If DEI is falling apart, now’s a great time to start proposing alternatives.
The alternative is we look at the root problems, which come down to "culture and not racism", and (somehow) get the people with the dysfunctional cultures to change their actions.
This is seriously hard and will draw accusations of victim blaming and racism.
Witness how Asians or even Foreign Blacks are hugely successful in the US. Change the culture and everything else is small beer. If we feel the need to virtue signal we can reform the police or remove all lead from pipes, but we shouldn't expect much from that.
Much more likely we'll find a DEI version 2 to avoid this conversation. DEI's flaws included needing to redefine "truth" and "evidence" in order to make their case. Normally that's what religion needs to do.
We needed to go all in on stopping microaggressions, which we're not sure have a measurable affect, because we don't want to talk about single parent families which are strongly associated with massive negative effects.
The purpose of DEI was to avoid painful conversations and allow virtue signaling. We'll find other ways to avoid those conversations.
Killed on the front lines by troops who had no idea that's who they were shooting at.
That implies Hamas' reserves are insanely low.
Also it's being suggested that those 6 hostages killed by Hamas a week or two ago were his personally and he ordered them killed because he was running away and couldn't take them with him.
Rate increases are capped under state law; the cap for a primary home is 14 percent...
The skyrocketing cost of home insurance in Florida, driven by excessive litigation, widespread fraud and the increased risk of natural disasters hitting the state, has caused an ongoing crisis of the sector in the Sunshine State which has hit homeowners hard....
According to google: A 2021 study found that among homeowner households with a mortgage, only 4.1% were uninsured. For those who own their home free of debt, 26% were uninsured.
I totally lack sympathy for someone who lacks insurance because they expect God will protect them or something. The gov shouldn't be making them whole.
There is a massive difference between "insurance is not cheap" and "insurance doesn't work".
Insurance spreads risk, not cost.
If there is a one-in-a-million-per-year disease that costs ten million to cure, then the cost of that insurance should be $10 per year per person (plus the cost of run the pool which I'll round to zero).
If you want to cover someone who already has that disease, then the cost for him to get insurance should be ten million dollars because the odds of him getting it are 100%.
If I own a million dollar house and the odds of it being destroyed in a flood in any year are one in ten, then it should cost me about $100k a year to insure it.
One way we get into "insurance doesn't work" is "the expected disaster is so big that the insurance company will go bankrupt and not pay".
Because Hurricanes could reasonably flood an entire area, the risk from that Hurricane needs to be spread around the entire country. That either means national ins companies or re-insurance or both.
The supplied link suggests that insurance is actually not working. That's a very different animal than "insurance is too expensive to use".
"Not working" might mean the gov is forcing the insurance companies to have rates lower than risk so they can't/don't honor claims. It might mean other things. The whole "Florida insurance companies are small and local" is the opposite of what I'd expect here.
This strat is highly workable against a small colony where the colonizers exist only because of support from the fatherland and they have the ability to go back to their native country.
The massive flaw is the Jews are native to Israel and have nowhere to go.
The Palestinians reject that fact and are insisting that Israel is a colony of [some empire]. Which empire changes from decade to decade.
In a functioning market, insurance is unaffected by global warming. Various costs will go up but they'll all be passed on to their customers.
RE: Fraud
Your link is interesting.
13 insurance companies have folded and Florida is involved in 76% of insurance lawsuits with some law firms filing hundreds per day. The top 15 Florida insurers make up 6% of the nation’s premiums but 52% of the nation’s complaints.
Your link says about 20% of premiums go to these lawsuits. There is a disconnect between that claim and the idea that there's no link between lawsuit payments and companies going under nor rising premiums.
Someone is behaving badly. If the tail end of your article is correct and Florida's insurance companies are tiny and over exposed to Florida, then somehow Florida (or rather Florida's ins companies) has been shielded from national companies/competition.
The only way for that to happen would for the State of Florida to pass laws.
That would take us back to "multiple gov created market failures" but we can add that as a fourth potential gov mismanagement of the market.
If memory serves, one of the underlying issues is that insurance fraud in Florida is an industry to the point where many insurance companies exited the market.
