baazaa

Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/09/10/...

The striking thing is that the dismal career prospects hasn't stopped bright ambitious people trying to get into academia. Whereas In Australia you can just look at entry-scores for teaching degrees to see that only people who did poorly in school go into teaching nowadays.

So sure, pay and conditions have some influence but it's not a sufficient condition to explain what's happened in teaching. Pretty sure if researchers could get the job security and entitlements of teachers we'd have no problem finding bright people trying to get into research. But that's because research is more intrinsically rewarding and higher status.

Child-minding just fundamentally isn't a job which requires much talent, the job is steadily degrading to the status and pay which one would expect for a semi-skilled occupation. The teachers' unions are doing a valiant job fighting a rear-guard action to prevent that decline, through rampant credentialism to buttress the 'professional' status of the job. But it's an uphill fight, politicians aren't going to push for tax hikes to fund teacher salaries when every voter knows full-well that regardless they're still going to have to teach their kids themselves or get tutoring if they want their kid to actually learn anything.

There's no media coverage on this case because we don't have a proper press thanks to the ACCC, but it's a ridiculous case on the face of it. I use location data covertly stolen from users who've installed various apps at work (we don't do anything nefarious with it but there's no reason someone couldn't). The ACCC doesn't care about privacy or consumer protections unless it involves big tech, as anyone familiar with its history can attest.

ACCC hasn't taken any interest in privacy for decades. The first time they showed an interest was the very same digital platforms review in 2018 that also led to them extorting Google and Facebook to hand over cash to Murdoch. We don't even have decent privacy laws, so the ACCC have been quite open about using section 18 of the consumer law as a means to enforce privacy standards against tech companies (said section is a vague prohibition on misleading or deceptive conduct, which can be interpreted as broadly as the ACCC likes which means it can be easily weaponised against whomever).

Australia has very high levels of market concentration and the ACCC is widely derided for failing to ensure competition. This is not a competent regulator. Of course one of the most concentrated industries is the media, which also hates tech companies, so the seeming alliance between the ACCC and traditional media conglomerates is of interest when considering their crusade against big-tech.

Regulatory capture is a well-known phenomenon, and it's especially dangerous when the captured regulators destroy competing industries. A recent example being the FDA's attacks on e-cigarettes because they've long been partially captured by traditional tobacco companies.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/05/27/study-raises-questions-...

A month after that was published btw, Matt Holman, chief of the office of science in the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, left for Philip Morris, a competitor to Juul's owner. This is how things work, it's just harder to find out about when it comes to Australia because, again, we don't have a functioning press, thanks to the ACCC.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/03/17/alan-kohler-news-...

[Rod Sims] said last week: “It doesn’t matter a toss what the money is paid for.”

At an on-the-record Q&A event in Melbourne last week, Mr Sims said: “For reasons of their own, Google and Facebook strongly don’t want to pay for news on search and news feed. Fine. The news media companies don’t care what the money is for. So I just think it’s a perfect outcome.”

“But”, I followed up, “this does nothing to address the dominance of Google and Facebook”.

“This is one problem at a time”, Sims responded.

“The problem we’re addressing with the news media code is simply that we wanted to arrest the decline in money going to journalism. That’s what the code is about – getting more money into journalism, and I personally think the money going into Seven and Nine, what’s been publicly reported, which is north of $30 million, will make a big difference.”

When I pointed out that there is nothing in the code that makes the companies spend the money on journalism, rather than dividends or executive bonuses, he replied that “the world is watching what they do”.

Q: What's the difference between a thug who threatens to break in your windows unless you pay up and Rod Sims?

A: Rod Sims is paid three quarters of a million dollars a year by the taxpayer and has the gall to claim he's acting in the public interest.

We shouldn't assume the ACCC are acting in good faith in this case because we know they haven't historically, instead waging an ideological campaign against tech companies.

Of course we don't have any federal bill of rights in Australia, and the implied rights in the constitution to thing like political speech can be violated so long as the court thinks the government had a legitimate reason for doing so.

Obviously the judiciary is much less powerful here than the US, but my point was how power has been stripped away from party members, legislatures, the civil service, and most of the political executive. Even senior ministers have effectively no political power whatsoever, they're just sent out with their lines to read. All the power is concentrated within the PMO (or Number 10 in UK parlance), which nowadays solely dictates party strategy and policy.

