iguy

89 ms·

841.
by iguy 8y ago
Something like that. It's not a lack of tax revenue or of potential employees, it's the system which is supposed to connect these two.
842.
by iguy 8y ago
> It's funny that part of the north believes that they were better off without the south[2]. Or perhaps rather, that they would now be better off. In 1861 Switzerland was a bunch of poor shepherds with goitre. But the world has chan
843.
by iguy 8y ago
Many people say this. I'm sure you can invent examples where a cheap car is indeed a false economy. But I'm pretty sure that, on average, total money spend on car per annum will be strictly increasing with income. It would be inte
844.
by iguy 8y ago
By definition it's a bell curve centered at 100, width 15. But what was clearly meant was that IQ 90 woodworkers would be more accident-prone than IQ 100 ones (on the same tasks etc). And while I'm sure nobody has done the exact
845.
by iguy 8y ago
It is exactly that: think of it as the first principal component, of some group of tests. Obviously this always exists. The argument is really about how big the 2nd component is -- if it were comparable, then talking about the 1st alone wou
846.
by iguy 8y ago
I agree that "peer-reviewed" is a pretty low bar, although a better example would be more modern fields like those recently dubbed "Grievance Studies" -- formal peer review was not common even in hard sciences until mayb
847.
by iguy 8y ago
It's true that some tests give little information about the top end of the range -- if your goal is to see whether Joe is smart enough to be a GI or not, then you're wasting everyone's time if you try to separate the top 0.1%
848.
by iguy 8y ago
In my case, saving money by buying nuts in bulk is like a frat house saving money by ordering kegs. More seriously I've also saved money by having a prepaid phone plan which was a lot more expensive per minute. And by buying super-chea
849.
by iguy 8y ago
I agree that this could in principle happen, for some values of cars. It could also literally happen with shoes, you can walk a lot more miles in $200 hiking boots than in four pairs of $50 sneakers. And in GGP's example, someone with
850.
by iguy 8y ago
These are all true, but they are weaker examples than the boots, where the rich guy bought a higher quality version of something which both needed, and still saved money.
851.
by iguy 8y ago
You're making a lot of different claims here. You may be right about insurance etc, although the rent will be lower too... but I think there are much simpler explanations for why some things are more expensive in the shops in poorer ne
852.
by iguy 8y ago
This would also be interesting. But has the same difficulties, of looking for the effect of an exotic process, when we know that quite normal processes are also involved. I don't know whether anyone has looked at this in mice, I mean i
853.
by iguy 8y ago
I like the boot story as much as the next guy, but is this actually true in the real world? By which I mean something like this: In what categories of products do rich people actually spend less than poor people? Are there any? It's ce
854.
by iguy 8y ago
> What kind of dad was this man then? What kind of connection did he build with his daughter? I'm not sure whether you intended this, but (since we're discussing biology here) this is really two possible connections. One is tha
855.
by iguy 8y ago
The Dutch children are an odd example here, because they themselves experienced hunger in the womb. That their bodies remember this isn't surprising at all. The markers through which this is remembered are sometimes called epigenetic,
856.
by iguy 8y ago
Here's an archive.org link for "Flo Control": https://web.archive.org/web/20040401115046/http://www.quantu...
857.
by iguy 8y ago
I don't know why you're insulting me when it sounds like you agree with me. You can compare different regions at the same time, and in the pre-industrial world, per-capita incomes didn't vary a whole lot -- maybe over a facto
858.
by iguy 8y ago
The analogous list is to point to the Romans in 100AD, and Charlemagne in 800, and Napoleon in 1800, and conclude that clearly the EU has always been a united super-state. The peaks were quite short-lived, often only one ruler's lifesp
859.
by iguy 8y ago
Thanks. But again, beware of the two meanings of rich/poor. > "India's wealthiest province, ... rich in muslin, silk yarn" i.e. rich in luxury goods, crafts serving the 1%. That's what the company was after, beca
860.
by iguy 8y ago
Indeed. But German industrialisation didn't seem to need much from tropical colonies. And conversely, all those fabulous silver mines didn't exactly leave the Spaniards with a head-start in modernisation.
861.
by iguy 8y ago
Obviously this is a huge subject. I'm not sure it's so clear that British rule slowed Indian industrialisation... I guess answering that requires a counterfactual, and as you say post-1850s Japan is the best-case one. But do note
862.
by iguy 8y ago
That's a century years after they arrived -- read the link!
863.
by iguy 8y ago
No this is nonsense. That relative decline was because the pie grew... and grew spectacularly, for the first time in history, for reasons that had next to nothing to do with some colonial adventure.
864.
by iguy 8y ago
> ... tax money ... used for the benefit of people who paid the taxes This is a surprising recent notion. The Mughals sure didn't conquer territory to tax it for the peasant's benefit -- the entire purpose of conquering land wa
865.
by iguy 8y ago
If you mean ordinary people, then everywhere was poor, so travel authors would not have seen a shocking contrast. We actually have numbers on all this stuff, e.g. you can track a slow decline in day-labor wages, and IIRC (around Delhi maybe
866.
by iguy 8y ago
This is not correct, Calcutta was some villages where it happened to be convenient for the east india company to set up shop: "The area where the city is now located was originally inhabited by the people of three villages: Kalikata,
867.
by iguy 8y ago
Of course, but it's a start. They aren't exactly running gulags. 10% committing 50% of crimes is a factor of 10 over-achievement, there's no reasonable argument that the odd wacko prosecutor tips the scales this much. Countin
868.
by iguy 8y ago
You can accept that bias exists, while denying that it explains very much of the difference. Again I know nothing about NZ, but in places where I've seen numbers, you can invariably show that the amount of bias in policing/sentenc
869.
by iguy 8y ago
Thanks for this. I know nothing about NZ but you could replace just a few nouns to translate this to many other countries, sadly. Not to pick on you, but I'd like to add that I think it's helpful to disentangle three things which
870.
by iguy 8y ago
Exactly. Cloned sheep are still sheep, optimised by for a life in which they have no clones. Whereas ants are instead optimised for this colony life. As are leaves of a tree, for instance, who are 100% willing to sacrifice themselves.

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