> It was never fun to grind through killing 100 Goblins, but you did it so that you could get the magic sword at the end.
I think you're taking exactly the wrong lesson from that. It wasn't fun to grind through the goblins, but it wasn't challenging either. You did it because you could turn your brain off. I opine that if it did require thinking then the world would now be overrun with goblins...
I think he took the right lesson in that case. I at least did it for the rewards. I for one don't do tedious and mind-numbing tasks, that involve serious involvement over time, just to turn my brain off. I might do the dishes, but that is very time constrained, and not something I repeatedly come back to doing unless I have to.
On the contrary, games usually inspire work by precisely _being challenging_. That's what normally keeps people coming back to play them for their own sake (the autotelicity of games).
A lot of my kids math and reading is not hard either. He just needs to do a lot of it, over and over. He is 8 so he is learning a lot of times tables and spelling.
See, this is the kind of response that makes people not trust Politifact. This article delivers a more detailed version of exactly what I said. There's direct evidence indicating Kennedy reached out to the KGB, and indirect evidence it was tied to his political ambitions, but there's no ironclad proof and some people believe the evidence was just a complete fabrication. The "false" rating is based entirely on the specific claim that Kennedy sat down for a meeting with them, which I think you'll find I did not make.
Just to be clear, you're saying manofstick's response is at fault here, and that an undiscriminating reader might blame Politifact by association, not that Politifact did wrong here, correct?
Manofstick incorrectly suggested that the Politifact article applied to your post, but it looks to me like Politifact itself did an exemplary job. They evaluated the specific claim that a meeting happened, which was made by a conservative pundit, and found it false, which is consistent with the evidence they present and all other evidence I found in my brief poke through google.
(Edit: pondering the down-vote. Is it because you don't like what I am saying, or that it's factually not true?)
The problem with the Carbon Tax is that right wing parties across the world (well at least in the Anglo-zone that I know about) have demonized it - even when they supposedly believe in market-based solutions.
So a regressive measure is unfortunately the only (well...) politically viable solution.
Tolls and other car taxes can be reintroduced slowly after the transition is complete.
Yes this is "stupid", but unless you can change the psychology of the populous, then that's about it.
Reframe "Carbon Taxes" as a "Carbon Dividends" and you might be able to change the psychology of the populace. The recently failed bi-partisan Carbon Tax bill attempted to do just that by establishing a revenue neutral carbon tax where the proceeds were distributed as "dividends" directly to citizens.
But I agree, getting popular support has been very hard and will continue to be problematic.
Ars Technica writes that although this bill failed, it will help shape the debate to come.
Oh and Exxon Mobile spent $1mm to support the group lobbying for the Carbon Tax.
Carbon taxes have been passed and revoked in Australia, Canada and France. They have been rejected in ballots twice in Washington. It’s not a right wing thing. People just really hate taxes and don’t want to change their behaviour. Talk is cheap.
> Washington State Voters Reject Nation's First Carbon Tax
> The measure was unpopular with social justice groups and divided environmental activists, many arguing it did not go far enough in promoting clean energy.
> Among those who decided not to support the carbon tax were Sierra Club, the Washington Environmental Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Climate Solutions, and 350Seattle.org.
The Carbon tax has been rejected by some provinces but the federal government is still moving ahead with it and they have the constitutional right to do.
> Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, has repeatedly called carbon pricing “the worst tax ever” and at least five provinces have banded together to fight the tax in the courts, a battle legal experts believe they will lose.
> Along with their provincial counterparts, the federal Conservatives have pledged to repeal any carbon taxes, with Scheer dismissing the policy as an “election gimmick”. This fight comes amid reports that Canada is not on pace to meet its 2030 climate goals.
> In the 2008 Canadian federal election, a carbon tax proposed by Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion, known as the Green Shift, became a central issue in the campaign. It would have been revenue-neutral, with increased taxation on carbon being balanced by tax cuts for individual citizens. However, it proved to be unpopular and contributed to the defeat of Liberal Party with its worst share of the popular vote since Confederation.
