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Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

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Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#51

Post by amanaplanacanal »

mwbajor wrote: post #46
yardie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The libertarians keep saying this. Yet the US continues to sell bonds to international investors who never question if the credit line is overextended. They continue to use the economic model they learned in high school economics class to a more complex economic model that is designed by and for a hegemony. The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, mos…

Could this not change in an instant though? "The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, most stable investment going right now. " Its hubris like this that worries people, not partisanship.

What’s the alternative though? There has to be one for the dollar to fall.

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#52

Post by xethos »

mwbajor wrote: post #44
verall wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to wonder if this comment is made in good faith - Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets? Are they adjustable for different people's shapes and sizes? How long was it before car chairs were adjustable to be driven by women, and how much longer until regulators started considering women-sized crash dummies? Sure, your skin color doesn't mean much to a car, but it does to an automatic fa…

Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like. "Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?" I would argue they a…

> I would argue they always were.

I would posit we can't even get healthcare without bias for people that aren't straight white men. There are subtle differences in body composition between men and women, doubly so for larger (or smaller) body types, but ignoring those differences isn't exactly something from the far-flung past [0].

Otherwise we can quibble over how treating everyone as an average can and has cost lives [1]. People are different, and very small differences can have unexpectedly outsized impacts on usability.

> The most important products don't care about what you look like

The product doesn't care, but this site is awash in stories about how management or engineering should have just talked to the damn floor workers. Worked together, instead of dictating from on-high that the machine in question works well in the lab, and is an elegant, cost-effective solution - that the people actually in the shop know will fail immediately.

DEI (when done right) is not diversity hires. It's accepting others have different ideas that you may not have seen.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28343109/

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#53

Post by miffel »

mwbajor wrote: post #44
verall wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to wonder if this comment is made in good faith - Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets? Are they adjustable for different people's shapes and sizes? How long was it before car chairs were adjustable to be driven by women, and how much longer until regulators started considering women-sized crash dummies? Sure, your skin color doesn't mean much to a car, but it does to an automatic fa…

Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like. "Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?" I would argue they a…

I would insist that you try to open up your worldview slightly and accept that sometimes having a team with more than just white men can be desirable and lead to better outcomes for the end product. Maybe bandaids are not the best example, but consider pulse oximeters[0].

There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for some very well done research on the way that you can codify human biases in processes that should neutral.

I would also personally recommend that you give an earnest try to understanding why so many people argue for diversity. A genuine attempt. Even if you don't fully change your mind on it I think you will find it easier to approach the world with a little more compassion for people who don't look like you.

[0]: https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/commentary-more-health-inequalit...

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#54

Post by LargeTomato »

yardie wrote: post #26

Reading the article and nodding my head along at salient points. Then... > The American ruling class found itself compelled to spin bizarre fantasies of Russian “disinformation” to explain away the results of the 2016 election. It can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausibl…

But all of that is true. What makes you surprised at any of that paragraph?

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#55

Post by mwbajor »

miffel wrote: post #53
mwbajor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like. "Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?" I would argue they a…

I would insist that you try to open up your worldview slightly and accept that sometimes having a team with more than just white men can be desirable and lead to better outcomes for the end product. Maybe bandaids are not the best example, but consider pulse oximeters[0]. There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for som…

Lets make a deal: I'll read your diversity books if you realize that meritocracies will never go away. You might be able to suppress them, but the smart people (and they're not just white people) will reorganize behind your back and be better than whatever you are doing. See INTC vs. TSMC for probably the best example since you're into references.

Pulse oximiters are another terrible example by the way. Couldn't we hire a bunch of really tanned white people since you're just talking skin color?

