Con Sternant @consternant

Another thing to understand about Zucman: engaging him is like trying to kick a football through a constantly-moving goalpost that also arbitrarily changes its height and width mid-kick. He and his team at UC-Berkeley churn out a stream of working papers on inequality measurement that bake dozens of dubious assumptions into their data files, all of which "coincidentally" reinforce the headline figures that align with their political narrative. But finding and weeding out those assumptions is an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. Zucman and coauthors Piketty and Saez do most of their work in Excel, and it's seldom ever straightforward. Instead you'll find some extremely questionable and undisclosed multiplier that's just guesstimated out of thin air...but it's buried 10 layers deep in a formula from a convoluted Excel spreadsheet, which changes the an input for another Excel spreadsheet that's used to create a ratio, which in turn goes into a formula on another Excel spreadsheet that's used to estimate a decade of missing data, which in turn alters the trend of their entire series. @VincentGeloso and I know this well because we've been scrutinizing their work for over a decade and have found dozens of examples of this sort of stuff. But there's another twist to the PSZ universe: once you've done the work and found a problem in their data files that alters their main results in significant ways, they've already moved on to a "new" approach that conveniently hard-bakes all the faulty assumptions of the old approach into its source data while refusing to revisit them, and then layers them over with new paint, consisting of even more of the same style of Excel spreadsheet labyrinths that you now have to navigate to even figure out what they are doing. And what they do in their data files often diverges in substantial ways from how they describe it in their papers and descriptive appendixes. While you're toiling away to figure out what they did in their last peer reviewed paper, they call up a friendly reporter at the NY Times and get him to publish a new non-peer reviewed statistical claim that grabs headlines and aligns with whatever wealth tax initiative they happen to be activisting for at the moment. By the end, the goalpost has hopped around the field, changed its size and height multiple times, and been replaced by a new goalpost on the other end of the field that announces itself not through the referees of the field but via some sportscaster up in the broadcast booth who also happens to be openly cheering for their team.

Phil Magness @PhilWMagness

4 days ago

Here's the best way to understand what Gabriel Zucman is up to on the California billionaire tax, and why it's a problem: Suppose you were tasked with assembling a complex historical time series of an important economic indicator, but also suppose the data needed to build it is

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A Europa será destruída por mulheres que projetam naqueles animais a maternidade que cabia aos filhos que elas abortaram.

La France n’a jamais noyé des centaines d’Algériens dans la Seine. Jean-Paul Brunet est le seul historien à avoir exploité toutes les archives de la PJ en lien avec la manifestation du 17 octobre 1961. Il a examiné cas par cas la liste des 325 manifestants algériens, avancée par Jean-Luc Einaudi, qui seraient morts ce jour-là des suites de la répression policière. C’est notamment sur les travaux de ce dernier que se base la gauche et la dictature algérienne pour accuser l’État français aujourd’hui. Le constat de JP Brunet est sans appel : la plupart des noms qui figurent sur cette liste correspondent à des décès qui ont eu lieu avant et après la manifestation du 17 octobre. La majorité d’entre eux sont imputables au FLN qui, dans sa guerre contre le MNA (un autre mouvement indépendantiste algérien), ainsi que dans l’exécution systématique de ceux qui "collaboraient" avec l’État français, n’hésitait pas à massacrer ses propres "ressortissants". Un autre historien, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a par ailleurs démontré que le FLN n’hésitait pas à tuer et à jeter les cadavres de ses victimes dans la Seine. Au final, une seule noyade au pont Saint Michel en lien avec la manifestation du 17 octobre 1961 a fait l’objet d’un constat. UNE SEULE. Pour le reste, il y aurait eu maximum 32 morts imputables à la police et à la gendarmerie ce jour-là, parmi lesquels seulement 14 seraient "certains". Ainsi, l’affirmation selon laquelle les forces de l’ordre auraient noyé des centaines d’Algériens dans la Seine le 17 octobre 1961 est complètement fausse. Il y a eu certes une répression violente, mais celle-ci est à replacer dans son contexte, à savoir, celui de la guerre d’Algérie et des attentats fomentés par le FLN en métropole qui ont fait des centaines de morts. Pour terminer, j’aimerais dire deux mots sur l’historien JL Einaudi qui a avancé ce chiffre de 325 morts : il s’agit d’un adorateur de Mao et Pol Pot qui a rédigé des textes hagiographiques sur le FLN. Chacun se fera une idée de cette information.

