Exofunctor

Are you familiar with https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict... ?

This is a good example of how relatively small populations can have huge cultural effects.

Another example is how migrants from Islamic countries can carry out terrorist attacks and completely change European and American culture for the worse. The loss of American travel culture post 9/11 is tragic, and I can't think of a better word to describe it than "erasure".

Paris is now building a wall around the Eiffel Tower, thanks entirely to recent massacres committed by strongly religious immigrants for religious reasons.

Heavily Muslim neighborhoods in the U.K. have volunteer "sharia police" that harass women for dressing "immodestly".

Swedish officials removed traditional Christmas displays from Muslim areas, and then blamed the structural integrity of lamp posts (yes, really) when asked why.

Cultural erasure doesn't take a huge influx of people; it just takes a small population with aggressively viral cultural memes and a host culture with insufficient memetic defenses.

But, of course, I must be a racist for preferring European culture over throwing gays off buildings, women being unable to drive or show their faces, etc. etc.

No, which is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. "Free movement", to me, means that you are free to travel wherever you'd like on your own dime. It doesn't mean that you get to show up somewhere and demand citizenship, housing, medical care, or other free stuff. But obviously some people conflate these things.

I am, by most metrics, an ardent globalist; I advocate absolute free trade and absolute free movement. However, it's not very hard to recognize that many people's definition of globalism effectively includes such things as forced immigration, cultural erasure, and overburdening of welfare states, which are conducive to increased conflict rather than increased cooperation.

I can't imagine how people have such an incorrect view of how insurance works.

No, car insurance is not you subsidizing other people. Car insurance is you paying in proportion to your own estimated risk. That means if your expected costs are 5x higher (nicer car, young driver, etc.) you pay 5x more.

Medical insurance in the US emphatically does not work this way. More expensive people don't pay proportionately more than cheap people, meaning that the expensive people are being subsizidized. You should be alarmed at the fact that you apparently fundamentally misunderstood the way insurance works in an open market, or what the ACA is. The only part of the ACA that is even reminiscent of car insurance is the individual mandate, which is actually way worse than car insurance because you don't need to buy car insurance just for being alive. You only need car insurance if you drive on public roads.

It's too bad that your friend has a disease, but I'd rather have them pay for it than pass the bill off to a bunch of innocent people who aren't sick. If you choose to have tunnel vision and focus on health alone, it's worth noting that the second-order effects of making other people's lives more expensive will also include worsened health from poorer nutrition, increased stress, less frequent medical consultation, etc.

While I think health insurance shouldn't be attached to employers, I don't really have an objection to insurance companies using genetic testing. This is certainly an unpopular opinion here, but as someone who believes that medical care is a service, not a right: I think it's unfair to force people to subsidize the healthcare of other people, regardless of the mechanism used.

When you have car insurance, the insurance companies are allowed to use statistical techniques to predict how much you are going to cost them. Competition between insurance companies involves treading the line between beating the price of other insurance companies while charging slightly more than the customer is expected to cost.

If we let health insurance companies do this, then yes, healthcare would get substantially more expensive for very risky/unhealthy people. Of course, it would also get drastically less expensive for healthy people. From a moral perspective, I think this is preferable, but obviously not everyone will agree.

Now, from a utilitarian perspective, these two possibilities seem roughly equivalent at first glance. However, I'd argue that the latter (where insurance companies are allowed to set prices like car insurance) has a number of (significant) positive side effects.

The largest side effect is that it incentivizes customer health improvement. A lot of health risks, including at least the top 6 causes of death worldwide (heart disease, stroke, lung infections, COPD, respiratory cancers, diabetes) can be substantially mitigated by personal choices such as diet and exercise. If you had to pay an extra $200/mo to your insurance company because you were morbidly obese, one would expect that this would encourage a lot of people to start eating better. Let the market do the heavy lifting! This is exactly the sort of thing that the market excels at. Society benefits from healthier people, but in almost all countries rich enough to have insurance (including the US and nations with socialized healthcare), there is no mechanism to incentivize this! An actual insurance market would do the job.

