once you make the jump to go on a killing rampage the only real allegiance you have is to violent authoritarianism
Where'd you get this idea? Someone like this could just as easily be an anarchist.
You are thinking of authoritarianism and anarchism in terms of political views (which at least for anarchism can be pretty nebulous depending on who you ask), but I am thinking of it more in terms of psychology:
"Authoritarian personality is a state of mind or attitude characterized by belief in absolute obedience or submission to one's own authority, as well as the administration of that belief through the oppression of one's subordinates. It usually applies to individuals who are known or viewed as having an authoritative, strict, or oppressive personality towards subordinates."
I would argue that murder is sort of an absolute means of forced submission to one's own authority. If not of mind, it certainly is of body. The murderer imposes their will and once it's happened the victim is powerless to overcome it (at least in so far as the mortal world is concerned).
Or a nihilist, who doesn't fall anywhere on the left-right political spectrum. This sort of thing doesn't have to be motivated by ideals or mental illness. Disillusionment is enough, in some cases.
I guess that's most of the point that you were making. And that's a fine point.
Ultimately it really comes to "might makes right".
Can we all just agree the guy was a fucked up human.... I just wish people that miserable would just use one bullet into their brain instead of killing innocent people as well.
Despite how divisive politics is these days, once you make the jump to go on a killing rampage the only real allegiance you have is to violent authoritarianism. Whatever perceived injustices that led one to commit that kind of atrocity is more like the window dressings that surround a deranged mind. People like James Hodgkinson, Stephen Paddock, and even Timothy McVeigh have a lot more in common than they do separating them apart. It's really important that we stop trying to project these people as extensions of the left or right. It makes it too easy for people to start demonizing anyone that doesn't agree with them.
It's a very general talk. I remember it going more in depth but maybe that was another one. However it does touch the 'men are better at spacial stuff' and 'women are better at reading/grammar' claiming that these are the biggest differences found and measured and even there the overlap of the Gauss curve is great.
Yeah, I think the new research also talks about significant overlap. IE if you are shown a bunch of MRIs you can't easily discern which scans come from females and which come from males, even if you know what to look for. It would be very interesting to know though, if brain scans of people in STEM tend to skew in any direction and how those compare to the brain scans of the general population.
Thank you for the kind words. In my estimation these are among the best without digging into actual research abstracts and papers (which I find myself referencing more and more). Sadly I am ill-equipped to understand some of the nuances in the research (I am neither a biologist or a psychologist), so I stumble as best I can and hope that those who are experts in their respective fields will gently guide me to correct interpretations so I can improve my understanding.
While many fields are close, There's a huge disparity in Gynecology (85%), Pediatrics (75%), and radiology (27%). Other subdivisions listed show lesser skew one way or the other, but it's still there.
In no way does this imply a difference in ability, but there absolutely appear to be different preferences at play.
Thank you for the link. It appears this talk was from 2014, while the MRI scan research is from 2017. I will still try to watch it, but I wonder if it might be outdated at this point?
Full disclosure, I posted in the comments section in the article you linked, but my comments are still being held in moderation because they are detected "spam" (this appears to happen any time you provide a lot of links for references with discus). In any event, you can see the thread here:
Regarding expert's opinions, the discussion at Quillete has been good and includes very good comments from David P Schmitt, who is one of the authors that James Damore quoted.
Marie Curie is one of my science heroes, and I posted some of her quotes the other night after at the Heterodox Academy discussion of this. I thought I'd repost them here as a bit of a break from the rest of the arguments over the memo. Also, if you want a great descriptions of why Marie Curie is so cool, look here:
âoeBe less curious about people and more curious about ideas.â
âoeIn science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.â
âoeLife is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.â
âoeYou cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.â
âoeNothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.â
âoeI am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.â
I'm a white male software engineer. I'm having a really hard time trying to separate out my own biases and the biases of others in reaction to the memo with actual factual discourse about the science. In almost all of the reaction commentary, even some of the better discourse, people keep wielding any ammunition they can find to defend their point of view on both sides. I worry that I am inclined to do the same thing.
