it's always the libs

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/24/17152144/canada-wants-clearer-warnings-on-junk-food-the-us-is-using-nafta-to-stop-them

Canada: we want people to be properly informed.

United States: no! asymmetric information is absolutely crucial to the functioning of the free market!

Speaking of, labeling should reflect the way people actually eat. Labeling a king-sized Reese's as "4 servings" doesn't reflect the fact that most people are scarfing down all of them on the ride home.

who eats an entire king-sized Reese's?

I'm under the impression that most Reese's products are meant to be jokes. Like one time I got a hockey puck-sized Reese's cup for Christmas. I cut it up like a pie. I can't imagine there's much of a market for stuff like that.

Lol, most people eat pretty terribly.

Might be a bit of a class thing too. When I worked construction or minimum wage, many of the people I worked with ate terribly. When I'm around university educated people, as I am basically 100% of the time now, I don't see it.

Curious, what is your idea of not terribly. Most people I know who don't eat candy etc still eat like **** but it's somehow fine because they made it at home or bought it at pretentious place.

I guess I would say something like: less than half of what you eat is highly processed.

Also, I feel personally pretty okay about this. The department I'm in is pretty good at placing academic jobs. This year's group of people who applied had 10/12 people find academic jobs, and last year some people landed some pretty good academic jobs, including two tenure track teaching positions and a high profile postdoc at UCLA. So maybe I lucked out in finding a department morally still in the 1970's, rather than this modern "grad student slave labor" era of education.

The formal sciences are different[sup]TM[/sup].

The pudding is in the proof: mathematics doesn’t rely upon statistical tests; perfunctory counterexamples are celebrated; both upper and lower division courses are demanded by many other programs; there are highly lucrative career options in mathematics, direct to industry, other professions, and other graduate programs, so nobody is pressured into applying to math grad school specifically; and retention is an ongoing concern, as excellent researchers are poachable by industry or even other universities; and the only people who might care whether a mathematician is an authority are more than capable of reading the papers that mathematician published, so the original issue we were discussing does not apply.

It also wasn’t a knock against your career choices. I seriously considered trying to become a computational geometer, and only decided against it because dolla bills y’all. It was a knock against the idea of teaching the public to accept a credentialed or recognized academic at their word. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that there are profound structural problems in a lot of fields. Psychology and psychopharmacology, in particular, are basically on the scrap heap at this point - pretty much everything since Skinner is shaking out to be junk science. People need to be taught to view all authority with skepticism, and to only pay attention once scientific knowledge has become an overwhelming consensus on the basis of repeated replication.

So I've been hearing here and there blips that Vietnam is something of a neoliberal success story. Then I saw articles about Vietnamese forced labor, and lol, Gulags. Well it got me thinking about this sort of arrangement, the U.S. has it too, of creating what is, essentially, a "prisoner class" in society who are required to work hard jobs for almost no pay as part of their sentence.

I wonder how much of this is basically an effort (subconscious or otherwise) to breed a new class of people stripped of their citizen status so they can be treated horribly. I don't think, for instance, the amount prison laborers gets paid is counted in official "wage" statistics, so we basically get to force cheap labor but don't call it what it is. I think effectively that's what we see going on.

Neoliberals are anarchists who are afraid of their own slaves.

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/976765417908776963

My god.

i lol'd

Who cares about the tweets anymore?

To be fair, the first time Creepy Joe threatened Tronald Dump he referenced what he would do to him in high school, and Tron would have beat the **** out of wispy ass Joe in High School.

Which is like, the whole problem with this whole thing.

It's too bad President Trump's bone spurs disqualify him from fighting, because he could totally beat up Joe Biden's dad.

Medical waivers rule out any fighting anywaher

Yeah Biden was a right idiot about this too, saying he would have beaten up Trump in high school (before that tweet by Trump above). What a level of political discourse...

I wouldn't've beaten up Trump in high school.

b/c my parents couldn't afford to send me to a private boarding school, lol.

look at this not-bougie privilege of not having to deal with insufferable ****s in high school

If you want to avoid insufferable ****s the last place you should go is a boarding school

Hahah ok, this is how Sam Harris got to be famous. This is so juicy (and entertaining): https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/

If you are talking about the 2017 interview with Murray he references: Harris was definitely well known before that. Unless you are saying that now he's getting to be famous.