That means we have multiple gov created market failures. Gov encouragement to live in flood zones, gov pressure (and sometimes action) for the ins industry to have rates below it's risk, and gov failure to deal with ins fraud.
She's trying to run on Obama's "hope and change" without detailing what she'd change since she's the incumbent. That translates into "I'm a woman and it's our turn".
None of which works well in an interview.
Unless she's ready to define more of her message she should avoid interviews.
We had about 5 percent of the country backing Trump and not being willing to tell poll workers that. So now we've adjusted for that... but we're not really sure if that 5% still exists or not.
We could see a crushing Harris victory or a Harris squeaker or a Trump squeaker.
That's a really interesting link and it's not behind a paywall.
Things to take away:
1) Hamas has agency, vision, and determination. All the good behavior we've seen in recent years has been a deliberate ploy to get Israel to lower it's guard in prep for 10-7.
2) Hamas is serious about its goal being the destruction of Israel and the killing of all Jews. Killing every civilian they could find was the end goal, over running the military bases was just done to make that easier.
3) Although they are allied with Iran, they're not puppets. Hamas put a lot of working and planning into this, Iran really didn't.
For urban, we could look to history and increase policing; break the log jam that prevents housing creation and then actually destroy some mass slums if we still have them.
For the rural, hmm... we want them to move to a city. I'd suggest gov jobs programs doing that but we already have 18 gov jobs programs and we've found the gov is terrible at this. Probably breaking the urban housing log jam would still be very helpful.
For everyone, we've tried to encourage marriage. That implies strongly linking benefits to marriage as opposed to lack-of-marriage.
I asked google this and their robot gave me a list of answers. Better policing. Better sanitation. More jobs.
"Clearance" i.e. going in and destroying all the existing housing to get rid of concentrated poverty. Of course this only works if we're willing to build new housing which mostly we're not at the moment.
We're not "ignoring the problem". We spend trillions of dollars a year on fighting poverty. By the standards of centuries past they're successful. We also invest huge amounts of money in education.
Where we have failed is in creating equality. When we say "we want everyone to have an equal shot at success" we're saying "we want gov programs to fully compensate for bad parenting".
That's unrealistic. The children of competent involved parents do better than the children of people who make bad choices.
We can, and should, and do, encourage people to leave various cultures (thus "moving" from my previous post) but the people who remain are self selected for making bad choices.
For those 0% schools... it's unclear what we should do. I'd never put my kid in that situation, ergo every kid in those schools is selected for having parents who did put their kid there. We might be looking at a school where all of the parents make terrible choices.
School choice would help some kids flee and we're in "lifeboat ethics" where everyone who gets out is a success. After that I'm not sure what's needed. School breakfast? We already do free school lunches.
It's not about race, it's about culture. When we rolled out the Great Society, we enabled (encouraged) single parent households. The benefits we handed out were aimed at the poor. At the time, Blacks were poorer because of racism and segregation.
The moral hazards we created caused more problems for them than for whites as a percentage of the population. However whites have always accounted for more in terms of raw numbers.
Blacks are more visible because it's mostly an urban thing for them while for whites it's more rural. The media is largely urban and ignores all things rural so poor rural whites are invisible.
This implies white dysfunction will be harder to deal with than black because many solutions/services are close to impossible in a spread out rural environment. Ergo part of the "solution" for them typically is convincing them to move to a more urban place where there are more jobs, opportunity, services, public transportation, etc.
If you want to build support for your proposals then I suggest rolling them out at a small scale and see how much they cost in the real world if there is a way to make them cheaper.
Ideally you'll be proven right that they're cheaper than paying for jails and I'll be wrong that we need 5 adults per child to make some of these approaches work.
I'd be surprised if Gates hasn't attempted it. Not hearing about social experiments suggests they're either scary expensive or simply don't work.
Chip: A combination of aggressive and well funded support services.
There are serious people who claim these services are a big part of how we got here.