Many would argue that IP itself is inherently anti-capitalistic, because it imposes artificial scarcity where it would not otherwise exist and, relatedly, because IP "theft" doesn't actually deprive the "victim" of a scarce resource they created or purchased. Ideas have (effectively) zero marginal reproduction cost.

That's not to say there aren't some good arguments for IP, but they sort of inherently have a planned-economy bent.

I recommend that everyone use an extended-length PIN for your phone. Both Android and iPhone support it. Mine is 12 digits; a bit of extra time, but vastly more difficult to brute-force or shoulder-surf.

Being more confident than average is not the same thing as being overconfident.

You realize there's actually a severe gender imbalance in who chooses to go into STEM fields in college, right?

Privige has nothing to do with it; for whatever reasons, women don't actually want to study tech fields. I actually find it pretty ridiculous and patronizing that people like you insist that there's something wrong with the world because women don't make the career choices you think they ought to.

This approach may work (I say "may" because most of the time it's not actually backed up by hard evidence free of confounding variables), but it's also lazy; there are vastly more accurate predictors of a priori success rate than race or gender. It's especially lazy for organizations that have access to those more accurate predictors, like universities, to use race and gender instead.

More accurate predictors include parental education, family wealth, social connections, etc. Mostly what people would describe as social class.

It's interesting that in certain subcultures, including a large portion of the tech community, things that are non-racial are now considered racist. Not only do you have to be "racially aware", as they say, but you have to be racially aware in the right way. Being "colorblind" isn't enough anymore. Even the emoticons have to express race!

Perhaps predictably, this has backfired and will continue to backfire quite spectacularly; it turns out that when you force people to start thinking along racial lines, they might not end up with the exact same ideas about race that you have. I suspect this may be a large contributing factor behind the recent resurgence of ethno-nationalism (see the Alt Right et al.).

The ADA is an example of a regulation that's entirely well-intentioned, but has tremendous second-order costs to society that very plausibly outweigh any benefit it's ever provided.

Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts.

Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.

Stating that Germany only exists for the sake of Israel is controversial, however. (At least, I hope it is! I hope most Germans have enough self-interest to dislike the idea of being a vassal state.)

Claiming that European politicians give a shit (his words) about their citizens is not 'criticizing' anything. It's just hate speech against politicians

This is probably the strongest invocation of Poe's law I've seen in the last few years.

The whole "if you support Europe in any respect, you must be a white supremacist" meme is one of the most inane things I've heard in a long time. Europe isn't all white, and hundreds of millions of white people aren't in Europe. You've made a lazy attack that doesn't actually address what I said.

Burg's comments put Schultz's ability to support pro-Israeli policies at risk; if he's known to be an ardent supporter of Israel for ideological reasons (to the exclusion of concern for Germany), people will be more critical of his motivations when it comes time to e.g. send military aid to Israel.

Calling out your supporters, when being a supporter is politically contested, isn't a good idea. If Burg was lying, he'd be better off saying that Schulz doesn't give a shit about Israel.

Maybe it could have, but it wasn't. Have you tried analyzing my arguments instead of just recognizing that it sort of reminds you of something you disagree with?

Yes, you're right; European politics has fallen victim to ridiculous notions of ancestral guilt. Is it any wonder that people who had no involvement in something that happened hundreds of years ago are unhappy that they're being punished for it?

European unity is about more than free trade.

You're right again, which is why it's insane to drive a wedge between Europeans with politically and socially untenable forced immigration.

So what you're saying is that a direct claim from a high-ranking Israeli politician about a conversation he had, with no apparent benefit to lying about its contents, is not enough?

right-wing groups

Haaretz, a liberal Israeli newspaper, is a "right wing group"?

What does it have to do with Martin Schulz?

I feel like I'm chatting with a bot; do you remember the course of our conversation?

Yes, Schulz has been working for the EU for a long time; he also, apparently, has had strong interests outside the EU for as well. Why do you think many Europeans feel betrayed by the EU?

Turkish immigrants we already had.

That's not a very high standard. You haven't refuted my point, just said "well, they're not the absolute worst".

Which means you have no idea whats going on.

You would do well to remember that nowadays we have the internet and international friendships.