I had already skimmed Ezra Klein's blog post which Sam Harris references this morning. The biggest takeaway I got from that blog post was that Ezra Klein is basically fuming at Sam Harris here for basically fumbling into a discussion with a guy like Murray who is probably a little racist by most people's standards. But really in my view a lot of the stuff that Klein sees as definitive is just more bluster and comes across as obnoxiously sanctimonious, which really sort of does confirm the idea that it is "forbidden knowledge" that Sam Harris is exploring (whether or not it is actually true and therefore can be considered knowledge at all). Anyway, I think that Ezra Klein is probably right here, but his blog post from this morning reads like a big long rant in my eyes.

I didn't read what Sam Harris wrote, but it just seems like more airing of dirty laundry in public.

In a lot of ways Harris really is rather confrontational simply because of his style. He takes neutrality and passive even-handedness to an extreme that seems to piss off a lot of opinionated people, and he doesn't seem to hesitate in rubbing this in their faces. In the end, though, I'm not sure I gain a whole lot from Harris at this point.

I didn't mean that this specific conversation made him famous, I meant that this article fully exhibits everything that has made him popular: his confrontational style and his almost pornographic intellectual posturing is what made him famous, coupled with his ability to generate controversy by clashing with other public figures. There's something irresistible about it... like a guilty pleasure.

Oh yeah, totally. "Pronographic intellectual posturing" is a good description, lol.

Don't forget that the man sells books....

It is getting to me a little bit just how much some people try to pin bad things on Trump. I just saw a post where a person saying "until Trump threatened North Korea our position there was entirely defensive".

Uh, you have to basically not know what any past presidents did to think Trump's are the first threats. His are surely the dumbest and most outright, but he's not even remotely the first.

And that's not only it, like so many artiles about random **** mention Trump when it's totally irrelevant to the story. Like, yeah, Trump is the worst president in living memory. He's also not responsible for everything, Christ.

I think this is what makes Harris such a letdown as compared to, say, Hitchens, who was incredibly, genuinely passionate in his convictions, even when they set him against his peers (and even if his ego intruded frequently). Harris is articulate enough, but his ideas seem to stop at the water's edge of like, actual knowledge, & he seems more interested in needling people than any kind of moral clarity. He's the human personification of a smirk

Trump created ISIS and he's been fighting it his whole adult life.

https://www.salon.com/2017/04/28/labor-is-being-paid-first-again-american-airlines-investors-complain-after-company-gives-pilots-and-flight-attendants-raises/

It's interesting how naked this stuff is. Capitalism does not incentivize wage increases.

I miss Hitch.

His brother is satisfying to listen to. Plus, they have basically the same voice. And a similar argumentativeness. But a very different worldview, although one no less strong in its moral convictions.

"...establishes a worrying precedent, in our view, both for American and the industry."

Jesus bleghhh Christ

I was debating whether to mention names and I think not to, but even in many math departments the "TA mill" thing has some truth. I know of departments where the academic job rate is abysmally low, I mean like 1 person per year gets a lame teaching postdoc kind of thing, at schools that house quality researchers. It makes a big difference how active the professors are in engaging the grad students in the mathematics world at large. At some schools, the professors basically don't give a damn and just pay attention to their own research. I know of some research groups where students don't even get to meet individually with their adviser, they all sort of meet in the same room and just talk about stuff, and the professor plays favorites.

But yeah, that's more of a departmental issue, as you mentioned the issue is more structural in some areas. I've heard pretty awful things about how some grad students are treated in other areas, math grad students seem to have an easier time overall.

This is only one tweet from one person who's effectively claiming to speak on behalf of all Trump supporters, so of course it should be taken with a grain of salt. But I think it is worth considering how Trump's rhetoric has consistently been pro-LGBT and he has frequently affirmed his support for LGBT rights. The prospective ban on transgenders in the military is a very notable exception, of course, but I do suspect that many Trump voters are actually closer to Democrats on some social issues than many on the left appreciate. (It's worth remembering that one of Republicans' greatest fears when Trump got the nomination wasn't that he was a far-right extremist, but that he might be too liberal.)

Political opinions are not ordinal.

Here’s the thought. Roughly half of Americans voted for Trump, so if you assume political opinions are normally distributed around some “centrist” vector, then the average Trump voter is right of center.

On the other hand, knowing how deeply polarized US politics are, the distribution is more likely bimodal or multi-modal clustered around political loci. Which implies that, not only is there no such thing as a political centrist (i.e. self-narratives of being reasonable and non-partisan are universally false) but that the average Trump voter could be, indeed, politically extreme.

According to this study, that's true evening among Trump voters: https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publications/2016-elections/the-five-types-trump-voters