...Johnson's Great Society policies led to the dismantling of the Black nuclear family.[68][69] The result of strikingly higher rates of single motherhood has led to lower outcomes in Black children across the board.[70][71]
Yours was a high level comment. Turning that into "this is exactly what we do" low level ideas without also creating a ton of moral hazard will be a challenge.
"Solidarity" means "we all stand together unified", however you are asking me to help fix dysfunctional behavior and families.
Getting other people to make good choices is amazingly hard. Sparing them from the consequences of bad choices quickly and easily becomes moral hazard.
When I ran into that sort of thing from my (ex)wife, I couldn't get her to make better choices so the best I could do was remove myself from the situation and divorce her.
My ex is burning through her life savings to protect her worthless hoarded furniture. She's talking about how little money she has. She has five properties to store her collection of junk.
The solution isn't I pay for her to maintain 5 properties to protect her junk, it's she gets rid of 4 of her properties, her junk collection, and uses her master's degree to get a real job. She needs to change her behavior. I do not need to change mine, nor should I be funding her mistakes.
The problem with "solidarity" is there often is someone at fault, and they won't change or accept responsibility for their actions.
Add to that list the problem that many of these solutions might be worse than the problem and they're also normally not needed.
It's the whole "my zip code has a zero percent murder rate, why do we need gun control" problem.
These are massively ugly ideas and mostly they're not needed in my zip code. Ergo it's less risky for me if the gov simply doesn't have these tools.
Having said all that, I'm taking an engineering approach to cultural problems... so maybe someone else has better ideas on how to reform (destroy) a dysfunctional culture.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/14/2024”
Moving from one "safe" house to another? Supervising troops? Out for a smoke?
"
If DEI is falling apart, now’s a great time to start proposing alternatives.
The alternative is we look at the root problems, which come down to "culture and not racism", and (somehow) get the people with the dysfunctional cultures to change their actions.
This is seriously hard and will draw accusations of victim blaming and racism.
Witness how Asians or even Foreign Blacks are hugely successful in the US. Change the culture and everything else is small beer. If we feel the need to virtue signal we can reform the police or remove all lead from pipes, but we shouldn't expect much from that.
Much more likely we'll find a DEI version 2 to avoid this conversation. DEI's flaws included needing to redefine "truth" and "evidence" in order to make their case. Normally that's what religion needs to do.
We needed to go all in on stopping microaggressions, which we're not sure have a measurable affect, because we don't want to talk about single parent families which are strongly associated with massive negative effects.
The purpose of DEI was to avoid painful conversations and allow virtue signaling. We'll find other ways to avoid those conversations.
"
Killed on the front lines by troops who had no idea that's who they were shooting at.
That implies Hamas' reserves are insanely low.
Also it's being suggested that those 6 hostages killed by Hamas a week or two ago were his personally and he ordered them killed because he was running away and couldn't take them with him.
"
Has she decided if she's running as an insider or an outsider yet?
"
Rate increases are capped under state law; the cap for a primary home is 14 percent...
The skyrocketing cost of home insurance in Florida, driven by excessive litigation, widespread fraud and the increased risk of natural disasters hitting the state, has caused an ongoing crisis of the sector in the Sunshine State which has hit homeowners hard....
https://www.newsweek.com/florida-insurance-crisis-could-get-even-worse-1918060
"
Lots of options, not the least is "bad at math".
According to google: A 2021 study found that among homeowner households with a mortgage, only 4.1% were uninsured. For those who own their home free of debt, 26% were uninsured.
I totally lack sympathy for someone who lacks insurance because they expect God will protect them or something. The gov shouldn't be making them whole.
"
There is a massive difference between "insurance is not cheap" and "insurance doesn't work".
Insurance spreads risk, not cost.
If there is a one-in-a-million-per-year disease that costs ten million to cure, then the cost of that insurance should be $10 per year per person (plus the cost of run the pool which I'll round to zero).
If you want to cover someone who already has that disease, then the cost for him to get insurance should be ten million dollars because the odds of him getting it are 100%.
If I own a million dollar house and the odds of it being destroyed in a flood in any year are one in ten, then it should cost me about $100k a year to insure it.
One way we get into "insurance doesn't work" is "the expected disaster is so big that the insurance company will go bankrupt and not pay".
