booly

By this logic fat shaming is acceptable?

I mean, yeah, in many contexts. For example, when a professional athlete shows up to training camp after putting on a bunch of fat in the off-season, that's fair game. It's literally their job to maintain their bodies and if we're allowed to criticize their job performance then we're certainly allowed to criticize their maintenance of their physical fitness. There's obviously a clear parallel here between that and other public figures where their intelligence may be fair game for criticism.

More broadly, when people are engaged in unhealthy habits of any kind (from smoking to sleep deprivation to overwork/stress to terrible relationship decisions to unhealthy eating/exercise habits), I think it's fair game for loved ones to point that out and encourage steering their lives back towards healthier choices. I'm not advocating that we go and make fun of strangers, the range of acceptable conversation in our day to day relationships is going to be different.

No, that's not OK to mock people's medical conditions, and it's always a good idea to exercise some empathy and humility to know that things might not always be as easy for others as for yourself. But I've never been on board with the idea that fatness is somehow off limits, in large part that I don't believe that most people's fatness is inherently innate. Correlations between moving to or away from high obesity areas (most notably between countries or between significant changes of altitude, but also apparent in moves between city centers and suburban car-based communities) make that obvious that fatness is often environmental.

TLDR: I make fun of Trump's fat ass all the time.

But because intelligence is an inherited trait

I don't think this is true, practically speaking. Intelligence is like endurance running speed in that there are heritable components to it, but at the end of the day environmental factors dominate on who is or isn't faster than another.

I can make fun of someone for being dumb in the same way that I can make fun of someone for being a slow runner. It's only problematic when their slowness is actually caused by something out of their control, like some kind of health issue.

The simple claim of calling Arabic a single language is inherently a political one, in the same way calling Cantonese and Mandarin the same Chinese language is. Or would be like trying to reduce the Slavic languages into one or two.

I'm not as pessimistic as you about the future, and I don't think of today's children as people passively experiencing things that happen in the world. They're participants, and they'll have a lot more agency about their futures during our lifetimes.

Politically, I still think that fascism is brittle. Competence is actively discouraged (independently competent people are minimized to prevent threats to centralized power), so I think any fascist system is bound to fail when the people actively resist.

Economically, the business cycle ebbs and flows, and whoever's on top today might not be on top tomorrow. I believe the current economic system is dominated by bubbles that have no future, so we're gonna see some future chaos where new bases of power will rise. Good guys can win in those scenarios, and those good guys may very well be my own children.

Culturally, nothing is permanent. Trying to predict things is a fool's errand. Better to just prepare our children for resilience through flexibility and adaptability, and raise them to be kind, well adjusted, socially plugged in.

Living a good life is possible even in a bad world. That's happened throughout human history. And so if people want to raise children, let them.

Just want people to think a bit further than mid-19th century definions and analysis which I think no longer hold.

Yeah, one of the things that really shaped my views on fairness in wealth distribution was studying corporate law (and the legal cases that shaped what Delaware corporate law is today). That history adds a lot of complexity to figuring out who is the "owner" class and who is the "labor" class. Highly compensated executives often have their shareholders over a barrel, and the legal system is designed to protect management from shareholders, so long as the corporation makes some minimal token gestures towards shareholder value. In practice, shareholders have very limited means of controlling a corporation (mainly by electing directors, who tend to be officers/managers of other companies and sympathize with managers and give quite a bit of leeway when only part time supervising the officers they often play golf with).

And we can see this play out in the modern era. We have a bunch of wannabe finance bros, hopeful future millionaires, talking about financial topics and cheerleading their heroes (CEOs and founders), often being willing marks in financial investment scams. They believe that holding capital will help them survive further divergence between the haves and the have nots, but history shows that when push comes to shove, only power matters. No amount of accumulated wealth can protect against power, and those with power can always use that power to enrich themselves.

So I don't find it particularly useful to draw bright lines on who is or isn't the enemy based on their financial situation. We should recognize the power structures themselves, and how power is exercised (politically, financially, legally, culturally, and the old standby, violently), and work to influence things through those levers (including the power to change the levers themselves).

why were highly skilled Korean engineers working "illegally" in USA to begin with?

