Those kangaroos in snow pics made news here. Not often it snows low down enough that you see that.
(Climate change fake ldo)
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Thanks for posting about this article here. I have a lot of thoughts about this subject and this article in particular, so I’ll post more later. Some teasers though:
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The Atlantic article is pretty openly reactionary. NYT had a more progressive and maybe more insightful look at similar issues here: Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got ‘Greedy.’ - The New York Times
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Statistical measures of income persistence can blur two channels that have different policy consequences. One is that lower-income parents have fewer resources (time and monetary) to make high-value “investments” in their kids, in terms of education, teaching emotional self-regulation, etc. Kids who don’t benefit from these investments can grow up to be less productive at economic tasks and more prone to being on the giving or receiving end of anti-social behavior, which in a meritocratic system can reproduce their parents’ low income. On the other side of the spectrum, the ultra-rich can buy their kids’ ways into opportunity and allow them to access high opportunities that they don’t deserve on merit. That’s anti-meritocratic. In the middle is the most challenging scenario, where the rich can make lavish investments in their kids that have some benefit in terms of productivity/pro-sociality, but pay outsized economic returns.
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The fact that a lot of economic endeavors have more tournament-like reward structures drives a lot of what’s in the third category. Harvard and Yale don’t offer that much better education than a mid-tier public university, but if the 1% difference lets you be the 100th employee at Google rather than Yahoo (or, god forbid, Alta Vista), then the returns are enormous and you should rationally invest a ton chasing that 1% improvement.
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The elephant in the room is what returns society gets from meritocracy. It makes it harder to conform to some basic ideas of social equity, but (as the Atlantic bemoans) it also incentivizes an enormous amount of effort from high-productivity workers. You have an easy answer if you conclude that all that extra effort is socially useless–just go back to the 1300-billable-hour year and old-school banker’s hours. Instead of assigning slots in the cushy elite to WASPs, assign them randomly or based on social-justice principles or what have you. Tax the hell out of anyone who tries to creep out of the high end of the respectable income band. If, however, that extra effort produces social value, there are much more difficult questions to answer.
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That valley could use some strip mining iyam
Isn’t there a right-wing movement in Israel calling exactly for that? Explicit annexation of the West Bank and granting of citizenship to everyone there. And then just maintain the status quo in Gaza forever.
Think law school and med school admissions are now both over 50% women.
https://twitter.com/adamwinkler/status/1163608961003556864?s=19
Giuseppe Conte has resigned as Italy’s prime minister after blasting Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League, as an “opportunist” for triggering a government crisis that could have “serious consequences” for Italy.
Conte said he would formally resign his mandate to the president, Sergio Mattarella, after the close of the debate in the Senate on Tuesday.
The outgoing prime minister said that Salvini, deputy prime minister and interior minister, had betrayed Italian citizens after pulling the plug on the party’s tempestuous alliance with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) earlier this month.
Well g’bye
lol at giving Palestinians full citizenship, they won’t do that
full annexation of the West Bank is now supported by a majority of Israelis, I believe
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Gonna be pretty tough to sell the whole who us do the apartheid HOW DARE YOU SIR bit if they don’t let everyone who lives in the West Bank vote. Which, sure, sounds exactly like something Netanyahu would try to pull.
James Woods says he’s leaving Twitter ‘until free speech is allowed’ on the platform following suspension
So brave.
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Never forget we got the modern preview of James Woods in the movie Ghosts of Mississippi. He kept telling everyone he wasn’t that guy on the set.
He was.
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I feel like James Woods is one of those actors who can only play James Woods. And the James Woods character is an incredibly unlikable asshole. Maybe he’s not acting so much as reading lines as James Woods?
Seth McFarland is a yuge liberal, I’ve never understood why he uses that guy so much. He’s awful in every way
dont really know where to put this, but some of my buddies who practice in texas are talking about this a bunch recently and today.
Texas mistakenly may have decriminalized marijuana. in HB 1325 they attempted to legalize Hemp production and sale, however to attempt to differentiate between hemp and marijuana they put a limit on the THC content(.3%). Where this goes wrong is standard labs cant differentiate the percent of THC so the labs just say its marijuana and the HB 1325 legalizes all parts of the marijuana plant that contains less than .3percent so without further testing the state is finding it can’t prosecute marijuana charges. to update the labs to test percentage of THC would require tens of millions in funding that doesnt exist, so marijuana cases are being dismissed throughout the state.
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Obviously finds him hilarious. Seth McFarland at least pretends to be a yuge liberal. Then I watch the content he makes and find myself sincerely curious what he is.
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