But I have a hard time conjuring up any sort of realistic compelled speech scenario where this newly-announced wrinkle in the law would not involve religious belief.
DEI statements and trans issues come to mind. A radical feminist baker's objection to being required to bake a trans coming-out cake (or whatever) would not likely be motivated by religion. If I were a web developer, I would reject requests to make web sites promoting various left-wing racial blood libels, like BLM and MMIWG.
After not being able to get a new graphics card at a reasonable price during the last generation, and then just not getting around to it for a while, I finally replaced my 6-year-old desktop with a new one with a 4070 yesterday.
I didn't want to deal with the hassle of building one myself again, so I went with a prebuilt. An annoyance I ran into is that almost all prebuilts skimp where it doesn't really make sense to. In the case of the one I bought, it only came with a 1 TB SSD, even though a 2 TB SSD only costs like $30 more, and modern games are regularly coming with install sizes over 100 GB. And they were charging $150 to swap out the 1 TB for 2 TB! For half the price I could just buy a separate 2 TB drive, pop out in myself, and get 3 TB of SSD, which is what I'm doing.
I haven't had a chance to take it for a spin yet. I'm thinking of starting with Skyrim VR, because it's Skyrim, in VR! But I've heard that they really phoned it in and you have to install a bunch of mods to make it good. Maybe No Man's Sky.
On a related note, I'm surprised that my $200 3 GB 1060 kept chugging along for six years. It wasn't until last year that new games that it couldn't run started coming out, although it did always have a lot of trouble with VR. I saw a lot of hot takes last year about how PC gaming is becoming unaffordable. But this is stupid: Developers basically never make games that need a new, high-end graphics card to run, because doing this would kill sales. People were freaking out over the mere availability of expensive high-end cards, despite the fact that perfectly serviceable cards were available for a fraction of the price.
I guess this is the music thread now? I've been listening to old Chinese (language) music recently. Most of the good stuff is from Taiwan, IMO, but I recently came across a song by Tián Zhèn, a mainland singer, while searching for a different song with the same title, and liked it enough to look into her other music. Unfortunately, most of it isn't online, buther excellent self-titled 1996 album is.
It's so full of great songs that I originally thought it was a best-of album, so you can't go wrong, but tracks 6 (回來又去,去了又回) and 11 (陽光下的田震) are my personal favorites, and I think 3 (執著) is the most popular.
Translation of the track list, to the best of my mediocre ability:
1. Wildflower
2. Carefree
3. Persistence
4. Are You the Same as Me?
5. A Woman Who Fears the Dark
6. Come and Go, Go and Come
7. Who Will Stay for Me?
8. Love's Guardian
9. Conjecture
10. Sand, Ants
11. Tian Zhen in the Sunlight
I'm not sure whether the last has some double meaning I'm not picking up, or it's just her name in the title.
I found some tracks from her 1984 debut album on YouTube, and it was very, very different, just straight traditional Chinese popular music. I'm not sure whether there's any particular political significance to the change, or just that it took her a while to find her niche.
Every time I see a stupid or bad-faith criticism of a Supreme Court ruling I understand by people who ought to know better, I'm that much more inclined to assume that criticisms of rulings I don't understand are just partisan hackery.
I don't really have a good sense of how much this costs, but the fact that YouTube is able to store vast amounts of low-value user-generated video content with only ad revenue to support it makes me question the idea that infrastructure costs are a major factor here.
This seemed odd to me at first, too, but I think I see how it makes sense. You pay a flat fee for a streaming service, and they probably have some formula that decides how subscription revenues get split up depending on how many views a movie or episode gets.
I guess maybe they ran the numbers and did some projections and figured that those particular shows a) were not adding much revenue by attracting or retaining new subscribers, and b) were cannibalizing the viewership for content that allowed Disney to keep more of the money and pay out less in royalties.
Or maybe there was something in the contract that required Disney to pay just for having the content on their platform, regardless of whether/how much it was viewed.
I'm not sure which if either of these hypotheses is the actual reason; my main point is that there are plausible reasons it could make financial sense, and there's really no way to know for sure without knowing the details of their contracts.
Legacy admissions and affirmative action combine to make things extra tough for blue-collar whites and Asians. Despite straight As, mostly 5s and a couple 4s on ten AP tests, and a perfect score on the SAT, I didn't get into any of my first-choice universities. Between legacies, international students paying full tuition, and affirmative action, top schools don't have many slots left for people like me.
