RodericDay

Especially stuff related to "race realism" and various forms of sexism.

There's interesting stuff in the field, but absolutely nothing that would warrant telling a woman "the science is in". Especially given the track record of people itching to chalk injustice up to biology.

The fact that some aspiring-rich techpreneur reduces his complex gambit like you do here is not at all surprising to me.

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hn is stopping me from replying downstream so:

And yet you use ad hominem to advance your own perpective, weird!

"I'm greek don't question me on this!"

"How dare you bring up my background?"

If you don't care, and encourage initiatives like these, you will never get it.

Back when America could do no wrong, America was Rocky, or one of those glistening 80s heros. Maybe a bit flawed, but generally a family man vs. evildoers, a plucky little upstart.

Then America was Bruce Willis in Die Hard, rough around the edges and divorced but still a good guy, trying to do the right thing. Then America was Keifer Sutherland in 24... somebody's gotta do the torturing! For a good cause, though.

The more and more dirt comes out, the more public sensibilities turn to stuff like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and House of Cards, reassuring watchers that nobody's good, that if you try to do the right thing the world will crush you, that all that matters is being top-dog. Sucks, but "that's the way the world really is".

It's super interesting. You'd think the character development in those shows is indicting, but it really is mostly immunizing and pride-preserving.

Doctors and lawyers make for great television and movies, because of the drama involved and the ease of portraying it.

Pretty girls are also a requirement for entertainment, for <reasons>.

So many doctor and lawyer TV shows were cast with women in them.

And then many girls aspired to be doctors and lawyers, because they saw a viable path that way.

Also, secretaries and nurses worked close to doctors and lawyers and businessmen, tech was more isolated. Again, less bridge, less role model.

Culture > everything.

Man, as an outsider looking in, it seems like the propaganda program surrounding the atomic bomb is astoundingly effective. Everyone regurgitates the same arguments, the fact that its contentious in the history and ethics communities seems to be glossed over completely.

The narrative that it saved Japanese lives is based on wrong premises (they'd never surrender, etc.), but tries to build a persuasive argument that it was for their own good.

I can't understand why you think "the american military saved their own lives by killing foreign civlians" is at all a more persuasive justification.

The underlying logic is extremely controversial, and relies a lot in "othering" the Japanese, and talking about them in terms like "they would fight to the last man, woman, and child" like they were wild dogs or something.

A much stronger theory is that Japanese were sacrificed in order to flex muscle against the Soviet Union.

However, I live here, and it's incredible. Every time some economist (or, worse, economics enthusiast) makes a ludicrous claim like "rent control is objectively and universally agreed upon to be bad" I just laugh. Montreal routinely ranks as one of the best cities in the planet (and I agree with that assessment), so clearly it's not as black-and-white as it's made seem.

The PropOrNot scandal was a disaster, but its victims remain blissfully unaware.

Best takes on the Hamilton musical, curiously enough.

Thanks, universally-slandered rent-control! Living in this city makes me realize how cargo-culty a lot of HN economics is.

I honestly don't understand the point of reporting such "phenomena" in such stilted, euphemistic, academic terms. Every time I read such a milquetoast description of corruption, I'm reminded of this essay discussing the ways in which well-meaning "discoveries" in economics and political science serve mostly as a prophylactic against the immediacy, urgent, and valid claims made in other epistemic registers.

It really feels like some people just don't want to "give credit" to the angry mob for realizing something that eluded them for so long, so they come up with these strange parallel constructions that quantify, and "prove", what was already obvious to everyone else, but in slightly different/more mathy ways, to make it seem like fresh knowledge. However, in doing so, they de-legitimize the ways that other people used to arrive to such conclusions, such as a cursory reading of Marxist literature.

It's such a weird dance.

https://clrjames.blogspot.ca/2014/04/ideas-whose-time-has-be...

While I studied engineering, it was common to get in spats with lefty liberal-arts types, who always brought everything around to talk of class, rich vs. poor, and so on. I mainly read The Economist, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and so on, so I thought this perspective was reductionist and overly simplistic, when reality was much more complex, a mostly net-beneficial process where foul-play was a relatively minor factor.

After graduation, when I started working, I had time to read more history and philosophy, learned more about my own domain of expertise, learned how the professional world worked, and also caught up with much more current events. Turns out I now feel like those critics were more-or-less right all along.

I still have issues with the way some issues were introduced to me originally, but ultimately I was just very reluctant to accept that there was basically a full-on class war I was blissfully ignorant of.

> For some reason, recently a number of writers seem to have taken it upon themselves to salvage Martin Shkreli’s reputation. Previously, there had been a rough consensus that Shkreli, the oily, simpering pharmaceutical executive who raised the price of HIV drugs by 5000 percent before being indicted on fraud charges, was one of the most cretinous human beings alive. This seemed utterly uncontroversial, in fact so self-evident as to render debate unnecessary. [...] But a miniature genre of article has sprung up recently: the Martin Skhreli Is Not As Bad As You Think hot take. From Vanity Fair to The Washington Post to The New Yorker, authors have issued the provocative thesis that, far from being the mealy, smirking, patronizing little snot he appears to be both at a distance and up close, Shkreli is anything from a blameless cog in a vast dysfunctional apparatus to a sweet and tender do-gooder unfairly disparaged by a society too stupid and hateful to appreciate his genius.

> And the Vice profile, while questioning a number of Shkreli’s claims and containing numerous criticisms, calls Shkreli a “finance wunderkind” and “a Horatio Alger story” and sympathetically relays Shkreli’s claim that his unapologetically money-grubbing attitude is merely an exaggerated caricature that he plays for the public to entertain himself. [...] Let’s be clear: these reporters are dupes.

> One of Shkreli’s ex-girlfriends has confirmed that he is a manipulative, psychologically abusive habitual liar with zero capacity for empathy. As she explained: It soon became obvious that Martin was a pathological liar, would pretend to cheat on me and brag about it to raise his value in my eyes, so I’d always feel like I was hanging on by a thread, could be replaced, would vie for his approval and forgiveness.

> Shkreli’s ex-girlfriend also displayed screenshots of conversations in which Shkreli offered to pay her ten thousand dollars for sex, a proposition that revolted her.

> His menacing behavior has been noted elsewhere: he has been accused of waging a harassment campaign against an ex-employee, writing in an email that “I hope to see you and your four children homeless and will do whatever I can to assure this.”

Every single time there's someone "reluctantly" doing overtime in their defense.

I know people who are feeling increased pressure to participate in the Airbnb game, so as to not get priced-out by people who are doing so!

It's a race to the bottom.

Parents claim they've learned nature trumps nurture. They gave girl firetrucks, found her tucking the firetruck to bed. Parents conclude it's the nurturing feminity.

Psych asks "who tucks her to bed every night?". Oops.