_edo

The numbers you pointed out:

White LDC 3rd Decile: 16.67% White non-ALDC 10th Decile: 15.27%

The "much smaller gap" that I chose to focus on:

African American non-ALDC 4th Decile: 12.76% Asian American non-ALDC 10th Decile: 12.69%

3rd vs. 10th decile in one case is worth an academic paper with 3 authors collaborating from 3 different universities. Plus their associations with NBER and IZA.

4th vs 10th decile in the other case is something I was socially conditioned to see and is not worth focusing on at all.

I think that if the study's authors had completely messed up a spreadsheet and replaced the numbers for the White LDC/White non-ALDC columns with the numbers from the African American non-ALDC/Asian American non-ALDC columns, you would suddenly find those numbers to be troubling.

If you're a random (non-ALDC) African American in the 30-40% (4th decile) range for academics you have the same chance of getting in as an Asian American in the top 10%. They each have about a 12% chance.

> Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs.

If we're looking at how group membership affects acceptance rates, why not ask how many white ALDC admits would get in if treated as African American non-ALDCs? Why not ask how many Asians would get in if treated like Hispanics? Why not ask how many African Americans would get in if treated like Asians? The whole paper looks like a reflection of the cultural value that it's a good thing to go after rich white people, a bad thing to go after anybody else.

The interesting comparison is in Table 6 Panel B: White LDC vs African American non-LDC. For the top 60% academically just being black carries about as much advantage as being in the elite 4% (roughly) of white people who have some form of deep connections to the school. If you're in the bottom 40% you're better off being white with connections.

Notice you have to assume that most people agree on what's good and that you know what that is. It's a solved problem, it's just a matter of implementing it.

> If I invest $100 in protecting a public good....So I'll only invest if everyone else chips in, too.

Public goods are non-rivalrous, another person consuming the good has no effect on you. So out of spite you're going to go against your own best interest because you think it's better to punish other people than to purchase a good that you would purchase if you could just figure out how to exclude them from using it. That's valuing the suffering of others over your own well-being. Going back to how hard it is to figure out what people think is "good".....

Two of the sectors where the author is touting gains for Democrats both have significant left-leaning bias: academia and tech. How does that play into this?

Democrats are getting more college degrees now, but which degrees?

Why start so many graphs of Democrats doing better than Republicans in 2008 when we had a big recession and a new president who didn't prioritize rural America? Why not go back to 2000 or 1990 so we can get a bigger picture?

And pardon my ignorance, but "GDP per seat"? And why is this graph next to Median household income? Are they saying that the changes in median household income are causing "GDP per seat" to rise? Urban populations have changed a lot in the past 10 years, are we even talking about the same households?

Household income statistics are prone to distortions[0], GDP per seat is probably prone to even more, why not use GDP per capita? It feels like they were just happy to find two graphs where the Democrat line went up and the Republican line went down and they know most people will just glance at the graph without wasting their morning thinking about what GDP per seat really means and how it's affected by the population flows of the past decade.

[0] - https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/09/16/misleading...

I believe a human being has a fundamental right to their own labor, and even if this isn't the case I think we do best acting as if it is. Socialists of all stripes disagree with me; if the state is to claim control of everybody's labor of course you can't hold this right as sacrosanct.

I agree that a market system requires laws and regulations to function. That doesn't mean we should be blindly regulating in the name of consumer rights without thought for the consequences and whether or not it even works. This is why we have the field of economics.

In this case the intended goal of helping the consumer by increasing their "freedom" probably won't be met. Either because 1. game developers can't get funding to develop future games without a stable revenue model so they stop making games, or 2. they realize they can get funding so long as they never actually give the consumer the full game. This leads to the server model where some core functionality of the game only runs on the server and you buy a subscription. Either way, you start with the intention of giving consumers more ownership of games and they end up with less ownership than they started with.

