Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?
10 years ago if you'd told me articles like this were coming I'd have laughed. How did misconstruing the truth to further the "white people bad" notion become not just acceptable but popular? And it doesn't even stop there - the article implies that more diversity (i.e less white people) is an ontological good. How does this stuff even get published?
> Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?
Is it really? This is definitely not the point of the article, which talk about the bias that people grow more conservative when that is at least partially explained by a survivor bias.
You decide to read this as "white people bad", when the article simply highlights some democratic bias that isn't talked about that often, and I think your reaction says more about your own obsidional way of thinking than the author's.
> And it doesn't even stop there - the article implies that more diversity (i.e less white people) is an ontological good. How does this stuff even get published?
Can you please for the love of god point to me where in this article it's said that more diversity is an ontological good? Are we reading a different article altogether?
> Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?
I don't really see this framing. I see an examination of "are older voters more conservative" "is that a change or is it other factors" that then briefly veers into predominant political leanings by race (in a sloppy, only-looking-at-two-races way), but not a lot of harsh judgemental terms there. More descriptive.
If indeed "some races have less political influence because they die earlier because they're poor" is true, though, and then you factor in "why are they poor" for some of those races and find some nasty answers... why wouldn't that be bad?
There's also a gender lifespan gap that's even bigger than the black-white racial lifespan gap. E.g. black women live longer than white men on average.
Consequently, more than half of elderly voters are women.
Probably, if you make the comparison the authors make, you get the numbers they got. If you compare five different groups instead of the two groups they used, then what a shock, the order of the five doesn’t match the order of the original 2.
Why would the commenter have made the comparison they do, if they wanted to consider the matter in good faith?
I think we agree here and I misunderstood your original comment. I think the comment listing life expcetancies for various ethnic groups is disingenuous.
Except in this case adding the other races as additional data points changes how you view the black-white comparison. For example, native Americans live almost as long as whites, but are as poor as blacks. And Hispanics are closer to blacks than whites in income, but live much longer than whites.
I don't fully understand why this happens, but it's pretty common to see people say "nonwhite" when they clearly mean "black". The author goes on to quote statistics for black people age 18-64, so that has to be what he had in mind.
> I don't fully understand why this happens, but it's pretty common to see people say "nonwhite" when they clearly mean "black".
Americans’ conception of race really only has white and black. They don’t know much about other races, so they project their mental conceptions about black people onto other races.
This is obvious when you see “people of color” applied in ways that really only make sense if you’re talking about black people. But also consider affirmative action. Hispanics as a group have similar economic status to blacks as a group, because many are recent migrants from poor countries. But while blacks have much lower economic mobility than whites in the same income level, Hispanics have similar economic mobility to similarly situated whites. So the logic for preferring a black person over a white person with similar economic level doesn’t apply to Hispanics. But people never think about that, because they conceptualize Hispanics as a “kind of black person.”
1. more diversity doesn't equal "less white people." It means less white people proportionally, of course. But if your view is really "all people are the same" than it doesn't even matter whether there or more or less white people. Reading between the lines you seem to be suggesting that you, at least, think "more white people" is good. Just come out and say it, if that is your belief. No need to beat around the bush.
2. You don't have to be a genius to get the idea here: even if you imagine that white people are 100% not racist, wealthier white people may simply not have similar political priorities to poorer black people (your parent comment is also disingenuous to indicate asians and hispanics have longer lifespans, since this article is primarily about poorer black people). If it is the case that poorer black people die earlier then it stands to reason that their political interests are less served. No one has to be racist or "bad" for this to be the case. And, in a society which purports to want equal representation for all people, a systematic difference in literal years of life is a reasonable barrier to wish to overcome insofar as it affects voting.
3. this "stuff" gets published because differences (in for example, health outcomes) between black and white americans are profound and are directly correlated with segregation and political disenfranchisement. You might be some kind of weirdo who somehow believes society is 100% equal and everything black americans suffer is "their fault" but that view is, at the very least insufficiently universal that its pure and disingenuous rhetoric to assert it as if it is obvious and true. There is a shit-ton of research on this in public health: https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/report/k...
As to the fact (indicated by the parent comment) that one's ethnic identity affects different ethnicities differently, well "no shit Sherlock." It is asinine to collapse the discussion about how race operates in our society to "white people" and "non-white people" and this article does not do that and does not even gesture in that direction.
Regards to the last paragraph, did you miss the part where the quote parent opens with is directly from the article, and explicitly makes that distinction? If your going to write an essay for everyone to read, at least try not to end it with evidence you didn't process the original post...
Sorry, this isn't "critical race theory." Like how is making observations about the demographics associated with old age and voting "critical race theory?"