I've been trying to read as much research as possible in the last couple of days as science feels like the only bastion where I can try to come to a reasoned conclusion about all of this. That path has lead me to some unusual places, like wondering if there is a biological explanation for higher average verbal intelligence in women that allows them to have greater selection in careers (Ref 1) and differences in brain anatomy where men have thinner average cortical thickness than women but higher variability. (Ref 2)
Given that you are a female engineer directly affected by all of this, do you think it's reasonable to explore these kinds of questions? Does it diminish the effects of the real sexism and bias that face women in tech to examine other potential explanations for the gender gap?
Granted it's been well over a decade for me since college, but it's the same story with technical conferences and work meetings. Inevitably you will run into people who spend 60 minutes saying something that should take 5-10. Allowing the audience to bring a laptop to do other stuff when this happening is the socially acceptable solution we've come up with as a society to let the lecturer save face while letting the audience quietly stop listening to them.
Perhaps it would be better in the long run if we were honest and just booed or walked out so lecturers were more forcefully encouraged to get better. I'm not sure it would really work that way though. It's already scary enough presenting in front of a lot of people. As it is, if you've got an audience full of people staring at their laptop instead of staring at you, it's them gently telling you that what you are saying is less important to them than whatever is on their screen.
Do you have a breakdown anywhere I can reference showing how the EPA spends money? I've only been able to find documentation for budget requests that show 2 out of 5 high level goals:
"Second, this correlation holds true with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates.
So I take it South Africa wasn't included in the study?
That's a fair point. A quick google for violent crime rates in South Africa shows a (murder) trend that increases rapidly and peaks in the early 90s, then falls:
The difference is that leaded gas was still widely used there after the peak. I did find an article talking generally about violent crime in South Africa:
The political climate I think is the big thing. Negotiations regarding ending Apartheid started in 1990 and ended with the election in 1994. That violent crime increased up to those negotiations and then decreased to 1970s levels afterward doesn't seem to me to be a coincidence. I imagine that's overshadowing everything else, including whatever effects leaded gasolline are having on their (still very high!) violent crime rates.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The US has seen a massive decline in violent crime in general, along with a decline in teen pregnancies. There is no correlation between increased gun-ownership, increased conceal-and-carry, and increased violent crime.
While it's only a theory and correlation does not strictly imply causation, I cautiously subscribe to the lead-crime hypothesis:
"Second, this correlation holds true with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Within the United States, you can see the data at the state level. Where lead concentrations declined quickly, crime declined quickly. Where it declined slowly, crime declined slowly. The data even holds true at the neighborhood level - high lead concentrations correlate so well that you can overlay maps of crime rates over maps of lead concentrations and get an almost perfect fit.
Third, and probably most important, the data goes beyond just these models. As Drum himself points out, "if econometric studies were all there were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look." But the chemistry and neuroscience of lead gives us good reason to believe the connection. Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person's ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for "emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility."
You don't get sarcasm, do you? I was using humor to make a point, as my proposal would clearly (very clearly) never actually work in real life. I swear the critical reading skill have left this site (mods, I'm looking at you).
Here's the thing: It's happened in the past and some day it might happen again in the future. You might have been joking, but there are people out there that will read what you said and think maybe it's not such a bad idea. Again, it's happened before. Don't normalize it.
I'm all for #1 unless we start to get squishy on what law-abiding means. It would be disrespectful of the 2nd amendment to say that anyone with a blemish on their record (e.g. a parking ticket, you filthy lawbreaker) is banned from gun ownership.
There will never be an end to that argument. When should someone no longer be able to possess a firearm? When should they go to jail? When are they such a threat to society that they should no longer be allowed to live? Reasonable people can debate both sides of any of these questions and there are pros and cons both ways. These are exactly the kinds of discussions that people in a healthy nation should be having rather than talking about how evil the other side is.
Regarding #4, I would love to have a rational discussion about gun control policy, but the left has literally made that impossible. That's why we have to resort to hyperbole and sarcasm.
