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simplestats··on Why Ireland's housing bubble burst
Birth rates are predicted to keep going down though, meaning the supply of immigrants will dry up anyway.
simplestats··on Why Ireland's housing bubble burst
Looks like the links in the second paragraph are examples or perhaps origins of the myths he is attacking.

The topic is apparently his phd thesis.

simplestats··on FalsiScan: Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned
You need ID to get that job flipping burgers. Two forms of it for the I-9. Though not proof of residency perhaps.

Once you have the job you can use the paycheck as proof of residency.

simplestats··on A $3B bet on finding the fountain of youth
They have actuaries to make sure they get their profit margin either way. Healthy insurance customers just make sick insurance customers happier since the price goes down.
simplestats··on A $3B bet on finding the fountain of youth
Yeah but I'm guessing you wouldn't be willing to pay them that now.

Their point was the high risk versus the high reward. Even if investors gave such money to thousands of longevity startups, would they produce something that makes all the investing pay off better than what they sunk into them? (without pivoting to something other than longevity).

simplestats··on I’m a public school teacher – the kids aren’t alright
It's junior high. But with grown adults doing the teasing and bullying.
simplestats··on What it means to teach gifted learners well
If you put slower kids into (legitimately) accelerated programs they just get left behind and do even worse. When you separate children into classes that proceed at different rates based on how fast they learn, everyone is actually getting their own "special classes".

Meanwhile if you try to handicap parents who care, to bring their children to the level of parents who don't care, they just take their children out of the system and put them in private schools. Except of course for the poor gifted kids stuck in public school, ironically, who you wanted to help.

simplestats··on Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’
Maybe it's just your points idea that's not very good. If you were punished with traffic school and just ignored it they can still increase penalities and eventually come arrest you. Unless your plan involves hiding out in the mountains somewhere or something.

Laws aren't only for punishing people who have something to seize. How else do we deal with people who have no money but still commit minor infractions?

simplestats··on Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’
Just eliminate fines altogether and give some more appropriate punishment like traffic school (which must also be free...)
simplestats··on What it means to teach gifted learners well
I think the poster was generally referring to the fact that students who progress at a faster rate will have an advantage by simple virtue of having covered more material in school. They will be more preferred by colleges which leads to being more preferred for jobs. Basically a "rich get richer" effect.

Of course the idea that this is a bad thing (as opposed to being exactly how a merit-based system is supposed to work) is based on presupposing that higher performance was the result of unfair discrimination in the first place.

simplestats··on What it means to teach gifted learners well
Are you sure that isn't what you are doing by refusing to consider the specifics of critics' complaints?

Woke policies have a societal/political agenda in terms of ethnic and other favored groups. That is by definition tribal thinking.

simplestats··on What it means to teach gifted learners well
The issue with gifted children isn't about indoctrinating them to whatever beliefs. It's the destructive belief that high academic achievement is the result of some unfair "privilege" which they seek to counter by limiting opportunities for advancement.
simplestats··on What it means to teach gifted learners well
That sounds to me like you're conceding it is true but you just don't like the way I worded it. Which is horrifying.

But are you saying they don't even want to offer calculus in high school now? Holy crap, that is also horrifying.

simplestats··on What it means to teach gifted learners well
so the alternatives are: A. lifetime benefits from being challenged up to their real potential during their most-formative years, versus alternative B. being cooler for a few years during puberty when being different is a bad thing.
simplestats··on IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access
The standard is no undue burden. That does not cover minor hassles like paperwork. Unless you're claiming it's some kind of language issue.
simplestats··on A simple math equation can transform your productivity
But our way is easier to say with braces.

