An excerpt from the book subtitled "A New History of British India" from a review: "This short charge sheet differs from the extensive accusations made by modern left-leaning historians, who recognize economic exploitation but choose instead to emphasize cultural issues, especially the bureaucratization of Indian society and the introduction of capitalist norms. This is hardly fair, because the progressive middle classes in India would have done broadly the same things if they could. Almost nothing of the imperial administrative agenda was undone in independent India."
"girls are consistently preferred to boys, and Caucasians and Hispanics are consistently preferred to African-Americans. In monetary terms, the increase in desirability of a girl relative to a boy can be compensated by a decrease of approximately
$19, 500 in adoption finalization costs. Similarly, the increase in desirability of a non-African-American baby with respect to an African-American baby (both of unknown gender) is equivalent to a decrease of at least $38, 000 in adoption finalization cost." I've mentioned this before regarding abortion, but evidence for sex-selection out of certain sub-communities seems opposite to what you often find asserted.
"the willingness to expose your wounds is another sign of privilege. Those for whom injury has a use-value will display their injuries; those for whom woundedness is a survival risk, won’t. As a consequence, middle-class grievances now drown out lower class pain. This is why the wounded lower classes come to embrace conservative discourses that ridicule middle-class anguish. Those who cannot afford to see themselves as disadvantaged are instinctively repulsed by those who harp on about disadvantage. ... I grew up in violent environments. For people like me, ‘symbolic violence’ or ‘offensive speech’ were, if anything, a benign alternative to real violence and real hate. It was often registered as a joke—or yes, banter—because we understood its relative harmlessness."
This is from Dan Gardner's Don't Trust The Trust Decline, talking about how others may make incorrect assumptions about the world by making assumptions from watching American-focused media:
I’m very confident that most people assume that black Britons also have shorter life expectancies than white Britons. They don’t. In fact, the average black Briton from the Caribbean lives a little longer than the average white Briton, and the average black Briton from Africa has a much longer life expectancy — longer even than the life expectancy in Japan, which is among the world’s highest. (Similarly, all-cause mortality is lower among black Canadians than white Canadians. I doubt I’ll ever read that in the Toronto Star, although I will read headlines like this.)
"high performers benefited by just over 20% from AI advice, whereas low performers did roughly 10% worse with AI assistance. Exploratory analysis of the WhatsApp interaction logs shows that both groups sought the AI mentor’s advice, but that low performers did worse because they sought help on much more challenging business tasks."
"And yet, the Finns, mounting a defense on skis, managed for an astonishing time to hold off Soviet forces. They also showed great ingenuity—for instance, posting portraits of Stalin on targets so no Soviet soldier would dare shoot at it."
"Climate change will have some positive impacts on human health. There are likely to be reductions in cold-related mortality and morbidity in high-income populations. ... The effect of cold temperatures is
therefore not modelled in this assessment."
Milei's 2024 Davos talk, directly translated to English by AI (by heygen), in his own accent. Better than the dubbed version imo. pic.twitter.com/8OAGELuqxl
Will also be interesting to see what happens to Argentina in the wake of Milei's election as president as he's quite a change from the country's previous government given his generally libertarian positions and has tried to make some very-aggressive changes.
(Overall I'm probably a little less libertarian than Milei but suspect the changes he make to Argentina will have positive results relative to the alternative).