> this isn't "critical race theory." Like how is making observations about the demographics associated with old age and voting "critical race theory?
You're correct, it's not. But there's a trend of shoehorning race into everything, and I think that's what the comment to which you're responding refers. The underlying study never mentioned race. By proxying SES with race, the article recapitulates the racial determinism that is, if not at the core, then a necessary consequence of CRT.
The article you’re replying to is that 70% of household infections started with a child. That’s selective application of externalities, that’s a causal statement. So, you could without a huge stretch of conditional probability say that ~70% of fat people dying in a household were due to their kids infecting them, assuming the paper is right. I am not blaming kids for anything, or fat people. I’m saying the focus on preventing kids from being infected had important knock on implications - which is a restatement of the paper linked itself, with the extension that all mitigants were helpful in saving household lives.
They were except for their nominee running against FDR in 1940. His interventionist stance (and otherwise complete lack of political experience) made FDRs victory all but assured.
I’m not sure how you have a base so aligned on a topic that gives them an excellent chance on defeating the incumbent nominate a political nobody who holds a dissenting opinion. The same nobody who went on to serve in FDRs administration.
Weren't they in the process of committing some as these trials were ongoing? I don't think there's a reliable number, but certainly 6 figure and likely 7 figure death tolls for ethnic Germans due to postwar resettlements etc.
With regards to #2, Wendell Willkie winning the republican nomination over the isolationist candidates was extremely fortuitous for FDR and Churchill. There was no real desire from the US population to get involved in another European war, but Willkie (lifelong democrat with no previous political experience) securing the republican slot (and basically guaranteeing FDR's win with no policy adjustments) made that issue a moot point since his stance on the war was similar to FDRs. Willkie eventually ended up with a position in FDR's administration.
The only truths taught in US schools are those beneficial to the empire - it's best viewed as propaganda.
School shootings are still insanely rare. When you account for high crime areas the likelihood of an average kid experiencing a school shooting is so low it should make you question anyone trying to make it seem otherwise.
This may be akin to the craze of fear of terrorism that swept the general public after September 11th. I found that craze to be entirely irrational, but it would hardly be appropriate for the same individuals to see their kids as being particularly irrational, if their fear of being shot is real.
As far as I can tell, fear of being shot is not the primary factor why students don't want to go to school. The article, for example, doesn't mention global warming / climate change (our planet burning) or AI (possible humanity ending). How incentivized would you be to spend your youth working hard for a future that might not exist?
But the shooter drills are incredibly common. Just because it doesn't happen often doesn't mean children aren't often being forced to think about it happening.
Not sufficiently rare enough to avoid transforming education in a myriad of ways, from clear backpacks to endless drills to metal detectors at the door to armed people in body armor walking around.
And the idea of having to account for "high crime areas" as if it is a normal thing for a subset of the population to be dealing with guns on a regular basis in schools is a very American attitude.
While outright shootings might be rare, bullying by fellow students and teachers is common. Shootings might just be the straw that breaks the camels back.
What does this mean? Kids in high crime areas are still kids, you still have to count them when they get shot.
The harm of a school shooting is certainly not contained to the specific individuals who got shot either, which if one of these has happened near you you know. Everyone at that school and to some extent the entire city is affected socially and psychologically. They are a particularly powerful terrorism for this reason.
"School shooting" is a polysemous phrase. There's the very literal version--a shooting that happens at a school--but also a more specific one that refers to a much rarer situation--a lone kid consciously plans to go in and shoot a lot of people en masse, as a kind of suicide that is intended to leave a permanent presence on a community that the kid viewed as having wronged them in some way. The former is much more relevant for policy making, but in public discourse the latter plays the disproportionate, defining role. OP is frustrated by that vacillation. School shooter drills are almost irrelevant for the modal literal school shooting, but they inflict psychological damage on students and even create the archetype of the statistically rarer type in the public imagination.
The descent from "The vaccine is 99% effective and prevents transmission" to where we're at now was pretty eye opening. It sounded too good to be true and was.
Nobody has been held accountable for coercing (and worse) the US population based on bad data. I don't see any reason to trust the government going forward.
> No one who understood the vaccine said that. But deniers still claim they did.
This is historical revisionism.
The Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines were approved for a single indication, and a single indication only. Prevention of symptomatic Covid.
From the Pfizer vaccine package insert:
> COMIRNATY is a vaccine indicated for active immunization to prevent
coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory
syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 12 years of age and
older. (1)
They were never approved for anything else because the trials were never designed to test for anything else.
In a functioning science, when reality (almost everyone got symptomatic Covid, regardless of vaccination status) conflicts with predictions (~95% efficacy in prenting symptomatic Covid), there would be some attempt to understand why the trials failed so miserably.