Do you resort to hyperbole and sarcasm because you are frustrated that the other side doesn't agree with you? Lead by example: show them that your way of thinking is better for society and back it up with research and facts. It takes a long time to change people's minds, but people do change.
But I can guarantee you this is what's going to happen: the left will totally disregard the fact that they made this man who he is if this was indeed politically motivated, but they will be howl for far stricter gun control no matter what you say about points #2 and #3 in your post. They might as well start a conspiracy where they send believers out to shoot up the public so they can force their policy onto the country
Why bring up conspiracies? Do you really think most people on the left want others to die so they can enact gun control? I don't think they do. People who murder other people to achieve political goals are sociopaths. I don't think that fits most people on either end of the political spectrum. I think they see tragedy after tragedy on the news and hope that getting rid of guns will make it better. I disagree for a variety of reasons, but it's important to understand their concerns. It's also important to entertain the possibility that even though you and I might disagree with them, there is a chance they are right, and we are wrong.
1) Let's respect the 2nd amendment for all of our law-abiding citizens. 2) Let's avoid demonizing political opponents based on the actions of a single individual. 3) Let's try to understand the motivations of the killer. 4) Let's try to think rationally about our policy as a country rather than having knee-jerk reactions based on fear.
You'd think with their lacklustre performance over the last 5 years they'd play it safe rather than trying to pretend they are Apple.
Get this message through your thick skulls HTC: You are not Apple. Your customers are not Apple customers. The Android world is a very different place and you aren't in any position to cram user-unfriendly features down people's throats. You will fail if only because there is always some other Chinese company ready to give people what they want.
Thank you for answering our questions! How do you view top-down product driven development vs bottom-up engineering driven development? Are there situations where one excels vs the other?
Why would you randomly access the data? Instead of reading the data randomly or in some kind of random-access inducing order, you'd be much better off scanning through the data sequentially by sector or extent to get data in as large of contiguous chunks as possible. Granted with SSD and NVMe drives it doesn't really matter. My ~29K message work inbox shows an average message size of 63KB. At that size solid state storage is already throughput bound rather than IOPS bound. A modern NVMe drive like a P3700 should be able to read that data in it's entirety in about 20 seconds assuming the CPU can keep up. If the FBI is using a reasonably decent distributed storage system that distributes objects across multiple device you can easily do it far faster. ~20GB/s and half a million read IOPS is nothing special for distributed storage systems on NVMe.
If you can't trust this thing to detect that it's attempting to run over something like a child, can you trust it to accurately detect and report that a crime is in progress?
Working and living in those places still puts you ahead in absolute terms if you invest your earnings in non-depreciating assets. The cost of housing skews much higher in those places than typically necessary material goods (cars, home appliances, etc). Assuming you invest your money well in DC, that should put you in a good position to retire in the midwest and/or leave a better inheritance (in absolute terms) for your kids some day should you so choose.
He is dodging inheritance taxes by transferring money
That is still only an example of following the rules as they currently exist. And it is still not hypocritical to advocate different rules while following those in place.
Wrong. It is absolutely hypocritical to act against one's publicly professed ideals and goals. He says one thing, does something else, its hypocritical. That it is legal or common changes nothing.
No, it's perfectly reasonable to act in one's self interest while believing and advocating that global unrestrained self-interest yields a less than optimal global outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
once you make the jump to go on a killing rampage the only real allegiance you have is to violent authoritarianism
Where'd you get this idea? Someone like this could just as easily be an anarchist.
You are thinking of authoritarianism and anarchism in terms of political views (which at least for anarchism can be pretty nebulous depending on who you ask), but I am thinking of it more in terms of psychology:
"Authoritarian personality is a state of mind or attitude characterized by belief in absolute obedience or submission to one's own authority, as well as the administration of that belief through the oppression of one's subordinates. It usually applies to individuals who are known or viewed as having an authoritative, strict, or oppressive personality towards subordinates."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I would argue that murder is sort of an absolute means of forced submission to one's own authority. If not of mind, it certainly is of body. The murderer imposes their will and once it's happened the victim is powerless to overcome it (at least in so far as the mortal world is concerned).