... revoked in Australia after the right wing party spent years demonising the "great big new tax." The government had used the income from it to compensate consumers for price increases passed onto them, so the majority of voters arguably had no real reason to hate it, other than partisan politics.
No "Privileged" means having advantages that others don't.
Being white is highly correlated with being privileged due to historical circumstances, but it is only a racist reading of the word that thinks that being privileged is being white.
> No "Privileged" means having advantages that others don't.
When pro-white racists exist and are more common than anti-white racists in positions of influence, being white is, on its own, an advantage other people don't have.
It may also correlate with wealth, parental education, and other sources of privilege, but it is a source of privilege itself.
> but it is only a racist reading of the word that thinks that being privileged is being white.
Being white is, ceteris paribus, being privileged, not the other way around.
And, sure, that's a product of the existence of racism, but it's not racist thinking to recognize the effects of racism.
The author switches from using the term 'white' to 'privileged' halfway through the article to describe the parents who campaigned against the scheduling changes.
>One of the first things they showed us was a photo of the parents who had protested against the schedules devised by the algorithm. Nearly all of them were white. The majority of families in the Boston school system are not white. White families represent only about 15 percent the public school population in the city.
followed by:
>Optimizing the algorithm for greater “equity" also meant many of the planned changes were "biased" against families with privilege.
Since the author didn't clarify what they meant, or differentiate between them I am assuming they used the two terms interchangeably.
One funny thing I noticed. You could argue that since white families only constitute 15% of the public school population these changes disproportionately negatively affect a minority group.
Ahh but word games are par for the course in these discussions. A recent example is the humanities redefinition of 'racism' to mean 'power and privilege', instead of 'discrimination or bigotry based on race'.
Don't disproportionate negative consequences constitute a disadvantage? Especially when faced with the existing issues of being a minority in a school system? Who really is disadvantaged here?
You can compound that with the new racism definition and I'm starting to wonder where all this supposed privilege is.
privilege doesn't need to be all encompassing. I'd argue that just being white has some inherent privilege no matter how poor you are. Such as interactions with police. that doesn't mean you automatically do better in life, and you can be less privileged in others areas. white privilege =/= wealth
Yes, it's Hedonic Quality Adjustment [1]. If you follow through the example on the link, you see the negative CPI component, even though a) you can't actually buy the old version anymore - so you can't reap the "real" price benefit and b) the subjective experience ultimately for lots of these things is the same. i.e. a mid-level TV from 40 years ago probably gave the same hedonistic pleasure as one today. Arguably the older one gave more because of less other gadgets!
Another economic number I ponder over is inflation, and the economists method of revaluation of goods called the hedonic quality adjustment [1].
If you follow the example on the link provided, they show how upgrading an old tv that cost $250 to a new one that cost $1250 actually was had a negative inflation effect due to the extra features that the new TV had.
From one perspective I can understand their point, but when the "new normal" of tv ownership basically demanded those features, so they weren't really extra benefits for the end user in the long run (and then became standard features where the prices did plummet back to the original $250, one again reading down the inflation figures).
Look if like to think that economist are smarter than that, but given the original article...
There's an epically bad version of that error that I keep re-linking because it was such a central economic policy maker and such a clear version of the error[1]: essentially, yeah, food is more expensive, but iPads are faster, so it cancels out.
Even if you accept the core logic, they went about it in an absurdly naive way: a 50% faster chip does not make the iPad 50% better; very little of that went to relieve a true bottleneck and so doesn't translate into observably higher usefulness. Now, if iPads were so much better that they actually freed up owners from significant household tasks that actually translated into e.g. greater free time or ease of earning, that would make sense. But the chip simply being faster isn't good enough.
Incidentally, do they ever readjust inflation upward when products get worse? Like, when packaging is flimsier or paper cups harder to grip? Somehow I doubt it.
Or more relevantly, when ecological standards make household products worse. Removing phosphates from detergents, low-flow showerheads that are less relaxing, low-flow toilets that clog more often, high efficiency washers that break down more often, etc.
