They picked... And they also saw who was weak... Some other guys... One of those traditions lasted a few thousand years in the west...
That's an argument based on cultural evolution, the implication being that if we don't impose these traditions, we will die out as a society.
The traditionalist guys wanted the young folks... They were sometimes mean to folks who wouldn't go along with that, as you say.
That means they were traditionalist totalitarians, as opposed to traditionalist classical liberals who limit themselves to teaching their own kids and don't otherwise impose their views on "the young folks" in general.
There's no tribe across the river any more, but totalitarians threaten us all.
Well, that's because totalitarian thinking is pervasive among both the left and the right; it's so pervasive that you don't even perceive it as a distinct viewpoint but think that it's just "tradition".
The fact that a behavior exists isn't an argument for it.
I'm not making an argument for anything. You made an argument based on cultural evolution about homosexuality and that argument doesn't work.
It's merely an explanation of how traditional relationships became a tradition.
Yes, and your explanation is wrong. Cultural evolution is not necessary to explain traditional family structures; traditional family structures and pair bonding are biologically natural for the majority of humans. The only way to destroy traditional families we have ever found is to subsidize single motherhood; stop that, and most people go back to living in traditional families. Homosexuality is a red herring when it comes to the destruction of the traditional family.
I’d say totalitarianism is more of a threat than non-family-oriented behavior these days.
Whether it's left-wing authoritarians or right-wing authoritarians, they all want to tell people how to live their lives and they all say "we need to force you at gunpoint to do something" because of "what's best for society" or "what's best for you even if you don't know it".
but I don't think you're considering the consequences of evangelical belief systems. God punishes the faithful for the sins of the heretic
That's a fringe belief that is neither representative of Christianity or even evangelical Christianity.
Famous examples include Sodom & Gomorrah and the Flood, but there are plenty other's in the bible.
I don't recall any faithful being punished in either of those stories; in fact, God saved the faithful. More importantly, in Christianity, God functions in the role of "inevitable consequences" and "impartial judge". So what those stories actually mean is that if your society gives in to violence, rape, and corruption, then your society will inevitably fail and there is nothing you can do about it. And those stories don't say that the solution is for the faithful to impose their will on the corrupt (as you and Pat Robertson suggest), they say instead that the faithful should take responsibility for themselves and their families, pack up, and leave.
You ended your post worried that a progressive would punish you for not towing their "party line".... A conservative, OTOH, is also likely to be an evangelical (again, we're talking likelihood) and they _will_ punish you for your sexual orientation.
I'm not "worrying" about it, I'm relating my experience. I have never had a Christian conservative be mean to me or my partner because of our sexual orientation; I have frequently encountered progressives who became downright nasty and hostile for simply stating my (classically liberal) political beliefs.
I know quite a lot of people who were happily fucking all over the place yet have quite the problem with gay people, specifically not just gay sex but any signs of homosexual attraction (e.g. men holding hands).
Oh, you're absolutely right: fascists, socialists and communists used to consider homosexuality to be a symptom of bourgeois Western decadence, while happily fucking around like crazed bunnies among themselves.
Right... A simple thought experiment disproves this claim. Trump supporters and Evangelicals are generally ambivalent about Trump porking porn stars on the side or engaging in serial adultery.
What makes you think they are "ambivalent"?
The vast majority of Americans considers cheating on one's spouse to be immoral. So, given the choices in the presidential race, choosing a moral leader was simply not in the cards.
Furthermore, people (in particular Christians) allow for the possibility of change and redemption. Trump appears to be a good husband and father these days, which makes what he did a decade ago irrelevant.
It's hard to pass down traditions to people who never exist.
And yet, homosexuality, promiscuity, and extramarital sex have persisted for many millions of years of mammalian, primate, and human evolution. Obviously, if those traits were so harmful or incompatible with successful societies, they would have been eliminated long ago.
As I was saying, I'm sympathetic to the idea that traditional marriage is generally a good thing. However, the conservative reasoning you exhibit is as brain-dead and authoritarian as that of totalitarian leftists.
They picked the one they thought would work out the best, taught it to their children, and it became a tradition.
