Spectator

[Ralph Schoellhammer @Raphfel]

Almost 4% of the entire German population are asylum or protection seekers, one percent of the population is Syrian, and almost 5% of all Syrians live in Germany. In the age group of under 5 year olds, over 40% have a migrant background.

This is unprecedented demographic change.

[Sam @Dollarydoos_]

An extremely formative moment for me was about ten years ago when I was in Papua New Guinea for work and I was chatting to an Australian official about trade and economic development there and he very straightforwardly told me that, look, we invest a lot and we try, but at the end of the day, there's a guy who runs the port, and he has this uncle who is a fisherman, and you can schedule some freight to arrive at the port, but if the uncle shows up and decides he needs the port berth for his fishing boat, the guy who runs the port will let him have it and cancel the freight because that's just how it is.

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

Immigration is the meta-issue because it determines who will get to decide every other issue. It must be the top priority. No other issue is even close to it in importance. Vote for whoever credibly promises closed borders and remigration. We’ll work out everything else later.

[Jonatan Pallesen @jonatanpallesen]

It is crazy how easy this tragedy was to avoid.

• Don't take all these Lebanese migrants -> avoided

• Deport him after first robbery sentence, or first assault sentence -> avoided

• Deport him for supporting Hezbollah -> avoided

• Deport him after attempting a previous terror attack(!) -> avoided

Instead what he got was probation and a useless deradicalization program.

The mass immigrationist left have the blood of the victims on their hands.

[🅱️ete oaks @b0newalljackson]

250 years ago our greatest grandfathers beat the dogshit out of the most powerful military on the planet over a 3% tax and now we can’t deport 100 million immigrants that hate us because women and gays think it would be mean

[Peachy Keenan @KeenanPeachy]

Calling white anti immigration conservatives “in breds” as he supports the mass migration of millions of actual inbreds from third world countries who’ve been practicing cousin marriage for millennia. Podhoretz so dumb he might be inbred too

[unseen1 @unseen1_unseen]

Pro tip: if you have 52 million people on welfare/government assistance you don't have a labor shortage.

[Maxwell Tabarrok @MTabarrok]

Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of NYC, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970.

Since then, land values have grown by 30x but land reclamation has ground to a halt.

This failure follows the spread environmental law around the world rather than any geographic, technological, or economic constraint.

Thus, our lack of land reclamation and the severe land constraints in our most important cities are self-imposed and avoidable. We should make more land!
https://t.co/J9zghvLkz2

Land reclamation was common practice in American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Charleston, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, DC, Oakland, and LA all had major land reclamation projects that extended residential living space or infrastructure or both.

The Bay Area alone reclaimed an area of land equivalent to ten Manhattans between 1850 and 1957, at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330,000 per acre. Today, an acre of single-family-zoned land in San Francisco County averages $24 million. Even if the cost of land reclamation grew faster than inflation, despite technological leaps in dredging and construction technology, there should be plenty of room for profitable arbitrage.

And yet, land reclamation is extinct in the Bay Area as well as in every other American city. This isn’t because we ran out of good spots to reclaim: Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than Boston’s Back Bay was when it was reclaimed in the 1860s. Nor is it because of better transportation: We’ve used up all of the easy suburban expansions enabled by the train and the automobile so prices are rising even in outlying suburbs.

Instead, land reclamation’s death is due to environmental law. Evidence for this claim shows up in the coincident timing of land reclamation’s demise across dozens of cities in the US and in the environmental compliance process of the few reclamation projects still inching along today, but the best evidence is found internationally.

No country has more experience or more reason to reclaim land than the Netherlands. The Dutch built 5% of their country out of the sea over the first half of the 20th century and by 1975 they had another artificial lake in the Zuiderzee ready to drain at the flip of a switch, which would have made tens of thousands of acres of land just east of Amsterdam. But a 1969 environmental review law, similar to NEPA in the US, stopped the project before it was finished and the site is now a protected bird sanctuary. Their one major reclamation since, the Maasvlakte 2 extension of the port of Rotterdam, took 11 years and 6,000 pages of environmental review before construction began.

Inversely, countries without these laws, like China, Singapore, and Japan have continued major land reclamation projects into the 21st century. China has reclaimed over 5,000 square kilometers since 2000, including a city of half a million outside Shanghai and Singapore has grown by a quarter since 1975.

Every major American city has a land shortage. But we have more than enough shallow water, dredging capacity, and market incentive to make more land, just like we did 150 years ago. The only obstacle is our own choice to make making land illegal. The benefits of more land in our most productive cities are large enough to justify the effort of reforming the laws that currently prevent it. Let’s make more land!

