trowawee

Actually, a lot of people at the time had issues with slavery! At an absolute bare minimum, 3.9 million enslaved people in the United States probably had some strong critiques to level against the existing system of slavery and Lee's decision to commit treason in defense of that system. Of course, Robert Lee didn't consider those people to be humans, with full human rights. And similarly, when you ignore their humanity, and you ignore the historical record of abolitionists from the United States and all over the rest of the world, it becomes a lot easier to pretend that anger at the continued celebration of someone who committed treason in defense of slavery is somehow based on shifting modern mores.

The post-war stuff isn't being ignored; it just doesn't matter. The value of "painting him as a bad man" is that he was a bad man, who did horrible things, for horrible reasons, and people like your family still think he was actually a great hero. Even in the language you use, you imply that you don't actually think he was that bad, and you definitely are suggesting that opening a school later in life somehow mitigates leading the military arm of a rebellion in defense of slavery. It really, really doesn't!

I’m using Feedbin (and their website) in the browser and Reeder 4 on iOS. I think it’s a pretty solid combination.

Disclaimer: I'm married to a doctor. That said, I agree with your point that they are over-paid, but I absolutely don't agree with the idea that you only need a moderate amount of intelligence to work as a physician. A slight majority of my friend group is physicians, both through my spouse's education and work and through a collegiate friend group that mostly went into medicine. While I have many, many complaints about the medical profession and many of the people who work at it, they are, virtually without exception, extremely intelligent people. The ones who weren't washed out at some point in the 4 years of university and subsequent 8-12 years of training. Some of the barriers to entry are excessive, but most of them are there because being a doctor is incredibly difficult.

Because Americans aren't buying groceries or paying rent in the rest of the world, they're doing that in America. Knowing that you're theoretically well-off in comparison to people living in other places doesn't put food in the fridge, and it tends to be deployed to shame people who are having a tough time making ends meet.

> Now, you didn't watch Rauf play, so all you have to go on are the stats. I did. I was a huge fan of him in college. He averaged over 30ppg as a freshman (his scoring dipped in year 2 because he had to share the court with Shaq) and had the prettiest stroke I've ever seen. He had some of the best ball handling skills since Maravich. He was a basketball savant.

> So what happened?

I mean, mostly what happened is that he got blackballed out of the league for refusing to stand for the national anthem, but also, yes, I don't think Phil's comparison was crazy. I do think Abdul-Rauf, in a modern run and gun/SSOL offense would have been Steph-before-Steph (I also think Nash would have been much the same if he'd hunted for his own shot more).

Oh! Forgot to add, tho, that your initial comment was wack; every player is limited in some way and Steph is probably the best shooter who's ever played and he bends the gravity of the game in a way that basically nobody ever has before, which would be reason enough to put him in the running for MVP even if he wasn't routinely among the leaders in counting and advanced stats.

Well, first, I reject the idea that the only potential motivation for learning new things, building interesting things, and working hard is personal greed, especially given that virtually the entire tech industry is built on the hard work of open source contributors, who built and continue to build incredible things without any expectation of financial recompense.

But more importantly, I don't really care if a few people are slightly less motivated if it means that we can unlock the massive amount of latent human potential currently wasted in poverty, hunger, and desperation. The number of people like that would be massively outweighed by the people who aren't scrabbling just to survive, and whose intelligence and work ethic could instead be turned to learning and building the future.

It's not an outcome I'm particularly worried about. There are a lot of countries with a median GDP per capita greater than or roughly equivalent to the United States[1] with more robust social welfare states and lower GINI coefficients[2]. I'm much more concerned about the effects of runaway inequality.

[1]: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/world-bank-poverty-statistics-lac... [2]: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm

I think there are a lot of policy changes that could make massive strides towards resolving this. A significantly higher marginal tax rate and a wealth tax would reduce the amount of wealth available to gift. Lowering the amount of money that can be gifted legally would reduce the amount of support that could be offered. Free education and healthcare (and potentially a UBI), forgiving student loans, and some combination of rent control and improved zoning laws (and possibly vacancy taxes) would ameliorate most of the problem areas that people get help with and that cause this resentment.

I disagree that this is essentially an emotional problem. This is essentially an inequality problem; the inequality (unsurprisingly) breeds resentment, and trying to fix the resentment without fixing the inequality is just slapping a bandage over a sucking chest wound.

They have a staff of 90 engineers already out of an overall headcount of ~300. Performantly serving text and images to a userbase of 2 million users/month is not a wild expectation. it's barely even table stakes. And if you fail at that, despite employing 90 engineers, why should anyone trust you when you claim that taking more money out of their pockets will somehow turn that around?

Literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. Flights on private jets when there's a pressing need for travel. Rent and food and entertainment in major cities, full tuition payments for millennials and, as they reach the point of starting their own families, their children.

Relatedly, one of my strongly-held, but weakly-sourced opinions is that the disparity between anger about financial inequality (wildly inconsistent throughout the country, but not really dominant anywhere) and the level of actual financial inequality (higher than ever before in the history of the country) is largely due to the fact that most people, like you are realizing here, don't actually see that disparity that much. A lot of this wealth transfer is obfuscated (very deliberately!) and laundered through less-explicit mechanisms, like the aforementioned "paying for the ludicrously expensive nightmare that is childcare".

> I understand there is empirical data showing how race is correlated with zip code, but you still choose your zipcode at the end of the day.

Unless you live in a city that was redlined[1], which is to say, unless you live in virtually any city. In which case, you really did not and in many cases still do not actually have much of a choice where you live. And that's without even looking at the fact that the racial wealth gap means that even if there weren't still strong barriers to integrated neighborhoods, lots of members of groups that were and are discriminated against would be unable to move into the neighborhoods that would theoretically let them escape that zip code bias.

[1]: https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/August-2017/How-Redlini...

> The root of injustice is simply bad luck. Ethnicity and gender are only loosely correlated with bad luck but there is no causal relationship between them (not so much anymore at least).

This is wildly ignorant and ahistorical. There are literally thousands of books, articles, studies, movies, etc. disproving this. Literally just this week a study was released showing that predominantly white school districts collectively receive $23 billion more in funding than predominantly black districts, and that: "For every student enrolled, the average nonwhite school district receives $2,226 less than a white school district,".[1] That isn't bad luck; that is a system designed to reinforce a system of racial segregation, and it's just one example of thousands, all of which are a moment of research away if you actually cared about this.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/26/696794821/why-white-school-di...

Well, that's certainly what Harvard would argue, although a lot of people might disagree, but even if we accept their/your framing, that doesn't solve the issue. You're throwing around "most qualified" and "elite students" like those are settled terms of art, rather than the heart of contention in an argument that's more than a century old.

Imagine two hypothetical students. One student graduated with a 4.3 by taking advanced courses at a high school where every student gets between a 3.5 and a 4.5 thanks to some combination of intelligence, good funding, grade inflation, and a parent population who can pay for a new wing or two if it means junior will graduate on time. The other student graduated with a 3.8 from an underfunded high school on Chicago's South side, where the average class size was 30+, the textbooks are 20 years old, and the average annual family income is around $30k. Which one of those students is more elite? Which one is more qualified?

Zion Williamson is currently a student and a basketball player at Duke University. He's 6'8", weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 280 lbs., and a few days ago he had a highlight where he started from under the hoop, sprinted out towards the three point line some 22 feet away, leapt towards a player on that line who was taking a shot, blocked the shot in mid-air, and landed without touching the shooter. The number of people in the United States with that combination of size, speed, and skill is in the single digits. The number of people in the world might - might - be in the triple digits. Is he an elite student? If so, is he more or less elite than the other students in the previous paragraph?

There isn't a clean metric for most qualified or most elite, and there really can't be, because the world doesn't neatly standardize like that. It's a symptom of insufficient consideration of the problem to suggest that fixing a massive and massively flawed system is super simple and just requires One Neat Trick that the thousands of people who have been thinking about and working on this for decades haven't considered.

Well, the cynical answer is that the elite schools churn out the people who go into the media, government, and various other halls of power, so a lot of the chatter is actual graduates of these schools discussing their own alma maters, and they've essentially worn down the rest of us into caring. But a slightly less cynical take is that this stuff all trickles down through the rest of the higher education system, because of the aforementioned dispersal of elite university grads into positions of power, so fixing the culture at those elite schools would probably result in positive changes in the institutions they influence.

Not trying to be unkind here, but you keep bringing up examples from Oxford in a discussion about the American higher education system. There's a big difference in culture between the two, and so discussing Oxford as a counterpoint doesn't really make sense. It's not an American outlier, it's a totally different system with its own issues and culture that don't have much to do with this conversation.

And yes, schools in the US do care, deeply, about extracurriculars. Harvard could fill every seat, every year, with the valedictorian of a different high school class. Since nearly every data point is tightly grouped on the most immediately available metric, they turn to other data points to make their decisions. (And there's a long history of using that flexibility for both exclusionary and inclusionary purposes.)

Absolutely agree. I don't know how much this particular proposal would help them, though; I think catching those people would require a wholesale overhaul of the educational system: universal free pre-school, standardizing school funding nationwide (and specifically decoupling it from property tax revenue), fully subsidized university education for anyone who wants it...and then lotteries to get into elite schools.