And it's a good tradition. What isn't good, however, is when tradition becomes dogma or is imposed through government authority.
with mostly similar traditions elsewhere in almost every non-Western culture for the same time period or longer
What differs greatly among cultures, however, is how they deal with choice. In a free society, what traditions you follow ought to be up to you; government shouldn't interfere, but it also shouldn't subsidize. Christian conservative politicians want to interfere with sexual behavior they don't like and subsidize traditional marriage. Progressives want to interfere with "irrational" religion and subsidize irresponsible sexual behavior. Both are simply variants of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
In a free society, you make your choices and you live with the consequences. You can sleep around, but you pay for the STDs and the illegitimate children yourself. You can try to turn yourself straight and lie to your wife, but you need to deal with the damage that does to your wife and your kids. Etc.
Headphone connectors are subject to a lot of mechanical forces; that's what they are designed for: they are strong, springy, and very simple mechanically.
Lightning and USB-C connectors are not designed to have something plugged into that has a lot of forces applied to them. I've gone through two of these headphones so far, and the connectors keep failing, and I suspect the connector inside the phone is not going to survive long either.
The only realistic choice with the new headphones is to use Bluetooth. Unfortunately, Bluetooth has its own problems with connectivity, security, quality, and latency.
can simply plug their headphones into the little adapter that comes with every iPhone
A connector that's designed for connecting your phone for charging and data exchange turns out not to be so good for connecting headsets: the requirements are quite different.
I never said that employers weren't stupid and acting against their own interest.
No, you said that employees were stupid if they worked 60h/week.
If they experience no stress, they are probably anhedonic or suffering from some other medical condition. They definitely experience stress if they are capable of healthy range of feelings and emotions.
Typical of leftist attitudes: when people say that they'd like to make their own choices, you first call them stupid and then you call them crazy.
There are still limits, but they would fall outside of norms
Yes, imagine that! People who make unusual amounts money have an unusual tolerance for stress and long work hours and have an unusual willingness to sacrifice health and personal comfort for their careers. And you're so consumed by your greed and envy that instead of accepting their choices and being happy for them that their sacrifices pay off, you declare them crazy. Because that's the kind of guy you are.
Putting in someone whose primary qualifications are political rather than scientific is very suboptimal;
I think having good political and management qualifications is far more important than having scientific qualifications when leading large teams of scientists.
NASA has suffered enough the last few years due to congressional politics and politics dictating goals rather than science and engineering
And a politician and manager is far more likely to be able get the scientists at NASA what they need than a scientist in a suit. That's because a politician and manager can listen to the people who work for them and communicate their needs to Congress. And he can do that without letting his own scientific biases and preferences influence his actions.
Agreed, but they think that people choose to be straight or gay, in spite of the contradictory evidence.
You are misrepresenting their position. They don't think that "being gay" is immoral, they think that people choose to have gay sex and they consider that choice to be immoral; in Christianity, morality is about the choices you make and the actions you take.
And they generally aren't saying that that choice should be made illegal, they are saying that it shouldn't be promoted or subsidized or encouraged by government.
The problem is that it is plain stupid to consider things people are born with "immoral".
Conservative Christians don't consider "being gay" immoral, they consider gay sex, and in particular promiscuous gay sex, immoral. You aren't born having gay sex. Furthermore, they nature of their objection to gay sex has little to do with sexual orientation, and more with the fact that they believe that people ought to have sex only inside a heterosexual marriage; so they object to pre- and extramarital sex as much as they do to gay sex.
it's therefore a good indication of being totally incompetent in leading people that do science, which is all about rationality
And the beliefs of conservative Christians contradict rationality... how? What rational argument can you make that extramarital sex is not immoral? I happen to disagree with the views of conservative Christians (I think some extramarital sex is moral), but that's a moral judgment, not a rational belief.
Furthermore, I think you are projecting your own behavioral patterns onto others. While it is certainly true that a progressive managers will frequently act with intolerance and hatred towards employees holding what they consider "immoral beliefs" (e.g., conservative, libertarian, Christian beliefs), the reverse isn't true. Christians generally believe that people can be saved and redeemed from their immoral actions through reasoned argument and teaching.