It's not so much an error, to be frank, and more of a deliberate manipulation.
Everybody and their dog for quite some time "knew" that inflation is bad, because you get less for the same money when prices rise.
But, around the world, it's usually some government entity publishing inflation numbers... So it isn't a big surprise that the governments came up with ways to keep the inflation numbers as low as possible, at least on paper if they failed to keep the number low in the real world. One of the many ways to artificially "shrink" inflation numbers is Hedonic Quality Adjustment.
A government does that to avoid disgruntled citizens asking questions about why the inflation is so high, but you also does that to avoid disgruntled companies asking questions about why the inflation is so high and thus why their workforce keeps demanding wage raises to offset that high inflation. And then there are those rating agencies judging the risk of state bonds and consols also in part on the inflation numbers.
Another potential way to massage inflation numbers is the "inflation basket"[1]: E.g. the UK between the 2017 and 2018 basket the gov't slightly decreased the weight of all goods in that basket (such as "Food" and "Health") except for "Alcohol & tobacco" (steady at 3.3% weight) and "Housing & household services" (27.6% to 30.0% weight). Now I'm perfectly sure there is a real fine explanation why this happened other than to optimize for low inflation numbers on paper, just like I'm perfectly sure there is a real fine explanation why Hedonic Quality Adjustment just makes sense and it's absolutely necessary to use it in your calculations!!
Other countries do the same or similar things.
Governments got really good at mucking with numbers. E.g. in Germany they started massaging unemployment numbers by essentially redefining what "unemployment" means[2]: It used to refer to people seeking jobs but now it's those job seekers minus all those people who are enrolled in government "employment" programs (where e.g. they teach you how to write a good CV), working in shit jobs that don't pay a living wage (incl "1€ Jobs") and therefore still rely on the welfare state, etc. The most drastic "adjustment" they came up with in regards to unemployment numbers in Germany is that they simply do not count anymore unemployed job seekers older than 58 years as "unemployed" (retirement age by law is between 65 and 67 years old, depending on when you were born).
Other countries do the same or similar things.
> Those who are forced to say or believe something will instead resist the idea.
Curious wording. The vast majority of even modern human history seems to provide an incredible amount of contradictory evidence—at least if you’ll grant that “forced” can also mean socialized into a certain cultural and ideological narrative from birth. Sure, there are notable moments when resistance forms quietly, and perhaps even makes its way into the public sphere. However, resistance does not appear to me to be a default human trait. That’s usually only found in a smaller portion of what is typically non-boat-rocking humanity—those who hope to convince their fellow citizens to join them. The majority of humans appear to rarely make it habit to question anything at all.
> Simply put, those who are attacked will fight back.
Well not that I'm Christian, but Christian teaching is basically the opposite of this (Matthew 5:39 - i.e. turn the other cheek). And Gandhi's resistance was also an example of the opposite. In fact the opposite is the only way to deescalate a fight (or, as the US chooses to do, create the biggest weapons, but isn't that then affecting the rights of the people on the other side of the argument?)
> Those who are forced to say or believe something will instead resist the idea.
Really? Advertising, religion, nation states, even your belief that these are "natural" laws are examples of your inherent bias. As a smaller example, even politeness - civility - is a counter example.
The fact that people have to be taught other ways goes against saying it's human nature, doesn't it? Why would you teach someone to do things they already do?
And then you bring up every method of manipulation as if people don't hate all of those things. Why would we need to invent clever tricks to manipulate people if it was human nature to like it?
Sure, we're plenty effective both at hurting others and manipulating people, but it seems odd to express examples of our capability at doing that to unwilling people as evidence that we like those things being done to us...
Why would we have to go to such lengths to develop these capabilities if it was something we naturally liked? You're kind of proving the opposite of the point you think you are here....
If you want to be closed minded, and not accept that you are choosing your axioms in the same way as someone else exposed to different upbringings is - as per my examples, then I guess I have no chance of convincing you otherwise.