Huh. I guess I've just been misinformed, because I was always under the impression that that was exactly the kind of thing the courts refused to rule on and that you actually had to do the thing and get charged, sued, or fined to challenge the law.
What was the basis for standing? I've always heard that the courts don't make advisory rulings and only rule on actual cases, hence the shenanigans that are sometimes involved in getting a test case before the court (e.g. Lawrence v. Texas, where the defense asked the judge to increase the fine in order to make it large enough to appeal).
Also, in addition to everything you said, I'd like to point out that the Supreme Court's main role is to settle questions of law, not of fact. Often the facts of a particular case are little more than a pretext for ruling on a legal question. Given that, the standing requirements we have are rather silly, in my opinion, but it's the system we have. I get the sense that there are probably about fifty people in the country who actually care about standing (I don't claim to be one of them), and everybody else is really just complaining about laws they like being subjected to judicial review.
The lower average academic performance of black and Latino students relative to white and especially Asian students is one of the most well-documented and replicated findings in education. The black-white gap is on the order of a standard deviation, and the Latino-white gap is a bit smaller. A decline in admittance of URM students was a predictable result of admissions offices ceasing to discriminate in their favor, and the size of the decline was an indication of the extent to which they had been discriminating in favor of URMs and under AA.
I'm not even sure which part of that you think is evidence of racism.
That aside, while I don't have time to dig into the details right now, I'm not sure you have the facts right. IIRC, URM admission at the most selective UC universities fell sharply shortly after Prop. 209 passed, and then quickly increased again as universities found ways to discriminate against whites and Asians without violating the letter of the law.
But I believe that this mostly resulted in URM applicants being admitted to less selective schools, not to a substantial decrease in URM enrollment at universities statewide. Since most universities have non-competitive admissions, everyone who really wanted to go to college and wasn't obviously unprepared for higher education (though even this is negotiable; I went to a fairly selective school, and even there we had remedial classes) should have been able to get in somewhere.
In general, educated people are better at learning the party line. This results in a curious phenomenon where, on many issues, Republicans and Democrats diverge at higher education levels, rather than converging as one might naively expect.
Even among people with college degrees, only a small minority understand any given issue well enough to form an educated opinion. Most are really only capable of memorizing a few key talking points, and on this basis conclude that they know everything they need to know and that everyone who disagrees is just ignorant.
Higher education allows you to make more money and insulate yourself from crime. It also makes it easier to recover financially from theft, vandalism, and even injury.
The effect of being a Democrat is probably just mediated through ideology.
The article mentions in passing that Asian-Americans have the highest poverty rate in NYC. I see this mentioned a lot, and while a lot of people disingenuously try to pass it off as nationally representative instead of a weird local phenomenon in order to promote the "Model Minority Myth" myth, it does seem to be legitimate.
This is something I've been thinking about on and off for years. Why are there so many poor Asians in NYC, when nationally they're the wealthiest racial group and have poverty rates only slightly above non-Hispanic whites?
I guess it must have something to do with older immigrants with limited English skills. Or maybe it disproportionately attracts low-skilled service workers, while tech workers tend to go to the west coast?
The share of black and Hispanic Americans who are in the middle class rivals that of whites.
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Take a look at the source for that claim. Yes, 47% of black and 49% of Hispanic adults are middle-income compared to 51% of white adults, but black and Hispanic adults are far more likely to be low-income and far less likely to be high-income. It's not shown here, but the black and Hispanic median incomes are also significantly below the white median incomes. The difference is even more extreme for Asians, Part of that is age---white Americans are on average several years older than black and Hispanic Americans---but that doesn't explain the whole gap, and it certainly doesn't explain the black-Asian gap, which is even larger, because white supremacy works in mysterious ways.
Of course, this doesn't mean that black-white income gaps are caused by racism, any more than white-Asian or gentile-Jewish gaps are. There are very real and so far largely intractable racial gaps in academic and job performance that explain the gaps.
On the other hand, blacks still lag behind whites in college degrees and attendance.
There's an interesting phenomenon that doesn't really get talked about, which is that when you control for test scores, black students are more likely than white students to attend and graduate from college. For example, 17% of black test takers score over 1000 on the SAT, and 23% of black Americans age 25-29 have college degrees, while for non-Hispanic whites those numbers are 53% and 42% (Asians: 71% and 63%). Whites are more than three times as likely as blacks to score over 1100, but less than twice as likely to have a bachelor's degree.
To be clear, this does not mean that the SAT is biased against black students. Black students do not get better grades in college than score-matched white students. Nevertheless, they do attend and finish college at higher rates than score-matched white students.
