Viewing profile — blackbagboys

If Tesla refused to cut the power but required the work to be done anyway, it's absolutely their fault.

On the other hand, you're much more likely to be able to carve out a niche for yourself and be niche-famous in a huge and varied country like the United States.

According to the government, every leak of classified information "may" put the goverment's personnel and interests at risk. That doesn't mean it's true, and even if it is true it'…

Good point! Hopefully the Kickstarter crew will incorporate the "incinerate whole families based on probabilistic guesswork" card in the public release.

Doesn't seem particularly true to life. Where are the cards for kidnapping innocent people off the streets, keeping them locked in secret prisons, pulverizing their internal organs…

Nah, this is wrong. Putting a Nazi symbol on your car with the intent to piss people off is a juvenile provocation and in no way requires that the perpetrator actually harbor a sec…

At absolute best, it's tasteless, and certainly grounds for social exclusion, but criminalizing and especially pathologizing mildly anti-social behavior is profoundly immoral, reck…

Ironically, this is exactly the sort of conformist, vindictive, authoritarian mentality that helped the Nazis stay in power.

They were good problem-solvers and Tesla needed a PR win. Let's not mysticize Musk more than has already been done.

Monasteries of the medieval / renaissance time period usually had very large complements of lay staff and tenant farmers, who maintained the estates and produced goods for both int…

True. Any organization in which the incentives for an executive to increase or maintain their own power within the organization trumps the incentives for them to work for the benef…

Tuchman in her heyday was the recipient of an enormous amount of opprobrium from her generation of academic historians (of which the nearly-fossilized Bachrach is a member), mostly…

There's a book I remember reading - I can't remember, but it may have been The Dictator's Handbook - which talked about how this is a common management pattern in authoritarian dic…

This is a useful academic introduction: https://www.amazon.com/Oligarchy-Jeffrey-Winters/dp/05211829...

companies and wealthier people moving in makes everyone in the area more wealthy. This would only be true if everyone owned their own residences and profited from the increase in l…

It's worth keeping in mind that, by and large, this is how the oligarch class thinks. Their top priorities are protecting and justifying their wealth and power. A journalist who ex…

President John Tyler (born 1790, President 1841-1845) has two living grandchildren.

There is no 'battle' here, and all political discussion is inherently ideological, so either the site should ban all political articles or you should specify which ideologies are a…

There are very few people actively trying to prevent lower class people from getting into the upper class, but it's competitive to be in the upper class and there are only so many …

Yes, that's the point. University admissions are a ridiculous sham, the primary purpose of which is to justify the political power and wealth of the elite professional class. But n…

Yes, I take that as strong evidence in favor of demanding that society make higher education free and available for anyone who wants it.

This post is a perfect example of this mechanism in action. It takes as a given that the criteria for university acceptance are fair, objective, attainable - 'meritocratic'. The on…

Yes, this is exactly what the upper class wants to think about itself, and sort of the point of the article.

The underlying point is that these professional-class distinctions are cast in moralistic tones and serve as an ideological justification for denigrating and ignoring the material …

gwern rejects Diamond's hypothesis later down the thread, so I'm interested in hearing about any alternate hypothesizes he may have.