You're assuming that it's self-medication, but recreational drug use goes back to prehistoric times. Two things started changing in the 90s:
1. Opioids became more widely available, and the fact that they were available as a prescription drug created the illusion that they were relatively safe to abuse for recreational purposes.
2. Baby Boomers, the first generation to mainstream harder drug use, started reaching middle age. Interestingly, the drug-related death rate for white men aged 45-54 started increasing sharply around 1991, right as the oldest Boomers started entering that age bracket.
It's plausible that economic conditions played a small contributing role, but claims that they were the main causal driver are really hard to square with the data.
It's nice to see the center left finally coming around to what I've been saying about the "deaths of despair" narrative since the original paper was published. The exogenous effects of opioid availability were always a much better fit for the data than the "economic despair" story Deaton and Case were pushing for ideological reasons.
Razib Khan did an interview with Sundar Iyer, who was the target of the original Cisco accusations and is alleging some pretty serious abuses by California's Civil Rights Department.
He could be lying, I suppose, but the fact that they dropped the case gives him some credibility.
It looks like nearly 2/3 of the students are qualifying for the advanced math class (43% of black, 60% of Latino, 82% of white, and, while it doesn't say, presumably 90+% of Asian students). How advanced can a class be if 65% of students qualify?
I like the approach of relying on standardized tests and grades rather than subjective teacher recommendations, but it sounds like they're setting the threshold too low. If it works out, great, but I'm skeptical. I suspect that either they're going to have a lot of kids failing, or they're going to have to make the class easy enough for kids with IQs in the low 90s to pass.
Jaybird’s desire for autodidactism and self-study could also be related to his own fears against woke 20-somethings yelling at him or his own fears of left-leaning politics in general.
A recurring theme I've seen in your comments here over the years is a sort of knee-jerk rejection of any criticism of ideologies popular with people who are younger than you, and a weird fixation on the idea that people who engage in such criticism are motivated by a fear of being seen as uncool and no longer with it.
I suspect that there's an element of projection here, because this doesn't make any sense. If you're afraid of being seen as uncool, the last thing you want to do is criticize current intellectual fads. Rather, you'd want to distance yourself from such criticism, and maybe engage in a bit of sanewashing or even active defense of these fads.
I didn't get this earlier today, but had a bit of a chuckle hours later when I learned the context. Originally I assumed that the joke was that if a black woman was good, a black lesbian would have been even better, which is kind of meh. The actual joke is that Laphonza Butler, whose identity-based qualifications are beyond reproach, lives in Maryland.
In practical terms, it doesn't really matter. I can't imagine that she's significantly better or worse than any alternative that Newsom could realistically have been expected to select, with or without identity-based constraints. But surely there was a resident of California he could have picked? It's a small thing, but emblematic of Democrats' contempt for the Constitution.
That aside, Democrats' identity fetishism and tokenism are also fair game for mockery, and your ostentatious display of disgust for some fairly mild ribbing betrays, I suspect, a certain lack of confidence in your ability to defend these quotas on their own merits. No matter how hard you clutch those pearls, they're not going to turn into diamonds.
The only reference to Scalia and a sleeping defendant I could find was a 2002 case in which the Supreme Court declined to review an appellate ruling that the defendant was entitled to a new trial.
Actually making payments on student loan debt while it's locked at 0% interest would have been good for taxpayers, but not a great move in terms of pure self-interest. Better to pay down other debts, or invest the money, and then (depending on interest rates) use it to pay down the student loan debt once it starts accruing interest again.
Biden has played a dirty trick here. By dragging out the student loan payment pause for years past the point where there was any remotely plausible economic justification for it---illegally giving away well over hundred billion dollars, largely to doctors and lawyers---he's induced many borrowers to budget around not having to make payments. As a result, many will no longer have slack in their budgets to resume payments, even though most would have been capable of making payments if there had never been a payment pause.
Trump deserves a much of the blame here. Really there should never have been a blanket amnesty, given that a) the unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds peaked at only 14.5% in April 2020 and was back down under 7% by the end of the year and b) most people's incomes stayed the same or increased due to the stimulus payments and bonus unemployment benefits.
But economic conditions in mid 2020 were very different from those in 2021, so Trump starting the payment pause is at least somewhat understandable, while Biden continuing it for another 2 3/4 years was characteristically scummy and irresponsible.
You might almost say that if restarting student loan repayments doesn't work out, it's because Democrats didn't want it to work out.
