defertoreptar

> Glasgow has had a 21.5 per cent reduction in alcohol-related deaths from 2017 to 2018 - down from 186 to 146.

They really should be tracking all alcohol and drug-related deaths instead of pretending that we live in a world free of negative externalities.

I like how they calculated consumption, rather than income or net wealth. That's a more honest way of comparing poverty in different countries.

The percentile rank of China's GDP per capita was 13.7 among listed countries in 1950. [0] As of recently it's 44.5. [1] You have to standardize the information to make a meaningful comparison, since there are more countries nowadays.

0: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...

1: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP/...

> Are there really no other factors at play?

What factors do you have in mind, and how do they relate to the goal of the trade wars?

> At the same time, higher prices of garlic — they soared 53% — actually illustrate tariffs working as intended.

> China had been the biggest exporter of garlic to the U.S. and domestic garlic growers have long argued they were being undercut by cheaper Chinese competition. Now that Chinese garlic faces higher tariffs, domestic companies can charge higher prices.

Domestic companies being able to charge higher prices was not the goal of tariffs. Labor is cheaper in other Asian countries, and that also results in their being able to undercut America producers. However, the trade war is against China and not low labor cost countries like Vietnam and Malaysia.

Your comment was "Chomsky covers your exact comment quite thoroughly here." Is it really that far a reach for someone to see the attached video as a low effort stand-in for their argument given that comment?

If you just wanted to post a Chomsky interview video, I of course have no issue with that.

So instead of summarizing it and putting it into the context of this discussion and how it might refute my point, you're just going to link to it as though to say "look Chompsky said something about this therefore I'm right"?

It comes down to probability. Let's say we want to maximize the total hours of time enjoyed living before before dying.

Let's say we know we're going to die in a month with 100% certainty. We might liquidate all of our assets. Go into debt. Pay to fly loved ones from all over the country to spend time with them. Spare no expense.

On the other hand, let's say instead we know we're going to die when we turn 100 and with 100% certainty. In that case, it makes sense to delay gratification, invest more, and get the benefit of compounded returns. We might aim to have enough passive income coming in at around 60 or 70, and then we can quit working and slowly spend it all so that our the last check we write before dying bounces.

Since we don't know when we die, the best strategy is somewhere in between these two extremes. If the actuarial tables say we have 50 years left, I'm more inclined to believe the better strategy is likely to look like the second scenario.

> The united states is a republic whos purpose is "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. "

It's true that James Madison was deeply concerned with a tyranny of the majority supplanting core constitutional rights, a flaw in democracy first identified by Aristotle.

> In a letter to Thomas Jefferson in October 1788 James Madison expresses lukewarm support for the idea of a bill of rights since “repeated violations of these parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every State.”

> [...]

> He continues to believe that the real threat to liberty will come from “the majority of the Community” and not from “acts of Government”.

To say that the United State's purpose is to protect the minority is way off base. After all, the country was born as an opposition to the idea of people not being represented by its government and instead at the behest of a very small minority of royalty and aristocrats.

> the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for esports, and that spoiled the genre for the mid-range gamers that were its bread and butter.

Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?

So your argument is that the post office could be profitable if it were allowed to be more than a post office? Yeah I agree with that, but it doesn't really say anything about whether the USPS in reality has a net cost on tax payers.

Which is exactly what the president campaigned on and presumably why his voters voted for him.

And that's not strictly accurate. The US is only pulling out, something they announced a year ago, if a new deal cannot be made.

> American taxpayers subsidize the USPS at a rate that surpasses the costs associated with any Congressional mandate. He estimates that, all told, the subsidies and legal monopolies that Congress bestows upon the post office is worth $18 billion annually. https://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/

Part of the reason interstate shipping is high is due to the fact that the USPS must ship below cost on these kind of international packages. One subsidizes the other.

A career with similar average salary would be teaching. Four year tuition is an average of 25k in state and 41k out of state.[0]

Welding school is typically 5k to 15k [1] and takes two years or less. Despite how things played out for the particular case covered by this author, there is a good argument for welding. It may not make you rich. However, if you don't like the traditional college route, then welding and similar trades offer comparatively good pay/training trade-off.

* https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/average-cost-of-c...

* https://education.costhelper.com/welding-school.html

It's as much of a strawman argument as the Twitter image is, then, since the image is literally a picture of a hospital bill.

One argument doesn't mention the subtext of socialized medicine, and the other doesn't mention the subtext of insurance.

It sounds like you're saying saying that "orphan drugs" can benefit 10% of the population and are also "cash cows." Do I have that right? I ask because if that's true, it seems to me that this is a good thing. If it wasn't a cash cow, would companies still be incentivized to take on the risk of researching these drugs and going through the work of having them tested and approved?

Your post seems critical of Google, but I don't know if that makes sense. Isn't your main criticism with the healthcare system and laws surrounding it? I don't know if we can blame companies that operate within existing law. The blame should instead be passed to policy makers and their voters.

The ideologies themselves are exclusive, to the point that they are opposites. What you're implying is that "Americans" are composed of groups and individuals that adhere to varying beliefs. Some can "love elitism", while others go the way of populism. It's not good to generalize a whole country so easily, which is my point.

The price of goods is a function of all of the costs associated with selling, so I think the cost in additional theft is ultimately put on the honest customers. That may not be such a terrible result though, since self checkout reduces cost in the first place. Since many customers prefer to save time / avoid human interaction by self checkout, it's probably a net gain either way you cut it.