Le problème fondamental c'est que les gens ne comprennent pas que, pour financer un État-providence, il faut s'appuyer sur une base d'imposition très large et taxer la classe moyenne parce que les sommes requises sont énormes et qu'il n'y a pas d'autre choix. En pratique, ça veut dire que d'une manière ou d'une autre, le financement repose principalement sur les revenus du travail, parce que non seulement c'est de loin la principale composante du PIB dans une économie moderne mais qu'en plus les revenus du capital sont beaucoup plus difficiles à taxer. C'est pour ça que, dans quasiment tous les pays européens, le financement de la protection sociale repose principalement sur les cotisations et les taxes sur la consommation, qui directement ou indirectement sont principalement alimentés par les revenus du travail. Même au Danemark, où l'impôt sur le revenu joue un rôle beaucoup plus important qu'ailleurs, l'assiette d'imposition est beaucoup plus large qu'en France et l'essentiel du financement repose aussi sur les classes moyennes, donc en dernière analyse principalement sur les revenus du travail. Si vous consacrez 1/3 du PIB à la protection sociale, comme c'est le cas en France, vous allez forcément devoir financer ça principalement avec les revenus du travail, parce que c'est près des 2/3 du PIB et que les revenus du capital, outre encore une fois ils sont beaucoup plus durs à taxer, c'est 5 à 6 fois moins une fois prise en compte la dépréciation. Il n'y pas de réserve de pognon dans laquelle on pourrait facilement taper sans que les classes moyennes doivent payer. On pourrait certes gratter un peu d'argent en taxant le patrimoine davantage, mais dès lors qu'on veut épargner les classes moyennes, ça n'ira pas chier très loin au regard des besoins si on ne réduit pas les dépenses. Le seul moyen de financer nos dépenses de protection sociale, sachant qu'à l'heure actuelle on le fait à crédit en s'endettant à des taux qui ne font qu'augmenter, c'est soit de travailler plus soit d'augmenter la productivité et, comme on n'a pas de baguette magique pour augmenter la productivité et que ce n'est certainement pas en s'endettant pour financer les retraites plutôt que de l'investissement productif qu'on va le faire, il va falloir bosser plus ou couper dans les dépenses. Si on continue de ne pas vouloir regarder la réalité en face, tout ce qu'on parviendra à faire, c'est rendre l'austérité encore plus douloureuse le jour où elle sera devenue inévitable parce que les investisseurs ne voudront plus nous prêter qu'à des taux exorbitants et, en attendant, mettre encore plus à l'os les services publics parce qu'il faut bien trouver le pognon pour financer les retraites et les dépenses de santé quelque part.

Philippe Lemoine @phl43

a week ago

Quelles sont les "revendications légitimes" des manifestants exactement ? Ils ne sont pas contents parce que le revenu disponible réel n'augmente pas voire recule, mais ce n'est pas une revendication ça, c'est un sujet de mécontentement. Donc qu'est-ce qu'ils proposent

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Premise: Incentives drive all human behavior. The corollary: How to destroy a country: A vast social security and support system that serves as a magnet for those who would rather not work. An open immigration policy that does not screen immigrants to determine their ability and willingness to provide for themselves and their families. An open immigration policy that does not screen for political and/or religious ideologies that are a threat to the country. Economic incentives large enough to incentivize immigrants on the state dole to have large numbers of children, but insufficient for educated and economically productive mothers to be able to quit to raise a family. The declining fertility of the most educated and productive women due to their delay to begin a family as a result of their desire and/or need to advance their careers, among other reasons, to live a life they deem consistent with their educational achievements and/or to repay their student debts. Amnesty programs that give citizenship and voting power to illegal immigrants without consideration of their economic productivity or their threat to the country due to their religious or political ideologies. The changing demographics and increased population due to the above factors. The state responding to protests by increasing social support. The continued failure to punish and hold accountable violent and looting rioters. Government managed by a massive and growing unelected bureaucracy. Government fraud, waste, and abuse contributed to ballooning budgets. Anti-business legislation that makes it difficult for businesses to compete in a global marketplace being disrupted by AI, including restrictions on firing even poorly performing employees. Overly burdensome, globally uncompetitive, corporate taxation. Continuous increases in personal taxes to raise funds to provide for the rapidly growing welfare state. The substantial majority of the tax burden levied on a small percentage of the population. A growing percentage of the electorate paying no taxes and receiving welfare. The introduction or threat of a wealth tax including the taxation of unrealized gains, i.e., taxes on paper wealth. The flight of the most productive business builders and highest taxpayers to lower tax countries with lesser security concerns. A growing percentage of the electorate voting for candidates that support increased welfare and laws favorable to, and/or that match the cultural and ideological needs and desires of a growing unproductive immigrant population. The rapid rise in anti-semitism and inadequate efforts to address this hatred. Increased borrowing by the state to fund the growing social burden. Higher sovereign interest rates due to all of the above. The resulting need to reduce expenditures to make the math work. Increasingly violent protests that make life less livable for the productive and law abiding citizens leading to their accelerated departure. And so on…