I don't think we can attribute this to affirmative action, because most colleges have non-competitive admissions. Nobody of any race fails to get into any college at all because of affirmative action or the lack thereof. It only affects who gets into selective universities. I suspect that a number of different factors contribute. Black students tend to come from wealthier families than score-matched while students. Athletics probably plays a role as well. Possibly black students are on average more conscientious or value education more than score-matched white students, since they have to study harder to achieve the same scores due to the gap in g.
Anyway, given that black students actually get degrees at higher rates than white and Asian students with similar academic ability, it's hard to argue that higher education is biased against them.
You are once again committing the fallacy of assuming that differences in outcomes must be due to racism or other systemic disadvantages, and that simply isn't true, as has been explained to you multiple times.
Biaggi is being disingenuous here, of course. If her balance is going up despite consistently making payments, she's probably on an income-driven repayment plan, which means that she will never be required to pay off the full balance. Likely the two loans she paid off in full were private loans ineligible for income-driven repayment.
I never thought I'd say this again after Trump, but Biden might legitimately be the worst President since Nixon.
Also, housing starts took a dive in mid 2022, so that doesn't suggest good things to come:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
The decline was only in single-family starts, though. Multi-family housing starts kept rising, possibly because of the longer process to get started, or possibly because the barriers to building are so high that it's profitable to build even at high interest rates.
By the way, for the last five years, in the entire United States, there have been about 350k housing units in multi-family buildings completed per year. Prior to that it was even lower, though it was much higher in the 70s and 80s. Yet for years I've been hearing about how we're building tons and tons of luxury apartments and condos that just sit empty.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A Paucity Of Limits, By Stipulation: 303 Creative v Elenis”
DEI statements and trans issues come to mind. A radical feminist baker's objection to being required to bake a trans coming-out cake (or whatever) would not likely be motivated by religion. If I were a web developer, I would reject requests to make web sites promoting various left-wing racial blood libels, like BLM and MMIWG.
On “AITA For Not Telling My Girlfriend About My Hobby?”
Eh, I'm just not buying the idea of a Redditor being superhuman.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/3/2023”
It looks like the edited "mandatory" into the headline. Originally it said that he banned water breaks.
On “Weekend Plans Post: On Cat Toys”
It only stands to reason that a cat should be catty.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Stone Age (the board game)”
After not being able to get a new graphics card at a reasonable price during the last generation, and then just not getting around to it for a while, I finally replaced my 6-year-old desktop with a new one with a 4070 yesterday.
I didn't want to deal with the hassle of building one myself again, so I went with a prebuilt. An annoyance I ran into is that almost all prebuilts skimp where it doesn't really make sense to. In the case of the one I bought, it only came with a 1 TB SSD, even though a 2 TB SSD only costs like $30 more, and modern games are regularly coming with install sizes over 100 GB. And they were charging $150 to swap out the 1 TB for 2 TB! For half the price I could just buy a separate 2 TB drive, pop out in myself, and get 3 TB of SSD, which is what I'm doing.
I haven't had a chance to take it for a spin yet. I'm thinking of starting with Skyrim VR, because it's Skyrim, in VR! But I've heard that they really phoned it in and you have to install a bunch of mods to make it good. Maybe No Man's Sky.
On a related note, I'm surprised that my $200 3 GB 1060 kept chugging along for six years. It wasn't until last year that new games that it couldn't run started coming out, although it did always have a lot of trouble with VR. I saw a lot of hot takes last year about how PC gaming is becoming unaffordable. But this is stupid: Developers basically never make games that need a new, high-end graphics card to run, because doing this would kill sales. People were freaking out over the mere availability of expensive high-end cards, despite the fact that perfectly serviceable cards were available for a fraction of the price.
On “Weekend Plans Post: On Cat Toys”
I vaguely remember the Morris the Cat commercials from when I was a kid, and I did not at all pick up on how stereotypically gay he was.
"
I guess this is the music thread now? I've been listening to old Chinese (language) music recently. Most of the good stuff is from Taiwan, IMO, but I recently came across a song by Tián Zhèn, a mainland singer, while searching for a different song with the same title, and liked it enough to look into her other music. Unfortunately, most of it isn't online, buther excellent self-titled 1996 album is.
It's so full of great songs that I originally thought it was a best-of album, so you can't go wrong, but tracks 6 (回來又去,去了又回) and 11 (陽光下的田震) are my personal favorites, and I think 3 (執著) is the most popular.