We could spend the next few days waxing intellectual about what freedom really means and all that or we can realize that the plan just doesn't work in meeting its own goals.

In the short term they my be losing out (kind of. It's like how I lose out when I don't steal at the grocery store.) but in the long term they're gaining because the companies making the goods they're purchasing get to stay in business.

It's a trade-off. Do you want video game consumers to have a short-term boost because everything's free, or do you want them to have a healthy game development ecosystem where talented devs can get loans to make good games because they'll have a predictable revenue stream from sales. You can try to balance the two, but you can't give them both.

Really all of this I want it free, I want it now just leads to free-to-play games where the developer recoups costs through micro-transactions, loot-boxes, pay-to-play items, etc. And in this model you probably never own the game at all. If the user can't be trusted to own the game, then never give them a complete game! Always keep part of it on your own servers. Force them to log in, force them to be connected, force them to have an active credit card number on file.

If we demand to resell/copy/trade the digital goods we purchase without restriction then this is the world we get - we stream movies, we stream music, we connect to game servers, but we never possess any of it. We never listen to a song without Spotify taking notice and putting it in our file. We never watch a movie in privacy without Netflix, "oh, he's watched Fight Club three times this week." We never get to play a game without server-side analytics being run to look at how tweaking the boss difficulty affects sales of the super-sword.

It's not as simple as saying locking up digital goods hurts the consumer.

On Orwell. I was commenting that I could accuse the accuser of Orwellianism of Orwellianism. But I could do it with the advantage that their version includes using the machinery of the state to call a restriction of a freedom a freedom.

I don't think it's productive to argue over who's really Mr(s). 1984. Instead we can accept that we're talking about trade-offs in freedoms, that it will be complicated, and go from there.

This is not true. They paid no federal income tax which is not the same as no income tax. In 2018 they paid $1.2 billion globally[0] and I don't understand how much they paid domestically because deferred income tax is confusing to me.[1]

Taxes are extremely complicated and a lot of people (politicians especially) will pick one or two numbers that support their narrative. They know most people won't spend the time researching the context surrounding their "statistics" and they also bank on how people will misunderstand what they're reporting.

You just said "NO income taxes last year." The people popularizing the "no federal income taxes" meme know a lot of people will think it means "no income taxes."

[0] - https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials [1] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deferredincometax.asp

No, you can't. That's why this is such a complicated issue.

The inherent value in a physical good is consumed with use. If somebody buys a couch and takes it home it becomes a used couch. Used couches are not great substitutes for new couches; they devalue with time and use and you eventually have to pay somebody just to take it off your hands. Its value actually goes negative.

A used digital good is a perfect substitute for the original. A digital copy is also a perfect substitute for the original. That changes everything. If we want people to be able to make games professionally, and to be compensated for their work, we have to use laws to make the digital marketplace resemble the physical goods marketplace. Or find a whole new model which I don't believe anybody has done.

> decreasing their opportunity for first-sale revenue increases the opportunity cost of making such a game.

I don't understand the use of 'opportunity cost' here but I think it's a good point. It's generally not good to discourage viable business models. My fear is that if we're baking in resale value to the purchase price, now consumers may overvalue both the game AND the resale so they get hit twice in a blockbuster/flop type situation.

Short of offering resale/final-sale options, which I do like, the laws will encourage some sort of business model. I'm thinking encouraging long-term quality through final-sale only purchasing is looking a little better for consumers than what the French court is apparently doing.

Another option is reselling could be done through Steam who takes 30% which they split with the devs. So the consumer gets to resell, Steam gets paid, devs get paid, maybe any lost revenues are offset by consumer wellbeing?

Somebody wants to take that away from them.

GP is upset they're losing the freedom to do business in the way they like.

You're calling their view Orwellian because French Big Brother knows what ownership rights they really want to purchase?

It's not Orwellian, it's just a complicated issue of how intellectual property law affects consumers.

