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We don't know how Yahoo would've done under someone else. It could've been much worse.
It's perfectly possible Mayer did unique work that paid her compensation and much more in savings. Without the counterfactual, we cannot judge her.
"It is a SCAM and will steal your seed!"
I'm getting General Ripper vibes over here...
Work doesn't define humanity, but the fruits of work are what enable humans to exist.
Also, work is the only means by which we do things that can benefit others. It's all very good to be concerned with your own experience, but if you want to be helpful to a partner, a family, or a community, you have to work.
This is why work has such meaning. It makes benefits that are not purely selfish. Benefiting other people strikes me as more meaningful than simply attending to one's self, trying to make the days until death more pleasant. This selfishness is what has always troubled me about the popular hedonistic conception of meaning that's taken hold in recent decades.
incel, red-pill, and proud boy ideas that you must refrain from "spilling your seed"—that your reproductive emissions contain some of your essential energy
What you're describing is called NoFap; this community is based on the /r/nofap subreddit and is pretty much entirely separate from the culturally-Othered groups you seem to be trying to "weirdify".
Incel have no interest in NoFap.
To the degree that redpill and Proud Boy-like communities belive in NoFap, it's simply based on the repeatable observation that not masturbating increases energy and motivation - especially sexual motivation. Any man who can go two weeks without ejaculating will observe this easily for himself. The difference can be staggering - you feel like a different person.
It has nothing to do with some strange mysticism. Redpillers, especially, are entirely about rejecting traditional mystical beliefs ("soul mates", "love conquers all", "meant for each other", etc) in exchange for repeatable results-yielding methodologies. Nofap is such a methodology.
Not sure where you got this meme, but let's let it die here now because it's as disconnected from reality as most of what mainstreamers say about marginalized male sexual communities.
Is it a "structural" issue? Or is it just the fact that, statistically, poor people are really unlikely to pay back loans, so loaning to them profitably means charging really high interest? Or is that a "structural" issue?
the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.
So your belief is, the dominant economic-political movement in America regards "preserving the inferior status of blacks" as an end goal in and of itself? Or is this an instrumental goal that somehow serves some other purpose?
Another mode of travel doesn't seem to be accounted for: Travel for pleasure.
Not to score social points. Not for meaning. Just to relax and feel good for a week.
Weather can be a big factor. In the middle of five months of winter, daily snow, not seeing the sun in weeks, and working hard in an office every day, a week relaxing in the sun somewhere warm can be very beneficial - and not just in a trite or self-indulgent way. Seasonal mood disorders and work-related stress are real problems and time far away is a real solution.
Plus, if we're here to enjoy life, then self-indulgence is also one ingredient of a good life (accompanied by others). You don't have to be seeking "meaning" every moment of every day like a Terminator seeking his target.
Grandparent didn't imply it was a triumph of foresight, but rather a failure of foresight.
I think that's what he's saying - a general point that people's understanding of climate (and thus predictions about it) are poorer than commonly believed.
In about a billion years the sun will exhaust enough nuclear fuel to cool and expand, boiling the oceans, blowing off our atmosphere, and turning Earth back into a sterile rock.
It's predicted by astronomers and physicists who study stellar evolution.
Or maybe - and call me crazy here - men and women are different, and want different things, and therefore, as we reduce discrimination, nearly every job and hobby will end up with a huge gender imbalance as individuals sort themselves into groups doing what they truly, freely want to do.
Then your conviction that every job must be exactly 50% of each gender no matter how much power must be wielded to make it happen would be a massively misguided recipe for tyranny, harming both men and women.
America has a high ratio.
To call it 'worst' is a value judgment and not an objective statement, any more than saying the abortion or divorce rate is better or worse.
I'm curious, what's the definition of hard vacuum?
Obviously there will be a few nitrogen molecules bouncing around in there so it seems there must be some arbitrary cutoff.
Isn't that just the same Friedman approach with a longer time horizon?
Imagine a farmer who farms to exhaust the soil. He earns money but in 30 years, the farmland is rendered useless. He becomes poor in the end.
Another farmer farms slower, leaving fallow years, sustainably. He earns less money but 30 years later the farm is productive. He remains wealthy in the end.
Going from farmer 1 to farmer 2's strategy is not a change in ethics. The second farmer didn't care about the land as an end in itself. He just thought longer into the future, and knew how to measure assets that weren't obvious (in his case, land quality; in real life, loyalty, image, healthy communities to embed in).
You need more if you're cold enough!
Go out in frigid weather with a T-shirt on. You'll soon shiver - your body is recruiting muscles to generate heat. But also, your "brown fat" cells will start pumping out heat as well.