As for the WA border closure, if you read the judgement it did not say that the constitution only applies to the trade of goods. In Australia constitutional rights can simply be overridden by necessity. You saw the same with the implied right to political communication which has been routinely ignored, as in the Bolt case. If you want to read up on this, look up the doctrine of structured proportionality especially as it's been applied since McCloy. Basically governments can flagrantly breach the constitution and then it's up to the courts to decide whether the transgression was justified based off their own value-judgements. The court was satisfied there was a public health justification for the closure, so s92 goes into the bin.

Realistically until Kiefel and Keane retire, Australians don't have any genuine constitutional rights because they'll just extend the doctrine of structured proportionality to whatever constitutional right is in question. "Non-absolute" rights are simply not rights in any sense of the word.

Commonwealth nations have largely devolved into illiberal elective autocracies with immense power concentrated in the PM's offices, minimal parliamentary autonomy (i.e. everyone votes on the party line), and no ideological constraints on how state power is used or abused.

The paper seems to distance itself from Bateman's principle but I can't figure how it meaningfully differs besides being framed very weirdly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-ineffectiveness_proposi...

It should be pretty clear this is the exact opposite of monetarism.

It would clear up a lot of confusion if economic history textbooks simply describe Friedman's monetarism as a species of Keynesianism, certainly it would be less wrong than what everyone currently thinks.

Corbyn was completely unelectable and gained 30 seats with a nearly 10% swing towards him in 2017 because of the Tory's policy on social care, removing the triple-lock and cutting the winter fuel allowance. That's how determinative old-people are in elections.

The only reason Tories remain in power is because they're happy to destroy the country in line with boomer preferences, it's not evidence they can ignore boomers at all. We've seen what happens when they make even the slightest moves against Boomer entitlements, they get decimated in the polls.

People who think governments don't respond to voter preferences, especially the preferences of a voting bloc which pretty much single-handedly determines elections, have clearly never worked in government.

While government is an extreme example, I'm sure there's a lot of non-tech companies in a similar position. The people doing the procurement don't know anything about tech, but they do know that there's random databases all over the place that are a constant headache and they want to centralise everything in a single platform. Secondly they steadfastly refuse to hire competent tech people, if databricks ends up being a very expensive replacement for an OPs team then that's a big winner for any organisation that is unable to, or refuses to, hire an OPs team but has lots of money to burn.

Yeah it's like a law of reverse propinquity in government. Working with a team next to you in the org-chart is completely impossible. Working with people far removed from you in the department is easier. Working with other departments easier still. Working with private firms and other governments easiest of all.

Chucking a bunch of variables into a linear regression, getting an r^2 of 0.3 and calling it day is so far removed from Newtonian science that I'm not sure it should even be called science.

The problem in Australia is not the media or the politicians, it's the actual electorate. Ordinary Australians pine for despotism. Unfortunately the general public are the last group outsiders think to blame, so there's this real mismatch between their theories of what's happening in Australia versus the on-the-ground reality.

Hell the premier implemented a curfew and said it was due to public health advice, the public health advisors denied it, then he said it was on the advice of the police, and they denied, and that was that. No further questions asked why we implemented a curfew for fun. In this environment it's positively quaint the idea that our cyber laws are the thin edge of the wedge.

I would leave, but like North Korea, it's against the law for citizens to leave the country.

Is the standard consensus suddenly pro-slavery?

> As much as submission to a petty prince, whose dominions extend not beyond a single city, is more grievous than obedience to a great monarch; so much is domestic slavery more cruel and oppressive than any civil subjection whatsoever. The more the master is removed from us in place and rank, the greater liberty we enjoy; the less are our actions inspected and controled; and the fainter that cruel comparison becomes between our own subjection, and the freedom, and even dominion of another. The remains which are found of domestic slavery, in the AMERICAN colonies, and among some EUROPEAN nations, would never surely create a desire of rendering it more universal. The little humanity, commonly observed in persons, accustomed, from their infancy, to exercise so great authority over their fellow-creatures, and to trample upon human nature, were sufficient alone to disgust us with that unbounded dominion. Nor can a more probable reason be assigned for the severe, I might say, barbarous manners of ancient times, than the practice of domestic slavery; by which every man of rank was rendered a petty tyrant, and educated amidst the flattery, submission, and low debasement of his slaves.

Nowadays it's just assumed that any racist must be an advocate for slavery, or gas chambers, or whatever. Actually reading racists (like Hume) would quickly disabuse one of that notion.

Does anyone know of books that cover stuff like that? There's plenty of books explaining Simpson's paradox to laymen, but I want something that explains common statistical pitfalls for people with already some education in the area.