Translation of the track list, to the best of my mediocre ability:
1. Wildflower
2. Carefree
3. Persistence
4. Are You the Same as Me?
5. A Woman Who Fears the Dark
6. Come and Go, Go and Come
7. Who Will Stay for Me?
8. Love's Guardian
9. Conjecture
10. Sand, Ants
11. Tian Zhen in the Sunlight
I'm not sure whether the last has some double meaning I'm not picking up, or it's just her name in the title.
I found some tracks from her 1984 debut album on YouTube, and it was very, very different, just straight traditional Chinese popular music. I'm not sure whether there's any particular political significance to the change, or just that it took her a while to find her niche.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/3/2023”
It's weird how they'll just brazenly lie in the headlines like that.
On “On Fraud, Standing, and “Stewart and Mike” Not Getting Their Day in Court”
Every time I see a stupid or bad-faith criticism of a Supreme Court ruling I understand by people who ought to know better, I'm that much more inclined to assume that criticisms of rulings I don't understand are just partisan hackery.
On “From Bloomberg: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending”
I don't really have a good sense of how much this costs, but the fact that YouTube is able to store vast amounts of low-value user-generated video content with only ad revenue to support it makes me question the idea that infrastructure costs are a major factor here.
"
This seemed odd to me at first, too, but I think I see how it makes sense. You pay a flat fee for a streaming service, and they probably have some formula that decides how subscription revenues get split up depending on how many views a movie or episode gets.
I guess maybe they ran the numbers and did some projections and figured that those particular shows a) were not adding much revenue by attracting or retaining new subscribers, and b) were cannibalizing the viewership for content that allowed Disney to keep more of the money and pay out less in royalties.
Or maybe there was something in the contract that required Disney to pay just for having the content on their platform, regardless of whether/how much it was viewed.
I'm not sure which if either of these hypotheses is the actual reason; my main point is that there are plausible reasons it could make financial sense, and there's really no way to know for sure without knowing the details of their contracts.
On “Good Legacies”
Legacy admissions and affirmative action combine to make things extra tough for blue-collar whites and Asians. Despite straight As, mostly 5s and a couple 4s on ten AP tests, and a perfect score on the SAT, I didn't get into any of my first-choice universities. Between legacies, international students paying full tuition, and affirmative action, top schools don't have many slots left for people like me.
On “On Fraud, Standing, and “Stewart and Mike” Not Getting Their Day in Court”
Huh. I guess I've just been misinformed, because I was always under the impression that that was exactly the kind of thing the courts refused to rule on and that you actually had to do the thing and get charged, sued, or fined to challenge the law.
"
What was the basis for standing? I've always heard that the courts don't make advisory rulings and only rule on actual cases, hence the shenanigans that are sometimes involved in getting a test case before the court (e.g. Lawrence v. Texas, where the defense asked the judge to increase the fine in order to make it large enough to appeal).
Also, in addition to everything you said, I'd like to point out that the Supreme Court's main role is to settle questions of law, not of fact. Often the facts of a particular case are little more than a pretext for ruling on a legal question. Given that, the standing requirements we have are rather silly, in my opinion, but it's the system we have. I get the sense that there are probably about fifty people in the country who actually care about standing (I don't claim to be one of them), and everybody else is really just complaining about laws they like being subjected to judicial review.
On “SCOTUS Strikes Again”
Correction:
This should say over 1100, and it should say bachelor's degrees rather than college degrees.
"
The lower average academic performance of black and Latino students relative to white and especially Asian students is one of the most well-documented and replicated findings in education. The black-white gap is on the order of a standard deviation, and the Latino-white gap is a bit smaller. A decline in admittance of URM students was a predictable result of admissions offices ceasing to discriminate in their favor, and the size of the decline was an indication of the extent to which they had been discriminating in favor of URMs and under AA.
I'm not even sure which part of that you think is evidence of racism.
That aside, while I don't have time to dig into the details right now, I'm not sure you have the facts right. IIRC, URM admission at the most selective UC universities fell sharply shortly after Prop. 209 passed, and then quickly increased again as universities found ways to discriminate against whites and Asians without violating the letter of the law.
But I believe that this mostly resulted in URM applicants being admitted to less selective schools, not to a substantial decrease in URM enrollment at universities statewide. Since most universities have non-competitive admissions, everyone who really wanted to go to college and wasn't obviously unprepared for higher education (though even this is negotiable; I went to a fairly selective school, and even there we had remedial classes) should have been able to get in somewhere.
