Bruce G. Charlton: These studies need to (but almost never do) control for innate psychological attributes that are known to have a strong and causal effect on earnings: specifically IQ and the personality trait of Conscientiousness. It is IMO almost certain that if IQ and Intelligence were used as controls, there would be no significant effect on earnings of extra years of schooling. In other words, there’s a substantial literature to suggest that most of the differences in earnings that are not...
Phileas Frogg: Jim, You’re right. I was speaking off the cuff about its colloquial use by Marxist, not it’s original formulation, which was poorly articulated on my part. Good catch.
Jim: Phileas Frogg: Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s labor theory of value is not ordinarily understood to posit that, if the same amount of labor is done in double the time, that, therefore, a commodity is worth twice as much, but rather that the value of commodities is based on the quantity of abstract labor embedded in their production. More crudely, a good or service must sell for at least its cost of production or be a loser.
Phileas Frogg: Dan, Next thing you know you’ll be telling me there are elite international p3do rings operating at the highest levels of society, and that the governments of the western world are running cover and interference for them. Of course Nukes are real. And so is Neo-Darwinian macro-evolution.
Dan Kurt: RE: “We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.” Possible reason: explosive nuclear weapons are a hoax.
Phileas Frogg: It’s the Labor theory of value, applied to education. “I increased the amount of time I spent on my education, THUS IT MUST BE WORTH MORE.” They think that by saying horseshit theories with different words, that it makes the spell work better this time. They can’t escape the prison of their Marxist canards. There’s nothing new under the sun.
Bob Sykes: This needs to be done by discipline. I suspect engineering, prelaw, et al. show good ROIs, whereas fakes like gender studies show strongly negative ROIs at every year of study.
T. Beholder: Trump is a guy who largely agrees with leftist critiques of the mythos of American power as a force for good in the world That’s not quite «A-anyone who does not accept Franklin Delano Roosevelt as their Lord and Saviour is a leftist!», but not very far. The space between neocon choir kids and tumblrinas never was a wide uncrossable chasm both of these pretend it is.
T. Beholder: (That the Geneva Protocol of 1925 outlawed chemical agents in war and was signed by all the European participants in World War II does not itself explain the non-use of gas; it only provided an agreement that both sides could keep if they chose to, under pain of reciprocity.) Not only. Past the very start, there were simple practical limitations. Chemical weapons in conventional warfare as understood at the time were both very limited and very circumstantial. 1. The point of using chemical...
T. Beholder: But if war tends to result from a process, a dynamic process in which both sides get more and more deeply involved At which point it matters whether at least one side sees the whole “nuclear escalation” idea as simply nonsensical. For decades, Western military theorists have unanimously asserted that any nuclear war would begin with a first stage during which only conventional weapons would be used. Then, after a certain period, each side would begin, uncertainly and irresolutely at first,...
T. Beholder: Half a century of Indian fighting in the West left us a legacy of cavalry tactics; but it is hard to find a serious treatise on American strategy against the Indians or Indian strategy against the whites. The most obvious reason is that such a treatise is quite impossible to write without blatantly contradicting the Official Truth. Not a unique situation. USSR solved a similar problem via having large body of secret military literature. Of course, as much as discovering the very existence of...
T. Beholder: Back from 1930s, as Garet Garrett noted in The Revolution Was. https://mises.org/mises- daily/revolution-was Bruce says: Yes, the class struggle of 2026 is between financial oligarchs and pork barrel oligarchs. But then, the “financial” sector is in large part built in or around banks. Which are Bagehotian banks, thus by now all in fact are state banks — as Moldbug put it, the “lender of last resort” might as well be the lender of first resort, they are but middlemen between the client and...
bruce: Venezuela and Cuba are hostile regimes acting against the US. Yglesias has no loyalty to the US, so he considers US responses ‘unprovoked’ .
Bob Sykes: Why does Yglesias think the war in Iraq was a success? The current government only exists because Turkish and American troops occupy key areas of the country. The “government” we keep in power would immediately disappear if we left, and it would be replaced by people hostile to us. Even it has repeatedly voted to demand we and the Turks leave. And no one in Iraq, other than the Kurdish radicals recognizes the legitimacy of the Kurdish semiautonomous region. There will be a civil war in Iraq...
Jacob G.: Behind the scenes both China and the US are working to make reunification more palatable. The main effort is to move the chip foundries to the US or to the mainland. With them gone the strategic import of Taiwan is greatly reduced. My impression is that most Taiwanese are not at all interested in a Ukraine style defense of their island and will not sacrifice much to prevent annexation. But I suppose that was true of Ukraine in 2014, and that changed quickly. China’s best bet is something...
Phileas Frogg: If China is forced into a large military action, that alone SHOULD constitute a victory for the US, but only if our leadership is operating with the understanding that unification isn’t a matter of, “if,” but of, “when,” and our best bet is to simply exact the greatest amount of effort and treasure from them for their trouble. As it stands I fully expect US to fumble this and try to actually stop it, an even more idiotic Ukraine.
Bob Sykes: The Taiwan independence party lost many seats in parliament, and it is now a minority party, although it does control the Presidency. A substantial part of the Taiwan population is Han Chinese, and many of them, plus other ethnicities, favor reunification with China, although not necessarily under communist control. The Kuomintang is still a major political patty there. Taiwans’s economy is also heavily integrated with China’s, and many Taiwanese work on the mainland. The point is that any...
McChuck: China already smuggles masses of people to the USA in containers. There is a lot of tourism between China and Taiwan. If they wanted to, China could have hundreds of boots on the ground as “tourists”, and they’d just have to go to the ports to pick up their weapons. Then they unlock the shipping containers containing thousands of their compatriots, along with their supplies. How many rifles can you pack in a shipping container? How many drones? How many motorcycles?
Gaikokumaniakku: I don’t think Whitman claims D&D successfully won all of its players for life, I think Whitman is holding that up as an ideal. I think a small number of highly visible TTRPG evangelists have latched onto TTRPGs for life: Seth Skorkowsky and Professor Dungeon Master might be examples. Those evangelists will not stop even if TSR or WotC or Hasbro goes bankrupt: even if the rules were not available in print, they would vanity-publish them, or pirate them, or something. With that...
Gaikokumaniakku: Any seaborne invasion would be very difficult for the first 100 hours. Blockade has a much better chance of getting Communists what they want. Recently, Xi Jinping has overseen a significant purge of senior military leaders, including “investigations 221; of Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Liu Zhenli, chief of staff of the Central Military Commission’s Joint Staff Department. Some fear that Xi wants to get young, fanatical, stupid warfighters...