Most of them say they had valid visas or work authorization.

The U.S. has a visa waiver program where people can come into the U.S. without a visa, and have certain rights similar to visa holders. Many of the South Korean workers have taken the position that the visas they had that allowed them to work for 6 months, or the visa waivers they had entitled them to do temporary work for less than 90 days, and that they were within those time windows.

The lawsuits being filed also allege that immigration officials acknowledged that many of the workers did have legal rights to work, but that they were deported anyway.

So no, I don't think it's been shown that the workers did anything illegal. It really sounds like ICE fucked up by following a random tip a little too credulously.

It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960's. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn't even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.

Increasing productivity of workers is met with demand for more production-intensive products. It's like how every time hardware improves, software becomes more complex to take advantage of that increased capability. It's like Jevon's Paradox, but applied to productivity of workers.

One prominent example: our farmers are more productive than ever. So we move up the value chain, and have farmers growing more luxury crops that aren't actually necessary for sustenance. We overproduce grains and legumes, and then feed them to animals to raise meat. We were so productive with different types of produce that we decided to go on hard mode and create just-in-time supply chains for multiple cultivars so that supermarkets sell dozens of types of fresh apples, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, etc., and end up eating much more fresh produce of diverse varieties compared to our parents and grandparents, who may have relied more heavily on frozen or canned produce, with limited variety.

The average cost of a hospital stay in a U.S. hospital is about $3,000 per day, but it varies significantly by location. So long stays like yours might cost between $250,000 and $500,000.

If your insurance covers it (and about 92% of Americans have health insurance), you'd be looking at your annual out of pocket max, which the law caps at $18,000 for family plans or $9,000 for individual plans, but which most people on employer sponsored plans (around 60% of Americans) have out of pocket maxes around $4,000 to $5,000. Source

So for most Americans, your hospital stay would've probably cost the individual patient about $5,000. Insurance would've paid another $350,000.

But for some Americans, they'd be looking at a $360,000 bill and then would just file bankruptcy, start over with close to a net worth of zero, at least for non-exempt assets (people generally get to keep their homes, cars, and retirement accounts in bankruptcy so it won't actually be starting from zero if you're well into a middle age in the middle class).

Or worse, the hospital would realize they're not getting paid, and then would find a reason to kick you out as soon as you're stabilized. They have to keep you alive even when you can't pay, but don't have to treat you beyond that for free.

Let's take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer's description of what is wrong, and you're prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you're confident in your diagnosis.

Your typical job looks like this:

• Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
• Drive out to the person's home (30 minutes).
• Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
• Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
• Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
• Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
• Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
• Drive back to your office (30 minutes).

There, that's 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn't need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn't have had to remove an old one.

Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn't have to waste too much time driving from place to place.

Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you're also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.

The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn't until you're up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.

For $500 devices, it's gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.

I'm only generally familiar with the big crime podcast/documentaries that spilled into the mainstream about 10 years ago: first season of Serial, Making a Murderer. And both of those were highly critical of the police work and called convictions into question (and actually got the public attention on the wrongful convictions).

More recently, I've seen the HBO series on Karen Read, and it painted a picture of severe police misconduct that at worst tried to frame an innocent person, and at best botched the investigation to make a conviction of a guilty person difficult to impossible.

So yeah, crime documentaries often do show police misconduct and incompetence. At least the ones that hit my radar.

No, LCOE is an aggregated sum of all the cash flows, with the proper discount rates applied based on when that cash flow happens, complete with the cost of borrowing (that is, interest) and the changes in prices (that is, inflation). The rates charged to the ratepayers (approved by state PUCs) are going to go up over time, with inflation, but the effect of that on the overall economics will also be blunted by the time value of money and the interest paid on the up-front costs in the meantime.

When you have to pay up front for the construction of a power plant, you have to pay interest on those borrowed funds for the entire life cycle, so that steadily increasing prices over time is part of the overall cost modeling.