samueldays

[samueldays]

Responding here for context. One, there is no upper bound on the damage caused by disparate impact law - it wrecks mostly by preventing things from coming into existence, rather than destroying things that have been built, so the loss is harder to see but potentially far larger.

It's sort of like a law making it illegal to leave your house at night. Average person is not going to be much inconvenienced by this because he spends his night sleeping, but there's millions of non-average people who lose potential night jobs, and a lot of potential nighttime work that goes undone.

We have no idea how much was lost to decades of compounding incompetence. Maybe America could have invented moonshuttles cheap and easy enough to build moonbases and take moonvacations with the money from moonmines, but hiring for Shuttle Competence would have had disparate impact! It took sixteen years from the Wright brothers flew their first airplane to Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in an airplane, and twenty years from that to Boeing running transatlantic passenger flights.

Two, it's aggravated by a reversed burden of proof, at least under a classic idea of "racism" and "discrimination", where the EEOC skips over the work of finding wrongdoing and demands the employer must prove innocence in a kangaroo court with no standards given for what constitutes proof, and the EEOC gets to bring hypotheticals in place of evidence. The cost, difficulty, and risk of this causes a chilling effect far beyond what the law might strictly require.

On an alternative view with Kendians, as arcticdementor has been expounding in the replies, the problem can instead be viewed as the subjugation of all society to racial-quota-filling, where the lack of a filled racial quota is considered a wrongdoing in its own right.

Three, it's aggravated further by lies and taboos and contradictions around the subject.

Amidst the great variety of human custom and culture, many things are made more tolerable with honesty and forthrightness about what obligation exists and how it can be discharged.

But in America, it's illegal to hire for the purpose of filling a racial quota, and disparate impact law also makes it presumptively illegal (see: reversed burden of proof) to hire people in a manner that does not fill a racial quota!

An unprincipled exception is to hire by university degree. This passes the problem to the universities, which have been high-status and beloved of leftists and lawyers so they get to run racial quotas, and still catch their own lawsuits sometimes. The majority of the black Harvard students, for example, are affirmative action admits. Harvard admitted this in court discovery, and was allowed to get away with it de jure because "diversity" is a compelling interest, and de facto I suspect because GPA-based, SAT-based or similar objectively-scored admission of a majority-Asian, 1%-Black Harvard class would lead to riots and murders.

This contributes to student loan inflation, degree inflation, "Bachelor's degree required for internship" job requirements, and a whole host of secondary effects.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the news about the federal lawsuit against the Sheetz convenience store chain charging them with hiring discrimination. Apparently refusing to hire people who fail a criminal background check is racist. Do you think there’s any chance of this rolling back some disparate impact hiring rules?

Almost no chance, good luck with that! Most of the reporting I can find seems to agree on this example of tone:

Federal officials said they do not allege Sheetz was motivated by racial animus, but take issue with the way the chain uses criminal background checks to screen job seekers. The company was sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion and national origin.

“Federal law mandates that employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue,” EEOC attorney Debra M. Lawrence said in a statement.

Finding evidence of wrongdoing is too hard work for the EEOC, so they find evidence of Bad Percentage and prosecute people for that instead!

Disparate impact is a totalitarian insanity of American law, for which the EEOC should be prosecuted by the successor regime.

And it's also well established in precedent of the current regime that disparate impact law gets to micromanage hiring, reverse the burden of proof, invent a Numbercrime, create contradictory obligations on employers to fill racial quotas and also not do that, and contribute to even more problems as side effects such as university diploma mills and inflaming racial taboos.

#all #asks #rant #racepol

[samueldays]

You seem to be assuming a total collapse to discuss the difficulty of rebuilding from scratch, but I dispute that there will be a total collapse in the first place, with radios and common books being part of what preserves bits of civilization.

Radios are pre-1900 tech, they don't need a complex supply chain, more ruggedized variants have been invented since then, a radio can run off solar power, et cetera.

It would suck ass if for example America had a civil war, stopped ensuring ocean safety, piracy resumed, the current Red Sea fracas became a global destruction of supply chains, and a lot of complex industries collapsed, but I'm confident that still wouldn't destroy literacy. People would still have encyclopedias in multiple languages describing the basics so they're much harder to lose. I don't see a path to losing that much even in the worst case scenario.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the news about the federal lawsuit against the Sheetz convenience store chain charging them with hiring discrimination. Apparently refusing to hire people who fail a criminal background check is racist. Do you think there’s any chance of this rolling back some disparate impact hiring rules?