[Marko Jukic @mmjukic]

Here's a mind-blowing statistic: despite making up just ~0.2% of the global population, players with ethnic heritage from the former Yugoslavia are 7.5% of players in the FIFA World Cup Round of 32 (overrepresented by 40x) and play for 9/32 or 28% of teams! -> 🇭🇷🇧🇦🇦🇹🇦🇺🇨🇭🇺🇸🇨🇦🇸🇪🇩🇪

[Uubzu v4 @uubzu]

You might think Indians would be hesitant to be on the front lines demanding Americans surrender our nation to any biotrash which crawls over the border, but optics be damned

[Mike McCulloch @memcculloch]

#Anomalyoftheday Lifters. These highly-charged capacitor-like contraptions hover (see below). It's supposed to be due to ion wind, but oddly the thrust decreases with more wires (doesn't fit that model) & increases with more foil area (doesn't fit). These do fit QI though.

[The American Tribune @TAmTrib]

This envious attitude is a very real one and is exactly what destroyed Britain in the postwar era. Just look to Wentworth Woodhouse and the Fiztwilliam family

The Earls Fitzwilliam spent generations building a prosperous coal mining industry on their estate. They were beloved by the miners because they cared about miner safety, paid quite well, provided schools and such for the children of the miners, provided alternate work for the miners when the mines had to be temporarily shutdown, and otherwise were great employers who pushed the industry of the nation forward with a true sense of noblesse oblige

In so doing, they built up a stable and prosperous coal extraction effort that was worked by loving and loyal employees. As a result, they became immensely wealthy and used their wealth build Wentworth Woodhouse, one of the grandest and most gorgeous English country houses, and its beautiful parklands.

The miners by and large weren't envious. They had good jobs and good employers. All was stable, and everyone benefitted from the relationship

That state of things lasted for well over a century. In fact, the Fitzwilliams maintained good relations with their workers even when labor agitation elsewhere was a disaster for coal mine owners. The Fitzwilliams had done their duty, and were rewarded with loyalty for that

Such good behavior didn't matter when, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Attlee's Labour regime was elected. It nationalized all of British heavy industry, essentially, from the steel mills and railroads to the coal mines

That meant the Fitzwilliam mines were expropriated by the Labour regime

Yet worse, it meant a spiteful mutant named Manny Shinwell ordered the strip mining of all the coal on the estate, including through their beautiful and beloved parkland.

The workers still loved the Fitzwilliams, and they revolted, and in a genuine outpouring of love and support, refused to follow Shinwell's orders and begged Attlee to reverse the decision. He didn't; the strike was broken by the Labour regime, and the grounds were irreparably destroyed to mine valueless, dirty coal. So too was the house, which had its foundation destroyed by the open-cast mining, which went right up to the doorstep.

Now it can't be lived in, and the Fitzwilliams had to give it up. The government of course refused to pay for the damage it did, or to take responsibility for the reprehensible actions of its minions

And what was gained by all that destruction? Nothing.

The coal mined from the Fitzwilliam parkland was essentially valueless, the stolen mines were largely shut down by the Thatcher years, and all the capital that could have funded Britain's post-war rebuilding was instead stolen and wasted on the welfare nanny state

Priceless English heritage was destroyed, and noblesse oblige not just ignored but punished, all for nothing at all

Such is what they now want to do to Elon

He created a company doing things thought impossible until just years ago...because he did them. He became very wealthy as a result. He also minted thousands of millionaires in the process, including blue collar guys who stuck by the project for years and accumulated equity as they did so

Now spiteful mutants like Liz Warren want to follow in the footsteps of Manny Shinwell and expropriate his property to punish him for succeeding

[WHG baddie @isa2001m]

As it turned out, the cotton swabs used for DNA testing were produced at a factory in Germany where an old Eastern European woman had been working, who had accidentally been contaminating all the cotton swabs with her DNA over the years. There was no serial killer.

[gandalf the racist @racistbilbo]

When I worked for a failing company, I didnt stress because I knew one day id come in and the company would simply be closed. It was nobodies fault, the market was just changing. There was nobody actively looking to fire me. And i didnt even stress the day it finally happened.

When I worked for a profitable megacorp that routine cleared billions in profit every year,, I was constantly stressed because theyd lay off people, even strong performers or people with critical skills, with absolutely no predictability. And theyd always say "Watch out, pick up the slack from the missing guys, because more layoffs are coming and you dont want to be in the crosshairs!".

Every day for the last 5 years I worked there I would start the day thinking "is today the day?" Every time I got a message from my boss, or a request for a meeting from management, id think it was about laying me off.