Well, you seem to be under the misconception that I think these are some kind of platonic ideals or whatnot. There was a time when the law tried to describe the values of the people rather than to dictate it and they came up with common law and some ideas about human rights after considering human nature and what did and did not work.
You can say there's construction there, but there's a limit to it. I mean, just as you can't simply construct a functional bridge out of anything you want, neither can you reasonably construct any sort of right and have a functioning society. There are both positive and negative rights, tensions among the rights of different people, and responsibilities imposed on individuals and society by any particular conception of rights.
New Zealand in the 90's was trying to have an integrated policing system designed by IBM which burnt a lot of money (in the order of 100 million) and was abandoned [0].
I was working with one of the companies that came along to replace one part of the system with a much smaller component that just handled that individual piece and vividly remember the meeting with the IBM team. They had no code to show me, but they handed my a massive folder - probably verging on 10cm thick of use case diagrams. So many little stick figures staring up at me I was awestruck - but not in a positive way!
I remember interviewing a BA (business analyst) who had just come off of the INCIS project. She said their entity model was enormous, with tens of thousands of entities.
I couldn't understand how any project could have so many entities, let alone how anyone would ever hope to code up such a thing.
She said the commandment to the analysts was to model everything so they did, just like they learnt in data modelling 101.
So (INCIS was a project for the NZ Police), e.g.:
- A police station has zero or more cells
- A cell has one or more doors
- A door has one and only one key
- A door has many bars
Another data point in INCIS - my sister at the time worked in the police. Her workplace ran out of pencils (they did a lot of note taking with pencils and paper). INCIS had so thoroughly depleted the police's budget that there was nothing left for...say.. computers with email and the like.
The software itself, before fixing it, cost $182mm and covered payroll for 90,000 teachers. That's over $2000 per teacher. It cost another $45mm to fix it after this.
As non-american, living outside of america (but having lived there for a year and a half starting January 2000), I concur. I still follow american politics quite a bit (too much for me to remain healthy actually) and I'm constantly bamboozled trying to comprehend what people mean by the "far left".
To me it seems like any one is considered "far left" if they believe in:
- treating all people, regardless of race, gender, gender-identity or age equally (*)
- believing in the science of climate change
- believing that guns are the main reason for mass murders
- believing that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay
Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...
I don't think those beliefs are far-left, I believe what makes beliefs far-left is the conclusions that are drawn from them are typically to reduce the freedom of the governed to achieve those objectives:
- Treat all people equally, and legislate that outcomes are the same for all groups of people
- Believe in the science of climate change and legislate reductions programs which incentivize offshoring manufacturing (but don't put any constraints on global trade)
- Mass murders are caused by guns and that outweighs all advantages of civilian gun ownership, and there's no other way to solve the problem, so it should be banned
- The more you earn, the more tax you should pay, so if your economic output is really high you should hide your money in other countries and signal your virtue on other fronts so people forgive you for being a tax cheat
"Far-left" used to mean "Revolutionary Marxist" - and still does in most parts of the world. You're talking about left-liberal here by my understanding.
> believing that guns are the main reason for mass murders
Not to start a political flame war but that's the only thing I disagree with you on - mostly. I think guns allow for easy mass murder at a distance but you have to have a mental illness along with some other potential extreme views, to be able to jump the mental hurdles where mass murder is an acceptable option.
The people committing these horrendous crimes are not the same people as most gun owners. That being said I think some federally mandated gun control laws are needed - leaving it totally up to the states allows things like what happened in Florida to occur.
> Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...
If you can frame those issues outside of politics, I think they are in the US too. Once people think their political affiliations come into play it becomes personal like the scum that use Emacs.
>you have to have a mental illness along with some other potential extreme views, to be able to jump the mental hurdles where mass murder is an acceptable option.
This is a hard truth for people to swallow, but no, you don't have to be mentally ill to think this. It's really easy to think murder is an acceptable option when you live in a country which is constantly murdering innocent civilians daily.