As a classically liberal gay man, I'd rather work for a Christian manager than for a progressive manager; progressive managers make your life a living hell if you don't agree with their party line.
Bridenstine ran a planetarium once, and peddled a debunked argument made by climate change skeptics, claiming that global temperatures "stopped rising 10 years ago." He said "the people of Oklahoma are ready to accept" an apology from then-President Barack Obama for what Bridenstine called a "gross misallocation" of funds for climate change research instead of weather forecasting. In further news, our rockets will now be coal powered, and gay people aren't allowed in space.
Looks like Slashdot has gone from "News for Nerds" to yellowpress-style hit pieces.
What won't be so good is that for percentage point that the middle class population drops, taxes or deficits will go up several percentage points. And if you own a home, improvements in traffic go along with substantial drops in the value of your home.
The end of the question is: if you have a median income of 30 bakers and I have one, what would it mean to compare the two?
No, the question we are discussing is: if you have the median income of several hundred people working around 60h/week and you have the median income of several hundred people working around 40h/week, how do their hourly wages compare? And dividing the median income by the hours worked answers that question.
Would you have a second paper to support your "idea"?:D
Very good that you put "idea" in quotes there, because it's not an "idea", it's a simple mathematical fact. It's in fact the kind of math that is part of basic computer science education both in the US and in Europe. Which makes it surprising that you are having such a hard time with it.
Right, they're leaving because of progressive policies. Absurdly gigantic housing cost and traffic nightmares (=lots of time wasted) can't possibly have anything to do with it.
Not really, foreign immigration makes up for the Americans that can't cut it in CA and leave for red states:D
With one of the highest rates of income inequality and poverty in the nation, it looks like California is becoming a state of ultra-wealthy tech overlords and their foreign slave labor. Yeah, anybody with a choice doesn't want to be part of such a dysfunctional social structure. And the irony is that these people still blame conservatives for the massive inequality, racism, and poverty in California.
Very smart and capable people get dumb and make silly mistakes after 13 hours
Very smart people are still smarter than average even after losing a dozen IQ points to fatigue.
So many times, long hours are wasted and the next morning after a good rest, someone comes up with the solution that solves the problem.
What makes you think those long hours are wasted? Intense concentration likely helps you find the solution overnight.
In any case, here is an idea: why not just trust that individuals and their employers know best how they carry out their work? Why not trust that they can negotiate the best conditions for work, vacation, and salary between them? Why do people constantly feel like they need to poke their noses into other people's life and work arrangements?
Nor is that the only problem stemming from private discrimination; I included it as an obvious example.
We're discussing whether private or government discrimination causes more harm. From personal experience as an oppressed gay male immigrant, I have told you that in my experience, government discrimination is far worse. You have disputed that but so far not made a rational argument to support that. It's not sufficient to list examples of private discrimination to establish your claim.
I'm well aware that unions were racist at that time period. Pretty much everyone was.
No, that's absolutely not true. Large numbers of Republicans, classical liberals, and Christians strongly believed in equal rights and equality of all humans at the same time as Democrats and progressives were pursuing their racist and authoritarian policies.
You seem keen to see racism among unions, Democrats, and progressives, but you don't seem to see it among Republicans, conservatives, etc. Given the period of history we're considering, that's prejudiced partial blindness.
You keep mixing up public policy and private beliefs. You're saying the racially discriminatory policies that Democrats and progressives ran on are balanced out by the racist beliefs you suspect everybody had. But that's absolutely wrong. There is a big difference for the government to pass laws against mixed marriages or to pass laws mandating discrimination on the one hand, and private disapproval or discrimination on the other hand. One of the most important differences is that the market can alleviate and eliminate private discrimination, but government mandated discrimination cannot be legally avoided by anyone.
You seem blind to the documented realities of the Southern Strategy.
Documented where? Where is the evidence that Republicans explicitly appealed to racism in order to swell their ranks in the South? And if that was the strategy, it didn't work: Republicans only overtook Democrats in the South decades later. And the reason for that is the opposite of what you believe: it's not that Republicans attracted a large pool of racist Southern whites from the Democrats, it's that racism had diminished in the South to the point that most whites now felt comfortable voting for Republicans.