> Americans love elitism

Last I heard, Americans were being criticized for populism. Which is it?

> Just because it's a right doesn't mean it needs an organization to advocate it.

Any time there's a group of people who fear that one of their rights will be taken away or diminished, don't they "need" an organization, or something, to voice their concerns?

Is it that you just don't care about what they have to say, so you don't mind if they're not allowed to say it? Seems like a scary position to hold, given the subjective nature of what people care about or not.

Difficult to extract the pertinent info out of that, but I take it you're saying that the player is compensated for speed. They can send more garbage and increase their chances of winning by placing pieces faster. In which case, that undermines the earlier point that bag randomizer is better because it rewards fast play. In reality, both kinds of randomizers reward fast play, as the net advantage of playing fast with the classic randomizer is still positive.

> Lets say drop 100 through 110 were unlucky SZSZSZSZ pattern. The faster player will come across the "unfortunate" pattern first and then lose. In contrast, the slower player will only be on drop 80.

Does the faster player get nothing in return for their speed advantage? If so, then shouldn't they just play slower? If not, then aren't they compensated fairly for the risk of running into a difficult sequence earlier in the game?

> “If you were to include cohabiting relationships [in addition to marriages], the breakup rates for young adults have probably not been going down,”

It's interesting that they think to factor in cohabitation when when looking at overall breakup rates, however they go the opposite direction and fail to account for how well-paying jobs actually relate to college degrees over the years:

> Chen connects this trend to the decline of well-paying jobs for those without college degrees, which, he argues, makes it harder to form more stable relationships. Indeed, Cohen writes in his paper that marriage is “an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.” [...]

In 1960, 22% of Americans ages 25 to 34 had some college or more. By 2009, it was 60%. [0] For the sake of argument, let's say we have 100% employment among this age group and that those with college degrees always get the best paying jobs. We'll define a "well-paying job" as the top 50% of jobs by wage.

That means that in 1960, the college folks get the top 22% well-paying jobs. That leaves the remaining 28% of well-paying jobs to those who skipped college. In 2009, we have all well-paying jobs filled by the college folks, and they actually spill over into the non well-paying jobs, since we have so many now.

So yes, there is technically a decline in well-paying jobs among those without college degrees. However, that's only because there are a larger proportion of those with college degrees in kind! If you want to consider "social inequality", it makes more sense to look at the proportion of those with well-paying jobs compared with those without, which is 50% in both theoretical scenarios.

[0] https://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-table...

> since the voting public did not have "all the available information."

What information then was available but the public didn't know?

> Because no one could have possibly known what the terms of Brexit would be, because they would have to be negotiated.

So then it's fair to say that information was not available.

Yeah when you frame it that way, it's one thing. However, what if two people agree to buy the car given all the available information. Then, one person changes their mind and the other doesn't? Person A keeps saying, "well, let's decide later" and keeps kicking the can down the road. Is that fair to person B, who originally had an agreement and never not wanted the car?

This unfairly penalizes students whose parents recently came into money. Early education is important, and it is unfortunately often the case that parents who work hard to become successful financially don't have as much time and energy to put into their children. Such children may be disadvantaged during critical years and now have the additional challenge of being penalized for their parents now being wealthy.

> The "wisdom" of the late 90s was that six or so small meals were better than one large meal, with respect to weight loss. Now it appears some experts would argue the opposite. Is it all just a bunch of smoke and mirrors over calories in > calories out?

Too true. It was trendy as recently as a decade ago to eat many small meals and frequently "to keep your metabolism high." What no one was acknowledging was how the study that showed the relationship between fasting and metabolism had participants basically starve themselves for an extended length of time.

> There is no tax money involved, and all the subsidizing comes from the increased revenue from raising domestic shipping costs.

If the USPS loses money, which it has been every year recently, who pays the difference?

I remember reading Politco's "Hillary Clinton’s ‘Invisible Guiding Hand’" [1] back in mid 2016. I thought, "wow, the Democratic party is way ahead of the game in data analytics", seeing as how successfully they've applied it in Obama's campaign. Here are some choice excerpts:

> Kriegel’s anodyne title is Clinton’s director of analytics, but it’s a job that makes him, and his team of more than 60 mathematicians and analysts, something of the central nervous system for the campaign: charged with sensing, even predicting, the first tinglings of electoral trouble and then sending instructions to everyone on how to respond.

> When Clinton operatives talk about their “data-based” campaign, it’s invariably Kriegel’s data, and perhaps more importantly his models interpreting that data, they are talking about. It was an algorithm from Kriegel’s shop — unreported until now — that determined, after the opening states, where almost every dollar of Clinton’s more than $60 million in television ads was spent during the primary.

> Now, with Donald Trump investing virtually nothing in data analytics during the primary and little since, Kriegel’s work isn’t just powering Clinton’s campaign, it is providing her a crucial tactical advantage in the campaign’s final stretch. It’s one of the reasons her team is confident that, even if the race tightens as November approaches, they hold a distinctive edge. As millions of phone calls are made, doors knocked and ads aired in the next nine weeks, it is far likelier the Democratic voter contacts will reach the best and most receptive audiences than the Republican ones.

When this Cambridge Analytica stuff started coming out, I thought, "huh? what's the big fuss?" It seemed like people were upset with the Republican party for doing the same kind of targeted campaigning that the Democratic party had spent more money on, had more mathematicians on the payroll, and had more and higher quality data from the Obama presidency.

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clin...