Look, I'm not a mass murderer sympathizer or anything like that. But the US army killed somewhere near 1 million civilians in Iraq alone (possibly more, this poll is from over a decade ago): https://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/09/14/poll-civilian-d...
When you live in a world which routinely brushes away and rationalizes that kind of mass murder because it promotes American interests and American values, it's not hard to see why some random dude might see killing people he disagrees with as a way to promote his values.
>believing that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay
I suspect you've fallen for some propaganda here if you think the rich pay less in taxes in the US or that Republicans think they shouldn't pay more. The top 1% already pay half of all taxes at the federal level.
The argument comes down to what proportion of income should go to taxes at various income brackets. This is hardly a settled topic even in liberal countries like France.
That's the thing, that's pretty damn central in the US too. The problem is that's not good enough for some people. In the US, legally, we treat everyone equal. However, we're (in theory) a meritocratic society based on survival of the fittest. The modern "far left" ideology is interested in equal outcomes for everyone and defines any statistical dependencies they perceive, and anyone who doesn't support correcting them, as racist, sexist, generally "-ist". So they've moved the goal posts. It's become a battle between equal opportunity and equal outcome and as far as the left is concerned supporting equal opportunity and not equal outcome is deplorable and should be shunned.
Even if you start with the premise that no laws explicitly target any race/gender/etc, it doesn't automatically follow that everyone is treated equally under the law.
The parent comment is asking why the idea of equal opportunity is seen as far left. I am trying to explain that everyone pretty much agrees we should have equal opportunities, and explain that the debate has now become about whether we enforce/regulate the distribution of wealth and jobs such that society ends up statistically "equal". And that this is a very controversial and political topic and has nothing to do with racism despite the rhetoric employed at both extremes of the horseshoe.
I think that's an oversimplification of the issue. The point of contention is whether we've actually achieved equal opportunity.
As far as I know, there are no remaining laws explicitly targeting e.g. a race, and racial discrimination is socially taboo. A lot of people recognize that and make the invalid argument I described above — that everyone now is treated equally. IMO, a lot of the left operates in the space between that and what you've described, where they want to eliminate implicitly discriminatory laws and social norms.
I'm also genuinely curious — let's say an industry discriminates against a group of people (we'll use the tech industry and either women or conservatives, to keep this somewhat neutral). How do you try to correct the lack of equal opportunity without it looking something like trying to achieve equal outcomes?
That's a really good question. When I start to think about it two things crop up:
1. How is discrimination defined? Is it an excess of reports of discriminatory behavior e.g. sexual harassment, or is it a discrepancy between the general distribution of some class and the observed distribution?
If it's the latter, you're already implicitly arguing that society should have an equal distribution of outcomes.
If it's the former, sign me up for what whatever awareness campaign is going to help address the issue socially & politically. I'd truly be happy to participate in raising awareness and working to create an inclusive and safe environment for everyone (and I have supported such in the past, regardless of whether I personally think there may be an issue or not, out of solidarity). I'm willing to be proven wrong here: I just haven't seen anything that indicates SV actually has, following with the example, a sexual harassment problem relative to the rest of the world. If we demonstrated that SV observes more sexual harassment than average, I'd wonder WTF was up too and even agree with trying to _target SV_ in order to solve the problem. Where the logic breaks down for me is when we target SV and paint it as a place with rampant sexual harassment in a campaign to address a general social issue.
Speaking for socially-liberal-economically-conservative individuals for a second: we don't disagree with the ideals, it's usually that we disagree with the tactics. A minor example, say we agree ingrained and harmful social norms regarding expectations of females' role in society is causing women to be underpaid in the workforce today. Instead of demanding the regulation of salaries at a political level (a very economically liberal idea that I think plenty of people are not onboard with) we'd argue for an approach involving educating and empowering women so that they don't end up, at large, agreeing to work for numbers that are below average/market rates (I'm not blaming women, but I'm suggesting that they share some of the responsibility in correcting the imbalance because at the end of the day it is their problem).
