supreme_sublime

It is interesting, it seems like the default position is "Every complaint is legitimate". There are no specifics given so we're left to speculate and land wherever our own bias tends to lean.

Not having health insurance is different from not being able to access healthcare. Everyone in the US is entitled to healthcare regardless of their ability to pay. I don't really know if that's the best policy or not, but it simply isn't true that people don't have access to healthcare.

>"I can win if I just work harder/emulate those more successful than I -- ultimately I'm in control and nothing else matters"

While obviously there are things outside individual's control, is this really a harmful outlook? I'd certainly rather look at my life as if I had agency vs thinking I had none, or it was incredibly limited.

>It's already had plenty of time to compound over generations, to whatever extent it does.

I'm not sure what you mean, most westerners don't make a habit of marrying their cousins.

Because of this compounding it means that the risks would be much higher than 3-4%, which is what we see in the data.

>I mean, are you really suggesting that a slightly higher incidence of e.g. cystic fibrosis in Pakistani communities somehow makes it more difficult for them to integrate?

It seems as though birth defects aren't the only way that inbreeding negatively affects offspring. It also appears to lower intelligence[0], while also increasing mental health issues.

[0] - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01068128

I did take calculus in high school, but I barely remember it. So I don't understand your notation, if you could explain in a bit more layman terms it would be great. As I understand it, the chance for birth defects goes from around 1% to 3-4%, about the same as a woman in her late 30s/early 40s having a child. I'm not sure if this would compound over generations though, it seems like it would.

I don't really think that my comment was "racist". Just talking about how culture affects genes and vice versa. Was it not bad that the old European nobles were inbred as well?

>When I went to school there was a pretty high number of second generation muslim immigrants, but even there you already saw their strict values eroding.

I certainly wouldn't take that happening as a given. If you bend over backwards to attempt to accommodate their culture in the west, you aren't giving any incentive to join your culture and worldview.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1540895/Young-Britis...

My own personal theory is that the GDPR was going through and the big players didn't fight too much knowing this was going to come through soon as well. They have the ability to comply, their smaller competitors don't, or at least will have to heavily invest in compliance.

Where did you see that Greyhound said no such event occurred? When searching for it all I see are articles that only cite the Facebook post as proof. There are no videos from any passengers, or statements from Greyhound I can find. If you could post a link it would be greatly appreciated.

>But this “believe the victim first” mentality came about as an inverse to the “give the accused the benefit of the doubt” mentality because the latter suppressed the former’s credibility and made it difficult for real victims of real heinous shit to come forward.

Are you referring to our courts "innocent until proven guilty" standard? I'd suggest you be extremely careful in trying to change that.

During the Obama Administration Title IX was used as an extrajudicial bludgeon to expel students who were deemed "more likely than not" to have done something illegal. They were not allowed legal representation during the "trials". This resulted in many cases where police exonerated the alleged perpetrator through evidence, but the student was expelled anyway. The Emma Sulkowicz story is one of these cases.

"Listen and believe" is probably okay for friends giving support to their friend. Legal standards on the other hand must be more strict and an accusation cannot be a conviction.

I don't read Breitbart, nor do I particularly care what they do. I'm not sure what was done by the company that was illegal?

Strange that you view it this way. I'm not extremely familiar with the case, but how I remember it is Gawker published a sex tape of Hulk Hogan and refused to take it down. While at the same time lampooning "society" about "the fappening". Hulk Hogan sued Gawker, which brings it to a court. Peter Thiel had a personal grudge against Gawker and used that case to take them down. Either way, it was still up to a court and all Thiel was doing was helping to fund Hogan's legal case. I'd hope that our courts have enough integrity to where if the evidence is against someone, no amount of money will change that verdict. Perhaps a bit idealistic, but I see no evidence that Thiel's money caused an inappropriate ruling in that case.

I'd characterize it as, "journalists" using their platform to go after specific people they don't like. Thiel helping one of their victims who couldn't afford to mount a case without running the risk of ruining themselves if they lost. Seems to me like a really noble thing to do.

Perhaps they feel an undue pressure to do something like this. There are some people in these threads that definitely find it out of the norm. [0] It very well could be people who simply don't stand up for themselves particularly well. I find it really difficult to believe that they lack the time/ability to use a gas station bathroom. Some routes may not have public restrooms, but I'd be willing to bet these are few and far between. They would most likely be rural routes, where you could get some privacy much more easily anyway.

It is also possible people actually prefer to do this rather than stopping frequently and dealing with the hassle of finding a place, parking, running the risk of it being a single restroom and already being occupied.

[0] https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/what-do-you-do-w...

Seems like charging a specific fee might help alleviate some of the concerns about that. Though I suppose you still need to know how much money you should charge.

I really hate estimates and have always hated estimating projects. I do appreciate the need/desire for them by some in management. I've tried to figure out how other people do it and have yet to find anything satisfactory. It doesn't have to be an extremely simple process, but I don't really know how one gets better at estimating. The only way to get better is to just understand the domain more clearly but estimating doesn't really help with that.

Kanban does have a cool idea of just attempting to break down work into equal parts and measuring the throughput of these roughly equally sized components. The only problem is actually sizing stories to be equally sized. Some changes don't have any kind of real stopping point of functionality without large changes. It seems kind of arbitrary to chunk it out just because your project management system wants you to.

I'd encourage you to amend "equality of opportunity" to "equality of opportunity under the law". I've seen too many people try to argue that if we want equality of opportunity we still have to actively level opportunity.

So you don't agree with the Freakanomics theory that it is a result of Roe Vs Wade?

