Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. Is there a better book on this topic?
Saudi Arabia Wants Your Next Vacation.
Where Rent Is $13,500, She Lives Off What’s Left at the Curb. On the one hand, capitalism is great. On the other hand, w.t.f. America?
Search for Habitable Worlds Joined by New European Space Telescope.
Her Job Requires 7 Apps. She Works Retail.
Japan Shrinks by 500,000 People as Births Fall to Lowest Number Since 1874.
The 2010s were supposed to bring the ebook revolution. It never quite came. The TLDR; seems to be an illustration of the sort of stuff Matt Stoller writes about in Goliath. Unlike most, most of the e-books I get are nonfiction, academically-oriented books. But I’m not a typical reader. I’ve never read a John Green book.
Chinese Restaurants Are Closing. That’s a Good Thing, the Owners Say.
He Always Felt Out of Place. After Taking a DNA Test, He Found Out Why.
We’re Getting a Clearer Picture of the Climate Future — and It’s Not as Bad as It Once Looked.
A community-maintained standard library of population genetic models. For what it’s worth, stdpopsim installed easily on my Mac, but didn’t get it to work on Ubuntu.
Direct deposits delayed by Federal Reserve glitch. How society isn’t antifragile.
First, the Smartphone Changed. Then, Over a Decade, It Changed Us.
The Insight is back! Would appreciate more reviews (positive ones).
A ‘Mic Drop’ on a Theory of Language Evolution.
Estimating the effective sample size in association studies of quantitative traits.
Early in 2020, I want to read Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, The Exodus.
Also early in 2020, Charles Murray’s Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class and Hugo Mercier’s Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe. Tyler Cowen has a review up on Human Diversity at his weblog.
“Why hasn’t the term Latinx caught on the way African American did in the late 1980s?”
Beasides all other reasons, there is a reason than nobody seems to be talkings – it is almost impossible to use “Latinx” or “Latinxs” in the spoken language
Where Rent Is $13,500, She Lives Off What’s Left at the Curb. On the one hand, capitalism is great. On the other hand, w.t.f. America?
The disparity between the wealthy and the poor is always sharp-feeling, but more salient for the society at large is how the middle class lives. So I found the following article about budgets of three upper middle class families in the suburbs of the nation’s capital region of interest: https://www.northernvirginiamag.com/family/family-features/2019/12/09/3-local-families-share-their-real-life-finances-with-us/
The most notable thing for me is how “hand-to-mouth” these budgets are. These aren’t young couples starting out. But they do have young children and few of them. These seem to be a classic case of Steve Sailer’s unaffordable family formation.
If you liked Empire of Liberty you might want to check out the rest of the Oxford History of the United States. They’re all good excllent.
re: Empire of Liberty. I think a lot of people believe Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution is better, though it may be because they read it first.
The Age of Federalism by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick is better than than Wood on what the federalist were up to. I believe it was originally supposed to occupy the next place in the Oxford series, but the authors were so interested in the first twelve years that they were at 750 pages by 1800. I recall this this as pure political history, none of the cultural asides that seem to be spread awkwardly in the Oxford series.
I lean towards the “Latinx is an odd-sounding word for Romance-language speakers, where there’s a lot of gendering of words”. To me, it always seemed odd because of the non-obvious pronunciation – is it “La teenks” or “Latin ex”?
As neat as it is to see an emergent market for stuff like this, it really is depressing that there are a bunch of elderly people who have to do this to try and make ends meet. How about a bit more property tax on those $13,500/month rental buildings to pay for services to help them out?
There’s another aspect of this that the article doesn’t get into, and it’s that this same set of consolidated publishers have also used their weight to make it harder for libraries to lend e-books.
“The 2010s were supposed to bring the ebook revolution. It never quite came. The TLDR; seems to be an illustration of the sort of stuff Matt Stoller writes about in Goliath. Unlike most, most of the e-books I get are nonfiction, academically-oriented books. But I’m not a typical reader. I’ve never read a John Green book.”
idk. In the decade before the 2010s, I read maybe 5% of books and 25% of legal cases and journal articles that way. Now, about 50% of the books I read (in addition to 98% of the periodical articles and legal cases) that I read I in an e-format. My wife reads about 98% of the books she reads (all but one out of maybe 50 a year) in that format (which can make audio and magnification easily available to deal with a vision impairment). The books we read for pleasure are mostly free downloads from the local library.
In high school, about 90% of my children’s textbooks were in e-formats. I think that they actually used a bit larger percentage of hard copy books in college, but still plenty of e-books.
Also, you really should read a John Green book. They average an elegant, insightful, quotable sentence every couple of pages. Make it a New Year’s Resolution.
“Where Rent Is $13,500, She Lives Off What’s Left at the Curb.”
It is a New York Story, not a capitalism story. New York, San Francisco. Our richest and most liberal cities have begun to resemble medieval societies — a few lords, a lot of serfs. I suspect their liberalism is a defense mechanism, not a considered theory of the case.
“The share of Chinese restaurants has fallen in metro areas … Many owners are glad their children won’t be taking over.”
It is very good news. Although I am sad that it has been so long since I have had crispy war su gai with a big glob of Chinese mustard on top.
“We’re Getting a Clearer Picture of the Climate Future”
I am waiting for the never mind when a few more years have passed and the world is nowhere near coming to an end. It never does.
