Thanks to Balsa Research, every weekday I now get to meet and talk to someone new, usually multiple new people, all of whom are interesting, know things I don’t know that they are eager to explain to me, and who share a passion for modeling the world with an eye towards making things better rather than worse. It’s super great, and leaves me with the very Happy Problem of there not being enough hours in the day, which is only going to get worse when the Mets start playing playoff games.
"You should worry more about your own kid’s success than the success of kids in general, and this going the other way is super weird."
Just like peoples' own Congressperson is good but Congress overall is a dumpster fire, their kid is awesome and special and fine but the others are in trouble. Few people understand base rates.
1: I think you are misinterpreting the survey regarding worrying about kids growing up properly, specifically conflating "worrying about" and "doing something about." The former is likely to be parsed as "do you think/are you confident that X kids are going to grow up into functional adults?" which makes perfect sense when people respond "other people's kids, no, not really. Mine are going to be fine, but those other parents are crazy."
2: Re: Bike lane bounty: My guess is that lower income people report the bounty less because they don't care about bike lanes. Those lanes seem to be popular with the upper middle class set, not so much with the poor. Since one has to be in a position to see the blockage (so probably in a car?) and car enough to pay attention for potential blockages while in such a position, it isn't too surprising it is skewed towards the wealthier people who care about the lanes and probably are in a car that notice.
The Democrat/Republican excess death curve is strange. Not that there's a delta at all and it's bad for Republicans, that's not surprising. What is surprising is that the delta gets worse over time. What's driving that?
There are many factors that I think would make the delta shrink. COVID strains have become less deadly, there are few people left with immune systems that have zero COVID defenses, the people most likely to die of COVID have already died.
One possible factor that would keep COVID in the mix is that Republicans engaged in riskier behavior as time went on and so were more likely to suffer a COVID infection. Do we have any data on infection rate by party?
Or, maybe COVID infections themselves aren't widening the gap, and it's something else.
Also re: bedrooms and windows, it's for egress in case of fire. In my state at least windows that people couldn't plausibly fit through don't count. You can't advertise your finished basement with tiny windows at the top of the wall as a bedroom.
I would like to hear your (or anyone else's) arguments about why Ohtani is clearly your (or their) pick for MVP above Judge. I thought that at first, and then looked at the WAR of each player and Judge was markedly higher, and then saw that people felt Ohtani's WAR was not fairly represented as a 2 way player. I looked further, and the calculations don't seem unreasonable to me, his WAR for pitching is only adequate even though his ERA is top 5, I assume due to the 6 man pitching rotation giving him fewer starts than other great pitchers. His batting is great, but he's always a DH, which to my understanding fairly comes with negative positional value, and pitcher fielding is included in pitching WAR to my understanding. To believe all these things to me points towards Judge being the correct vote for MVP.
If you think there's anything specific that's wrong with these statements, I'm interested as to your thoughts.
And of course, if you think WAR is not the best metric by which to measure MVP or is flawed for other reasons that make it unsuitable, I'm also interested.
The concrete vision of the future is utopian nonsense. It is completely detached from reality. There's nothing concrete about it, it's all fantasy based on left-wing denials of heritability and arrogance over the progression of history.
Say what you want about right-wingers talking about breaking up the US or otherwise seceeding from it - at least they have an ice cold appreciation for how things actually are on a political and societal level and how things are going to unfold. They're not saying that they're going to win and then everyone but some token group of leftists they tolerate is going to agree with them and their vision for a better world will be acheived. No, they know that these differences won't resolve themselves, the culture war never ends and in fact will become far worse as the left become more arrogant with their increasing institutional power, and many Americans know the only way out is to literally make a new country. You may think their political views are hopelessly wrong, you may think their new countries will become shitholes (which didn't happen to America in the past which had similar laws/values to what these people want, but whatever), you may think these people are evil. But by god if they're not down to earth in their ambitions.
About OTC contraceptives: If you look at the map, you can see that all red countries (prescription only) have a well-functioning and efficient healthcare system. Whereas light blue (informal OTC) countries have high corruption.
I support the prescription only system with some exception (just like in the UK). In general, contraceptives are divided into simpler ones (progestogen only) and combined ones (2 hormones). Progestogen only required more precise dosing and may fail more often whereas combined contraceptive pill may have more side effects and can increase, for example, cancer risk in some women. The general public may not be aware of all this and the specialist consultation is required.