Yeah, there are a lot of confounding differences between Americans and Norwegians here.
History, terrain/density, climate, culture, and even genetics all likely play a role. Not just policy.
I would be curious to learn how the numbers compare between Norwegians and Norwegian-Americans. That'd cut a few confounders at least.
Small ideological sects with large families historically don't seem to take over the world.
It only seems that way because pre-1960, the world was entirely dominated by sects (e.g. religions) with large families. All the old religions are very traditionally pro-natalist for a reason. Go forth and multiply!
If the population didn't grow, it was only because there was just no more food to feed more mouths. So it was for all of human history until recently.
It's only now that there is a significant group of people who choose not to have large families, and who have the birth control technology to make it happen. As with past sects who followed this path, they will dwindle as a proportion of the population. We are in nothing like a steady state, and high-fertility groups absolutely will own the future, just as they owned the past.
Topical here is The Most Important Graph In The World:
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Populati...
True, it is a de-facto outcome that constitutes a punishment.
Still totally understandable from an employer's point of view. e.g. How much of a discount would you need to hire a nanny previously convicted or domestic abuse?
But, it still functions as a de-facto punishment. But the rationality of it is what makes it difficult to address, without taking away the freedom of free people.
Perhaps a solution would be to make judges explicitly state that part of the punishment is to have a really hard time finding work, to make them acknowledge what's being done. Then, if the judge doesn't wish to make this part of the punishment, he can order that the criminal's future employers be subsidized, or that the record be hidden.
The thing is, these are political non-starters. Even if the overall result is better, we know what'd happen the first time a felon with a hidden record or whose paycheck is government subsidized does something awful on the job. And that will happen, fast.
Former criminals are far more likely to commit crimes than random citizens. So it's rational to discriminate against people with records. This fact has to get acknowledged, and my sense is that a lot of people don't want to because it makes the problem seem really hard to solve.
Overall, given that employers should have the right to choose their employees with knowledge intact (see: nanny example), but criminals shouldn't be receiving life-long extrajudicial punishments, I think subsidizing their wages to some degree, if they find work, seems like a good policy option. I wonder if it's ever been tried.
After the Spanish flu, multiple near-missed accidental nuclear launches as well as political crises during the Cold War, September 11, SARS scare, Ebola scare, weather events like Katrina or the Ottawa ice storm, as well as your bog-standard surprise wars from history, it seems obvious to me that the chance of a mass-destruction event requiring over 3 days of supplies far exceeds 0.000001% chance per year.
In Tokyo they test the public emergency speaker system every day.
At 5pm they play a 30-second traditional Japanese lullaby. If you ask people, they say it means it's time for children to go home - though as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with actual school schedules. I'm not sure everyone realizes it's actually a warning system.
It's not a punishment, though. Employers' motivation is not to exact retribution.
It's just people not wanting to associate with others who are more likely in the future to commit dangerous or destructive acts, because they fear being victimized. They rightly believe that if this person committed such an act in the past, they're more likely to do so in the future, as compared to someone with no such record.
If you pretend the motivation is to punish the other, instead of to avoid being victimized, you'll never be able to understand this behavior and thus will never be able to change it or adapt to it.
Those three dots are doing a lot of work.
There are a ton of citizens who would benefit from college but can't afford to go. I struggle to see the utility in discriminating against your own poverty-stricken countrymen in this. What's the real motivation?
Given how absurdly twisted and misrepresented the Damore memo itself has been in the media (calling it anti-diversity when it was pro-diversity, posting it but silently removing links to sources, stating that it says women are bad at engineering when it actually said they're statistically less likely to be interested in engineering, and many many other lies), everything reported in these sources should be taken with a grain of salt.
It's perfectly likely that these stories are just not true, or are at least a highly interpreted version of what happened. Only primary sources are trustworthy; show me the chat logs and emails.
consider what in our genetics makes us different than cave painters 30,000 years ago
A tremendous amount has changed in that time. Height, immune system changes, lactose tolerance, blue eyes, different hair colors, digestive system changes. There's strong evidence for significant changes in IQ, time preference, and other psychological traits. A cave painter from 30,000 years ago would probably act like an undisciplined, impulsive child because of genetic predisposition to high time preference and low intelligence.
It's a myth that evolution takes millions of years. With sufficient and realistic selection pressures, something like IQ or height can shift several percent every generation. This is how there's only a few thousand years between even the most different dog breeds. 30,000 years is more than enough time for massive shifts in a gene pool.