“Direct deposits delayed by Federal Reserve glitch.”
The ACH system referred to in that article was created about 50 years ago, and it was a revolution when it was first implemented because it allowed for direct deposits of employee pay. Before that employees could only be paid by check if they were given time off to go to the bank.
The problem here is that the banks and the airlines were the first businesses to make extensive use of computers. They still have many legacy systems that can break in unexpected ways. But, the cost and difficulty of replacing the legacy systems is nightmarish. There have been attempts, particularly in the airline business to do that, and they have resulted in some spectacular system breakdowns that have put individual airlines out of business for a few days. That sort of thing is just not acceptable to the banking regulators.
This is why you see so much fintech features like PayPal and Venmo coming out of the unregulated non-legacy bound arenas. It will be a very long time before we reach the sunny uplands where all possible features are available through all platforms.
“A ‘Mic Drop’ on a Theory of Language Evolution.”
Gorillas and chimps don’t have languages. Homo does. What the biological substrates of that difference are is, I guess, still unclear.
“Charles Murray’s Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class”
I guess he no longer cares if he is acceptable company on university campuses anywhere. It is one of the advantages of being old. The opinions of others make very little difference to you anymore.
just re-downloaded “Empire of Liberty” a bit ago as it’s my fav and i want to read it again soon. Honestly tried on “Goliath” a few months ago but didn’t finish it – too dang long and not wide enough in breadth. Ezra Klein has a book coming out that looks like it’ll be really good.
Finished “Prius or Pickup?”: pretty much says everything you need to know about our current cultural/political situation. Also did most of “Winner take all Politics.” Very good book for nerds but I’ve read so many like it i moved on.
“The Lost History of Liberalism” was good enough for me to read twice in a row. “Operation Paperclip” about Nazi experiments is totally insane and “Stalin’s Secret Agents” was also mind blowing. “Hitler’s American Friends” was a nice rebuttal.
“American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation” was fantastic.
This is good stuff. They’re trying to nail down the densities of exo-planets between Earth and Neptune in size, and thus get a more precise handle on where the transition between “rocky planet like Earth” and “gas dwarf planet with an increasingly thick hydrogen atmosphere” occurs.
The modeling and existing data seems to indicate that the transition happens with planets with roughly 1.6 times Earth’s radius and 5-6 times its mass. However, there’s some additional argument that the transition starts at a lower level – that planets above 1.2 times Earth’s radius and 2 times its mass can start to become “gas dwarf” planets (planets at that threshold or below simply can’t hold on to any meaningful amount of hydrogen or helium in their atmospheres for long).
I’m hoping that the higher threshold is correct, although what would be even cooler would be if they found rocky planets above that threshold – true potential Super-Earths.
@WalterSobchak
“The problem here is that the banks and the airlines were the first businesses to make extensive use of computers.”
One of the favorite factoids I learned in my Operations Research class in college was that the average airline in the U.S. spends equal amounts on fuel and mathematicians (or at least did as of the early 1990s).
Tyler Cowen commits the fallacy of conflating learned skills with intelligence in his commentary on IQ and The Wealth of Nations: “Because someone knows skills that I don’t (nevermind that they’ve had a lifetime to learn those skills), they’re smart!”
I can’t take his opinion on IQ seriously.
McWhorter overlooks one key fact in his discussion of Latinx: respectful terms for black people have been on the euphemism treadmill for nearly a century now, such that the most polite reference to a black person in 1949 is now considered horrifically racist 70 years later. I don’t even particularly want to give examples, given that they might cause offense, but you could read a W.E.B. DuBois essay, and if you faked to the listeners that he was a white man, some would assume he was as much a white supremacist as J.E.B. Stuart based on the terms he uses alone. It’s just life experience for white people and black people to see the correct terms for black people change once every 15 to 20 years, so that when you notice more and more high-status people (and if you’re a professional, often your peers) keep increasingly referring to black people with a term you hadn’t heard of 5 years ago, most people past 25, black or white, just figure it’s time for another run on the treadmill: if you fall off, you’ll hit the “racist” floor hard.
This isn’t true for Hispanics; there are certainly offensive slurs, but there hasn’t been a general shift in what is the “polite” way to refer to a Hispanic person. The only real change I can recall is that “Mexican” is no longer at least ok as a generic descriptor, even in that case not so much because it was denigrating as because it implied foreignness and increasingly, due to shifts in immigration, became outright factually incorrect. Hispanic people don’t have any experiential susceptibility to term changes from above for themselves, nor do non-Hispanic people. Even Asians, specifically East Asians, have had more experience on the euphemism treadmill: “Oriental” was ok until maybe 20 years ago, and has only come to be considered racist in the past 10 years or so after millions of millennials had a class or two in college that touched on postcolonial theory or read something on tumblr by a 21 year-old who had taken an entire course on the subject.
does anyone have data on caste distribution among indian-americans?
I was arguing with an indian coworker about how upper castes are overrepresented among IndAms. He said that’s not true. I confidently told him I would dig up the stats but i was unable to find any. All I found was a survey on caste discrimination in the usa and an assertion without citation by amy chua.
i’ve looked at indian american personal genomics results. the genetics indicates clear skew toward ‘upper castes.’