292 karma · joined June 11, 2024
The term itself sounds absurd and oxymoronic to me, but also I know NYC housing is absurd and I can imagine that there are places that do nice interior finishes on studio apartments and call them luxury so maybe it's real?
People are primarily looking at the speaker, secondarily at themselves, third is probably checking slack/email/whatever and only in a deep 4th or 5th place is anyone paying any attention to the expression on other people's faces.
Realizing that nobody is paying that much attention and doesn't care hopefully can make the calls less stressful and exhausting for you.
When Bernie Madoff or Enron or any of the other major headline-grabbing frauds fell apart, the victims generally got back almost nothing. The fact that FTX is returning all of the user's money, plus interest, is quite unique and newsworthy.
A) Loans need to be paid back, with interest. The person must either be selling assets or drawing in other (taxed) income to pay back the loan. A loan could delays the taxes to a future year to let someone buy a house or yacht or whatever without the full tax burden in year 1, but they still ultimately pay all the taxes
B) If they die while still having outstanding loans, their heirs pay a 40% inheritance tax on everything above like 10 million, so there is no magic avoidance of taxes there, just a change in whether it's capital gains tax today or inheritance tax tomorrow.
I'd love to be disproven if someone can explain a real tax loophole, but as far as I can tell, the "Billionaires avoid taxes by taking out loans" thing is completely untrue.
They're suggesting that to give the optimal assistance to those countries, the IQ of the current adult population needs to be considered as an important variable in the equation, but it's taboo and stigmatized to discuss or acknowledge, so the people get sub-optimal solutions instead.
If you want to help some community in need, but you're not allowed to address certain taboo topics- IQ, substance abuse, STDs, domestic abuse, religious beliefs or cultural norms, whatever may be relevant for that group, then you're probably not going to design your programs for assistance in the best way.
"Gun violence" is of course factually a non-issue in America. Being scared of guns is like being scared of shark attacks or being struck by lightning- technically possible, but realistically such a small risk for the average person that it rounds to 0. But, if you follow certain news or get your social media algorithms tuned to show you certain content, it can seem like this big scary thing.
I also can't really fathom what "repressive moral culture" someone is imagining in America today. There has never been a time of greater tolerance for diverse sexual expression, recreational drug use, religious freedoms or alternative lifestyles. In 2024 you can be a tattooed queer polyamorist pagan who goes to Burning Man for a week and then returns to your corporate finance job on Monday.
But, all the "content for you" algorithms everywhere on the internet will have huge swaths of people afraid of their neighbor and society at large and believing they're under attack and marginalized.
If you're lucky enough to get an unusually good internship.
Won't most of the interns be shadowing someone who is just practicing the same bullshit/pseudo-intellectual woo the elder therapist was taught by the same programs a few years earlier?
The political establishment doesn't want the proletariat having journalism that reports against the wishes of the powerful or of regular people having free speech to be used against the government.
No ethical person should take part in enforcing these laws.
I have never witnessed this in real life. Every actual PhD and MD I've ever interacted with are cautious about over-reliance on a single study and particularly if a result is surprising will view it with extreme skepticism if the study has any flaws.
> and the reporting thereof
Sure. 99% of journalists don't know any science beyond their C in high school basic science, and they're rewarded for views and engagement, not accuracy, so they'll hype up any study. Especially ones that are provocative or engaging for general audiences.
There is a huge, huge, huge difference between the editors at Nature and the talking heads at CNN. Or between research scientists and twitter commenters.
A white kid from a trailer park in West Virginia with low-income, absentee parents is far less privileged than a black kid from Palo Alto with affluent, involved parents.
Affirmative Action (or DEI, the name doesn't matter) is a very crude, inaccurate tool to try to use to address the inequalities in the world. The genuinely privileged find ways around it (they have the money, connections and knowledge of how to game the system) while the underprivileged white kids born into low income households end up facing an impossibly uphill battle to escape the cycle of poverty.
To be perfectly clear to preempt uncharitable interpretations, I'm 100% anti-racist, I acknowledge the historical racism prolific throughout American history and I want a more just, fair and equal world. My point is that as a tool to achieve those goals, race-based university admissions and hiring is unproductive at best and counter-productive in most cases. It may be well-meaning people trying to fix real problems, but those intentions don't change the fact that it's ultimately harmful and a net-negative to the goals of a fair, equitable society.