Almost no chance, good luck with that! Most of the reporting I can find seems to agree on this example of tone:

Federal officials said they do not allege Sheetz was motivated by racial animus, but take issue with the way the chain uses criminal background checks to screen job seekers. The company was sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion and national origin.

“Federal law mandates that employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue,” EEOC attorney Debra M. Lawrence said in a statement.

Finding evidence of wrongdoing is too hard work for the EEOC, so they find evidence of Bad Percentage and prosecute people for that instead!

Disparate impact is a totalitarian insanity of American law, for which the EEOC should be prosecuted by the successor regime.

And it's also well established in precedent of the current regime that disparate impact law gets to micromanage hiring, reverse the burden of proof, invent a Numbercrime, create contradictory obligations on employers to fill racial quotas and also not do that, and contribute to even more problems as side effects such as university diploma mills and inflaming racial taboos.

#all

[samueldays]

Various things, my first answer is tools like printing press and ham radio. I inherited Grandpa's Norwegian encyclopedia set, so old that its stance on the kiev-or-kyiv bickering is "Kijev" for example, and this is a slightly hobbyist concern for keeping an old nonamerican hardcopy source around to resist propaganda. People more concerned than me have much better preparations to keep a package of civ-rebuilding and comms tools and other backups in case of collapse.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the news about the federal lawsuit against the Sheetz convenience store chain charging them with hiring discrimination. Apparently refusing to hire people who fail a criminal background check is racist. Do you think there’s any chance of this rolling back some disparate impact hiring rules?

Almost no chance, good luck with that! Most of the reporting I can find seems to agree on this example of tone:

Federal officials said they do not allege Sheetz was motivated by racial animus, but take issue with the way the chain uses criminal background checks to screen job seekers. The company was sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion and national origin.

“Federal law mandates that employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue,” EEOC attorney Debra M. Lawrence said in a statement.

Finding evidence of wrongdoing is too hard work for the EEOC, so they find evidence of Bad Percentage and prosecute people for that instead!

Disparate impact is a totalitarian insanity of American law, for which the EEOC should be prosecuted by the successor regime.

And it's also well established in precedent of the current regime that disparate impact law gets to micromanage hiring, reverse the burden of proof, invent a Numbercrime, create contradictory obligations on employers to fill racial quotas and also not do that, and contribute to even more problems as side effects such as university diploma mills and inflaming racial taboos.

#all

[samueldays]

I don’t know if you’ve seen the news about the federal lawsuit against the Sheetz convenience store chain charging them with hiring discrimination. Apparently refusing to hire people who fail a criminal background check is racist. Do you think there’s any chance of this rolling back some disparate impact hiring rules?

Almost no chance, good luck with that! Most of the reporting I can find seems to agree on this example of tone:

Federal officials said they do not allege Sheetz was motivated by racial animus, but take issue with the way the chain uses criminal background checks to screen job seekers. The company was sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion and national origin.

“Federal law mandates that employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue,” EEOC attorney Debra M. Lawrence said in a statement.

Finding evidence of wrongdoing is too hard work for the EEOC, so they find evidence of Bad Percentage and prosecute people for that instead!

Disparate impact is a totalitarian insanity of American law, for which the EEOC should be prosecuted by the successor regime.

And it's also well established in precedent of the current regime that disparate impact law gets to micromanage hiring, reverse the burden of proof, invent a Numbercrime, create contradictory obligations on employers to fill racial quotas and also not do that, and contribute to even more problems as side effects such as university diploma mills and inflaming racial taboos.

#all #asks #rant #racepol

[samueldays]

Notepad++

not including “directly into ao3 text editor” because i think you need help and i refuse to enable your sick and twisted lifestyle

#all

[samueldays]

#chef's hat and bon appetit #all #meme bandwagon

[samueldays]

Seems extremely unlikely to me, because "the queers" is bait-and-switch category.

At one end is the leftist party line from 20 years ago that it's none of your business what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms etcetera, and I think most of the potential right-leaning coalition has accepted this level of tolerance and internalized it in complaints that "the queers" should have been satisfied with that,

and at the other end is "Bake the cake" lawsuits demanding that one must express support for queerness as a condition of running a business. This looks to me like part leftist clientage to keep queers on the plantation by inciting hatred, part leftist flex to see how far they can push, both of which exist only due to a left-leaning coalition in power, and would rapidly cease to exist under a right-leaning coalition.

Man, if we switch from a left-leaning coalition based on racial and ethnic identitarian grievance politics to a multi-racial right-leaning coalition held together by hating on "the queers," it's gonna be so annoying.

It seems unlikely, but possible.