Actually, I didn't sufficiently adjust for the size of the Senate. While there were 24 states and 48 Senators in 1823, there were only 16 states in 1800 and the 18th was added in 1812. So while the mortality rate of sitting Senators was moderately higher in the period 1900-1923 than in 1800-1823, it wasn't twice as high, as I originally thought.
The counterintuitive thing is that there were four times as many Senators dying in office in the early 1900s as died in the early 1800s. Even accounting for the fact that there were twice as many states (and therefore twice as many Senators), that's a bit surprising.
I would attribute this to the Senate only having been around since 1789. By 1800, a Senator could have served for no more than 11 years, and by 1823 only 34. So there probably weren't that many really old people in the Senate. If we look here, most of the Senators who died in office in the early 19th century were first-termers, and the oldest was 57.
If you want to fight dirty, you should start a rumor that neckties originated from nooses that Southern whites hung around their necks so that they would be ready should the need for a lynching arise.
Causal inference is hard. Saying you're reducing theft by investing in people or whatever is good PR, but how much of it is that, as opposed to location (mentioned in the article), or that a hardware store's inventory is less attractive to thieves due to high weight-to-value ratio? What role does the male, blue-collar skew of the clientele (bigger, stronger, less crime-positive) play? How does Lowe's shrink compare to, e.g., Home Depot's?
There's not a clear causal path from more staff to less theft. Yes, more eyes means theft is more likely to be detected, but nowadays most major retailers have no-confrontation policies, and thieves aggressively exploit this, just grabbing stuff and walking out in plain sight.
Also, hiring more people is costly, and those costs are passed on to consumers. One way or another, consumers pay for theft.
I assume that you're alluding to Reagan's handling of the air traffic controller's strike, which doesn't really make much sense here, because:
1. Reagan's handling of the strike was by the book. Federal employees are not legally permitted to strike, which made their refusal to do their jobs grounds for firing.
2. That was a very different situation, because the air traffic controllers were employees of the executive branch, then headed by Reagan. He had no choice but to take a side, either turning a blind eye to an illegal strike, or enforcing the law.
Joe Biden is publicly taking sides on a private dispute that is really none of his business as long as nobody's breaking the law.
I see this talking point a lot, and it doesn't really make any sense on a micro level. The idea is that employers are willing to sacrifice profits, or customers are willing to pay more, when an occupation skews male just because they think that dudes rock?
If this actually holds as a general pattern, and isn't just an artifact of cherry-picking examples, then there must be some kind of supply-based explanation. One possible factor is that educated women seem to be more drawn than educated men to what you might call self-actualization jobs, i.e. jobs where supply is relatively wage-inelastic because people really want to do that particular kind of work, even if the pay is low. Men, on the other hand, are more inclined to follow the money.
It's a talking point from the zero-COVID crew: Learning to live with COVID instead of just masking and socially isolating forever is eugenics, because it will result in the deaths of those who are especially vulnerable.
Not just police, but also prosecutors. Police can arrest criminals all day long, but after that it's out of their hands. If a city elects a crime-positive prosecutor, arresting criminals won't do much good.
Immediately following Davis’ denial of the license, Bunning sentenced her to five days in jail after holding her in contempt of court, according to reporting from The Associated Press.
She was released after her staff issued the marriage license on her behalf, but removed her name from the document.
They got the license eight years ago, days after after she initially refused to issue it.
As usual, it's not clear to me why taxpayers should have to shell out for this. She's the one who didn't do her job. Make her pay for it. Or if we must make taxpayers pay, cap it to actual damages. My understanding is that punitive damages can't be awarded when suing the government, so presumably these are ostensibly compensatory, but I'm deeply skeptical that they legitimately suffered $100,000 in damages.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “From CNN: Israel says it is ‘at war’ after Hamas surprise attack”
They thought they were doing safe-edgy, but it was actually edgy.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/9/2023”
You're assuming that it's self-medication, but recreational drug use goes back to prehistoric times. Two things started changing in the 90s:
1. Opioids became more widely available, and the fact that they were available as a prescription drug created the illusion that they were relatively safe to abuse for recreational purposes.
2. Baby Boomers, the first generation to mainstream harder drug use, started reaching middle age. Interestingly, the drug-related death rate for white men aged 45-54 started increasing sharply around 1991, right as the oldest Boomers started entering that age bracket.
It's plausible that economic conditions played a small contributing role, but claims that they were the main causal driver are really hard to square with the data.