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#56

Post by mwbajor »

xethos wrote: post #52
mwbajor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like. "Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?" I would argue they a…

> I would argue they always were. I would posit we can't even get healthcare without bias for people that aren't straight white men. There are subtle differences in body composition between men and women, doubly so for larger (or smaller) body types, but ignoring those differences isn't exactly something from the far-flung past [0]. Otherwise we can quibble over how treating everyone as an average can and has cost li…

"should have just talked to the damn floor workers. "

You're all over the place trying to avoid my question. We're talking about product consumers. Mismanagement is an aberration in a long reversion to the mean of the product's specs that people want. What car would black Henry Ford make? What kind of induction motor would hispanic Tesla make? Keep cherry-picking references, though. Isn't there a crisis in the replication of journal articles anyway??

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#57

Post by throw7 »

hcayless wrote: post #32

It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without makin…

We've been digging this hole for awhile that it seems like we've hit china. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but things are coming to a head (vis-a-vis recent supreme court rulings) and we're not togetherizing we're dividezizing.

I don't think it's hard at all to understand the opposition. Just reread what you wrote what the straightforward good is. I mean to say, be wary of the paving stones you're laying on your path.

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#58

Post by miffel »

mwbajor wrote: post #55
miffel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would insist that you try to open up your worldview slightly and accept that sometimes having a team with more than just white men can be desirable and lead to better outcomes for the end product. Maybe bandaids are not the best example, but consider pulse oximeters[0]. There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for som…

Lets make a deal: I'll read your diversity books if you realize that meritocracies will never go away. You might be able to suppress them, but the smart people (and they're not just white people) will reorganize behind your back and be better than whatever you are doing. See INTC vs. TSMC for probably the best example since you're into references. Pulse oximiters are another terrible example by the way. Couldn't we h…

Hmm, I would hope that you want to read books that challenge your way of thinking to strengthen your beliefs and help you examine them through a lens you haven't considered before.

I wish I could agree in good conscience that we are currently in a perfectly meritocratic system, but alas (sorry to drop another reference on you, I guess I just enjoy having evidence to point to for justifying my beliefs), there's many cases where minorities are being unfairly passed up on [0].

Regarding pulse oximeters... maybe, maybe not. Seems like it would be an interesting field of study, the research of the different levels of light absorption between skin with different melanin pigments, and whether tanning or genetics plays a bigger role. If only there was more funding for something like that, huh? :)

[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#59

Post by smfugit »

miffel wrote: post #53
mwbajor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like. "Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?" I would argue they a…

I would insist that you try to open up your worldview slightly and accept that sometimes having a team with more than just white men can be desirable and lead to better outcomes for the end product. Maybe bandaids are not the best example, but consider pulse oximeters[0]. There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for som…

Diversity does make a diff but it depends on the problem. Its sort of the Explore-Exploit trade off.

For Explore type problems diversity has a much bigger impact then Exploit type problems. To add to the drama/misunderstandings/confusion sometimes you assemble a team for explore and they do find the gold mine, but then they arent suited to exploit it cuz its in their nature to explore. And vice versa.

Re: Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

#60

Post by throw0101b »

Darmody wrote: post #16
throw0101b wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not exactly because gold has an intrinsic value. Gold has zero intrinsic value. Like all forms of money, its value is a psychological and sociological construct to treat it as if it had value. The Incas for example simply used it for religious and ornamental purposes: * https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-r... Anything can be used as money, including giant rocks: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

Gold is the only currency that kept it's value through time. There's a reason people buy gold. 1kg of Argentinian gold has the same value as 1kg of American gold. And both have the same value as 1kg of gold from any ancient civilization. Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic. Of course, if you're in the desert and you're thirsty, a bottle of water has more value to you than all the gold in the world, but that doe…

> Gold is the only currency that kept it's value through time.

Papers have been written on how it does not:

* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789

See also Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560 to 1976 on how it's no good against infaltion:

> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.

* PDF: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram...

* https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/

Having gold as one's monetary base (e.g. Gold Standard) doesn't even help in stabilizing currencies:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...

* https://archive.ph/FWKcL

> Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic.

Big rocks as currency is one example of how any arbitrary object can be treated as such:

* https://americanhistory.si.edu/the-value-of-money/origins-mo...

Gold (or silver) bars and coins are nothing more than shiny rocks and are just as arbitrary.

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