The current setup gives game developers a somewhat predictable revenue model and on the strength of that model they can encourage investors to put up money to make the games. Changing the revenue model may change how investors look at the market. Maybe for better maybe for worse. Who knows, but it would be a disruption if Steam has to adopt this model worldwide.

The thing that I don't like is if you allow reselling then developers get less long-term revenue but (hopefully) more short-term revenue. This will cause them to focus more on getting a big opening weekend than making a solid game that might have years of appeal.

Portal is still $10 on Steam. Maybe they only sell 100 copies a month at this point but that's still money coming in rewarding them for investing in interesting core game mechanics. I'd rather see them get rewarded for that than for dishonest advertising campaigns because 50% of their money will come from the first few days of sales.

There's also a (very challenging, I would guess 150-300 hours time commitment) MIT course online: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algeb... But it has videos.

I would focus on Chapter 21 in the pdf because it tells you exactly what you need for this application. And supplement it as needed.

Obviously in retrospect the police were in zero danger, there was no hostage, the house wasn't really doused in gasoline. There was no way for them to know that. We've had 20 months to think about what happened that day from the safety of our homes. They had seconds to deal with the situation unfolding in real time while believing their lives and the life of a hostage were in danger.

Pointing a gun is a deadly threat and it's hard to believe (assuming this was a real hostage situation) he couldn't make out even one outline of a human to take aim at.

The police thought they were at the scene of a murder/hostage situation. They weren't just protecting their own lives, they were there to protect the life of the hostage from somebody who they believed had committed murder just minutes before.

Given ten minutes to think about the situation maybe the officer who fired the shot would take a different course of action. But he didn't have ten minutes, he had half a second.

Also, if you're into this sort of thing here's the first in a seven video series on a very different mechanical computer - Albert Michelson's Harmonic Analyzer which does Fourier Analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAsM30MAHLg

The Porsche Taycan's 7:42 is a major achievement whether or not Tesla tops it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_N%C3%BCrburgring_Nords...

You refuse to admit the difference between a peaceful and by-force arrest because you're expanding the definition of the word violence and apparently would like to talk about it.

You've expanded the definition of the word 'murder' to no longer require intent.

You've expanded the meaning of "choked to death" beyond what any reasonable person would expect it to mean.

If the police had gone out there and violently murdered somebody by choking them to death I would be very angry. That's simply not what happened and if you believe it is maybe you should examine exactly how you came to that conclusion.

1. He resisted arrest. He clearly stated his intent to resist arrest. He was given the option to be peacefully arrested, which he declined. In the resulting forcible arrest he was choked, which is wrong, he shouldn't have been choked, but he absolutely wasn't "just standing on the sidewalk" - he was resisting arrest.

2. When you say he was choked to death people might get the impression that there was intent to kill him or that he died on the spot from asphyxiation instead of later from a heart attack. (edit: roughly a heart attack. The coroner listed several pre-existing conditions that contributed, including heart disease, but didn't say "heart attack")

Since we've had literal riots over things like this I think it's appropriate to ask that we all try to stick to the facts.

I live in a bad neighborhood where gunshots are common. Since I've lived here there have probably been dozens of homicides within a .5 mile radius. Living here has changed my perception of officer involved shootings.

People don't realize how quickly things go from a slightly weird situation to bullets in the air. It goes from somebody standing funny, maybe they have a hand behind their back or they're holding a towel in a weird way, then bullets. Fast. A quarter of a second separates "that's weird" from "oh no somebody's shooting."

If you've ever dropped your phone and had to figure out what to do before it hits the ground that's about as much time as police have to make these life-and-death decisions.

In this particular situation, the police believed they were arriving to a hostage situation where somebody had already been killed.

What happened is tragic. If you've ever dug into this story it's heartbreaking. At the same time I don't think the anger at police lines up with what happened here at all.

Please don't spread misinformation about a tragedy that's been used to create so much division in this country.