"
It's nice to see the center left finally coming around to what I've been saying about the "deaths of despair" narrative since the original paper was published. The exogenous effects of opioid availability were always a much better fit for the data than the "economic despair" story Deaton and Case were pushing for ideological reasons.
"
Razib Khan did an interview with Sundar Iyer, who was the target of the original Cisco accusations and is alleging some pretty serious abuses by California's Civil Rights Department.
He could be lying, I suppose, but the fact that they dropped the case gives him some credibility.
"
It looks like nearly 2/3 of the students are qualifying for the advanced math class (43% of black, 60% of Latino, 82% of white, and, while it doesn't say, presumably 90+% of Asian students). How advanced can a class be if 65% of students qualify?
I like the approach of relying on standardized tests and grades rather than subjective teacher recommendations, but it sounds like they're setting the threshold too low. If it works out, great, but I'm skeptical. I suspect that either they're going to have a lot of kids failing, or they're going to have to make the class easy enough for kids with IQs in the low 90s to pass.
On “Mini Video Throughput: Emergency Zombies, Neuralink and iPhones”
One of the strange aspects of being human is that we don’t really understand … ourselves.
Not that strange. Try asking a cow to explain cows.
On “From The New York Times Magazine: Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?”
Jaybird’s desire for autodidactism and self-study could also be related to his own fears against woke 20-somethings yelling at him or his own fears of left-leaning politics in general.
A recurring theme I've seen in your comments here over the years is a sort of knee-jerk rejection of any criticism of ideologies popular with people who are younger than you, and a weird fixation on the idea that people who engage in such criticism are motivated by a fear of being seen as uncool and no longer with it.
I suspect that there's an element of projection here, because this doesn't make any sense. If you're afraid of being seen as uncool, the last thing you want to do is criticize current intellectual fads. Rather, you'd want to distance yourself from such criticism, and maybe engage in a bit of sanewashing or even active defense of these fads.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/2/2023”
I just found out that Roger Whittaker died on September 13th. I've always thought he was underrated, at least in the US and during my lifetime. He made uncool cool. Posting "The Last Farewell" would be too cliché, so here's "The First Hello, the Last Goodbye":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RPj8N0TKw0
"
I didn't get this earlier today, but had a bit of a chuckle hours later when I learned the context. Originally I assumed that the joke was that if a black woman was good, a black lesbian would have been even better, which is kind of meh. The actual joke is that Laphonza Butler, whose identity-based qualifications are beyond reproach, lives in Maryland.
In practical terms, it doesn't really matter. I can't imagine that she's significantly better or worse than any alternative that Newsom could realistically have been expected to select, with or without identity-based constraints. But surely there was a resident of California he could have picked? It's a small thing, but emblematic of Democrats' contempt for the Constitution.
That aside, Democrats' identity fetishism and tokenism are also fair game for mockery, and your ostentatious display of disgust for some fairly mild ribbing betrays, I suspect, a certain lack of confidence in your ability to defend these quotas on their own merits. No matter how hard you clutch those pearls, they're not going to turn into diamonds.
On “Trump Lawyers Fail to Demand a Jury Trial: Malpractice, Strategery, or Both?”
The only reference to Scalia and a sleeping defendant I could find was a 2002 case in which the Supreme Court declined to review an appellate ruling that the defendant was entitled to a new trial.
On “From NBCNews: Student loan payments restart today, forcing borrowers to take on more debt and put off saving for retirement.”
Actually making payments on student loan debt while it's locked at 0% interest would have been good for taxpayers, but not a great move in terms of pure self-interest. Better to pay down other debts, or invest the money, and then (depending on interest rates) use it to pay down the student loan debt once it starts accruing interest again.
"
Biden has played a dirty trick here. By dragging out the student loan payment pause for years past the point where there was any remotely plausible economic justification for it---illegally giving away well over hundred billion dollars, largely to doctors and lawyers---he's induced many borrowers to budget around not having to make payments. As a result, many will no longer have slack in their budgets to resume payments, even though most would have been capable of making payments if there had never been a payment pause.
Trump deserves a much of the blame here. Really there should never have been a blanket amnesty, given that a) the unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds peaked at only 14.5% in April 2020 and was back down under 7% by the end of the year and b) most people's incomes stayed the same or increased due to the stimulus payments and bonus unemployment benefits.
But economic conditions in mid 2020 were very different from those in 2021, so Trump starting the payment pause is at least somewhat understandable, while Biden continuing it for another 2 3/4 years was characteristically scummy and irresponsible.