The obligatory Feyman quote comes to mind:
> For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled
The trials showed that 95% efficacy over the initial trial period -- about 3 months, as I recall. That wasn't a made-up number.
As time went on, it became apparent that while efficacy against symptomatic COVID faded quickly, efficacy against severe COVID (I believe defined by needing hospitalization) and also against all-cause mortality remained strong. You would have had them pull a life-saving vaccine from the market on a bureaucratic technicality? That's insane.
> You would have had them pull a life-saving vaccine from the market on a bureaucratic technicality? That's insane.
It is not a technicality.
There are no drugs, procedures, medical devices, or vaccines without adverse effects. It is always and everywhere a tradeoff between benefits and harms. If you intentionaly terminate a trial (breaking blindness is effectively terminating it), you cannot trade off the harms and benefits because you have no idea if there are harms, or whether the benefits last.
There were drugs, devices, procedures, and even vaccines, whose massive harms were only apparent years after they were approved.
> There were drugs, devices, procedures, and even vaccines, whose massive harms were only apparent years after they were approved.
However, in this case "massive harms" were incurred when people WEREN'T vaccinated. We do know, from data collected around the world, that the vaccine lowered all-cause mortality. We know that vaccine hesitancy led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US alone.
You're right about one thing -- it's a tradeoff. And in this case the benefits were huge, and if there has been some great harm, I've yet to hear of it.
> However, in this case "massive harms" were incurred when people WEREN'T vaccinated
Even if it was true, do you suggest dismantling the current FDA efficacy and safety testing because it worked in one case? Is this a serious approach to risk management?
> We do know, from data collected around the world, that the vaccine lowered all-cause mortality. We know that vaccine hesitancy led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US alone.
The sad thing is that we know no such thing. Early termination of the trial made it impossible to know the real risks.
For example, it currently appears that myocarditis is diagnosed in one in 5,000 to 10,000 otherwise healthy young males (16-19 year olds)[1].
The vaccine has zero benefit in this population group because Covid is so mild in this group. In Israel, for example, exactly zero otherwise healthy 16-19 year olds died or were in any serious condition due to Covid.
In older people, and other risk groups (cancer, diabetes, obesity), the calculus is obviously different. But there was no reason to vaccinate otherwise healthy kids using a vaccine that was not tested properly.
From my understanding, the RCTs were never big enough to gauge the risks you're talking about in a statistically valid way. As your data suggests, even if the relative risk of myocarditis from the vaccine is very high, the absolute risk is quite small. Meaning that carrying on the RCTs for years would almost certainly have told us nothing of value.
> From my understanding, the RCTs were never big enough to gauge the risks you're talking about in a statistically valid way.
You can't know because the trials were cut short.
The RCTs were too small to detect that specific risk. However, the only reason it was discovered outside of the clinical trial was because the base rate of myocarditis for 16-19 year olds is so vanishingly low.
If the base rate was even slightly higher, much larger effects could not have been easily detected. Would you be able to detect an increase, say, of the diabetes rate in 1 in 100 after the vaccine has been released? what about 1 in 500?
It should be obvious that if your trials cannot detect adverse events that occur in 1 in 10,000, you should not vaccinate populations in which there is a significant benefit in less than 1 in 10,000.
> As your data suggests, even if the relative risk of myocarditis from the vaccine is very high, the absolute risk is quite small.
And sadly, a few thousand kids had their heart damaged (hopefully minimally) for no possible benefit whatsoever.
> Meaning that carrying on the RCTs for years would almost certainly have told us nothing of value.
BTW, hindsight is not a valid way to design vaccine safety studies.
It actually was a made up number because they didn't measure correctly. They classified people as unvaccinated even for weeks after they took the shots. This is guaranteed to inflate effectiveness. Norman Fenton has made this point repeatedly and even written simulations to demonstrate it. With the delay period they used you get to 95% effectiveness for anything, including water.
I recall government sources and pharma claiming >90% efficacy for the mRNA shots, which alone seemed absurd for a virus we knew was mutating at a rapid rate.
They also claimed you could not contract or transmit the virus if you were "vaccinated". Then redefined vaccination to fit their narrative. It took dystopian levels of misinformation for me to just lose all faith in the "experts". However honest their intentions may have been, to make claims you know aren't true is malicious at best.
> We're not sure, at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected. We know for sure it's very, very good, 94 percent, 95 percent in protecting you against clinically recognizable disease, and almost a 100 percent in protecting you for severe disease.