By arguing what the role of government should be. If the role of government is to protect property rights, it needs to be able to defend the country from foreign invasion. Typically people in favor of "small government" mean small in scope. It is only meant for (and efficient at) solving a narrow scope of problems. So while it may be good as a means of upholding property rights, it isn't great at manufacturing cars, for instance.

Yeah, but it begs the question, why would anyone want BAT tokens?

As of 2012 food costs as a % of spending are the lowest in the US than anywhere else in the world. [0] During the Obama administration there was a massive increase in enrollment with the SNAP program. [1] Between government programs and charitable organizations I'd argue it is practically impossible for someone to go hungry through no fault of their own. You'd have to be unlucky on a cosmic level.

[0] http://www.ibtimes.com/us-spends-less-food-any-other-country... [1] http://www.trivisonno.com/food-stamps-charts

Sure, that's the ideal situation. Paying no tax and having high property values. Ultimately I'd assume you still want the property to be worth more than what you paid for it. You and the government's incentives are aligned in that sense. Of course you still are moderately adversarial since they are taxing you.

I was just trying to point at that local governments are also encouraged to have high property values for tax revenue. They also tend to have a bit more power to be able to affect large areas property values by force. If people cannot/don't utilize the government to enact policies to force people out, it seems to me that it would be pretty difficult for people to enact those policies without governmental power.

What we see in places like San Francisco are property owners and governments teaming up to drive property values up in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Edit - It could be said that the government itself is rent-seeking in such an arrangement.

That's true, it is just difficult to know what level of expertise your users are at and what responsibility do you have to educate them?

With property taxes though, don't the incentives for government and property owners align in the desire for higher property values?

It is tough because there definitely are people who are very nervous about trying things on a computer. We just had a lady today worried about using a Mac as she is used to Windows. It is a slightly different paradigm in terms of finding programs and I remember being a bit lost at first. But I also have confidence with computers and am okay with trying things and searching for how to do things.

If you lack that basic curiosity and courage, I don't really know how "intuitive" anything can be. Isn't "intuition" driven by understanding concepts behind things? The best way to get that intuition is through a bit of instruction and a lot of experimentation.

> eliminating property tax only incentives blocking all new development to drive up property values and encourage rent seeking

I'm quite interested to see your reasoning behind that statement. Don't people still want their property values to go up even with property taxes? Except in a no property tax scenario, people who own their homes outright would still be able to stay if they wanted to. Perhaps no property taxes would more highly encourage local owners to restrict newcomers. Isn't the government also interested in increasing property values so they can receive more revenue? In that case I suppose they would in a sense be "earning" the taxes they levy.

- Edited for clarity

I like seeing people applying science to education. Something I didn't know about until recently is there has been a lot of study done on the other side of the equation; instructional styles. It seems "direct instruction" is by far the leader in terms of outcomes. [0] I'm curious how well known this is and if I was just ignorant.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd_9rszR27s

>I would have thought this happened because China choose to drift back to free markets instead of improving their central planning.

What would "improving their central planning" mean? Force people to study certain subjects? Force people to teach for free?

Throwing government money into a market definitely disrupts it. Perhaps it doesn't make it not "free" but it causes distortions that likely would not have come about from the market alone.

>Is that not econ 101 supply and demand?

Yes, it is. That means that these aren't simply forces that can be wished away by a central government with an agenda. They are things that come about naturally.

>Under a good central planning, anyone who really wants a job could be planned a state sponsered job.

"Good central planning" is an oxymoron if you ask me. In order to guarantee that people have jobs, you have to take away people's free will to make sure they can perform the functions you as a central planner desire. They cannot study what they want, you will essentially have to plan people's entire lives for them. This is all assuming that people are interchangeable cogs and you are able to predict that people will be good at the tasks you wish for them to perform.

>Interestingly enough, a lot of science and research in the US is state sponsered. If it weren't, I wonder if that talent would be employed

Who knows? The money used to fund their research would not have been taken and would have been spent how the person who paid the taxes saw fit. It is difficult to find exact numbers on research spending of government vs private industry. The top 20 companies spend almost $200 billion on R&D [0] this is about 1/5th of the US federal government total discretionary budget, which includes military spending. [1]

Point being, I think it is pretty safe to say that private R&D spending dwarfs public spending. The large corporations that are often maligned are the best institutions to do risky R&D as they have lots of resources and experience in their problem domain. Of course they don't always do so, but if they don't a competitor will.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/265645/ranking-of-the-20... [1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

2 nuclear power plants in the US in the last 20 years. [0] These shills, lobbyists, and astroturfers need to get better at their job for the defense contractors.

[0] - https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21

From my understanding a lot of the reason for this is it only really makes sense to make large scale reactors; mostly due to approval processes and regulations already in place. There's a massive up front cost no matter the scale of the operation, so it makes most sense to do larger projects vs smaller ones.

https://newatlas.com/small-modular-nuclear-reactors/20860/

Ah, I don't have kids and have never put in a car seat, I thought they all used seatbelts. Damn my assumptions! Probably one of those problems that might be best served with a simple human solution, like the "bag in the back".

It is interesting because you want basically the opposite of a seat belt alarm. If the back seat belt is buckled and the seat contains a certain range of weight (would probably get annoying if it would beep for an adult), it should beep.

You mean a world where women can decide what to do with their own bodies? You are advocating for a world where we have to take care of the poor downtrodden woman who just doesn't know any better. Instead of realizing that she likely knows her own needs much better than you do.

Perhaps it is the best way for her to get ahead and escape her current situation. People do it anyway and now they have almost no recourse when they are being manipulated. If it were legal, women would actually have more power in the situation.