(I'm not going anywhere with this...)

simplestats··on IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access
Isn't that effectively the same argument though? In practice states provide ID's to everyone who can prove residency. Forcing states to grant ID's to everyone who asks for it is the same as forcing them to allow anyone to vote without ID's, just with an extra step.
simplestats··on IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access
I don't know that the US is especially worse than other countries when it comes to time and paperwork needed to receive govt services. I have waited in long lines all over the world.
simplestats··on Meta 'most reluctant' to work with government: Home Affairs
Which side of the argument includes people who are on board with allowing backdoors into (otherwise) secure communication as long as it requires a warrant or some similar oversight? Because that's kind of how law enforcement has always operated (at least ideally) when it comes to violating freedoms.
simplestats··on Letter from Union Pacific to LA District Attorney re: train thefts, safety [pdf]
I agree it's not only deterrance (cops cared just as little when my gps was stolen in a good neighborhood versus in a bad one). You still need to ability to compare risk versus reward sanely. People I've known who couldn't hold a job always had emotional/mental issues. They hated authority so much they'd rather be unemployeed than have a boss telling them what to do. If they did have a job they'd sabotoge it one way or another.

If you did lose your livelihood I suspect you would fare better due to the same impulse control and ability to delay gratification that led you to be temporarily wealthy in the first place.

simplestats··on Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
People cite preprints in their references. So as an expert you can find the preprints that others based their work one. And you can use a tool like google scholar to find preprints that cite a particular work to build on it. It fits neatly into the same old systems experts always used to find your work. And is much faster.
simplestats··on Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
> I'm only speaking about publishing in journals, because peer review in conferences is a very different beast. In my field, of machine learning and artificial intelligence research, I'd go as far as to say that peer review in conferences is broken, getting published or not is a lottery and you're better off putting your stuff on arxiv: less hassle and more people will read it.

The situation for conferences in CS is basically how it works in journals in other fields. There may be more low-quality submissions to journals, but at the same time, the extreme competitiveness means most high-quality submissions are rejected also. The "solution" has been the appearance of open-access journals which are less concerned with subjective reasons for rejection like "impact", and scale to accept more papers. But they cost thousands of dollars. Open archives are a more democratic solution.

simplestats··on US claims jurisdiction over all .com/.net sites even if outside the US (2011)
But if you entered a country's airspace or waters without permission you'd be arrested or worse. This is more like preventing everyone from doing things that are illegal for Americans too. Meanwhile, if you operate legally, they are not claiming any control.
simplestats··on The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child
Probably the same. From what I can tell, "technically precocious boy" means the same thing as "technically precocious".

It's a no-win situation for the researchers.

simplestats··on The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child
I mean that the smart kids will show the most results for the same budget.

The utilitarian metric could also show that the average moves the most, and society benefits most, when those with the most potential can realize it. It's an interesting question. Either way though, I think it should be a basic constraint for an education system. Basically it's the same as saying classes should never be too slow for their students.

simplestats··on The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child
If your goal is average kids, then sure, you need to focus on average kids. But I'd say the smart self-motivated kids are always the biggest bang for the buck in education. Sometimes I get a sense that people (not necessarily here) consider disproportionate success among geeks to imply a program is "backfiring".
simplestats··on How life sciences work: Findings of a year-long investigation (2019)
The NSF funds basic science, including life sciences. NIH targets diseases. (and the NSF or NIH will not fund something if it better fits under the other) I certainly think it's a valuable thing to have a federal agency doing. If you want more basic life science, funding this area in the NSF more would be the way it's done in the system we have today. NIH has the cancer institute and the institute of mental health and so on. It is therefore really the domain of physicians. They want a path through mouse (or whatever) then human clinical studies, and want to see doctors as co-PI's.

The fact that this careful practical system still pumps out so much bs is very problematic. I think it's the same problem as other research areas, not the fault of the NIH system itself.

simplestats··on Why ideologies harm individuals
I'd call that a "no", actually. Or just a bad faith argument.

I left it vague so people of both sides could relate to how it fits the other side's hypocrisy. But I suppose this also allows people who are looking for a fight to imagine that it fits their own hypocrisy and get defensive.

simplestats··on Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?
Once you restrict your stats to those that stay in school and don't do drugs, I'd think it is hard to correct for other causes. Like the presence of involved parents.
simplestats··on Why ideologies harm individuals
Seems like a loaded question. You can't imagine govt policies that kill people but do not save anyone in return?
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