@0xTib3rius Seen a company that was using entirely 10.0.0.0/8 and 7.0.0.0/8 (DoD) for their internal machines, with the same suffix for each machine, and fast or slow routing depending on the prefix used. Yeah, better make sure you BGP config is solid.

It's not about the money. Money has an effect, yes, but it's a part of something bigger. Women are genetically programmed to mate up. Not down. And not even across. Up. If she doesn't regard a man as superior to her, she generally doesn't want to have his babies. What this means is that there is an extremely simple control dial on fertility. More male power and status = more babies. More female power and status = less babies. Yes, it really is that simple. Why? Because every species has a mating ritual, and can only breed if they can carry it out. That's why you can breed rats and chickens in cages, but not pandas. Different mating ritual. And a critical element of the human mating ritual is "male impresses female". Not charms. Not bribes. Definitely not respects. Impresses. So, if you take power, wealth, and status away from men, and give it to women, you are just plain reaching for the controls and turning down the fertility dial. If you let men keep power, wealth and status — you don't have to give it to them because they're the ones who create it — fertility goes up. The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis. This idea might horrify you. You might have been taught all your life that everyone is equal, or must be, and anything else is unfair. Well, have you looked around you at universe? Unfairness is baked into the life cycle of every living organism, not mention the food chain. Evolutionary processes don't care about fairness. They care what works. Perhaps someday, we will be able to code DNA as easily as we code C++, and can decide what we want our instincts to be. But until that day, we are faced with a choice. 1. Stop using the political, legal, and mass media processes to force female equality, if not outright female supremacy, on the first world. Or 2. Die out and be replaced by third world retards, who will stay on this planet fighting wars with increasingly rusty AK47s and then spears, until the next asteroid comes along.

Oilfield Rando @Oilfield_Rando

4 weeks ago

If a productive middle class family wants to have a child, they need to have good insurance and budget out like $8,000. If welfare dregs want to have a child, they just show up to the hospital and have it paid for by the productive middle class family. Societies die this way.

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Gregory Clark’s new book “Have & Have Not” is basically an extended version of his old “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls” paper, with main graphs below showing simple additive genetics clearly pretty much entirely explain most aspects of status (no reasons for parents, siblings, cousins, etc to all have the same implied genetic association with your status if parental nurture independently matters); given a simple additive genetics model of status, we can then infer how assortative marriage is *on genes* (m) by looking at how elevated intergenerational status inheritance (b) is above 0.5, & multiplying that by 2; this implies people are matching *even more* on phenotypes than m, in order to match *on genes* at m. The new book is legally free online (pdf posted by author bc wokes wouldn’t publish it, bc it’s about how genes matter, even tho his prior books on this topic were *actually rigorous* & yet also *actually popular,* unlike pretty much all other academic stuff). It includes chapters expanding on this to show that plenty of things we think of as “nurture” are actually still just simple additive genetics, with selection effects. Eg family size, birth order, death shocks, education shocks, wealth shocks, region shocks, & more don’t causally affect outcomes pretty much at all, except in very transitory very direct ways (eg first-born sons to elite families are likely to inherit more, but all that matters to *their* sons as adults are the genes they inherited). Many interesting tidbits about how eg mothers & fathers pass down status equally to their kids—mother’s extra nurture involvement & father’s extra professional involvement equally don’t matter in any statistical way, just genes, unless they happen to perfectly mimic what it’d look like if just genes mattered—& how this incredible assortativity significantly increases the variance in things like IQ (maritally matching on IQ intuitively leads to more geniuses & retards), & how UK elites had especially elevated fertility until the birth of mass democracy in 1830s-1860s (& how they were killed at literally double the typical rate in WWI), & how emigrants from UK were above average in genetic status but also at least until 1930 immigrants to UK were significantly even above *that* (esp eg Indians & Jews), & how regional divergence in UK is all about selective domestic migration (south is richer bc smarter people moved south, & smart people aren’t actually disadvantaged by birth region), etc. Clark has to put some throat-clearing stuff in there about supporting redistribution for basically Rawlsian reasons but even he clearly states eg that immigrants only matter to the society long term for their genetic value. What an awful own-goal for the UK to let Somalis Mirpuris etc swarm what had been an incredibly high quality population (Clark’s prior work showed how UK spent centuries heavily selecting for & concentrating IQ—some loose reasons to believe their 1800s IQ was maybe ~115 relative to modern definition of 100, like Ashk—& are now undoing it).

