Tesla vs. Edison

It has become popular of late, especially on the left, to love Tesla and hate Edison. (Warning: that is a link to the Oatmeal, which is very funny and will suck up large quantities of your time if you let it, but if you aren’t familiar with the leftists hate of Edison and valorization of Tesla, it’s a necessary read.)

Edison, (1847 – 1931) was an American-born (son of a Canadian war refugee of Dutch descent) auto-didact, inventor, and businessman who was awarded over a thousand patents. His most important inventions (or inventions produced by his lab,) include the first actually useful lightbulb, the phonograph, the first movie camera and a device to view the movies on, the electrical grid necessary to power the lightbulb, the movie studio necessary to make the films for people to watch, and the scientific research lab.

He was friends with Henry Ford, a community volunteer, deaf, and a general humanitarian who abhorred violence and prided himself on having never invented an offensive weapon.

His worst mistake appears to have been not realizing what business he was in during the “War of the Currents;” Edison thought he was in the lightbulb-selling business, and since he had invented a lightbulb that ran on DC, he wanted everyone to use DC. He also seems to have been genuinely concerned about the high voltages used by AC, but DC just drops off too quickly to be used in non-urban areas; to get the country electrified required DC. Edison not only lost the Currents War, but also got kicked out of the company he’d founded by his stock holders. The company’s name was later changed to General Electric.

His political views were fairly common for his day–he advocated the populist position on abolishing the gold standard, tax reform, and making loans interest free to help farmers. Religiously, he was basically a GNON-believing deist. He preferred silent films over “talkies” due to being deaf, and had six children, three of whom went into science/inventing, one with a degree from Yale and one from MIT.

The idea that Edison was “merely” a businessman or CEO is completely bollocks. He was not only a brilliant inventor, but also understood how his inventions would be used and created the systems–both human and mechanical–necessary to bring them to full fruition.

Edison’s lab in Menlo Park

 

Tesla (1856-1943) was a Serb born in Croatia back when Croatia was part of the Austrian empire. By all accounts, he was exceedingly brilliant. His father was a priest and his mother was the daughter of a priest, but he received a scholarship to the Austrian Polytechnic University, where he burned like a meteor for his first year, earning the highest grades possible in 9 subjects (almost twice the required course load.) In his second year, he became addicted to gambling, then gambled away his tuition money in year three and forgot to study for his finals. He flunked out and ran away.

A couple of years later, his family raised money to send him to university again, which was another fiasco, since Tesla didn’t have training in two of the required subjects and so couldn’t actually attend.

Nevertheless, Tesla managed to get work at a telegraph company and was eventually invited to the US to work under Edison. Here he did excellent work, but quit over a rather stupid sounding misunderstanding about pay, wherein Tesla expected to be paid far more for an invention than Edison had in funds to pay anyone. Edison offered a raise instead, but Tesla decided to strike out on his own.

Tesla attempted to start a business, which ended badly (it sounds like it went south because he wasn’t focusing on the stated goals of the company,) and left him a penniless ditch-digger.

He then hit on a series of successes, including the polyphase induction motor, which ended with him quite handsomely employed by one of Edison’s competitors, Westinghouse, but even here he had difficulties getting along with his co-workers. Eventually it seems he established his own lab and convinced investors to give him $100,000, which he promptly spent on more lab equipment instead of the new lighting system he’d promised. His lab was later sold and torn down to pay off debts.

Tesla received yet another major investment, $150,000 to build a wireless telegraph facility, but appears to have blown the money on stock market speculation. He did manage to finish the project, though without any more funds from his now very jaded investors, but eventually he had to sell the building, and it was demolished.

Many of Tesla’s inventions were clearly brilliant and far ahead of their time. Others are delusions, like his mechanical oscillator. Tesla claimed it nearly brought down the building; Mythbusters built one themselves, and it did no such thing.

There is a kind of brilliance that slides easily into madness, and Tesla’s was clearly of this sort. He was too adept at pattern matching (he could do calculus in his head) to sort out real patterns from ones he’d dreamed up. He never married, but once fell in love with a pigeon at the park, feeding it daily and spending over $2000 dollars on it when its wing was injured.

In his personal life, he was extremely rigid–working and eating at the exact same times every day, eating a very restricted diet, and wearing a fastidiously neat and regimented wardrobe. He was extremely thin and slept very little–perhaps only 2 hours a day. (There are a vanishingly few people in the world who actually do function like this.) He was critical and harsh toward people who didn’t meet his standards, like fat people or secretaries whose clothes he thought were insufficiently attractive. Despite not having any children of his own, he believed the unfit should be sterilized and the rest of the population coerced into a selective breeding program. He also said some unflattering things about Edison upon the man’s death, which is kind of rude.