#all #politics

[samueldays]

Good post.

First Substack-exclusive post (still free to access) looks at a good but one-sided Harper’s piece that linked January 6th to the right having abandoned coherent political narratives.

#all #politics

[samueldays]

Ehhhh only in a vague sense that people are cheering Jesus and then people are booing Jesus a week later, IMO. I'd say there's some difference in usage that Milkshake Duck is mostly about a shift due to a cultural taboo coming to light, whereas Holy Week features more overt maneuvering and shaping of opinion by authorities for governance reasons.

The Roman side of the government thinks Jesus might lead an insurrection and considers a harsh crackdown, the Jewish side of the government thinks "we're all going to be collateral damage if the Romans crack down" and decide to get Jesus out of the way, several conflicting plans and motives crash into each other.

am i just sleep-deprived or is holy week milkshake duck for jesus?

I'm sleep deprived myself, but that checks out for me.

#all #christianity

[samueldays]

"When libertarians say" "they mean" are u libertarian or not?

The short version is that there's two relevant parts of libertarianism:

Libertarians have particular analysis about how government works and its blunt-instrument-ness, which I mostly endorse.

Libertarians have particular morals about "therefore, abolish government", which I mostly reject.

#all #asks #politics

[samueldays]

I sometimes think about writing a isekai featuring a guy who's the second summoned hero, asked to help fix all the problems caused by the well-meaning first guy packing several centuries of social upheaval into a few years of attempted uplift.

First guy's trajectory was roughly: "I should introduce the printing press and mass literacy" (mass propaganda) "and the gun" (several species hunted to extinction) "and assembly lines" (Luddite riots) "and democracy" (revolution) "why is everything on fire?"

#all #idle thoughts #literature

[samueldays]

Your flattery might be more effective if you didn't mix it with sneering, moving goalposts, and commie talking points.

For nationalism, my argument against it (besides the "playing with fire" bit above) typically is that it is fucking pathetic and unworthy of an enlightened mind.

Oh, the irony of that coming out of your mouth! You are playing with a gate to Hell while you insult the people warming themselves at a fire.

Nationalism typically functions to paper over class antagonisms

Begging the question. Here is the statement from another POV: communists typically incite class hatred to undermine nations.

Communists should stop inciting hatred.

It's not hard to find articles on Norway wealth inequality.

It's not relevant to find articles on Norway wealth inequality. Norwegians have low stress and high enrichment as indicated both by strong indirect evidence about quality of life, and by direct-but-dubious surveys asking about stress itself. Norway is still nationalist. Wealth inequality is not stress.

Wealth inequality is neutral in principle, as it goes both up and down with both good and bad things, being an extremely noisy measure. Wealth inequality is deserving of defense in practice because levellers are prone to Harrison Bergeron levelling, and because targeting it as a measure is extremely prone to Goodhart's Law. For example, Norway's inequality would go down if it expelled and stopped admitting African migrants, who tend to be poorer than the Norwegian average.

Treating inequality as a bad thing in its own right is a sign of communistic thought, and communists are down there with kleptomaniacs as people whose stress is a sign of a diseased mind. They should not be indulged.

*sees nationalism* This is actually not natural behaviour, humans only do that when stressed out or not provided with adequate enrichment.

#all #politics

[samueldays]

Hey OP I invite you to visit Norway in about a month's time, 17 May, Norway's national day, when the streets fill with flags.

Stress or lack of enrichment are not problems for Norway, which has been at peace* since WW2, ranks highly on both wealth and happiness measures, has a lively media production, and is generally a good place to live.

*technically Norway contributed a few soldiers to international coalition operations such as the Libyan Civil War in 2011, but this was such a non-threat that the Norwegian force did not suffer losses, let alone risk any threat to Norway as a nation. Norwegians had the experience of peace, even if they were at war on paper.

Now that that's shown OP is wrong, so we aren't engaged in Bulverism, let's consider what is wrong with OP.

Have you ever seen those bluechecked idiots on twitter who confidently say something dumb, and go "Russian trolls are out in force today!" when they get pushback?

*sees nationalism* This is actually not natural behaviour, humans only do that when stressed out or not provided with adequate enrichment.

I contend this is the same sort of thing as "Russian trolls are out in force today!" because it dismisses the possibility of reasoned disagreement. Instead, it frames disagreement with the speaker as something that results from brute material circumstances, something that should be removed by altering the circumstances of discourse instead of arguing to convince people.

*sees nationalism* This is actually not natural behaviour, humans only do that when stressed out or not provided with adequate enrichment.

