forkandwait

I wish their were a labor wing of the Democratic party.

The sooner we lose the identity bullshit the better. Of equal rights need to be championed, but so do classic thing like safety, consumer protections, public education, minimum wage etc.

Oh wait, Bernie won my primary...

Thanks, but that is a somewhat crazy answer. I have a BA in mat with a few upper division stat and prob classes, but desire to do a grad degree in stats (yuck). I just want to read a book about how pollsters practically execute their job.

If I wanted to study a book for 10 hours on political polling and the math it takes to model the results, what book would you suggest?

This was a nice article, but can anybody reference a longer, more mathematical analysis?

At least here they talk about weighting the polling results, but I would really like to know how, exactly.

I am sorry, but what you said about the age at marriage is wrong, whether or not you can twist the argument about what wikipedia said. Really, you either need to read some books about demography or, umm, leave it to the experts. If you read some books about demographic history, you will be interesting to argue with.

(1) You are wrong, at since the middle ages in Europe. See child comment on Western pattern of marriage. I would be interested in your sources besides Romeo and Juliet, where if I remember correctly, they are told they are too young.

(2) The referenced article isn't really about marriage, but about the transition from adolescence to adulthood. There is a difference between a person getting married/ starting to have children versus setting up a household in which a person has an "adult" role; in the recent, Euro-derived West they are one and the same, but not so universally. And in the West, late age for marriage, and lots of non-married is the norm, and that pattern is pretty unique in the world.

If you do a graduate degree in demography, you learn all this. There isn't really any debate about it anymore, though it is very cool and interesting to discuss because it challenges our received knowledge about "normal". Don't get me started on fertility rates for women over 40 and their historical trends....

Among poor people in the US it is fairly common for a girl to have her first baby when she is 17 / 18/ 19 but still live at home; she has hardly left adolescence even if the boyfriend/ husband is also around...

There is a large literature supporting the parent comment, started by Hajnal, not your somewhat sophistic argument. In the Western part of Europe, people married late and there were a lot of spinsters.

Not so fast, "obviously".

I believe that "neolocal" households are unique, mostly, to post middle age Western Europe. And the 1950s are anomalous within that time scale.

Otherwise we see patri- or matri local multi generational households in which adulthood is not correlated with setting up a new household at all. You would marry someone and the move into their parents house. Sure you would start having children, but there isn't the same leaving adolescence thing.

The article uses the 1950s a reference point for the age at which people leave the home and parents, but the 1950s are actually an anomaly, weirdly young for marriage and household formation, at least for Western Europe culture.

I am working with a 20 table db (not including lookups and session management tables) based on surrogate keys and it sucks ass for discoverability. It also subverts data checking based on SQL REFERENCES. I think natural / composite keys should used to design the db and establish relationships, surrogate keys added only if necessary, and then auto-generated, just like one waits to denormalize until there is a real need.

I suspect the love of surrogate keys is just more MySQL bullshit pretending that classic SQL design is wrong merely because it is not implemented in that particular broken database.

In the USA, long distance passenger trains are very expensive and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains.

The only computer game I play is DCSS. Once got to the vaults as a troll beserker, but I can't get any farther than that. (I know, I know .... slow down, just don't get killed...)

I want one! Where do I order?

Anybody know about the emissions and if you can drive it in the US (non-California)?

I also wonder if the parts are easy and standard enough to make in more widely distributed factories. Seems the revolution waiting to happen is when a small country can make at least some of the parts in a small factory and trade with other similar partners to commodify the ecosystem, like PCs in the 1990s etc.

Interesting that the author does not cite anything describing the resounding success of psychiatry...

Yet again, my take away is that most psychology experiments are mostly bullshit. If there were 12 attempts to replicate, with the same setup, and 10 of them failed succeeded, we might actually be able to say something...

I didn't say lack of wealth, I said lack of stimulus at work. I don't actually believe that wealth makes you flourish.

Sources?

I think lack of stimulus at work is why addiction is (mostly) a poverty problem. I have even worked at factories where people got high to get through an inhumanely boring day.

My start up idea: Take all the social aspects of Mormonism, delete the theology (magic underwear), make gender roles symmetric, and allow gay people as long as they otherwise follow the rules. Then charge a membership fee, maybe keeping it under 10% of your income in order to remain competitive. Perhaps there can be an Uber-style app...

I think Mormonism/ LDS is possibly the most innovative social experiments in the USA in the last 200 years, even when stood up against such gems as the Land Grant Colleges, public schooling, public health, etc. You just have to see past the mystical bullshit (as you always must if you want to understand what is powerful in a religious movement).

I think the best definition of class is "functional" -- what category of function do you have in the society. I see four big categories (from the top): own the society (nobility, big capitalists), administrate the society for the owners (lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, computer programmers etc), move objects around (carpenters, forklift drivers, janitors), do criminal stuff for the society (prostitutes, drug dealers, hit men). There are different levels of skill within each, which can make a big difference in the life of the person.

Is there an equivalent of PostgreSQL release notes[1]? I went looking and all I can find is marketing bullshit, too many "exciting" links, and a little tiny bit of actual content.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/release.html

Do you have a citation?

The argument i have heard is that hunting gathering is far more intellectually stimulating and easier on your body than being a peasant or low skill factory worker, who probably don't have any more to eat or better Healthcare and shelter. Quite plausible for 80% of the population pre 1900.

I think there is a vacuum in US politics waiting for another real populist movement. And it should be working on the base of local and state offices, as well as building party machinery that transcends any single election. And it should NOT be focused around Hail Mary presidential candidates like Bernie until there is a network of democratic socialists in power somewhere besides Vermont.

I agree that Jesus was probably married...

.. But your statement about the age at marriage is wrong, at least for Western Europe since about 1400, which has had late marriage and uniquely high proportions never married. If you haven't fact checked your demography assumptions, you are probably wrong.

The story that Jesus was unmarried was probably promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church, with it's uniquely weird attachment to celibacy. Which, of course, has affected Western European demography in many complicated ways.

Sounds like the kind of relatives you avoid...

My rule is this : if I have equity then I am family. No equity, I am just an employee.

I don't think meaningless combinations of three words are particularly human friendly either...

I looked at the website, and couldn't figure out what makes this a good idea... Especially compared to geohashing.

A whole line of narrative theory would say that the sequential action matters more than any character development. That goes against a lot creative writing class assumptions, but those classes might be wrong.