I did some back when you first (to my knowledge) wrote about them. I should revisit tree diagrams. I appreciate the tip.
itās interesting how gender swapping (well enough to actually fool people) gives insight into gender biases. (plus modern social media gives more people a voice to share stories outside their friend group)
it reminds me a little of the multiple stories of the king (or other royalty) who dressed as a commoner and went out into the city. people treated him differently, including according to different biases
I didnāt know about this and itās relevant to the ongoing political debates about cops. Well, it depends how widespread this sort of policy is. But at least in one area they arenāt letting anyone over ~115 IQ be a cop, or around the top 15% of the population, which is a lot of people, including I imagine most people reading this post. A court upheld this which seems kinda ridiculous.
For high level leadership positions in the police force, do they get promoted from within (so they have to be low IQ in this area?) or do they use people who donāt have experience as a cop? Both ways are problematic.
I imagine a lot of areas with no formal policy also discriminate against high IQ people in police hiring.
Hereās an example of what I take to be a low IQ cop (or really, a bunch of low IQ cops with a far-more-guilty low IQ leader who pushed for this repeatedly over time):
EDIT: on second thought, i think arresting the firefighter is compatible with everyone involved being high IQ. there are plenty of smart people who will follow bad orders and just protect their job and try not to stand up to authority. i donāt really know if low or high IQ ppl are more willing to stand up to authority overall. and as for the leader, he could be dumb or he could be a smart bastard. there may be some way that doing this will help him get a promotion. being smart may be important to him coming up with rationalizations for this and help enable it, whereas a dumb person might think itās wrong and be unable to come up with effective excuses for it.
Also, disclaimer, I do not agree with a lot of common beliefs about IQ. I do think it can be discussed as a loose approximation though; itās not meaningless.
There are reports of both the left and right trying to bribe/hire social media creators to create propaganda while pretending itās organic, unpaid, unsponsored real content.
According to TikTok - Make Your Day Pendleton was lying and it was some other leftwing group, not the Democrat party itself, that offered Pendleton money to post undisclosed propaganda.
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Iām still near the beginning but itās talking about shortages of crucial medicines, in France, in the present, because big pharma refuses to manufacture them. These are drugs that were plentiful in the past. This is resulting in rationing where you get points for meeting criteria like has ā8 or more tumorsā and āhas tumors larger than 3cmā and people with more points are prioritized for treatment. Other people get 3 surgeries before getting a drug that I think costs far less to produce than the cost of 3 surgeries.
EDIT: I watched more and they gave an example about an epi pen factory in spain that wonāt sell to spain. Then they let a pharma exec from that company talk. He said:
When they launched epi pen product in 2011 in Spain, they got ā¬34 per unit. Then after multiple price decreases (set by the Spanish government) it was ā¬27. They kept making it but then in 2018 the Spanish govt lowered it under ā¬24 and they gave up and stopped providing to spain. He says ā¬24 would be by far the lowest price in Europe.
The problem is partly governments, partly pharma companies, and partly other companies like health insurers. Itās hard to sort out. Whatās clear is that the situation is broken in a lot of ways.
For every video like this, there are a lot more stories in the comments.
2020 happened- best friend had been on anti-rejection meds for 5 years. lost his job. pandemic, ya know. took 2 months for emergency Medicaid to kick in- but the rejection had begun.
a year later.
my dad had a kidney transplant and was in dialysis prior to that with a woman who lost her new kidney due to not being able to afford the anti rejection meds. it was sad
I needed a kidney transplant. My sister was a match. But unfortunately, she didnāt have health insurance because her job didnāt offer it and it was too expensive to go through the marketplaceā¦
my insurance dropped me the day they filled my 700$ adhd meds. there wasnāt a reason to deny the meds. so they just got rid of me.
United decided to refuse my anti-rejection meds for a couple weeks last January. Even though I got back on, rejection still happened.
My dad was in kidney failure for months. The Dr said he had to wait until he was at 10% kidney function before they would do dialysis. He passed Jan 5th 2024 at 12% kidney function from kidney failure
There are currently 2568 comments on this one video. I think I read under 4% of them (not a random sample). And I didnāt repost all the awful stories I found.
Iāve seen other stuff about involuntary prison labor. Seems super problematic. (This video doesnāt specify if the prison firefighters volunteer or not.)
racism
Lots of political news in the last few days. Lots of it bad. Hereās something that looks particularly important (though it could be fake).