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Ceb K. @CEBKCEBKCEBK

3 years ago

“But how do we know that productivity in 🇬🇧 is determined by genes?” Gregory Clark answers this in “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls”: he maps the family trees of over 400,000 Brits from 1750 to 2020, & finds that simple additive genetics explains basically all variation in status…

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Tiens, ça faisait longtemps que France Info ne nous avait pas rappelé la nécessité de couper son financement, privatiser tout ça et cesser de forcer les français à financer ce journalisme de haute tenue.

franceinfo @franceinfo

4 weeks ago

"On est face à des crimes de masse, voire un crime contre l'humanité. On a 330 000 victimes de pédocriminalité dans l'Eglise en 70 ans, [soit] 13 enfants par jour", déclare Arnaud Gallais, président de l'association Mouv'Enfants. #canal16

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Ce que j'admire avec Hervé, c'est qu'il est chimiquement pur. Il n'y a jamais rien qui va. Toujours l'opinion parfaitement prévisible assénée avec la conviction du camp du bien. Le proto-midwit.

Hervé Joly @RV_Joly

4 weeks ago

Quand on lit ça, on comprend pourquoi la décision des juges d'instruction contre l'avis du parquet dans l'affaire de Crépol est dangereuse. La reconnaissance d'un prétendu racisme anti-blancs est un véritable appel à la guerre civile.

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@GeekerieLa20807 @plbiojout J'ai du mal à croire qu'avec une promotion sur le campus (et la nouvelle déjà partie à la Courtine), plus une compagnie de GM venue de Satory ne suffise pas à faire régner l'ordre sur un terrain du mindef.

@GeekerieLa20807 @plbiojout L'école était gardée avec barrière à l'entrée jusqu'à ce que le campus soit ouvert à d'autres écoles, civiles celles là. Pour ce qui est du maintien de l'ordre, ce sont des ingés militaires, qui ont passé 6 mois sous les drapeaux.

This is arguably one of the best explanations of modern feminism and how harmful it is to women and the world.

𝕰𝖑 𝕭𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖔 𝕯𝖎𝖆𝖇𝖑𝖔 @El_BlancoDiablo

a month ago

Feminism is amazing!!! Single Motherhood up 700% over the last 50 years. Antidepressant use up 250% in women. Over a Billion babies aborted since 1980. Marriage rates at an all time low. It was never about equality, it has always been about destroying the nuclear family.

