simplestats (u/simplestats)

simplestats commented on Why Ireland's housing bubble burst worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/salonium_

ashtonkem · 4 years ago

I think you're drastically underestimating how many people emigrate to America. As of 2018 44 million Americans were born in another country and immigrated here[0], representing one fifth of the world's immigrants. As a percentage of the US' population (13.7), this is very close to the all time high of 14.8% in 1890. Our immigration wave right now is damn close to the peaks of the Ellis Island period of Italian and Irish immigration in the late 1900s. And that's as a percent of the current population, by total numbers this is the biggest wave ever.

Japan is trying to increase its immigration for the same reasons I mentioned, and they're struggling for the reasons you mentioned. Only 2% of their population is foreign born[1], which is up from past figures, but still a drop in the bucket compared to the US system.

You're totally right that there's going to be political and cultural issues over immigration, there always is. But America has the political and social institutions necessary to maintain a high level of immigration over long periods of time, which can help damped the blow of fertility change even if it's insufficient to fully reverse the trend.

0 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...

1 - https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e025d47d-en/index.html?i...

simplestats · 4 years ago

Birth rates are predicted to keep going down though, meaning the supply of immigrants will dry up anyway.

simplestats commented on Why Ireland's housing bubble burst worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/salonium_

greesil · 4 years ago

It's like this guy has never heard of a speculative bubble, and sets up a series of straw men to nock down instead. Even though "bubble" is in the title.

Edit: oh I get it, his point is that yes there was a bubble, and that's why prices went up. Without extra supply it would have been worse. I think that's putting the horse before the cart, because without the bubble the extra supply wouldn't have been built.

This post is all over the place.

simplestats · 4 years ago

Looks like the links in the second paragraph are examples or perhaps origins of the myths he is attacking.

The topic is apparently his phd thesis.

simplestats commented on FalsiScan: Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned gitlab.com/edouardklein/f... · Posted by u/tercio

scarby2 · 4 years ago

> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, it's just bad design.

We need people to feel pressured into doing shitty jobs, if the poor get less poor maybe they won't flip burgers for minimum wage.

simplestats · 4 years ago

You need ID to get that job flipping burgers. Two forms of it for the I-9. Though not proof of residency perhaps.

Once you have the job you can use the paycheck as proof of residency.

simplestats commented on A $3B bet on finding the fountain of youth economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/axiomdata316

godelski · 4 years ago

Definitely this. What people don't get is that an optimal solution in insurance is to have everyone healthy. If everyone is healthy then there's no one drawing money from the pool and the insurance company is only collecting money.

Of course the other optimization is forcing everyone to have insurance when healthy and kicking them off when they get sick.

simplestats · 4 years ago

They have actuaries to make sure they get their profit margin either way. Healthy insurance customers just make sick insurance customers happier since the price goes down.

simplestats commented on A $3B bet on finding the fountain of youth economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/axiomdata316

orangecat · 4 years ago

Does anyone understand the underlying economics or motivations?

How much would you pay for a treatment to prevent or repair the negative effects of aging? For me the answer is "well over 100% of my net worth".

simplestats · 4 years ago

Yeah but I'm guessing you wouldn't be willing to pay them that now.

Their point was the high risk versus the high reward. Even if investors gave such money to thousands of longevity startups, would they produce something that makes all the investing pay off better than what they sunk into them? (without pivoting to something other than longevity).

simplestats commented on I’m a public school teacher – the kids aren’t alright bariweiss.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/imgabe

throwaway6734 · 4 years ago

Twitter is not real life.

simplestats · 4 years ago

It's junior high. But with grown adults doing the teasing and bullying.

simplestats commented on What it means to teach gifted learners well nagc.org/resources-public... · Posted by u/rahimnathwani

PebblesRox · 4 years ago

I realized recently that some people have a view of education that is much more competition-oriented than my default worldview. E.g. the set of parents who want to make sure their kids do well relative to all the other kids in order to have a higher chance of success in the competitions later on in life (college, jobs, social status, wealth).

Fairness (in the sense of trying to create a level playing field and make sure nobody has unfair advantages) is important to the extent that something is a competition.

This means people who see education as competition will care about fairness - either they will want things to be truly fair or they will want any unfairness to be in their favor.

So from this point of view, special classes for kids who are already doing better can be seen as an unfair advantage (especially because there's plenty of real bias involved in determining which kids actually end up on those classes).

I think we need to fix the biased selection process and make it more possible for more kids to benefit from advanced learning opportunities, especially kids whose parents don't have the resources to take them out of public school to do something more individualized.

simplestats · 4 years ago

If you put slower kids into (legitimately) accelerated programs they just get left behind and do even worse. When you separate children into classes that proceed at different rates based on how fast they learn, everyone is actually getting their own "special classes".

Meanwhile if you try to handicap parents who care, to bring their children to the level of parents who don't care, they just take their children out of the system and put them in private schools. Except of course for the poor gifted kids stuck in public school, ironically, who you wanted to help.

simplestats commented on Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’ al.com/news/2022/01/polic... · Posted by u/ourmandave

pc86 · 4 years ago

You need fines, because some people don't care about anything else. You can set up a system of just points, with no fine, and people will just drive with revoked licenses. I don't know about you but my I am very rarely pulled over and there are several stretches of my life where you could have revoked my license for a year, or five, and I could have kept driving without a problem.

simplestats · 4 years ago

Maybe it's just your points idea that's not very good. If you were punished with traffic school and just ignored it they can still increase penalities and eventually come arrest you. Unless your plan involves hiding out in the mountains somewhere or something.

Laws aren't only for punishing people who have something to seize. How else do we deal with people who have no money but still commit minor infractions?

simplestats commented on Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’ al.com/news/2022/01/polic... · Posted by u/ourmandave

pishpash · 4 years ago

As the top parent says, it should not go to any special group, neither victims nor transit, as anything like that sets up perverse incentives. All fines should be revenue neutral, because the only thing they should accomplish is to be a disincentive for some behavior, not any other side effects.

simplestats · 4 years ago

Just eliminate fines altogether and give some more appropriate punishment like traffic school (which must also be free...)

simplestats commented on What it means to teach gifted learners well nagc.org/resources-public... · Posted by u/rahimnathwani

avar · 4 years ago

Why would having "gifted" classes detract from other students? In the case of OP's daughter giving her permission to simply skip math class and self-tutor in an empty classroom (by e.g. self-studying a more advanced textbook) would probably be an improvement over having to sit through a class that's below her level.

Once you do that less "privileged" students also benefit, since the teaching resources being spent on that bored student will be freed up to focus on the smaller class of students that need more assistance.

I don't see why it's a given that this is guaranteed to result in worse outcomes by any measure, even "woke" ones that might consider it a loss if OP's daughter pulls ahead further from the median grade, even if the median also goes up as a result of better spent teaching resources.

simplestats · 4 years ago

I think the poster was generally referring to the fact that students who progress at a faster rate will have an advantage by simple virtue of having covered more material in school. They will be more preferred by colleges which leads to being more preferred for jobs. Basically a "rich get richer" effect.

Of course the idea that this is a bad thing (as opposed to being exactly how a merit-based system is supposed to work) is based on presupposing that higher performance was the result of unfair discrimination in the first place.