Because Hurricanes could reasonably flood an entire area, the risk from that Hurricane needs to be spread around the entire country. That either means national ins companies or re-insurance or both.
The supplied link suggests that insurance is actually not working. That's a very different animal than "insurance is too expensive to use".
"Not working" might mean the gov is forcing the insurance companies to have rates lower than risk so they can't/don't honor claims. It might mean other things. The whole "Florida insurance companies are small and local" is the opposite of what I'd expect here.
"
This strat is highly workable against a small colony where the colonizers exist only because of support from the fatherland and they have the ability to go back to their native country.
The massive flaw is the Jews are native to Israel and have nowhere to go.
The Palestinians reject that fact and are insisting that Israel is a colony of [some empire]. Which empire changes from decade to decade.
"
In a functioning market, insurance is unaffected by global warming. Various costs will go up but they'll all be passed on to their customers.
RE: Fraud
Your link is interesting.
13 insurance companies have folded and Florida is involved in 76% of insurance lawsuits with some law firms filing hundreds per day. The top 15 Florida insurers make up 6% of the nation’s premiums but 52% of the nation’s complaints.
Your link says about 20% of premiums go to these lawsuits. There is a disconnect between that claim and the idea that there's no link between lawsuit payments and companies going under nor rising premiums.
Someone is behaving badly. If the tail end of your article is correct and Florida's insurance companies are tiny and over exposed to Florida, then somehow Florida (or rather Florida's ins companies) has been shielded from national companies/competition.
The only way for that to happen would for the State of Florida to pass laws.
That would take us back to "multiple gov created market failures" but we can add that as a fourth potential gov mismanagement of the market.
"
This approach did work in all of the surrounding countries. That doesn't change or disagree with what you said, but it should frame things.
"
If memory serves, one of the underlying issues is that insurance fraud in Florida is an industry to the point where many insurance companies exited the market.
That means we have multiple gov created market failures. Gov encouragement to live in flood zones, gov pressure (and sometimes action) for the ins industry to have rates below it's risk, and gov failure to deal with ins fraud.
"
She's trying to run on Obama's "hope and change" without detailing what she'd change since she's the incumbent. That translates into "I'm a woman and it's our turn".
None of which works well in an interview.
Unless she's ready to define more of her message she should avoid interviews.
On “Lone Star Rising”
We had about 5 percent of the country backing Trump and not being willing to tell poll workers that. So now we've adjusted for that... but we're not really sure if that 5% still exists or not.
We could see a crushing Harris victory or a Harris squeaker or a Trump squeaker.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/14/2024”
Pakistan would attack India (or itself) long before it attacks Israel.
"
That's a really interesting link and it's not behind a paywall.
Things to take away:
1) Hamas has agency, vision, and determination. All the good behavior we've seen in recent years has been a deliberate ploy to get Israel to lower it's guard in prep for 10-7.
2) Hamas is serious about its goal being the destruction of Israel and the killing of all Jews. Killing every civilian they could find was the end goal, over running the military bases was just done to make that easier.
3) Although they are allied with Iran, they're not puppets. Hamas put a lot of working and planning into this, Iran really didn't.
On “From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform”
For urban, we could look to history and increase policing; break the log jam that prevents housing creation and then actually destroy some mass slums if we still have them.
For the rural, hmm... we want them to move to a city. I'd suggest gov jobs programs doing that but we already have 18 gov jobs programs and we've found the gov is terrible at this. Probably breaking the urban housing log jam would still be very helpful.
For everyone, we've tried to encourage marriage. That implies strongly linking benefits to marriage as opposed to lack-of-marriage.
"
I asked google this and their robot gave me a list of answers. Better policing. Better sanitation. More jobs.
"Clearance" i.e. going in and destroying all the existing housing to get rid of concentrated poverty. Of course this only works if we're willing to build new housing which mostly we're not at the moment.
"
We're not "ignoring the problem". We spend trillions of dollars a year on fighting poverty. By the standards of centuries past they're successful. We also invest huge amounts of money in education.