#all #politics #bad post op

[samueldays]

High Honesty Society

I commute to work by Norwegian public transport, which has a wide variety of people on it. A typical Norwegian train has two sorts of labeled cars: [Prior ticket only] and [Tickets sold aboard]. If you have bought a ticket, you can enter either one. A controller walks up and down the train, checking tickets for everyone and selling tickets to new passengers in the latter cars. Persons found without a ticket in the former cars will be fined.

A scene I've witnessed several times is that of the controller slacking off (standing in place, or walking past without checking, because most people have prior tickets) and then a passenger will call for the controller and say "I need to buy a ticket".

Sometimes I feel like there's a disproportionate amount of talk about "high trust society" and less about "high honesty society" to build that trust on, because trusting dishonest people is a bad idea. Some places report problems with turnstile jumpers and fare evaders putting effort into it, here's people putting effort into paying when they could have remained silent. But how does one build honesty?

#all #essaying

[samueldays]

Most of post is good, and towards the end it takes this awful swerve.

We go looking for why the art we love is moral even if the art we love is a donut. I think this is the pressure of the Elders of Zion on time –

That's how you sound bitching about "capitalism", which is part commie hallucination, part blaming real but innocent people. Scarcity is not unique to capitalism. Wanting to get more things done in less time was not invented by capitalists.

“The way I personally stay true to the story I started down on is to give myself permission to not teach anyone anything. I’m not writing a manual. I’m not delivering bromides. I know that a lot of people do take enormous pleasure and relief in lines or phrases or ideas from stories that ring true to their own lives, but it���s important for me that I tell a story and that I’m not writing Chicken Soup for the Necromantic Soul. It is getting harder and harder again, especially for authors from marginalised places or backgrounds, to write works where the takeaway isn’t ‘this is to succour all my marginalised people’. For anyone on the female-identified axis this is especially hard because it seems to me that most books by anyone female-adjacent have an expectation that they will comfort the uncomfortable and discomfit the comfortable etc., whereas a guy can just tell an adventure story and be done with it. This ties in with an idea that I think nowadays that good art is moral and bad art is immoral: i.e. if a story is bad it actually has to be because the lessons are bad, and if a story is good it must somehow be beautiful on the moral scale. We go looking for why the art we love is moral even if the art we love is a donut. I think this is the pressure of capitalism on time – that everything has to double or triple up in benefit compared to the time we take on it: if we’re prepared to waste eight hours on a book we had better be able to tot up at the end how that book was also feeding us in some way. That’s brand time we just used.“  (Tamsyn Muir) Holy shit, Ms. Muir, marry me.

#all

[samueldays]

One of my philosophical considerations as I get older is appreciating how much moral virtue rules overlap with long-term pragmatism. Lying, for example, is a wicked thing to do, and also usually a bad idea and trying to spot the exceptions is unreliable. The more one generalizes utilitarianism across time and people, the more it looks like virtue.

Hundreds of philosophers have written on the edge cases of trying to pry these apart with deliberately constructed scenarios, which I feel get increasingly artificial as philosophy runs out of low-hanging fruit. "But if we suppose that the child is going to die unless an all-seeing oracle had predicted that you would..." -nah.

Recently I read an argument that such prying apart is itself a bad habit tending to wickedness. It is not a pragmatic thing to do, it worsens people's moral faculty by drawing an unreasonable amount of attention to an exception that is rare at best and physically impossible at worst, sometimes it glosses over another offense in the scenario construction. Philosophers will defend this glossing-over because in principle the other offense is a distraction from the point the philosopher wants to make, but pragmatically this inspires a mental habit of ignoring crimes to score dunks.

This was manifest in a fascinating retort to Amartya Sen that I want to share.

Amartya's constructed scenario in The Idea of Justice features three children presenting competing claims to a flute: Anne on the utilitarian grounds that she is a musician and will produce the most joy with it, Bob on the egalitarian grounds that he is poor and has no other toys, Carla on the libertarian grounds that she made it and the other two stole it. Amartya thinks this is a very difficult puzzle that shows there is no single right answer because he cannot decide between the competing claims.

The firebreathing retort: The flute should be returned to Carla, and Amartya ought to be punished as for theft or conversion, because by framing the scenario in terms of mulling over whose claim he should respect he has arrogated to himself the power of disposing of Carla's flute!

#all #philosophy #ethics

[samueldays]

Terrestrial Martial Arts, from Exalted which has TMA/CMA/SMA in increasing order of power

"tme" "tma" need to go back on the shelf. i can count the number of posts containing them that aren't deranged inane circular firing squad insanity on one hand.

#all #shitpost