There is real evidence that the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats in the diet has measurable impacts to health outcomes. Unsaturated fats (those which contain carbon <-> carbon double bonds, rather than each carbon being "saturated" with 3 hydrogen atoms and a single carbon <-> carbon bond) are classified by where that double bond takes place. The alpha carbon atom is at the carboxylic acid end and the omega carbon is at the end of the "tail". Omega-9, Omega-6, Omega-3 are telling you where the double-bond exists, relative to the end of the tail. These molecules can have slightly different behaviors inside the body, despite being highly similar.
The reason that fish oil supplements sometimes show positive health outcomes is because they are high in omega-3s and help bring balance to the overall diet of people who eat an omega-6 heavy diet. People whose diets aren't overbalanced towards omega-6 don't see any positive impact from fish oil supplements.
All that said, the impact is quite small. Avoiding seed oils often has the practical impact of avoiding ultraprocessed snack foods or shifting people's eating away from packaged foods towards fresh, whole foods, which have numerous positive impacts (less sugar, less microbiome-disrupting preservatives, less artificial colors, more fiber, more vitamins, etc) and so at population-level it can work as a reasonable proxy for "healthy" versus "unhealthy" food choices.
TL;DR - seed oils have a sub-optimal ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids. People should try to eat an overall diet which gives them a higher omega-3 to omega-6 ratio than seed oils will provide. Seed oils can be an acceptable part of a diet as long as this ratio is balanced by other meals. Overall, the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is a relatively minor part of health, and a focus on sugar, total calories, sugar, fiber, sugar, protein, sugar, vitamins, sugar and minerals is the more important thing.
We want physical buttons and dials, not touchscreens. We don't want our location and driving data recorded and sent over the internet to their servers. We want reliable engine starting, battery life and locks, not "smart" features which can fail due to software updates or being away from cellular reception for too long.
I'm not sure there's a single car being manufactured today that can compete with a car from 10+ years ago for a use case like "Will my key unlock the door and start the engine, after my car has been parked at a forest trailhead for a week".
It also might be that "its continued use in psychology suggests" that false information taught to university students can result in years of incorrect orthodoxy before the error is corrected.
There was nothing "reckless" about the speed of the vaccine development. That's just a fear-based reactionary thing, with no basis in any sort of fact or objective measure.
> the very real myocarditis and autoimmune disorders it causes
Both of which are far lower risk than the risk of myocarditis or long-term immune system damage caused by Covid infection.
The anti-vaccine arguments are the same as when seatbelts and airbags were new, and there was a vocal cohort highlighting the injuries caused by seatbelts, ignoring the fact that the injuries would have been 10x without them.
If 10,000 unvaxxed people get Covid and 1,000 of them get heart damage from the disease or 10,000 people get vaccinated and 1 of them gets heart damage from the vaccine, it's still obviously better to have gotten the vaccine for the general population.
So your bar for "authoritarian state" is not wanting people with a highly infectious, airborne disease to vacation on a remote island where every single hospital was overcapacity?
You understand that there were no ICU beds available, emergency services were overwhelmed, nurses and doctors were working perpetual overtime with insufficient resources, etc, right?
"Take a test to show you don't have covid before flying to an island with zero capacity to handle more sick people" seems like an incredibly basic, common-sense measure.
For a single, childless person who wants to live a lower-middle class lifestyle in a low cost of living area, sure.
But if you want to live in a decent location, you're looking at needing at least a million just for a house. That leaves 1.5 to generate income, so at a 3% safe withdrawal rate that's $45k per year. After taxes that's now like $35k. And you're not getting health insurance from employer so budget $6k per year for premiums (and be ready to pay out up to $6k per year more if you end up in the hospital).
So in the end, you've got something like $20k-$29k per year to live on. That covers groceries, car maintenance/insurance/payments, upkeep on the house, phone, etc sufficiently for one person. But you're probably not joining your friends on their ski vacation or even going out for drinks with them too often.
And of course, the whole thing falls apart with a family. The average cost of health insurance for a family of 4 is $24,000 per year.
Then a generation of millenials collectively got millions of degrees in liberal arts and humanities, but the degrees didn't have any class-signaling power or economic value the way a college degree in 1970 did, so instead of getting cushy careers they ended up in low-paid, low-status unfulfilling jobs, with debt from a useless degree.
Gen Z saw that happen and took a more practical view towards college, careers, etc.
