newbamboo

I feel like the public, even in may 2022, just can’t grasp the basic concept of inflation. A better way than dropping cash out of helicopters, or mailing checks, is to give people tax money back in the form of a standard deduction. It’s almost like people have thought about this stuff already.

“class of people so eager to take wealth/future prosperity from their children”

Agreed. Very Ugolino.

Not really no.

Why would it be a bit much?

Banks can’t give out fake loans. They try to all the time and are rightfully regulated/fined/charged when they do.

Banks giving out bad loans caused the 2008 collapse. Student loans will one day cause a similar problem but it won’t be big banks going bankrupt, it will be us. Hearing that 20% are obvious fraud doesn’t even surprise anyone. Imagine a bank saying 20% of their loans are fraud but it’s “not their job” to check that loans are given to anonymous recipients who don’t bother to provide even a fake name!

It’s a crime. Like the banks, the people at the top are aware but profit off doing nothing. That they work for the taxpayers just makes it that much more criminal, not less!

Exactly the same incentives problem with EDD. The more fraud, the larger their budget gets and so there is only one metric they care about; increasing the total number of recipients. Similar issue with fake user counts in the tech world. User count = money.

Unfortunately the dominant party also benefits from all of this fraud, so it is ultimately a political problem. Until there is viable outside political competition, there will continue to be zero accountability and wide scale fraud and corruption. User count = money = political power/voters. Mainstream candidates are owned, and so the only solution involves draining the swamp so to speak and it’s pretty clear at this point, the swamp usually wins.

“The financial aid administrators at Pierce College say it’s not their job”

Make them legally accountable.

Banks can’t assist fraudsters and then say “not my job.” The administrators should be jailed or lending to colleges with this problem should stop.

I’m normal.

You should read about inflation. Efforts to fatten up the middle class with free giveaways to certain voting blocks has and will continue to spur inflation and make those same voters ever less wealthy. But voters are myopic, so they’ll vote for free money every time. Eventually you get Venezuela.

A better way would be to protect people by not making policy decisions that reward bad behavior and punish those who avoid debt and save. Rewarding terrible behavior may get you elected but it’s bad for society. Like giving candy to pacify a cranky baby.

But such opinions have become verboten now, and actually censored.

Another manifestation of problems in higher education. It’s not just software.

If you read up on the sociology of professional specialization you’ll learn that most technical complexity in a field is there for competitive purposes. Jargon exists more exclude and obscure than to facilitate.

So one predicts less productivity as competition increases lead to complexification of professions. This is all because higher education is broken. One of the functions of higher education, perhaps it’s most important function, is allocating human capital efficiently. It’s fully derelict in this, preferring instead to sell credentials to labor that labor doesn’t need, at the expense of the debt holders and students, to the delight of corporations. The result is zero productivity going back to the early 70’s.

“the question is whether you have large amounts of the kind of parasites that make you sick and more specifically, the kinds of parasites that can be treated with ivermectin.”

It would be a useful study, to the extent Covid remains a concern for public health agencies. If you are familiar with poverty in America, you wouldn’t think sanitation and parasites aren’t issues here. They just aren’t as common.

Will you read his new book?[0]

If anyone were in a position to know whether it’s possible, and how to do it, he’d be on the list.

I think, regardless of his history regarding open source, water under the bridge long ago, he is worth taking seriously if we want to be prepared for the next one, which may come soon.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704751/how-to-preve...

On the other hand, we could have a zero Covid planet. A place without pandemics. Bill Gates is the hero we need.

Never been pro-ivermectin as a primary tool for Covid, but can you actually back up, “indeed, the argument for ivermectin in 1st world countries has been more or less demolished.”

I read Scott’s piece the day it was published and was over all impressed but don’t buy the conclusion. Westerners are filled with all sorts of parasites and as far as I’m aware we are not universally cleaner in that regard, for example with worms, than other places. That to me suggests that to the extent a significant fraction of the population would benefit from deworming, ivermectin’s widespread use in some of our hospitals during the pandemic was not entirely illfounded and may have even played a part in more than one life saving treatment regimen.

So I would love evidence that says clearly why it doesn’t work here but works in poorer places because somehow Americans are too good for parasites. My experience tells me this is wrong, and many Americans are carrying all sorts of bugs. Go read the Amazon reviews for proguard!

“folks from California and the Southwest wanting more water”

People don’t complain about Floridians or iowaians. It’s always the brown bodies from California “driving up prices” and “drinking all the water.” California is a dog whistle for anti-immigrant viewpoints. “Folks from California.” We know who you mean when you say that. Immigrants and other “water drinkers.”

Why not talk about nuclear war? It’s one of several elephants in the room. The full collapse of a nuclear super power is unprecedented. Who gets the weapons?

I want to generalize and say things that are round. Circles, whether the wheel or the phonograph, or a pulley, or lipid nano particles— circles are true magic.