And then even when it was time to finally lay me off, they sent me the email on a SUNDAY, at 11pm, with a meeting scheduled with an exec for the FRIDAY afternoon. It literally just said "Touch base meeting", and when I asked my boss, he said "I dont know anything about it", and when I asked the guy who sent it he said "We'll discuss it in the meeting, dont worry"...

The modern office, or really any modern organization run by college educated childless women and foreign MBA bean counting retards, is one of the most destructive forces a man can face today. It is totally and completely soul crushing.

This isnt even touching on all the humiliation ritual bullshit they put you through that is completely antithetical to being a man. No, i do not want to spend 45 minutes in a meeting hearing about how i am uniquely evil for being white, told to me be an 80iq african woman who is making double my salary, despite the fact that my work is whats generating the revenue to be able to pay for these makework racial grievance programs for foreign retards.

I would much, much rather be in literal fight for my life with clear threats and obvious solutions, rather than deal with that shit every day for decades on end. It is literally hell on earth.

[DT K @tomdoyo]

Are stuff models just memorizing pitchers?

One fun test is to make the model predict pitcher names (instead of ERA).

With @TJStats tjStuff+, we get a 49% accuracy using a *single* pitch, and 73% using the whole season.

(And tjStuff+ is less overfit than others!)

So theoretically at most 73% of the predictiveness is banking on prior season results (RV, xwOBA, etc.)

[Demographic Renaissance @DemographicR]

1/ Hidden in Paris for over 200 years: a high-fertility religious community known as “La Famille.”

Marrying exclusively within their own sect, with ~4,000 members divided amongst only 8 surnames.

A history so unusual that one of their prophets even appears in Les Misérables.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

Correction on this. The study I cited was corrected by its own authors in 2015 due to a coding error, and I missed it. Once the error is fixed, the effect of who-marries-whom on inequality essentially vanishes. The 2005 Gini moves from 0.430 to 0.429 under the corrected counterfactual. Sorting barely matters.

But the same correction found what does matter: the collapse of marriage itself. Take 1960 and raise single-household rates to today's level, and the Gini climbs from 0.342 to 0.382.

Inequality isn't being exacerbated because people don't marry their economic equals; it's because fewer people marry at all.

The authors' own correction: https://t.co/3kzS3QW6qo

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

In the 1960s, doctors married nurses. Today doctors marry doctors. Economists ran the counterfactual and found that if Americans married randomly, the income Gini would drop from 0.43 to 0.34, exactly where it was in 1960. Who pairs with whom is now a top driver of national inequality.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

The level of betrayal that has played out here is insane.

Normally, labor scarcity is how an economy heals itself. When workers become harder to find, employers have to raise wages to deal with it, and out of this market slowdown the seeds of a new boom would be sowed as young people have greater purchasing power to buy a home, get married, and have kids of their own.

But instead of allowing that correction to happen, America chose a different model. We’ve mass imported millions of replacements to suppress wages, blowing out asset prices in the process and leaving native Americans economically (and increasingly culturally and politically) dispossessed in their own country.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

There's an interesting story about how Victorian mansions, and particularly the Second Empire style, became synonymous with haunted houses.

They were extremely popular in the US from the 1870s through the 1890s, but were hard to maintain because of their large size and opulent style. Many of the families that constructed these homes lost much of their fortunes in the Panic of 1893 and the crash of 1929. Others remained wealthy but didn't have the means or desire to maintain large staffs of maids and servants to keep them running.

So, one by one, Second Empire homes across the US were sold off and continued to change hands rapidly until, by the time the 30s rolled around, thousands of them were left vacant because no one could afford to maintain them.

And not just maintain, but preserve them. The typical Second Empire house was around 50 or 60 years old by the 1930s. They needed upkeep just as much as a house built in 1970 would need repairs today if no one had lived in it for 10 years.

As a result, many of them were bulldozed or burned down to make way for newer homes in the 40s and 50s after World War II. And the entire point of Second Empire style was for them to be grouped together like a bunch of trophies, so tearing down a whole bunch of abandoned and decaying mansions but keeping the ones that were in relatively better condition only made them stand out more.

By the time the late 40s and early 50s rolled around, they had almost universally gone from being considered the crowning architectural achievement of the Gilded Age to being synonymous with urban decay.

The artists and writers of the 60s were growing up as kids in the 40s and 50s, thinking to themselves, "that old house down the lane that has been sitting empty since I was born." So when they got jobs in Hollywood writing scripts for TV shows, they carried those memories with them, and the Second Empire style entered the collective consciousness of pop culture as the default "haunted house" for the next 60 years.

The sad thing is, these homes are priceless. You can see it when you find a rare one that has been well-preserved or restored. But we've degraded ourselves so much that it would be nearly unthinkable to construct a home like this today.