I'm saying all this because I feel much of the issue is exactly that these nuanced topics are easily conflated, "You don't support regulating equal salaries for all? You're a sexist bigot!". Just no. It's so frustrating to hear that and it really hinders progress towards agreeable solutions for investing resources in solving issues.
2. Strategies for addressing industry-level discrimination that don't involve looking at the outputs? A few come to mind. I am a huge supporter of listening to the under-represented groups and making sure their feedback is present when developing responsible, inclusionary methods for hiring and operation. Also education. If our "American dream biased" (otherwise, capitalist) mode of operation has lead to a systemically ingrained and observed e.g. education gap, then we should invest resources in educating under represented groups specifically in creating programs that serve to bolster the industry in question.
The only thing to keep in mind is how we come to the conclusion that one industry exhibits an abnormal skew. We'll probably disagree a bit here, but I think it's okay for an industry to exhibit a general (not abnormal) "post game" skew. Whether it's females in nursing or men in engineering, I am willing to entertain the idea that it might be related to the nature of the game and less about the playing field and rules. One of the biggest arguments against the wage gap is that if a company could pay 70 cents on the dollar for female employees, men would be out a job pretty quick. That is of course assuming an unlimited supply of qualified female candidates. Regardless, either a) the industry is wildly sexist and prefers men (sexist enough that they're willing to pay 30% more on the budget sheet), or b) something else is contributing to the gap. It could be as simple as a difference in interests between genders. Especially conceding those differences could be the result of socially poisonous expectations cast upon children, I think the answer is again to focus on the pipeline.
I guess my overall point is that it's hard to come to an objective definition of discrimination. I have also realized that if you define it by the outcomes, it becomes a much bigger problem because you have to effectively control for everything in society to realize a world where we've achieved 100% utopian uniformity (importantly, it's no longer diversity). I find it more effective and productive and intellectually honest to focus the lens on making sure children are given a safe environment and equal opportunity to to explore whatever keeps their heart content. Would you not also agree it would be a problem to impose some idealistic notion of a perfect 50/50 split in gender across all industries upon children for fear of coercing them to do something they're not actually interested in due to pressure to achieve some broader fabricated social utopia? Don't take that the wrong way, I still think we need to target our efforts at building a fair platform, but it's the flip-side of the regulated outcomes argument: if you're not careful you end up discriminating all the same, just at the other end of the pipe. Let's just keep the pipes clean... social neutrality!
> everyone pretty much agrees we should have equal opportunities
Equal outcomes isn't really compatible with equal opportunities.
Advocates of equal outcomes want fewer opportunities for people from whatever group they label "overrepresented" or "privileged". In the most extreme cases, they want opportunities to be designated for certain groups and forbidden to others.
>> NZ is a small, ethnically (and therefore more importantly culturally) homogenous country
Not according to the CIA Factbook it isn't:
NZ: European 71.2%, Maori 14.1%, Asian 11.3%, Pacific peoples 7.6%, Middle Eastern, Latin American, African 1.1%, other 1.6%, not stated or unidentified 5.4%
USA: white 72.4%, black 12.6%, Asian 4.8%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.9%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.2%, other 6.2%, two or more races 2.9% (2010 estimate)
Moreover, the Maori population was just as downtrodden and oppressed as the blacks of the USA, 50 or 100 years ago, and is still on the whole poorer and less educated than the white majority.
That breakdown leaves Hispanics out of the US, which seems to me to be, a pretty enormous oversight. I imagine they're being lumped in with 'white'. If you break them out separately, I imagine you'll see quite a difference.
the 'white' category in the US contains many more groups that would not be considered european on the NZ census, for instance hispanic and MENA ethnicities. the US is about 60% white by a categorization system closer to what is typically used informally.
I think you're taking exactly the wrong lesson from that. It wasn't fun to grind through the goblins, but it wasn't challenging either. You did it because you could turn your brain off. I opine that if it did require thinking then the world would now be overrun with goblins...