Some background on Muskās anti-semitic grandfather from The Atlantic:
Sample quote:
Haldeman replied in a series of letters to the editor in which he maintained that the Social Credit Party was not anti-Semiticāwhile saying some rather anti-Semitic things, including the outrageous claim that Hitler had been installed as German fĆ¼hrer by āmoney ā¦ supplied by international financiers, many, but not all of them, Jewish.ā He claimed that Jews created anti-Semitism to generate sympathy. And in multiple letters, Haldeman argued that whether the Protocols were fake was beside the pointāthe ideas they contained were true, even if they were a forgery. āThe point is that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation,ā he wrote. āThis should be fair warning to all of us.ā
(Protocols = Protocols of the Elders of Zion)
I too feel like the US political right changed a lot in the last 8 years while I changed significantly less.
I too donāt like the current vandalism of the US government even though Iāve long wanted a more limited government.
I too would prefer more incremental, lawful change.
I too have become more concerned about racism and misogyny than I was 8 years ago.
I liked these examples:
To those observing from the outside, it is obvious that people who sign up for Trumpism completely transform themselves. Free marketers become protectionists, secularists become āculture war Christians,ā people who once sang paeans to the Constitution become advocates of one-man rule. Most disturbingly, people who used to talk in old Reaganite terms about the positive contributions of immigrants now delight in the administrationās performative cruelty toward immigrants. Look at Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban refugees who is now the chief enforcer of the administrationās arbitrary detention of foreigners.
Atrioc criticizes Trumpās new massive tariffs that have crashed the stock market. One of his main points is that unpredictable, chaotic tariffs canāt bring manufacturing to the US. If a company invests a bunch of money in building new US factories, thatās going to take a long time to build, and then a long time after that to make a profit on that investment. If the tariffs end or change dramatically before the profit, then it could be a bad investment and you could lose a lot of money. So itās very risky to make financial decisions based on assuming the tariffs will last. Even if Trump hadnāt seemed so fickle and chaotic lately, betting on tariffs lasting would still be risky because these tariffs are bad economic policy that will harm the economy and therefore voters will probably turn on them at some point.
Trump Is Going After the Independence of the Entire Legal Profession, Not Just Big Law
A new presidential memo is meant to instill fear in any firm that dares to represent his political adversaries
The Trump administration asserts a right to levy these sanctions for improper litigation whether or not its own Department of Justice saw fit to ask a court to levy sanctions at the timeāand, indeed, asserts the right to levy them even if they did already ask and a judge refused. It asserts a right to sanction the opposing lawyers even in cases where those lawyers won outright on the matter that was being contested.
The memo proposes to start by looking back eight years for supposed misconduct, long enough to settle every grudge from the first Trump administration.
Iām worried.
Here is an article talking a bit about prison firefighter programs:
I havenāt vetted that article for factual accuracy, it could be misleading.
But assuming the article is broadly accurate, the issue seems nuanced. It is a volunteer position, and volunteers have to be eligible for it (qualifying isnāt easy.) Also, it comes with some potentially big benefits, like being eligible for parole earlier and even getting your record expunged upon release. So it is generally seen as a very desirable position that lots of people try for.
So that seems good, compared to the alternative (that people are forced to risk their lives fighting fires.)
But I still think it is problematic. Mainly because involuntary prison labor in general is problematic, as you said. If youāre a prisoner, it seems like your choice is between:
A) Get forced into whatever job they tell you to do with zero agency and virtually no pay.
B) Volunteer for dangerous, life-threatening work that still has virtually no pay. But it could help you get released earlier and get other perks.
In that context, B might sound really appealing. But are āvolunteerā positions where your alternative is really fucked up and terrible actually volunteer positions?
One could imagine scenarios on either extreme to illustrate this.
If youāre a holocaust victim in Auschwitz and you are given the choice of ādie right now or have sex with a guard and live for an unknown amount of time before you might once again be killedā I think most people could recognize thatās not a particularly free choice. The person who chooses to have sex to live for a bit longer is not really a consenting volunteer, by reasonable standards.
On the other extreme, one could argue that e.g. no choice to work for pay is a genuinely free choice, if the alternative is not making any money and starving to death. I think this is a common socialist position but it isnāt very persuasive to me for various reasons. I think that generally, the fact that your alternative choices arenāt ideal does not mean free choice is impossible.
But where do prison firefighters fit in between these extremes? Iām not sure.
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The term āwage slaveā is a typical exaggeration. But lots of jobs merit complaints. Lots of coders working for Amazon are treated poorly, and warehouse workers and delivery drivers are treated worse. The poor treatment I mean isnāt difficulties due to lack of wealth or technology, nor is it just having to do hard work; itās unnecessary stuff like return to office mandates and unrealistic delivery schedules. The Amazon executives, like many other executives, seem to think having an adversarial relationship with most of their own employees is normal, acceptable and reasonable, rather than something to strive to avoid. A lot of companies also seem to think having an adversarial relationship with their customers is just how business works, not a problem. Problems like these being widespread makes it hard to find good jobs. And there are lots of barriers to starting your own business, and getting money from banks or venture capitalists has problems too.