Where we have failed is in creating equality. When we say "we want everyone to have an equal shot at success" we're saying "we want gov programs to fully compensate for bad parenting".
That's unrealistic. The children of competent involved parents do better than the children of people who make bad choices.
We can, and should, and do, encourage people to leave various cultures (thus "moving" from my previous post) but the people who remain are self selected for making bad choices.
For those 0% schools... it's unclear what we should do. I'd never put my kid in that situation, ergo every kid in those schools is selected for having parents who did put their kid there. We might be looking at a school where all of the parents make terrible choices.
School choice would help some kids flee and we're in "lifeboat ethics" where everyone who gets out is a success. After that I'm not sure what's needed. School breakfast? We already do free school lunches.
"
It's not about race, it's about culture. When we rolled out the Great Society, we enabled (encouraged) single parent households. The benefits we handed out were aimed at the poor. At the time, Blacks were poorer because of racism and segregation.
The moral hazards we created caused more problems for them than for whites as a percentage of the population. However whites have always accounted for more in terms of raw numbers.
Blacks are more visible because it's mostly an urban thing for them while for whites it's more rural. The media is largely urban and ignores all things rural so poor rural whites are invisible.
This implies white dysfunction will be harder to deal with than black because many solutions/services are close to impossible in a spread out rural environment. Ergo part of the "solution" for them typically is convincing them to move to a more urban place where there are more jobs, opportunity, services, public transportation, etc.
Making bad choices is the gift that keeps giving.
"
If you want to build support for your proposals then I suggest rolling them out at a small scale and see how much they cost in the real world if there is a way to make them cheaper.
Ideally you'll be proven right that they're cheaper than paying for jails and I'll be wrong that we need 5 adults per child to make some of these approaches work.
I'd be surprised if Gates hasn't attempted it. Not hearing about social experiments suggests they're either scary expensive or simply don't work.
"
Chip: A combination of aggressive and well funded support services.
There are serious people who claim these services are a big part of how we got here.
...Johnson's Great Society policies led to the dismantling of the Black nuclear family.[68][69] The result of strikingly higher rates of single motherhood has led to lower outcomes in Black children across the board.[70][71]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society#Legacy
The various relatives I've had who have openly told me they were pregnant but not getting married because of these policies is also suggestive.
This is the definition of "moral hazard".
"
Yours was a high level comment. Turning that into "this is exactly what we do" low level ideas without also creating a ton of moral hazard will be a challenge.
"Solidarity" means "we all stand together unified", however you are asking me to help fix dysfunctional behavior and families.
Getting other people to make good choices is amazingly hard. Sparing them from the consequences of bad choices quickly and easily becomes moral hazard.
When I ran into that sort of thing from my (ex)wife, I couldn't get her to make better choices so the best I could do was remove myself from the situation and divorce her.
My ex is burning through her life savings to protect her worthless hoarded furniture. She's talking about how little money she has. She has five properties to store her collection of junk.
The solution isn't I pay for her to maintain 5 properties to protect her junk, it's she gets rid of 4 of her properties, her junk collection, and uses her master's degree to get a real job. She needs to change her behavior. I do not need to change mine, nor should I be funding her mistakes.
The problem with "solidarity" is there often is someone at fault, and they won't change or accept responsibility for their actions.
"
if we started a drumbeat of that sort of social solidarity, (As opposed to IGMFU) we would have a much easier time tackling the problem.
Maybe.
There's a lot of moral risk from rewarding/encouraging dysfunctional behavior(s).
That's everything from political corruption to paying people to have children outside of marriage.
"
Chip, what is your wish list of educational solutions? I guess that should be "within some reasonable budget".
"
Add to that list the problem that many of these solutions might be worse than the problem and they're also normally not needed.
It's the whole "my zip code has a zero percent murder rate, why do we need gun control" problem.
These are massively ugly ideas and mostly they're not needed in my zip code. Ergo it's less risky for me if the gov simply doesn't have these tools.
Having said all that, I'm taking an engineering approach to cultural problems... so maybe someone else has better ideas on how to reform (destroy) a dysfunctional culture.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.