It's operating against the profit margin of the for-profit utility company. It's operating for the interests of the general public as a group, as distributed residential solar has significant societal benefits for resiliency after natural disasters, lower pollution, etc.
The American energy grid is a mess of bad incentives and bad actors, where we get for-profit companies with monopoly control and often their incentives are to lobby politicians for rules and regulations which increase their profits to the detriment of everyone else.
Unions would likely prevent this behavior (hire 10 then layoff 2) because companies with unions are much slower to hire. Instead of hiring 10 when things were going well and they were optimistic, they might hire only 1 or 2. So you'd have less layoffs, but also less people employed.
Also, unions can prevent layoffs in the short-term, but keeping the deadweight employees harms the company and the increased employment costs can make it so that a company doesn't survive a lean period and instead goes bankrupt, making everyone lose their job.
>When Fox News started the lie you're repeating
I don't watch Fox News, nor do I really consume any rightwing media that would repeat their messaging, so, I don't believe I'm "repeating" anything of theirs.
>So, what about that context changes anything?
He's trying to convince apathetic, disinterested non-voters to go out and vote, by making an appeal that this one-time act will fix things. This is an appealing claim to many people who believe voting doesn't matter, nothing ever gets fixed or meaningfully changes and so don't believe it's worth their effort. It's not a long-term commitment to becoming more political involved or a requirement to vote in every primary, ballot initiative, etc, it's a one-time ask.
> It's my firm belief that the intended meaning was, in fact, "There won't be any voting anymore after I'm elected."
That's unfortunate. Maybe you should try to talk to some real-world conservatives to broaden your understanding. Or at least recognize that your belief is a fringe, extremist interpretation not held by 99% of people.
>really the hill you want to die on? Aren't there better people you could be defending?
I don't believe I'm dying on a hill here? My stance is basically that Trump is terrible, and that there's no need to engage in hyperbole or dishonesty against him, and that doing so is in fact counterproductive, because it just makes it easier for the MAGA folks to ignore legitimate criticisms because they get used to tuning out the false "boy who cried wolf" ones.
In simple terms, I'm not trying to "defend" Trump here. I'm saying let's focus on the real problems, not against some strawman from an ambiguous statement. Of course, if we're a dictatorship in a few years, I'll be eating crow and I'll try to send you an apology. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course, everyone understands this wasn't the intended meaning, so nobody really cares.
Trump is legitimately pretty terrible and says and does all sorts of bad things, so focusing on these type of "gotcha" intentional misinterpretations seems unnecessary. You might have a more compelling argument if you picked any of the many things he's said where the actual intended meaning was horrible.
Sadly, the copyright cartel swiftly attacked and all the regular people lost their rights. It seems like the lesson learned is that the copyright-owning corporations can't be trusted to play fairly or meet in the middle on fair use. We really need to just abolish copyright laws entirely.
The shift to treating he/him/his as exclusively male seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon (last few decades) as American social progressives sought to change language to be explicitly-inclusive instead of implicitly-inclusive and to avoid confusion due to the context-dependent dual meaning of such words.
1970s - "he" means everyone 1990s - "he/she" means everyone 2020s - "they" means everyone
When I get invested in a certain belief, I find it useful to ask myself "What would it take for me to change my mind?". It's a helpful tool to catch situations where I've been discounting or ignoring evidence that goes against my belief. If you ask yourself that, and the answer is that nothing would change your mind, then you're not making evidence-based decisions, you're making decisions based on faith or (potentially mis-placed) trust in a person, group or identity.
2) Your "aside" there is the whole thing though. Obesity drives a lot of costs sure, but Obamacare legislation enshrined health insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers as essentially government-backed money printing machines, so it's going to take tremendous effort to change any legislation, because they can and will spend literally billions of dollars to keep their monopolistic position.
The profile on Walz was interesting. The overall assessment of "moderate" seems fairly reasonable, and the article did a good job covering the complexity and diversity of issues. Seems like Walz is far-left on abortion, center-left on economics, centerist on policing, center-right on environment along with some token populist stunts to appeal to various groups.
Not a publication I was familiar with before, but seems like a good source for liberal-biased but still fundamentally truthy information.
A templated rejection email sent from whatever tool you're using to manage resumes/interviews is fine.
"Dear applicant, we have decided not to move forward with your application. Thank you for your time. We appreciate your interest and wish you the best" is far better than getting ghosted.
Hey, the rest of the thread is over here. It looks like you moved the goalposts so far away you might be lost.