You’re understating it by only mentioning Silicon Valley. I’ve worked with lots of great people from all over the world who brought their talents and education here to be productive in our economy, and I’ve never stepped one foot in Silicon Valley. We’ve become an embarrassment.
Being “productive in our economy” shouldn’t be the test. People are hardworking and productive all over the world. People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh work really fucking hard. That’s not what makes America different from Bangladesh.
The test should be, if we put the immigrants on an empty plain, could they recreate Iowa or Massachusetts? I.e. a bottom-up democracy characterized by self-government, rule of law, weak extended family ties and strong civic institutions. Because if they couldn’t recreate those things they can’t maintain America. Instead, what’ll happen (and is happening) will be a slow reversion to the global mean.
As we have seen time and time again with democracy experiments in the third world, these things are rare innovations and can’t be conveyed to other cultures just by writing government structures and laws down on paper. The corollary to that is that there is no guarantee we can perpetuate these things in America against immigration just because they’re written down on paper.
A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test. The Amish have very strong extended family ties, and I think Pennsylvania would lose a lot of its culture if the Amish disappeared or assimilated.
Do you have any examples of immigrant groups establishing or asking control of communities in the US without self-government, rule of law, or strong civic institutions?
You don’t end up with communities that lack those things entirely, because they’re within America. Instead, what happens is that higher organizational units compensate by imposing the organization that’s lacking internally. These communities become dependent on others to provide law, organization, and civic institutions. That distorts the structure of society, making it a top-down structure rather than a bottom-up structure. The lack of social cohesion between different cultural groups further increases the need for top-down control and administration to manage that conflict. But I don’t think that’s sustainable over generations. Because over time those immigrants will start changing the culture of the host population.
> A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test
Well we created a lot of national myths in the mid 20th century to reconcile our historic immigration trajectory. But we have a lot of data from which we should be able to draw conclusions. If we take Denmark as the benchmark for rule of law, civic institutions, and good governance, which place looks more like that: Minnesota, or New Jersey? The answer to that question should guide our immigration policy.
> If we take Denmark as the benchmark for rule of law, civic institutions, and good governance, which place looks more like that: Minnesota, or New Jersey?
Violent crime rate in 2024 according to the FBI DB (incidents per 100k population)
Crime rates don’t measure the quality of democratic governance. You can have very low crime rates by having a top down authoritarian government like Singapore. They are also unreliable metrics across states because of differences in measures and reporting rates. Homicide is the most reliable metric. Homicide rates in Minnesota have been historically among the lowest in the country, almost at Canadian levels.
Interesting that you literally chose him as family (albeit parasocially) when he's not actually family, and then somehow justify it by saying that one cannot choose their family. Pick a lane.
I think he means that it was like family in the sense that he was there. You didn't choose him, Dilbert was just everywhere. And back in the day everyone loved Scott Adams, but then thing started to go bad over time and we all realized what was happening. It's similar to what a lot of families face - you love someone when you're younger but realize how messed up things are later. Or the person changes in negative ways. I don't see this as justifying anything.
My thoughts exactly! The "You can pick your friends, but you cannot pick your family" mantra is a good one, but this guy is talking about a cartoonist he likes. Scott Adams isn't your friend or a family member; he just draws Dilbert comics!
This captures how I tend to use LLMs when coding on my side project. I keep my favorite quote in mind and guide the model towards finding the essence of the mechanism I’m seeking:
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How would "the legal market" sort out someone who repeatedly uses the legal system in bad faith but, because they're in Donald's orbit the only hope left of consequences is the threat of disbarment? It increasingly seems like the last line of defense of late.
It's not about removing the requirement of the bar exam, just who decides who can take it
> The Texas Supreme Court issued an order Tuesday finalizing a tentative September opinion, asserting the ABA should "no longer have the final say" on which law school graduates can take the bar exam — a requirement to becoming a licensed lawyer in each state.
> But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals...
I think the relevant quantity we'd want to look at is what constitutes most of the property being bought-up by investors. Counting investors is going to bias the count towards multitudes of little-guys.
Publishing findings that amount to an admission that you and others spent a fortune studying a dead end is career suicide and guarantees your excommunication from the realm of study and polite society. If a popular theory is wrong, some unlucky martyr must first introduce incontrovertible proof and then humanity must wait for the entire generation of practitioners whose careers are built on it to die.
Quantum theory is so unlikely to be wrong that if large-scale fault tolerant quantum computers could not be built, the effort to try to build them will not be a dead end, but instead a revolution in physics.
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