Or a nihilist, who doesn't fall anywhere on the left-right political spectrum. This sort of thing doesn't have to be motivated by ideals or mental illness. Disillusionment is enough, in some cases.
I guess that's most of the point that you were making. And that's a fine point.
Ultimately it really comes to "might makes right".
Can we all just agree the guy was a fucked up human.... I just wish people that miserable would just use one bullet into their brain instead of killing innocent people as well.
Despite how divisive politics is these days, once you make the jump to go on a killing rampage the only real allegiance you have is to violent authoritarianism. Whatever perceived injustices that led one to commit that kind of atrocity is more like the window dressings that surround a deranged mind. People like James Hodgkinson, Stephen Paddock, and even Timothy McVeigh have a lot more in common than they do separating them apart. It's really important that we stop trying to project these people as extensions of the left or right. It makes it too easy for people to start demonizing anyone that doesn't agree with them.
It's a very general talk. I remember it going more in depth but maybe that was another one. However it does touch the 'men are better at spacial stuff' and 'women are better at reading/grammar' claiming that these are the biggest differences found and measured and even there the overlap of the Gauss curve is great.
Yeah, I think the new research also talks about significant overlap. IE if you are shown a bunch of MRIs you can't easily discern which scans come from females and which come from males, even if you know what to look for. It would be very interesting to know though, if brain scans of people in STEM tend to skew in any direction and how those compare to the brain scans of the general population.
Thank you for the kind words. In my estimation these are among the best without digging into actual research abstracts and papers (which I find myself referencing more and more). Sadly I am ill-equipped to understand some of the nuances in the research (I am neither a biologist or a psychologist), so I stumble as best I can and hope that those who are experts in their respective fields will gently guide me to correct interpretations so I can improve my understanding.
I don't think that women in subdivisions of Medicine are universally at gender parity as you assert. Look at the statistics for residents here:
https://wire.ama-assn.org/educ...
While many fields are close, There's a huge disparity in Gynecology (85%), Pediatrics (75%), and radiology (27%). Other subdivisions listed show lesser skew one way or the other, but it's still there.
In no way does this imply a difference in ability, but there absolutely appear to be different preferences at play.
Hi Tommeke100,
Thank you for the link. It appears this talk was from 2014, while the MRI scan research is from 2017. I will still try to watch it, but I wonder if it might be outdated at this point?
Full disclosure, I posted in the comments section in the article you linked, but my comments are still being held in moderation because they are detected "spam" (this appears to happen any time you provide a lot of links for references with discus). In any event, you can see the thread here:
https://disqus.com/home/discus...
Regarding expert's opinions, the discussion at Quillete has been good and includes very good comments from David P Schmitt, who is one of the authors that James Damore quoted.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/0...
There's also been a very good meta-analysis of studies being performed at Sean Stevens heterodox academy:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/2...
And a very good back and forth between Adam Grant and Scott Alexander here:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017...
Marie Curie is one of my science heroes, and I posted some of her quotes the other night after at the Heterodox Academy discussion of this. I thought I'd repost them here as a bit of a break from the rest of the arguments over the memo. Also, if you want a great descriptions of why Marie Curie is so cool, look here:
http://www.badassoftheweek.com...
Anyway, Enjoy!
âoeBe less curious about people and more curious about ideas.â
âoeIn science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.â
âoeLife is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.â
âoeYou cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.â
âoeNothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.â
âoeI am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.â
Hi Rydia,
How do you view Dr. Debrah Soh's op-ed? Her's is one of the more well-written supportive article of Damore that I've seen.
https://www.theglobeandmail.co...
Dr. Suzanne Sadedin has written a critical response, though more nuanced (and imho powerful) than some of the others that you've listed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/q...