Hispanics tend to be religious conservatives. They vote Democrat. Ever wonder why? It's because they don't feel welcome in the Republican party, which is basically the white Christian party.
The Republican party is indeed largely a party of "white Christians"; that's because white Christians tend to do the things that make you succeed in society: they finish high school, get married, raise kids in a two parent household, and save money for the future. If you do those things, you'll demonstrably succeed in the US regardless of race. And if you do those things, you are welcome in the Republican party, regardless of race. But the illegitimacy rate is 75% among blacks and 50% among Hispanics (hence not religious conservatives), compared to 30% among whites, which is why we have these racial disparities both in outcomes and among Republican voters. And it's Democratic and progressive policies that have destroyed the black family, caused a massive rise in crime, and massive intergenerational welfare dependency.
Pretty much all [igda.org] studies [iza.org] done on overtime [inc.com] and productivity. which is a big part of why the overtime rules were allowed to exist in the first place.
Those articles take original results out of context. Overtime rules don't apply to most higher earners, which by your own reasoning tells you that those results only apply to a subset of workers, namely those doing repetitive and boring tasks.
True, but damage to your brain and heart, which overtime creates, should matter to you,
Plenty of artists, scientists, engineers, musicians, and others experience no stress from their work, and spending time on their work is the most valuable thing they can do with their time. I'm sorry if your job is so dull and boring that you don't get that.
In any case, this is a strawman you put up anyway; my original point remains, namely that those extra paid vacation days, when translated into hours worked per week or hourly wage, make very little difference. So, if you desire extra vacation days, take unpaid vacations.
Slashdot Mirror
In your words:
That's an argument based on cultural evolution, the implication being that if we don't impose these traditions, we will die out as a society.
That means they were traditionalist totalitarians, as opposed to traditionalist classical liberals who limit themselves to teaching their own kids and don't otherwise impose their views on "the young folks" in general.
Well, that's because totalitarian thinking is pervasive among both the left and the right; it's so pervasive that you don't even perceive it as a distinct viewpoint but think that it's just "tradition".
I'm not making an argument for anything. You made an argument based on cultural evolution about homosexuality and that argument doesn't work.
Yes, and your explanation is wrong. Cultural evolution is not necessary to explain traditional family structures; traditional family structures and pair bonding are biologically natural for the majority of humans. The only way to destroy traditional families we have ever found is to subsidize single motherhood; stop that, and most people go back to living in traditional families. Homosexuality is a red herring when it comes to the destruction of the traditional family.
Whether it's left-wing authoritarians or right-wing authoritarians, they all want to tell people how to live their lives and they all say "we need to force you at gunpoint to do something" because of "what's best for society" or "what's best for you even if you don't know it".
That's a fringe belief that is neither representative of Christianity or even evangelical Christianity.
I don't recall any faithful being punished in either of those stories; in fact, God saved the faithful. More importantly, in Christianity, God functions in the role of "inevitable consequences" and "impartial judge". So what those stories actually mean is that if your society gives in to violence, rape, and corruption, then your society will inevitably fail and there is nothing you can do about it. And those stories don't say that the solution is for the faithful to impose their will on the corrupt (as you and Pat Robertson suggest), they say instead that the faithful should take responsibility for themselves and their families, pack up, and leave.
I'm not "worrying" about it, I'm relating my experience. I have never had a Christian conservative be mean to me or my partner because of our sexual orientation; I have frequently encountered progressives who became downright nasty and hostile for simply stating my (classically liberal) political beliefs.
Oh, you're absolutely right: fascists, socialists and communists used to consider homosexuality to be a symptom of bourgeois Western decadence, while happily fucking around like crazed bunnies among themselves.
What makes you think they are "ambivalent"?
The vast majority of Americans considers cheating on one's spouse to be immoral. So, given the choices in the presidential race, choosing a moral leader was simply not in the cards.
Furthermore, people (in particular Christians) allow for the possibility of change and redemption. Trump appears to be a good husband and father these days, which makes what he did a decade ago irrelevant.