I'm looking at this paper[2] released in the Lancet in Feb 2022 and very, very few of the efficacy figures against severe disease show 100% effectiveness, nor anything like it in the vast majority of instances. I could be reading that big table wrong though, but the findings section has this:
> For severe COVID-19 disease, vaccine efficacy or effectiveness decreased by 10·0 percentage points (95% CI 6·1–15·4) in people of all ages and 9·5 percentage points (5·7–14·6) in older people. Most (81%) vaccine efficacy or effectiveness estimates against severe disease remained greater than 70% over time.
so I don't think I have, but happy to be corrected. The figures are certainly higher against alpha, but not 100%, that's quite an overstatement, in my view.
> feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business
The efficiency gains and - more importantly - resiliency gained by having a single leader with a strong vision are enormous and the reason a single ruler is so prominent among humans. Democracy is weak to balkanization and demagoguery.
That being said the real issue here is corrupt elites - which no system can fix. The blast radius from a bad ruler is much worse than bad actors amongst a democratic system, but the potential gains from a single ruler are much higher.
and Single leadership is weak to overfitting to a broken model. example: Look how china efficiently built empty cities.
Thousands of CEOs each at the helm of a small business is a good model though because though its centralized command and control at the business level, it's also distributed and experimental in aggregate.
I think there's a degree of survivorship bias here. Single-leader feudal power structures are common in business because they're the standard model for businesses here, so you have plenty of examples of them being wildly successful. But there are also lots of examples of failed feudally-structured businesses!
Personally I can think of multiple examples of successful co-ops in one of the two industries I work in (games), in part because there is less of a stigma against less-traditional business structures there. Co-ops have successfully built and released wildly successful projects in a repeatable way. I think we simply don't have enough data to decide at scale whether co-ops are inferior to the way we run corporations in the West.
Perhaps it has been easier historically to converge to the single ruler model due to the available knowledge and resources. Is there any research concluding that one ruler systems offer higher gains in modern societies?
Did the study control for race then if genetics are a cause? ie other studies have shown those of ashkenazi descent are more likely to be schizophrenic.
I hope this isn’t taken the wrong way - id very much like to know if my genetic ancestry made me more or less susceptible to things like schizophrenia.
It could be environmental imprinting on genetics from previous generations. Of the people that I am familiar with that developed schizophrenia, there is often something traumatic in their family's past, and it is not always the previous generation (but may be from 2 or 3 generations previous).
American banks don't rip us off to that degree. They aren't nationalized.
The biggest rip-off in American banking is that narrow banking is effectively illegal (not the banks' fault), but HYSAs are starting to get around that.
A risk in any market economy, but I feel pretty good about my choices and the options in my area where both First Republic and SVB were have not significantly diminished.
It's not. A narrow bank is one that effectively passes on the federal funds rate as interest to a demand checking account. T-bills are a completely different animal.
There's one critical difference, which is that only chartered banks within the Federal Reserve system can take advantage of the federal funds rate, whereas anyone (including individuals) can buy T-bills.
The Fed, for various reasons, implicitly disallow this type of narrow bank. Several people have tried but the Fed always denied their application to join the system.
An important qualifier! I get the impression that probably 95% of consumer deposits in the US either earn zero interest or some comically low rate like 0.00121% that all of the big banks offer on their savings, Interest Checking, and even "money market" accounts. And they also exploit people with monthly fees that can only be waived with minimum balances or by jumping through hoops like debit card usage. And "using other ATM" fees from 2 banks at once usually.
But apparently it could be worse with transaction fees and negative interest!
I feel like the few in the US who are savvy about personal finance have found the banks/CUs (i won't list them to avoid sounding promotional) that don't do any of the above. It doesn't say in the article where they are seeing these outflows actually go. I wonder if Europe also has good banking options that not everyone is aware of.
Only the absolute worst bank accounts in the US have monthly fees. And effectively no credit unions do. I certainly wouldn't sign up for an account that charges me anything, but I've never had to bail on making an account because they would have.
> Only the absolute worst bank accounts in the US have monthly fees
Sure, and those worst banks have massive market share[1]. I'm sure maybe 50-60% of the people with these accounts actually manage to correctly avoid the fees by minimum balances or direct deposits or the "use your debit card 10 times a month" policies. But like, Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, Citibank... combined, their market share is massive. Chase, BofA and Citi are $12, Wells is $10. All require you to do certain things each month to waive the fee -- which seems easy to me with a steady job and savings, but a lot of people don't have that.
Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?
10 years ago if you'd told me articles like this were coming I'd have laughed. How did misconstruing the truth to further the "white people bad" notion become not just acceptable but popular? And it doesn't even stop there - the article implies that more diversity (i.e less white people) is an ontological good. How does this stuff even get published?