"
This was supposed to be in reply to Jaybird's comment above linking to an NYT article from five years ago.
On “Open Mic for the week of 6/26/2023”
In general, educated people are better at learning the party line. This results in a curious phenomenon where, on many issues, Republicans and Democrats diverge at higher education levels, rather than converging as one might naively expect.
Even among people with college degrees, only a small minority understand any given issue well enough to form an educated opinion. Most are really only capable of memorizing a few key talking points, and on this basis conclude that they know everything they need to know and that everyone who disagrees is just ignorant.
"
Higher education allows you to make more money and insulate yourself from crime. It also makes it easier to recover financially from theft, vandalism, and even injury.
The effect of being a Democrat is probably just mediated through ideology.
On “SCOTUS Strikes Again”
The article mentions in passing that Asian-Americans have the highest poverty rate in NYC. I see this mentioned a lot, and while a lot of people disingenuously try to pass it off as nationally representative instead of a weird local phenomenon in order to promote the "Model Minority Myth" myth, it does seem to be legitimate.
This is something I've been thinking about on and off for years. Why are there so many poor Asians in NYC, when nationally they're the wealthiest racial group and have poverty rates only slightly above non-Hispanic whites?
I guess it must have something to do with older immigrants with limited English skills. Or maybe it disproportionately attracts low-skilled service workers, while tech workers tend to go to the west coast?
"
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Take a look at the source for that claim. Yes, 47% of black and 49% of Hispanic adults are middle-income compared to 51% of white adults, but black and Hispanic adults are far more likely to be low-income and far less likely to be high-income. It's not shown here, but the black and Hispanic median incomes are also significantly below the white median incomes. The difference is even more extreme for Asians, Part of that is age---white Americans are on average several years older than black and Hispanic Americans---but that doesn't explain the whole gap, and it certainly doesn't explain the black-Asian gap, which is even larger, because white supremacy works in mysterious ways.
Of course, this doesn't mean that black-white income gaps are caused by racism, any more than white-Asian or gentile-Jewish gaps are. There are very real and so far largely intractable racial gaps in academic and job performance that explain the gaps.
There's an interesting phenomenon that doesn't really get talked about, which is that when you control for test scores, black students are more likely than white students to attend and graduate from college. For example, 17% of black test takers score over 1000 on the SAT, and 23% of black Americans age 25-29 have college degrees, while for non-Hispanic whites those numbers are 53% and 42% (Asians: 71% and 63%). Whites are more than three times as likely as blacks to score over 1100, but less than twice as likely to have a bachelor's degree.
To be clear, this does not mean that the SAT is biased against black students. Black students do not get better grades in college than score-matched white students. Nevertheless, they do attend and finish college at higher rates than score-matched white students.
I don't think we can attribute this to affirmative action, because most colleges have non-competitive admissions. Nobody of any race fails to get into any college at all because of affirmative action or the lack thereof. It only affects who gets into selective universities. I suspect that a number of different factors contribute. Black students tend to come from wealthier families than score-matched while students. Athletics probably plays a role as well. Possibly black students are on average more conscientious or value education more than score-matched white students, since they have to study harder to achieve the same scores due to the gap in g.
Anyway, given that black students actually get degrees at higher rates than white and Asian students with similar academic ability, it's hard to argue that higher education is biased against them.
"
You are once again committing the fallacy of assuming that differences in outcomes must be due to racism or other systemic disadvantages, and that simply isn't true, as has been explained to you multiple times.
On “Student Debt, Free College, and William Edward Hickson”
Biaggi is being disingenuous here, of course. If her balance is going up despite consistently making payments, she's probably on an income-driven repayment plan, which means that she will never be required to pay off the full balance. Likely the two loans she paid off in full were private loans ineligible for income-driven repayment.
I never thought I'd say this again after Trump, but Biden might legitimately be the worst President since Nixon.
On “Open Mic for the week of 6/26/2023”
He and Bernie Sanders can go halfsies.
"
Also, housing starts took a dive in mid 2022, so that doesn't suggest good things to come:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
The decline was only in single-family starts, though. Multi-family housing starts kept rising, possibly because of the longer process to get started, or possibly because the barriers to building are so high that it's profitable to build even at high interest rates.
By the way, for the last five years, in the entire United States, there have been about 350k housing units in multi-family buildings completed per year. Prior to that it was even lower, though it was much higher in the 70s and 80s. Yet for years I've been hearing about how we're building tons and tons of luxury apartments and condos that just sit empty.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.