Reuters is not a credible source, even if they’re right in this case. Leave peer review to peers, in journals where it belongs. Reuters is just another USA Today at this point. They should not be the arbiters of what constitutes valid science. We have scientists and a thing called The Scientific Process. It’s not something to discard out of fear or political anxiety. Another lesson, like inflation, we’re all going to have to suffer through because our elite ruling class didn’t do their homework.

Maybe when the late great JPB passed on? Hurts my ears to listen, burns my eyes to see.

It’s LA so you can just step on a dirty needle. They’re scattered liberally.

Don’t question Dan. He gets results. Everybody loves his moderation, and if you don’t love the moderation then you should just leave. There’s always Reddit!

“We should just get rid or corporations. And we should get rid of prices too. And profit of any sort should not be tolerated by the Government. We should all have exactly the same possessions and live in identical houses that the Government provides. And these shouldn’t be better for people in the west. We should all have free healthcare too, and unlimited credit that can be used for loans that never have to be repaid.” —The Guardian

The government, at federal, state and local levels, all rely on Twitter to conduct official taxpayer funded work. Taxpayer funded work should not happen on proprietary systems that operate with zero oversight or public transparency.

Elon polled Twitter users about this and the response was overwhelmingly in favor of open source and transparency. Everyone on Twitter got a vote.

If you oppose transparency, as many now are, you lose your credibility. So it’s another one of Elon’s people hacks, and look at all the morons falling for it.

They should have stuck to the dvd by mail model. There were so many good movies to watch back then. Lots of content doesn’t matter if it’s crappy content. I bought an antenna last year and been amazed at how much better the content is, even old shows like mash and all in the family. Tv shows that shaped our culture, but changed it for the better!

Et Tu EFF? Sigh. I remember when they supported open source. Won’t give them my support going forward. At least rms is still alive and kicking.

“Moving forward, McFarland is analyzing the racial disparities of childhood lead exposure, hoping to highlight the health inequities suffered by Black children, who were exposed more often to lead and in greater quantities than white children.”

https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-sh...

Sure. Children of divorced parents are more likely to opt for divorce themselves, based on my sample. That is consistent with everything we know and expect about humans. Whether and how these apparently heritable differences are due to nature vs nurture is to me the more interesting question. Many in the lower class have imperfections that seem plausibly linked to biology rather than culture, like fundamental biological differences in capacity for impulse control, cognitive deficits whether congenital or epigenetic in origin, etc If someone is abusive due to lead exposure for instance, maybe them divorcing their partner capriciously, as a result of poor impulse control, may in fact be the best outcome for everyone. But what if these biological factors can be ameliorated through culture, say through meditation or more traditional means, then problems of nature can be addressed through culture, and perhaps there alone. That’s a line of thought that might fructify other progressive efforts to improve our culture, should the progressivists pursue it.

Women control the social capital and function as norm setters in our society. Fixing men won’t help if women and the prevailing culture remain broken. All the divorces I’ve witnessed, nearly every married childhood friend of mine has been the victim of unwanted divorce - in every instance initiated by women who simply wanted a younger, richer, more x partner. All were heavily endorsed by the surrounding social groups. It’s framed by their culture as an issue of women having equal rights to live life the way that makes them happy. Well who could argue with that. It sounds great that people should just be free to be happy, and to restrict women’s freedom in this domain harkens back to the past which we as a society have decided was a bad time, when women couldn’t vote and were the property of men. I can’t argue with that! But the children are robbed of a chance at something better, something their parents had, a stable family. Sometimes the little boys will then decide to become females. Who could blame them! I have learned that it’s better to accept these changes than to swim upstream like an old salmon or something. As long as boys can become girls, hypergamy seems fair, more symmetrical. That said, this current state of affairs amongs the coastal working class doesn’t seem like the optimal arrangement with respect to mental health outcomes.

These are people you and everyone else should be familiar with. Their beliefs are well documented. No need for “perhaps.” They’ve written eloquently about their beliefs and an intellectually curious, or merely open minded person, can benefit from exploring those thoughts and ideas. It’s not something to cower in fear of. When people who are more intelligent espouse strongly held beliefs that you don’t understand, that’s a good time to ask more questions rather than close your mind and stop reading.

But you should be empirical. Does this change meaningfully impact public literacy? If it helps even a few kids, that’s great. Let us see if this moves the needle. There are opportunity costs with public policy, and so we should try and try to be results oriented when deciding what constitutes “good change.” Look at all of the problems in the world right now which can be directly linked to frivolous and performative policy moves, made with little consideration for the actual impact they have. I will be, very pleasantly, surprised if this does anything more than sow greater cultural division in a hot election cycle.

The abstract is probably enough to save you wasting your time, but here is the punchline:

“These entangled dynamics have also fuelled a favourable political environment for Trump, who has combined a corrupt and conservative agenda with stark claims about media corruption and demagogic incitements to violence.”

This is why people disregard the value of historical study. As though it were important scholarly work, not just an anti-Trump piece disguised as “analysis.”