IOM and UNHCR estimated 1 million refugees back in December 2015. More since then.

This is aggressive against millions of people.

Not sure how. You can describe it however you like, but that won't change the fact that it's true.

This is hate speech.

Criticizing European politicians is hate speech? Interesting.

(Side note: this is why people don't like "hate speech" laws. A surprising number of people think "hate speech" means essentially anything they disagree with.)

What are you implying? That I need to live in the EU to have knowledge of EU politics?

I'm not right-wing by any stretch of the imagination (pretty hard left, actually), so the fact that instead of actually thinking about my arguments you just slap a label on them and dismiss them out of hand should disturb you.

Perhaps what's confusing to you is that I'm capable of considering the thought process of people I disagree with.

Point me to a recording where Schulz said anything like that.

You understand that not everything politicians say is recorded? That said, Burg has literally no reason to lie about this.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.574332

On the contrary, Schulz has a decade long track record working for Germany and the European Union

All you've done is prove my point; even people who work for the EU for a long time appear to have plenty of conflicting non-EU interests.

Most people in Europe are not dumb enough to fall for your nonsense.

Feel free to actually try to refute anything I said.

It isn't.

It is according to Avraham Burg, and I'm not sure there is anyone more qualified to make such a claim.

What is driving this change? AFAICT there are no major issues that should have caused this.

I honestly can't imagine how you could avoid exposure to any of the incredible amount of discontent in Europe right now.

European leaders have been importing millions(!) of people from incredibly violent, theocratic, illiterate, and regressive regions, to the detriment of peaceful, secular, educated, and liberal Europeans who are not socially or memetically equipped to handle such an influx of radically different and heavily indoctrinated people. European news media emphatically denies that anything bad is happening; "No, rape rates have only gone up a little bit! No, we're not putting a wall around the Eiffel Tower, it's an aesthetic perimeter! No, Sweden isn't banning christmas lights in public for Muslims; it's because we all of a sudden realize that street lights can't structurally support christmas lights!" Most people in Europe are not dumb enough to fall for this.

For decades, the sentiment in the European political system has been "us last". Here's a great quote from the President of the EU Parliament until earlier this year, Martin Schulz: (and yes, it's a real quote): "For me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people."

The conclusion that any impartial observer would make is that European politicians don't seem to give much of a shit about Europeans, and instead see them as more of a resource to be used up for the sake of various political causes (mass immigration is a big one, and as Mr. Schulz demonstrated, Zionism is another).

It should come as exactly zero surprise that, at some point, Europeans are going to get fed up with being treated like shit by their own political system.

I'm not even European, but this sentiment is very obvious to me from my European expat friends. A large number of them are in support of leaving the EU in favor of increased national sovereignty (because then at least their own interests might come into play), and those that want to stay in the EU mostly feel that way because they falsely conflate free movement and free trade with the existence of the EU.

The result of this discontent with (forced) social globalism is that countries are becoming more isolationist. This led to Brexit, will possibly lead to France leaving the EU as well (although the EU parliament is currently trying to attack Le Pen), and who knows what next.

To be clear, I'm not happy about any of this, but I honestly don't know how people didn't see it coming.

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi... (no Syria data)

http://english.dohainstitute.org/file/Get/40ebdf12-8960-4d18...

What do you base this belief on? Any sources to any studies?

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...

You should think very carefully about why you had an incorrect model of these people. You may be making similar mistakes in other areas.

Swedens tiny population of 10 million can't handle immigration of tens of thousands?

Depends how you define "handle". If by "handle" you mean "avoid cultural erasure", then maybe not.

I'd also like to point out that it's tens of thousands per year. There are almost 100,000 Syrians in Sweden.

Upwards mobility will happen

On what do you base this claim? Has upward mobility happened in the countries from which these refugees originate?

Pew research does per-country religious belief surveys. I think you will find it very enlightening to look up the religious beliefs of the average Syrian.

Pointing out that religious fundamentalists don't integrate well is not a good example of "bias".

Clients mostly find me. I'm honestly not sure how to optimize for that, it's usually pretty random. I guess for those clients I do seek out, they'll post about wanting developers in forums or mailing lists or whatever.