His reputation as a “bloody minded bastard” aside, Martin has creznaragyl xvyyrq bss n tenaq gbgny bs bar CBI punenpgre va gur ebhtuyl svir gubhfnaq phzhyngvir cntrf bs gur NFbVnS frevrf fb sne (abg pbhagvat cebybthr/rcvybthr punenpgref, jubz ab bar rkcrpgf gb fheivir sbe zber guna bar puncgre). Gur raqvat bs gur zbfg erprag obbx yrnirf bar CBI punenpgre’f sngr hapyrne, ohg gur infg znwbevgl bs gur snaqbz rkcrpgf uvz gb or onpx va fbzr sbez be nabgure. (Aba-CBI graq gb qebc yvxr syvrf, ohg gur nhqvrapr vf yrff nggnpurq gb gurz.)
taelor
Karma: 1,058
As an aside, can someone please explain what the deal with reactionaries and crabs is? I feel like there’s some context here that I’m missing.
kings and patriarchy have been around for 5000+, which implies that they have some selective advantage.
This implies that they represent a stable equilibrium. Stable does not imply optimal (though depending on your time-prefernces and degree of risk-aversion, optimal may imply stable).
Nate Silver’s The Signal And The Noise has a chapter about this. The short answer is yes,, weather forcasting has gotten better, but comerical forcasts have a known “wet bias” in favor of predicting rain. The reason for this is that people get more upset at forcasters when they say it won’t rain and it does than when they say it will rain and it doesn’t. Acording to Silver, the National Weather Service’s forcasts are the most reliable, followed by various large comercial services (e.g. weather.com. etc.), with local news forcasts being the least reliable.
But then why do these stereotypes remain stable across generations?
Rational expectations equalibria are a thing. To take a somewhat exagerated example, if everyone thinks that girls suck at math, so no one teaches girls to do math, then no one will ever find out whether or not girls actually suck at math.
I wouldn’t expect such a subsidy to overcome inertia in all cases. I expect it would help on the margins, though.
We can conscript as many as we want if we pay them enough. If we’re willing to draft people, then why wouldn’t we be willing to raise taxes?
Taxpayers are generally better organized politically than potential conscripts.
In general I agree with this. However, I am also in favor of government subsidy on moving between jurisdictions (though, not a full subsidy, as that would cause moral hazard problems). Uprooting your life and relocating to a new location is costly, in time, money, effort, and social ties. These costs will be disproportionately borne by people with values far from the mean of their cultural/geographic locale. Without a subsidy to help Texans with California values and Californians with Texan values relocate, Federalism will essentially develve into a large welfare redistribution to individuals with values close to their jurisdiction’s mean from individuals further from that mean.
Exit: looks like someone beat me to this .
Worm addresses this in a somewhat round about way: Cnanprn’f srryvatf bs vagrafr thvyg sbe rirel ubhe gung fur fcraqf qbvat guvatf bgure guna hfvat ure cbjref gb urny crbcyr jrer n znwbe pbagevohgbe gb ure zragny oernxqbja naq fhofrdhrag vzcevfbazrag va gur Oveq Pntr.
Speaking of Generation Kill, I recently got done reading One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, the platoon commander featured in Generation Kill, which covered many of the same events, but with a somewhat different focus (Evan Wright’s book aimed at representing the experiences of as many of the Marines he was embedded with as possible, were as Fick’s book explicitly about his experiences in particular), as well as Fick’s experiences at Officer School and in Afghanistan.
In general, Fick’s book is more sympathetic to First Recon’s leadership, and to its commander Lt. Col Ferrando in particular, saying that he suspected Ferrando of caring about his men much more than he lead them (and by extension Wright) to believe. On the other hand, Fick agrees with Wright that Bravo Company’s commander, whom Wright identifies as Encino Man and Fick just calls “the captain” or “my CO”, was dangerously incompetent. Fick also describes having a hostile relationship with the battalion’s XO (who was only briefly mentioned in GK), and writes about imagining himself fragging the XO.
Overall, I thought it was engagingly written, and a good companion piece to Wright’s book (and the HBO series).
I would add Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
Of note, Alfred von Schlieffen, the architect of the original deployment plan for war against France, was on record as recommending a negotiated peace in the event that the German Army fail to quickly draw the French into a decisive battle. Obviously, this recommendation was not followed. Also of note, Schlieffen’s plan was explicitly for a one-front war; the bit with the Russians was hastily tacked on by Schlieffen’s successors at the General Staff.
I’m an 4th year economics undergrad preparing start applying to PhD programs, and while I’ve never formally attempted to memorize GDPs, I’ve found that having a rough idea of where a county’s per capita GDP is to be very useful in understanding world news and events (for example, I’ve noticed that around the $8,00-12,000 per year range seems to be the point where the median household gets an internet connection). If you do attempt to go the memorization route, be sure to use PPP-adjusted figures, as non-adjusted numbers will tend to systematically under estimate incomes in developing countries.
Madoka: Rebellion
I am ambivilent towards this. It had some clever bits, and I think I understand what Urobuchi was trying to do with the ending, but the overall execution did not live up to the standards of the orignial series.
That’s another problem with overuse of the “priviledge” concept: the more people throw it around, the less punch it packs.
I’m a community college transfer currently at UC Davis. Some quick googling turned up these figures from 2004, which give a graduation rate of 84% for transfer students, compared to 89% for students who enrolled as freshmen, conditional on acheiving junior standing (the probability of graduation for any random student who enrolled directly out of highschool is actually lower than for transfers). These numbers are a decade old, but are roughly in line with my current experiences, so I don’t expect them to have changed that much.
There’s a third thing wrong with it: generally, people use the phrase in order to praise one side of some historical dispute (and implicitly condemn the other) by attributing to them (in part or in whole) some historical change that is deemed beneficial by the person doing the praising. The problem with this is that usually when you go back and look at the actual goals of the groups being praised, they usually end up bearing very little relation to the changes that the praiser is trying to associate them with, if not being completely antithetical. Herbert Butterfield (who I posted about above) initially noticed this in the tendency of people to try to attribute modern notions of religious toleration to the Protestant reformation, when in fact Martin Luthor wrote songs about murdering Jews, and lobbied the local princes to violently surpress rival Protestant sects.
In general, neoreactionaries seem to have cribbed this position from Herbert Butterfield’s critique of what he called the “Whig Interpretation of History”. Butterfield was not himself a neoreactionary, and infact warned against the trap that many neoreactionaries fall into: that of thinking that just because Whig histories are invalid, that this somehow makes Tory histories valid.
To me, the stories with happy people “finishing paying their college loans” are horror stories. Stories with people getting charged thousands of dollars for simple medical procedures are insane. People maximising PROFITS out of selling weapons and military technology/services… is not the mark of a sane and healthy society.
Of note: most universities are either run by the government, or by non-profit organizations. Ditto for most hospitals.
The less dramatic name for it is the Social Brain Hypothesis. It was originally proposed by R. A. Dunbar (of Dunbar’s number fame).