Hi,
I'm a white male software engineer. I'm having a really hard time trying to separate out my own biases and the biases of others in reaction to the memo with actual factual discourse about the science. In almost all of the reaction commentary, even some of the better discourse, people keep wielding any ammunition they can find to defend their point of view on both sides. I worry that I am inclined to do the same thing.
I've been trying to read as much research as possible in the last couple of days as science feels like the only bastion where I can try to come to a reasoned conclusion about all of this. That path has lead me to some unusual places, like wondering if there is a biological explanation for higher average verbal intelligence in women that allows them to have greater selection in careers (Ref 1) and differences in brain anatomy where men have thinner average cortical thickness than women but higher variability. (Ref 2)
Given that you are a female engineer directly affected by all of this, do you think it's reasonable to explore these kinds of questions? Does it diminish the effects of the real sexism and bias that face women in tech to examine other potential explanations for the gender gap?
Ref 1: http://journals.sagepub.com/do...
Ref 2: http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Granted it's been well over a decade for me since college, but it's the same story with technical conferences and work meetings. Inevitably you will run into people who spend 60 minutes saying something that should take 5-10. Allowing the audience to bring a laptop to do other stuff when this happening is the socially acceptable solution we've come up with as a society to let the lecturer save face while letting the audience quietly stop listening to them.
Perhaps it would be better in the long run if we were honest and just booed or walked out so lecturers were more forcefully encouraged to get better. I'm not sure it would really work that way though. It's already scary enough presenting in front of a lot of people. As it is, if you've got an audience full of people staring at their laptop instead of staring at you, it's them gently telling you that what you are saying is less important to them than whatever is on their screen.
Do you have a breakdown anywhere I can reference showing how the EPA spends money? I've only been able to find documentation for budget requests that show 2 out of 5 high level goals:
http://www.eesi.org/images/con...
At least based on what's shown here, a large portion of the budget is spent on air quality and land restoration.
"Second, this correlation holds true with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates.
So I take it South Africa wasn't included in the study?
That's a fair point. A quick google for violent crime rates in South Africa shows a (murder) trend that increases rapidly and peaks in the early 90s, then falls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The difference is that leaded gas was still widely used there after the peak. I did find an article talking generally about violent crime in South Africa:
http://www.iol.co.za/dailynews...
The political climate I think is the big thing. Negotiations regarding ending Apartheid started in 1990 and ended with the election in 1994. That violent crime increased up to those negotiations and then decreased to 1970s levels afterward doesn't seem to me to be a coincidence. I imagine that's overshadowing everything else, including whatever effects leaded gasolline are having on their (still very high!) violent crime rates.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The US has seen a massive decline in violent crime in general, along with a decline in teen pregnancies. There is no correlation between increased gun-ownership, increased conceal-and-carry, and increased violent crime.
While it's only a theory and correlation does not strictly imply causation, I cautiously subscribe to the lead-crime hypothesis:
"Second, this correlation holds true with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Within the United States, you can see the data at the state level. Where lead concentrations declined quickly, crime declined quickly. Where it declined slowly, crime declined slowly. The data even holds true at the neighborhood level - high lead concentrations correlate so well that you can overlay maps of crime rates over maps of lead concentrations and get an almost perfect fit.
Third, and probably most important, the data goes beyond just these models. As Drum himself points out, "if econometric studies were all there were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look." But the chemistry and neuroscience of lead gives us good reason to believe the connection. Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person's ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for "emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
You don't get sarcasm, do you? I was using humor to make a point, as my proposal would clearly (very clearly) never actually work in real life. I swear the critical reading skill have left this site (mods, I'm looking at you).
Here's the thing: It's happened in the past and some day it might happen again in the future. You might have been joking, but there are people out there that will read what you said and think maybe it's not such a bad idea. Again, it's happened before. Don't normalize it.
I'm all for #1 unless we start to get squishy on what law-abiding means. It would be disrespectful of the 2nd amendment to say that anyone with a blemish on their record (e.g. a parking ticket, you filthy lawbreaker) is banned from gun ownership.