You might almost say that if restarting student loan repayments doesn't work out, it's because Democrats didn't want it to work out.
On “From NBC News: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a trailblazer in U.S. politics and the longest-serving woman in the Senate, has died at 90.”
Actually, I didn't sufficiently adjust for the size of the Senate. While there were 24 states and 48 Senators in 1823, there were only 16 states in 1800 and the 18th was added in 1812. So while the mortality rate of sitting Senators was moderately higher in the period 1900-1923 than in 1800-1823, it wasn't twice as high, as I originally thought.
"
The counterintuitive thing is that there were four times as many Senators dying in office in the early 1900s as died in the early 1800s. Even accounting for the fact that there were twice as many states (and therefore twice as many Senators), that's a bit surprising.
I would attribute this to the Senate only having been around since 1789. By 1800, a Senator could have served for no more than 11 years, and by 1823 only 34. So there probably weren't that many really old people in the Senate. If we look here, most of the Senators who died in office in the early 19th century were first-termers, and the oldest was 57.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/25/2023”
If you want to fight dirty, you should start a rumor that neckties originated from nooses that Southern whites hung around their necks so that they would be ready should the need for a lynching arise.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/18/2023”
What is "Welcum here man?" Is that Jamaican English? I looked it up in Wiktionary and it only said it was an eye-dialect spelling of "welcome."
Also, the sign has oppressor Chinese but not resistance Chinese.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/25/2023”
Causal inference is hard. Saying you're reducing theft by investing in people or whatever is good PR, but how much of it is that, as opposed to location (mentioned in the article), or that a hardware store's inventory is less attractive to thieves due to high weight-to-value ratio? What role does the male, blue-collar skew of the clientele (bigger, stronger, less crime-positive) play? How does Lowe's shrink compare to, e.g., Home Depot's?
There's not a clear causal path from more staff to less theft. Yes, more eyes means theft is more likely to be detected, but nowadays most major retailers have no-confrontation policies, and thieves aggressively exploit this, just grabbing stuff and walking out in plain sight.
Also, hiring more people is costly, and those costs are passed on to consumers. One way or another, consumers pay for theft.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/18/2023”
I assume that you're alluding to Reagan's handling of the air traffic controller's strike, which doesn't really make much sense here, because:
1. Reagan's handling of the strike was by the book. Federal employees are not legally permitted to strike, which made their refusal to do their jobs grounds for firing.
2. That was a very different situation, because the air traffic controllers were employees of the executive branch, then headed by Reagan. He had no choice but to take a side, either turning a blind eye to an illegal strike, or enforcing the law.
Joe Biden is publicly taking sides on a private dispute that is really none of his business as long as nobody's breaking the law.
"
Still, I'm sure Biden's NLRB can be trusted to enforce the law fairly.
"
Who would have guessed that the N*zis were anti-racists?
"
He stated all differences in group outcomes can only be explained by policy
It's insane how people on the left can get away with saying blatantly antisemitic things like this.
On “Barbie, Motherhood, and the Political Climate”
I see this talking point a lot, and it doesn't really make any sense on a micro level. The idea is that employers are willing to sacrifice profits, or customers are willing to pay more, when an occupation skews male just because they think that dudes rock?
If this actually holds as a general pattern, and isn't just an artifact of cherry-picking examples, then there must be some kind of supply-based explanation. One possible factor is that educated women seem to be more drawn than educated men to what you might call self-actualization jobs, i.e. jobs where supply is relatively wage-inelastic because people really want to do that particular kind of work, even if the pay is low. Men, on the other hand, are more inclined to follow the money.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/18/2023”
It's a talking point from the zero-COVID crew: Learning to live with COVID instead of just masking and socially isolating forever is eugenics, because it will result in the deaths of those who are especially vulnerable.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/11/2023”
Not just police, but also prosecutors. Police can arrest criminals all day long, but after that it's out of their hands. If a city elects a crime-positive prosecutor, arresting criminals won't do much good.
"
They got the license eight years ago, days after after she initially refused to issue it.
As usual, it's not clear to me why taxpayers should have to shell out for this. She's the one who didn't do her job. Make her pay for it. Or if we must make taxpayers pay, cap it to actual damages. My understanding is that punitive damages can't be awarded when suing the government, so presumably these are ostensibly compensatory, but I'm deeply skeptical that they legitimately suffered $100,000 in damages.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.