The prescription for contraceptives usually is for 6 or 12 months. It is not too much of a burden to visit a doctor once or twice per year. In the UK people don't pay for a GP visit (NHS) and any pharmacy will give emergency supply in case of missed prescription anyway.
"You should worry more about your own kid’s success than the success of kids in general, and this going the other way is super weird."
Just like peoples' own Congressperson is good but Congress overall is a dumpster fire, their kid is awesome and special and fine but the others are in trouble. Few people understand base rates.
One note is that the NYU students were not part of a non-SAT class.
https://twitter.com/AliceFromQueens/status/1577232041107939328
Two points:
1: I think you are misinterpreting the survey regarding worrying about kids growing up properly, specifically conflating "worrying about" and "doing something about." The former is likely to be parsed as "do you think/are you confident that X kids are going to grow up into functional adults?" which makes perfect sense when people respond "other people's kids, no, not really. Mine are going to be fine, but those other parents are crazy."
2: Re: Bike lane bounty: My guess is that lower income people report the bounty less because they don't care about bike lanes. Those lanes seem to be popular with the upper middle class set, not so much with the poor. Since one has to be in a position to see the blockage (so probably in a car?) and car enough to pay attention for potential blockages while in such a position, it isn't too surprising it is skewed towards the wealthier people who care about the lanes and probably are in a car that notice.
The Democrat/Republican excess death curve is strange. Not that there's a delta at all and it's bad for Republicans, that's not surprising. What is surprising is that the delta gets worse over time. What's driving that?
There are many factors that I think would make the delta shrink. COVID strains have become less deadly, there are few people left with immune systems that have zero COVID defenses, the people most likely to die of COVID have already died.
One possible factor that would keep COVID in the mix is that Republicans engaged in riskier behavior as time went on and so were more likely to suffer a COVID infection. Do we have any data on infection rate by party?
Or, maybe COVID infections themselves aren't widening the gap, and it's something else.
Also re: bedrooms and windows, it's for egress in case of fire. In my state at least windows that people couldn't plausibly fit through don't count. You can't advertise your finished basement with tiny windows at the top of the wall as a bedroom.
I would like to hear your (or anyone else's) arguments about why Ohtani is clearly your (or their) pick for MVP above Judge. I thought that at first, and then looked at the WAR of each player and Judge was markedly higher, and then saw that people felt Ohtani's WAR was not fairly represented as a 2 way player. I looked further, and the calculations don't seem unreasonable to me, his WAR for pitching is only adequate even though his ERA is top 5, I assume due to the 6 man pitching rotation giving him fewer starts than other great pitchers. His batting is great, but he's always a DH, which to my understanding fairly comes with negative positional value, and pitcher fielding is included in pitching WAR to my understanding. To believe all these things to me points towards Judge being the correct vote for MVP.
If you think there's anything specific that's wrong with these statements, I'm interested as to your thoughts.
And of course, if you think WAR is not the best metric by which to measure MVP or is flawed for other reasons that make it unsuitable, I'm also interested.
The concrete vision of the future is utopian nonsense. It is completely detached from reality. There's nothing concrete about it, it's all fantasy based on left-wing denials of heritability and arrogance over the progression of history.
Say what you want about right-wingers talking about breaking up the US or otherwise seceeding from it - at least they have an ice cold appreciation for how things actually are on a political and societal level and how things are going to unfold. They're not saying that they're going to win and then everyone but some token group of leftists they tolerate is going to agree with them and their vision for a better world will be acheived. No, they know that these differences won't resolve themselves, the culture war never ends and in fact will become far worse as the left become more arrogant with their increasing institutional power, and many Americans know the only way out is to literally make a new country. You may think their political views are hopelessly wrong, you may think their new countries will become shitholes (which didn't happen to America in the past which had similar laws/values to what these people want, but whatever), you may think these people are evil. But by god if they're not down to earth in their ambitions.
About OTC contraceptives: If you look at the map, you can see that all red countries (prescription only) have a well-functioning and efficient healthcare system. Whereas light blue (informal OTC) countries have high corruption.
I support the prescription only system with some exception (just like in the UK). In general, contraceptives are divided into simpler ones (progestogen only) and combined ones (2 hormones). Progestogen only required more precise dosing and may fail more often whereas combined contraceptive pill may have more side effects and can increase, for example, cancer risk in some women. The general public may not be aware of all this and the specialist consultation is required.
The prescription for contraceptives usually is for 6 or 12 months. It is not too much of a burden to visit a doctor once or twice per year. In the UK people don't pay for a GP visit (NHS) and any pharmacy will give emergency supply in case of missed prescription anyway.