There will never be an end to that argument. When should someone no longer be able to possess a firearm? When should they go to jail? When are they such a threat to society that they should no longer be allowed to live? Reasonable people can debate both sides of any of these questions and there are pros and cons both ways. These are exactly the kinds of discussions that people in a healthy nation should be having rather than talking about how evil the other side is.
Regarding #4, I would love to have a rational discussion about gun control policy, but the left has literally made that impossible. That's why we have to resort to hyperbole and sarcasm.
Do you resort to hyperbole and sarcasm because you are frustrated that the other side doesn't agree with you? Lead by example: show them that your way of thinking is better for society and back it up with research and facts. It takes a long time to change people's minds, but people do change.
But I can guarantee you this is what's going to happen: the left will totally disregard the fact that they made this man who he is if this was indeed politically motivated, but they will be howl for far stricter gun control no matter what you say about points #2 and #3 in your post. They might as well start a conspiracy where they send believers out to shoot up the public so they can force their policy onto the country
Why bring up conspiracies? Do you really think most people on the left want others to die so they can enact gun control? I don't think they do. People who murder other people to achieve political goals are sociopaths. I don't think that fits most people on either end of the political spectrum. I think they see tragedy after tragedy on the news and hope that getting rid of guns will make it better. I disagree for a variety of reasons, but it's important to understand their concerns. It's also important to entertain the possibility that even though you and I might disagree with them, there is a chance they are right, and we are wrong.
While I don't enjoy envoking godwin, promoting gun control only for your political opponents feels a lot like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here's my counter proposal:
1) Let's respect the 2nd amendment for all of our law-abiding citizens.
2) Let's avoid demonizing political opponents based on the actions of a single individual.
3) Let's try to understand the motivations of the killer.
4) Let's try to think rationally about our policy as a country rather than having knee-jerk reactions based on fear.
Dude, you got trolled. :)
It's not about the answers, it's about the process.
You'd think with their lacklustre performance over the last 5 years they'd play it safe rather than trying to pretend they are Apple.
Get this message through your thick skulls HTC: You are not Apple. Your customers are not Apple customers. The Android world is a very different place and you aren't in any position to cram user-unfriendly features down people's throats. You will fail if only because there is always some other Chinese company ready to give people what they want.
Hi Jim,
Thank you for answering our questions! How do you view top-down product driven development vs bottom-up engineering driven development? Are there situations where one excels vs the other?
Thanks,
Mark
Why would you randomly access the data? Instead of reading the data randomly or in some kind of random-access inducing order, you'd be much better off scanning through the data sequentially by sector or extent to get data in as large of contiguous chunks as possible. Granted with SSD and NVMe drives it doesn't really matter. My ~29K message work inbox shows an average message size of 63KB. At that size solid state storage is already throughput bound rather than IOPS bound. A modern NVMe drive like a P3700 should be able to read that data in it's entirety in about 20 seconds assuming the CPU can keep up. If the FBI is using a reasonably decent distributed storage system that distributes objects across multiple device you can easily do it far faster. ~20GB/s and half a million read IOPS is nothing special for distributed storage systems on NVMe.
If you can't trust this thing to detect that it's attempting to run over something like a child, can you trust it to accurately detect and report that a crime is in progress?
Working and living in those places still puts you ahead in absolute terms if you invest your earnings in non-depreciating assets. The cost of housing skews much higher in those places than typically necessary material goods (cars, home appliances, etc). Assuming you invest your money well in DC, that should put you in a good position to retire in the midwest and/or leave a better inheritance (in absolute terms) for your kids some day should you so choose.
Here in Minnesota we use hair dryers to stay warm!
He is dodging inheritance taxes by transferring money
That is still only an example of following the rules as they currently exist. And it is still not hypocritical to advocate different rules while following those in place.
Wrong. It is absolutely hypocritical to act against one's publicly professed ideals and goals. He says one thing, does something else, its hypocritical. That it is legal or common changes nothing.
No, it's perfectly reasonable to act in one's self interest while believing and advocating that global unrestrained self-interest yields a less than optimal global outcome.