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The worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman is to convince her she's as good as any man. This torture is lifelong, unendurable, and once you set up the initial conditions, the pain becomes self-inflicted. You see, women are genetically programmed for two things. First, to raise children. Second, to select a man who is superior to her to bear those children for. Not equal. Certainly not lesser. Superior. There is no point in arguing about this. It is obviously true to anyone who looks around himself without blinders made of wishful thinking. There is no point in becoming angry at me or anyone else about this. It is true whether I wish it to be or not, and whether you wish it to be or not. There is no point in trying to talk women out of this. It is not a part of their culture or education. It is not an individual character flaw in them. It is part of their genetic recipe. Therefore, if you convince a woman she is equal to most men, she will only be willing to bear children to a small percentage of exceptional men. If you convince her that she is the equal of any man, she will be unwilling to start a family with anyone. And she will remain genetically programmed to do so. When I was a child, and again when I was a young man, in high school and college, I noticed that the older adults who staffed the education system seemed to think "girls' self-esteem" was our most precious resource, perhaps because it's good for stable nuclear fusion containment, or as a growth medium for cancer-curing fruit trees. Well, I sure hope they're making good progress on that nuclear fusion thing, because it sure is hard on the women they grow up into. Perhaps they thought having a high self-esteem is the same as feeling good. Perhaps they thought half of humanity's potential Newtons, Einsteins, and Da Vincis were hidden among the ranks of the fair sex, waiting to be unlocked by "Project Self Esteem", and no, I did not make that name up. Perhaps they were retarded. They did, after all, work for the government. Self-esteem is not being happy. Self-esteem is not even feeling good. Self-esteem is how awesome you think you are. And if you think you're awesome, when you're mediocre, then you're miserable, because everyone around you treats you a whole lot worse than you think you deserve. High self-esteem is great for young men. It makes them take risks. And to thrive men need to take risks, and achieve things, for many reasons, one of which is that women only mate up. High self-esteem is not so good for young women. It doesn't get them anything they wouldn't have already had. It just makes them less happy with it. Sure, there's such a thing as self-esteem too low, but if a woman can look you in the eye, instead of in the shoes, when she talks to you, she's pretty much good to go. Anything more than that is superfluous at best, and at worst... well, eyeball the video for a moment and you'll see what I mean. But the misery isn't just personal. This is the fertility crisis in a nutshell. We, Western civilization, have spent the past five or six decades telling little boys that they are worthless sacks of protoplasm, and telling little girls that the sun shines out of their collective girl parts. And look what's happened. The fertility crisis is stupidly simple. When you elevate the status of women by giving them a greater share of respect, and of society's wealth, which is created by men, they refuse to have children. You can reverse this by allowing men to keep the wealth they create, instead of giving it to women. Then they will give it to women themselves, but the women will look up to them, and there will be children again. During the Trump administration so far, 94% of new job went to women. This is not natural or organic. This doesn't happen on its own. This is not happening because women are "crushing it". Women are the same women they have always been, risk averse, clustered around average intelligence, prone to wait for others to lead. This is not an accident. This is spin on the ball. Women vote. And pandering is an easy way to get those votes. But give a moderately pretty one a single email job at a Silicon Valley startup, and pretty soon she thinks that the father of her children should be a "post-economic" jet-setter with the body of a professional athlete who ticks all the boxes her therapist thinks are important. And she thinks she can pick him off a shelf at age 35. This is a vote, conscious or not, willing or not, for the extinction of humanity. Throughout the genetic history of humanity, approximately 80% of women had children, as opposed to 37% of men. Those numbers don't lie. Most men either weren't exceptional enough to breed, or died trying to become exceptional enough to breed. Women just had to not be in the bottom quintile. Not to be horrible, or horribly unlucky. This bears out what we already know. And this is why Western civilization told women they were the weaker sex, the dumber sex, the more fragile sex. Why Eve was said to made to serve Adam. Because this preserved civilization and the species. Women were actually happier that way, because women don't want to win. They want a winner. But even if it didn't, what choice would we have? The only nations and tribes in the world which are still breeding are the ones where women are still of low status. And if you try to replace Westerners with them, try to make them into Westerners, not only will you fail, but even if you succeed, they'll stop breeding, too. And we know now why there are no matriarchies. Its not because men have superior strength, and enslaved women with violence. It's because matriarchies don't breed. Humans are an animal, like any other animal. Every animal has mating rituals, and if those rituals can't be conducted, there will be no next generation. This is why some animals can be bred in zoos, and others cannot. We know what's wrong. We just lack the political will to fix it. Because it's "not fair". Well, of course it's not fair. But look around you. Look at the universe. Look at history. Whatever made you expect that things would be fair?

Abomination @Abomination81

a month ago

The entire human race is going to collapse based on 6's waiting for Thor to show up in a Bugatti

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Il voulut être Césaire, il ne fut que prompté.

@AmauryBrelet Triste nouvelle. Bien loin de partager ses convictions, je rappelle la phrase d'un homme politique français : "mort, l'ennemi mérite le respect".

>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me

Non, ils vont faire la queue devant les magasins vides comme tout le monde

Kiro 🛸 @Lorikhysenii

a month ago

Ils vont faire quoi les droitards quand LFI va arriver au pouvoir? Faire des manif contre l’augmentation du salaire ? Faire des manif contre la retraite à 60 ans ? Faire des manif contre le blocage des prix du carburant ? Ptddrrrrrrrrrrr

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Hard to calculate the loss to UK economy and social capital by allowing 100,000 homes in central London be occupied by third world layabouts rather than by the kind of elite professionals who would otherwise live there in a free market. Aside from how much the taxpayer loses on housing Somalis and Nigerians and so on, there’s a loss of tax revenue, professional networking, consumer spending, social and cultural dynamism, etc. Quite why European governments are so determined to fill their cities with the most economically inactive/criminally active peoples on earth I’ll never understand.

Migration Watch @MigrationWatch

a month ago

Immigrants born in just four countries occupy over 100,000 social homes in London.

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