And this is even assuming your cave painter is human. If it's 30,000 years ago, he may not be!
[1] News article on genetic changes post agricultural revolution.
I see humans who don't reproduce as analogous to cells in the human body that don't contribute to the germ line
One basic insight of the selfish gene is that a gene can be regarded as being in several places at once if it has copies in those places. It acts as the same gene, not separate copies.
Since all cells in the body have the same genes, if you have a biological child, they all contribute to the germ line since, in terms of outcomes, they are all the same unified entity. And if you don't, none of them do.
It's quite possible to do things that help a population or a lineage, and the multiplier effect can have more impact on the frequency of your genes than directly reproducing would.
Definitely true! Hence the human predisposition towards ethnic nationalism and tribalism.
Here's a thought: Perhaps one reason for our rising identitarian tribalism isn't just increasing ethnic diversity, but is also the fact that increasing numbers of childless people are expressing their reproductive instincts through tribal aggression instead of direct childbearing.
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-dna-suggests-agricultur...
That in general the well being of Native peoples in the US, of African Americans is devalued. It is witnessed in the exclusion in drug trials, in the diseases that pharma considers worthwhile to address...
Speaking about medical research specifically:
You seem to say these outcomes are because of white racists "devaluing" black and native peoples' well-being in an evil act of collective racism.
A simpler explanation would be: There are far fewer blacks and natives than whites in America, which means fewer sick people to help and fewer customers, which means their unique illnesses get less research focus.
The same effect happens between common diseases and rare diseases irrespective of race. Common diseases get studied first, because that's where the most good can be done. This isn't because the well-being of people with rare diseases is "devalued".
Frankly I'm concerned you jump so quickly to a mass accusation of collective racial evil (which echoes historic hatred against other high-performing ethnic groups) when a simpler explanation is so obvious.
I feel fairly comfortable saying that in a group of Ethiopians in 1991, probably more than 4% are pregnant. For comparison, I've read that 10% of Syrian women in the refugee camps were pregnant at any given time. Doing the math (with world bank stats):
Ethiopia fertility 1991: 7.2
Ethiopia female life expectancy 1991: 49
Total pregnancy time: 7.2 * 0.75 years = 5.4 years
Lifespan proportion spent pregnant: 5.4 / 49 = 11%
The main thing that turned me against the modern left is the insistence on categorizing everyone into identity groups, and then treating their individuality as less important than the groups they represent.
For example, every argument that any person has more or less of a right to speak on a given topic because of their identity markers also implicitly states that their identity markers are more important than their individuality.
This goes as much when it's saying whites shouldn't talk about racism, as it goes when saying women should talk about sexism, or should always be believed when making sex crime accusations against men, and so on.
It's strange to me that you and I started in the same pro-individuality place and ended up, apparently, on opposite sides of the political aisle.
Most poor people in the US are women and their children.
What a strange statement. This would be true if, for example, poor people were 33% men, 33% women, and 33% children.
It would also be true that "most poor people in the US are men and their children."
Did you mean to say something specific about single mothers and the children who live with them? Or was the phrasing an attempt to import that image while saying something much less meaningful?
Here's something that is specific and true: The vast majority of homeless in America are men. There are many, many centers set up to help women and children in poverty exclusively, while resources just for men are rare-to-nonexistent.
Extreme poverty is massively gendered against men, and the resources to address it are massively gendered towards helping women.
Our economies of wealth are not built "on the back" of the people in the soup kitchens.
Those few people who are going to soup kitchens are typically so crippled by their own internal issues (e.g. mental illness, impulsive criminality, addiction, total inability to manage money) that their productivity is extremely low or negative. Nobody's taking anything from them because there's nothing to take.
In fact it's the opposite of what you said. It's the people in the soup kitchens who are living (e.g. eating soup) on the back of the healthy, productive people running the economy. Just ask: Which group would suffer more if the other group disappeared?
And before those full of moral rage jump in here, no, I'm not saying they deserve to suffer, etc. They don't. But nor is the underclass a productive group being forced to hold up the wealthy. It's not the medieval era any more; in a modern economy those with zero or negative human capital are nothing but a liability.
Not every human endeavor has to make a profit. However, most do have to make a profit, otherwise total wealth decreases until we all starve to death.
If an activity doesn't make a profit, generally people unconnected with it shouldn't be forced to subsidize it unless there is a really good reason, like specific and well-understood positive externalities to the activity.
I have no issue with people doing beekeeping (or skateboarding or painting or snowshoeing) as a hobby. But I see no reason I should be forced to do more work I don't want to do in order that someone else can do their hobby that they do want to do.