And yet, homosexuality, promiscuity, and extramarital sex have persisted for many millions of years of mammalian, primate, and human evolution. Obviously, if those traits were so harmful or incompatible with successful societies, they would have been eliminated long ago.
As I was saying, I'm sympathetic to the idea that traditional marriage is generally a good thing. However, the conservative reasoning you exhibit is as brain-dead and authoritarian as that of totalitarian leftists.
Are you so confused by scientism that you can't follow a simple rational argument anymore without a citation?
And it's a good tradition. What isn't good, however, is when tradition becomes dogma or is imposed through government authority.
What differs greatly among cultures, however, is how they deal with choice. In a free society, what traditions you follow ought to be up to you; government shouldn't interfere, but it also shouldn't subsidize. Christian conservative politicians want to interfere with sexual behavior they don't like and subsidize traditional marriage. Progressives want to interfere with "irrational" religion and subsidize irresponsible sexual behavior. Both are simply variants of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
In a free society, you make your choices and you live with the consequences. You can sleep around, but you pay for the STDs and the illegitimate children yourself. You can try to turn yourself straight and lie to your wife, but you need to deal with the damage that does to your wife and your kids. Etc.
Headphone connectors are subject to a lot of mechanical forces; that's what they are designed for: they are strong, springy, and very simple mechanically.
Lightning and USB-C connectors are not designed to have something plugged into that has a lot of forces applied to them. I've gone through two of these headphones so far, and the connectors keep failing, and I suspect the connector inside the phone is not going to survive long either.
The only realistic choice with the new headphones is to use Bluetooth. Unfortunately, Bluetooth has its own problems with connectivity, security, quality, and latency.
A connector that's designed for connecting your phone for charging and data exchange turns out not to be so good for connecting headsets: the requirements are quite different.
No, you said that employees were stupid if they worked 60h/week.
Typical of leftist attitudes: when people say that they'd like to make their own choices, you first call them stupid and then you call them crazy.
Yes, imagine that! People who make unusual amounts money have an unusual tolerance for stress and long work hours and have an unusual willingness to sacrifice health and personal comfort for their careers. And you're so consumed by your greed and envy that instead of accepting their choices and being happy for them that their sacrifices pay off, you declare them crazy. Because that's the kind of guy you are.
I think having good political and management qualifications is far more important than having scientific qualifications when leading large teams of scientists.
And a politician and manager is far more likely to be able get the scientists at NASA what they need than a scientist in a suit. That's because a politician and manager can listen to the people who work for them and communicate their needs to Congress. And he can do that without letting his own scientific biases and preferences influence his actions.
You are misrepresenting their position. They don't think that "being gay" is immoral, they think that people choose to have gay sex and they consider that choice to be immoral; in Christianity, morality is about the choices you make and the actions you take.
And they generally aren't saying that that choice should be made illegal, they are saying that it shouldn't be promoted or subsidized or encouraged by government.
Conservative Christians don't consider "being gay" immoral, they consider gay sex, and in particular promiscuous gay sex, immoral. You aren't born having gay sex. Furthermore, they nature of their objection to gay sex has little to do with sexual orientation, and more with the fact that they believe that people ought to have sex only inside a heterosexual marriage; so they object to pre- and extramarital sex as much as they do to gay sex.
And the beliefs of conservative Christians contradict rationality... how? What rational argument can you make that extramarital sex is not immoral? I happen to disagree with the views of conservative Christians (I think some extramarital sex is moral), but that's a moral judgment, not a rational belief.
Furthermore, I think you are projecting your own behavioral patterns onto others. While it is certainly true that a progressive managers will frequently act with intolerance and hatred towards employees holding what they consider "immoral beliefs" (e.g., conservative, libertarian, Christian beliefs), the reverse isn't true. Christians generally believe that people can be saved and redeemed from their immoral actions through reasoned argument and teaching.
As a classically liberal gay man, I'd rather work for a Christian manager than for a progressive manager; progressive managers make your life a living hell if you don't agree with their party line.
Looks like Slashdot has gone from "News for Nerds" to yellowpress-style hit pieces.
