else that happens to have FAA red-green lighting (which wouldn't make sense for a military stealth drone experiment or for alien aircraft)
Seems like a decent disguise, though.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I agree. I just wanted to say that vigilantism isn't just limited to extrajudicial killing.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
You want some kind of civil wrongful death statute, otherwise someone who gets killed by a reckless driver or due to a defective product couldn't get money damages for it.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Vigilantism isn't just when someone ends up dead. Spiderman is still a vigilante when he leaves perps bound and webbed for the cops to find (fits the legal definitions of battery and false imprisonment).
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Mass shootings are easier, as horrible and macabre as it is to say it. Soft institutional targets that don't move and don't have to be tracked down.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
If you're suicidal, you're most likely in a deep, deep depression. Depressed people don't exactly have high motivation or impetus to do stuff, and assassinations - even if you're not planning to survive it - take planning and effort. Tracking down one random person (who presumably, because of their high-profile statute, puts effort into maintaining their personal privacy and security) and actually getting to them with a lethal weapon of some type seems like an awful lot of work.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I said the lion's share goes to higher salaries and higher admin costs. The abstract of the study I linked in my comment:
The United States far outspends Canada on health care, but the sources of additional spending are unclear. We evaluated the importance of incomes, administration, and medical interventions in this difference. Pooling various sources, we calculated medical personnel incomes, administrative expenses, and procedure volume and intensity for the United States and Canada. We found that Canada spent $1,589 per capita less on physicians and hospitals in 2002. Administration accounted for the largest share of this difference (39%), followed by incomes (31%), and more intensive provision of medical services (14%). Whether this additional spending is wasteful or warranted is unknown.
31% + 39% = 70% - over two thirds of the U.S.'s increased per capita physician and hospital spend over Canada's is down to those two things. That's "the lion's share" by any measure.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges.
Wouldn't Buddhism be the motherlode of such ideas, then?
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Your anger at health insurance companies is misplaced.
The insurance companies, the AMA, and the feds are locked together in a perverse cycle that produces a system that somehow spends even more on healthcare than socialized medicine countries...but the lion's share of the extra money goes to doctor's salaries (artificial scarcity driven by the AMA, med schools, and residency limitations) and ever-increasing administrative costs (additional regulations and insurance bureaucracy).
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
To which I would say, would your model predict:
(1) Trump wouldn't prosecute Hilary in 2016?
"Trump" isn't a unitary figure - the people who would have had to prosecute Hilary were the DOJ, which Trump was embroiled in a...contentious relationship with, given his termination of his first AG (who, incidentally, had a long history with Hilary as colleagues in the Senate), and the role of senior officials at DOJ in promulgating and sustaining the Russian Collusion hoax. Any order Trump gave to try and prosecute her would not have been obeyed.
(2) The lack of major civil unrest, stochastic terrorism, or any major backlash to the repeal of Roe v. Wade aside from some Democratic electoral wins in 2022?
How quickly we forget. There was at least one significant attempt at actual terrorism in the lead up to the Dobbs decision, coupled with strategic DOJ non-enforcement of (and thus tacit condoning of) the laws against harassment of judicial officers. There then followed a propaganda smear campaign designed to gin up impeachment efforts against conservative justices, notwithstanding similar conduct from liberal justices.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
One problem is that it contradicts the tribal narrative that presidential competence is important, which is a narrative that Blue Tribe has invested appreciable cultural capital in over the years, going back at least as far as Reagan
This is true. However, are the people who create tribal narratives and invest cultural capital the same as those who have an interest in and/or ability to oust POTUS?
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Zooming out a bit, another interesting pattern is, for lack of a better term, "reasoning break points". There's a lot of evidence that Biden's family is corrupt and that Biden himself is involved, but evidently not quite enough evidence for anyone on his own side to do anything about it. Likewise, there's quite a lot of evidence that Biden is meaningfully senile, to the point that his own side forcibly un-nominated him for the presidential race. And yet, somehow, he's not quite senile enough to actually remove from office. One might expect these two issues to compound each other sufficiently to tip the scales on either, but somehow they aren't quite enough even in combination.
I disagree; I don't think "being his party's nominee for President" and "being President" are meaningfully similar.
Biden's senility is a severe liability as a candidate, because being a candidate involves being the focal point of a large PR campaign centered around one's own speeches, appearances, and general celebrity. You manifestly can't do well at that if you can't speak coherently for more than a few minutes, are visibly shuffling aimlessly around the stage, and are otherwise out of it.
However, Biden's senility is not as severe a liability when it comes to actually being President (at least from the standpoint of the institutional Democratic party). All he needs to do is physically be alive to occupy the office; most of the decisions get made well-downstream from him, and those that require Presidential input can mostly be handled by his kitchen cabinet/advisors a la Edith Wilson. Whether or not he's compos mentis doesn't have any impact on the flow of money and influence to Democrat constituent groups/activists, or the implementation of Democratic policy priorities by Democratic-aligned actors within the bureaucracy.
DCI is the only thing that ever made me sad I was a woodwind player.
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