Otherwise, I suspect this would primarily benefit middle class students who can afford to pay for test prep and tutors, but not for a month-long volunteering stint in Nepal, and primarily hurt the relatively-sub-par-but-well-off legacy admits (which, who cares) and students with a lower SES that currently get a boost from consideration for that status/the follow-up effects of growing up and going to school in poor areas (which I do care deeply about).

"simply admit the most qualified students" is the "assume a spherical cow" of the college admissions discussion.

...kinda, yeah. Feynman's an interesting choice of example, actually; he wanted to attend Columbia, couldn't get in because of anti-Semitism, and then attended MIT before it was "MIT, Famous Engineering School", when it was still basically seen as a vocational school for middle-class students. I think the whole higher education system would benefit from having people like that scattered throughout it, rather than concentrated at a handful of elite universities.

Not really. Is it more impressive to climb the seven summits, or write an original work and have it performed by the New York Philharmonic? These aren't cleanly comparable things (which was always the point, of course; the focus on "more well-rounded students" appeared when elite institutions were worried that academically successful Jewish students were becoming too big a proportion of the student body.[1])

1: http://250.browndailyherald.com/how-1920s-anti-semitism-insp...

It would also probably dramatically worsen the grade inflation that's already rampant at a lot of the elite feeder high schools that pump people into the Ivies (and rampant at Harvard itself[1], fwiw).

1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...

People who go to HYS et al. aren't paying for the quality of education; they're paying for the signaling device and the network opportunities.

From the stuff I was reading/folks I was chatting with when I ran into the problem, it sounds like restarting your instance could sometimes fix it - I assume Netflix is basically playing whack-a-mole with AWS-based scrapers.

Yeah, this is a big problem. I set up a Streisand instance last year just to play around with, and while the set-up was pleasantly simple and the results were great as far as the VPN functionality, it shut down Netflix entirely for me. Definitely a deal-breaker.

They claim they've been profitable for the last three years, although they do so without providing any actual numbers.[1]

[1]: https://www.adweek.com/digital/meundies-pivots-its-membershi...

> Why are these questions so hard to answer?

At a micro level, because collecting accurate data on the best diet or the best workout system is functionally impossible and because a lot of the people who are theoretically researching these questions have a ton of conflicts of interest.

At the macro level, these questions basically are answered: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Exercise regularly with a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training (i.e. lift something and run/bike/swim somewhere).

The problems come when people:

- get overly bogged down in super-specific details of diet and exercise

- get overly invested in finding outliers to the broad guidelines

- think they're going to find some magic bullet combination of these things that will let them live forever

- are unable, due to personal characteristics or societal structures, to easily follow the two big guidelines

All of which I get, and all of which are traps I've fallen into before. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that there are lots of ways to achieve good health, because humans are wildly adaptable creatures, and obsessing over the details is mostly a waste of time unless you're trying to perform a specific physical task at an extremely high level for an extended period of time.

They tried that[1], and it didn't work out for them.

[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...

Higher volume, faster turnover, economies of scale, predictable customer interaction schedules. All the things that make a local coffee shop or bookstore attractive, both to own and to patronize, directly conflict with those factors.

Short answer: no. If you aren't part of the club, or if you don't go out of your way to find out these things, this is not particularly well-known. And honestly, I could flip this pretty easily: there are lots of narratives out there by people who for whatever reason weren't privy to this fact who made it into some of the big name schools and saw how daddy's ability to buy a new building beats out perfect grades, describing their shock at seeing some of these systems up-close and learning the rules. That should also be approximately as "obvious". It depends where you're looking, and whether or not you know to look there and care enough to actually look.

I think it's interesting that you quote Stevenson (and more broadly draw in the restorative justice movement here) because one of the core pieces of restorative justice is admitting your wrongs and making concrete steps towards making amends and being a better person. I'm not sure that it has much useful to tell us about how to evaluate someone like Gandhi (or Churchill, or King). It's a useful framework in a conversation about what someone like James Gunn or Louis CK would need to do to make amends, but for dead people, I don't know if it's a particularly useful tool for evaluating someone like Gandhi (or King or Churchill).

For the dead, I think we need to always resist the urge to make saints of humans, and to offer a clear-eyed accounting - what they did, right and wrong, as well as we can evaluate it. And we need to periodically reevaluate them, because things that weren't recognized as morally wrong at the time or shortly afterwards (like Churchill's war crimes and reprehensible racist attitudes, or Gandhi's refusal to condemn the caste system) or things that weren't widely known (like Gandhi's habit of sleeping nude with pre-teen and teenage girls) aren't always recognized as immoral in the first evaluation. It's not diminishing someone to evaluate them honestly, it's the only way to truly honor them.

Some good suggestions here from Jeff Atwood: https://blog.codinghorror.com/programming-your-hands/