What won't be so good is that for percentage point that the middle class population drops, taxes or deficits will go up several percentage points. And if you own a home, improvements in traffic go along with substantial drops in the value of your home.
No, the question we are discussing is: if you have the median income of several hundred people working around 60h/week and you have the median income of several hundred people working around 40h/week, how do their hourly wages compare? And dividing the median income by the hours worked answers that question.
Very good that you put "idea" in quotes there, because it's not an "idea", it's a simple mathematical fact. It's in fact the kind of math that is part of basic computer science education both in the US and in Europe. Which makes it surprising that you are having such a hard time with it.
The latter are consequences of the former.
With one of the highest rates of income inequality and poverty in the nation, it looks like California is becoming a state of ultra-wealthy tech overlords and their foreign slave labor. Yeah, anybody with a choice doesn't want to be part of such a dysfunctional social structure. And the irony is that these people still blame conservatives for the massive inequality, racism, and poverty in California.
And in other news, California is experiencing an exodus. And it's mostly the middle class that's fleeing progressive California.
Very smart people are still smarter than average even after losing a dozen IQ points to fatigue.
What makes you think those long hours are wasted? Intense concentration likely helps you find the solution overnight.
In any case, here is an idea: why not just trust that individuals and their employers know best how they carry out their work? Why not trust that they can negotiate the best conditions for work, vacation, and salary between them? Why do people constantly feel like they need to poke their noses into other people's life and work arrangements?
Introductory statistics
You have proven conclusively that you don't.
We're discussing whether private or government discrimination causes more harm. From personal experience as an oppressed gay male immigrant, I have told you that in my experience, government discrimination is far worse. You have disputed that but so far not made a rational argument to support that. It's not sufficient to list examples of private discrimination to establish your claim.
No, that's absolutely not true. Large numbers of Republicans, classical liberals, and Christians strongly believed in equal rights and equality of all humans at the same time as Democrats and progressives were pursuing their racist and authoritarian policies.
You keep mixing up public policy and private beliefs. You're saying the racially discriminatory policies that Democrats and progressives ran on are balanced out by the racist beliefs you suspect everybody had. But that's absolutely wrong. There is a big difference for the government to pass laws against mixed marriages or to pass laws mandating discrimination on the one hand, and private disapproval or discrimination on the other hand. One of the most important differences is that the market can alleviate and eliminate private discrimination, but government mandated discrimination cannot be legally avoided by anyone.
Documented where? Where is the evidence that Republicans explicitly appealed to racism in order to swell their ranks in the South? And if that was the strategy, it didn't work: Republicans only overtook Democrats in the South decades later. And the reason for that is the opposite of what you believe: it's not that Republicans attracted a large pool of racist Southern whites from the Democrats, it's that racism had diminished in the South to the point that most whites now felt comfortable voting for Republicans.
The Republican party is indeed largely a party of "white Christians"; that's because white Christians tend to do the things that make you succeed in society: they finish high school, get married, raise kids in a two parent household, and save money for the future. If you do those things, you'll demonstrably succeed in the US regardless of race. And if you do those things, you are welcome in the Republican party, regardless of race. But the illegitimacy rate is 75% among blacks and 50% among Hispanics (hence not religious conservatives), compared to 30% among whites, which is why we have these racial disparities both in outcomes and among Republican voters. And it's Democratic and progressive policies that have destroyed the black family, caused a massive rise in crime, and massive intergenerational welfare dependency.
Those articles take original results out of context. Overtime rules don't apply to most higher earners, which by your own reasoning tells you that those results only apply to a subset of workers, namely those doing repetitive and boring tasks.
Plenty of artists, scientists, engineers, musicians, and others experience no stress from their work, and spending time on their work is the most valuable thing they can do with their time. I'm sorry if your job is so dull and boring that you don't get that.
In any case, this is a strawman you put up anyway; my original point remains, namely that those extra paid vacation days, when translated into hours worked per week or hourly wage, make very little difference. So, if you desire extra vacation days, take unpaid vacations.
The median of a sample from a population is normally distributed around the true median of the population, just like the estimator for the mean.
I'm not sure what's more impressive: your mathematical illiteracy, or the assertiveness with which you display it.