To prevent him from sinking further into poverty, his former employer, Westinghouse, took pity on him and started paying his hotel bills, (Tesla seems to have not thought of living in a house.) Tesla spent much of his final years claiming to have built a “Death Ray” and claiming that various thieves had broken into his hotel room to steal it.

Upon his death in 1943, the government seized all of his belongings just in case there were actual Death Rays or other such inventions in there that the Nazis might try to steal. The box with Tesla’s Death Ray turned out to have nothing more than an old battery inside. The investigator concluded:

“[Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.^“

To be frank, I’ve talked to homeless schizophrenics who sound a lot like Tesla; the line between correct pattern matching and incorrect pattern matching is, at times, easily crossed.

 

The modern habit of shitting on Edison and glorifying Tesla stems from the tendency to see Edison as a stereotypically American businessman who wickedly and cunningly stole ideas from from smarter people to build up his own wealth and reputation. It feeds into the notion that Americans (white Americans, especially,) have built nothing of their own, but stolen all of their wealth and a great many of their ideas from others. Here Tesla–attractive, urbane, brilliant, and most of all, not tainted by the blight of having been born in America–gets to stand in for the usual victimized classes.

Ironically, Edison’s political beliefs line up with the Progressives of his day–that is, socialists/liberals like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Tesla, at least as far as the Wikipedia describes any of his beliefs, favored Nazi-style forced sterilization and eugenics. In daily life, Tesla may have been a nicer person than Edison (it is rather difficult to tell from Wikipedia articles what people were like personally,) but I question a left that denigrates one of their own Progressives while upholding a man whose political beliefs are, at best, anathema to their own.

Regardless, Tesla’s failures were not Edison’s fault. Edison may have screwed him on pay, but he didn’t gamble away Tesla’s tuition money, make him fail his classes, nor convince him not to marry. Edison didn’t make him blow his investment money on the stock market or wander around NYC at all hours of the night, feeding pigeons.

Edison, deaf since childhood, didn’t have half the advantages handed to him as Tesla. He had all of three months of schooling; no one ever sent him to university or gave him a scholarship to waste. He may not have been as smart as Tesla, but he was still an intensely intelligent man and adeptly capable of carrying out the business side of the operation, without which no research could get done. Without funding, you don’t have a lab; no lab, no research. Humans do not live in isolation; someone has to do the inglorious work of coordinate things so that other people can reap the benefits of a system set up for them to work in.

Ultimately, Tesla was a brilliant man who should not have been allowed to run his affairs. He needed the structure of a boss, a wife, parents, family, etc., to keep him on track and stop him from doing idiotic things like gambling away his tuition money.

Familial supervision during college could have ensured that he graduated and gotten him on the path toward a tenured position. Perhaps he would have rubbed shoulders with the likes of Einstein and Curie at the Solvay Conference. A boss would have ensured that the strategic, business ends of things–the ends Tesla had no great talent for–got done, leaving Tesla to do the things he did best, to reach far more of his full potential. (In this regard, Edison had advantages Tesla lacked–a wife, family, and a country he had grown up in.) But Tesla was too rigid to submit to someone of inferior intellect (real or perceived), and his family back in Europe was too far away to help him. Loneliness is madness, for humans are social animals, and so brilliant Tesla died alone, poor, and in love with a pigeon.

Tesla’s wireless telegraph tower, 1904

Just imagine what Edison and Tesla could have created had they put their animosity aside and worked together.

Part 2 coming soon.

 

 

Theory: the inverse relationship between warfare and homicide

That whole myth about hunter-gatherers being peaceful and non-violent probably got its start because hunter-gatherers tend not to be as good at organized warfare as the Germans.

Homicide is an act of disorganized impulsive passion; warfare is an act of organized dispassion; the two are inverse of each other. Thus we see the highest homicide rates in the world’s least developed countries, and the lowest rates in its most developed countries.

 

Note that it is not an absolutely perfect correlation; many Latin American or Caribbean countries have higher homicide rates than even less-developed countries in Africa, but broadly speaking, the pinks and reds are poorer than the blues. (Russia excepted, ‘cuz Russia.)

Also, as you may recall:

Share of violent deaths, non-state societies vs. state societies

Countries involved in the world’s biggest wars:

WWI:

Nuclear stockpiles or programs by country:

(South Africa used to have nukes, but they got rid of them before the end of Apartheid.)

Here’s another graph that makes the size of the arsenals clear:

Source: SMTKS

And here’s another graph that says about the same thing, but is a wonderful example of how to display data:

Source: SMNTKS

I’m pretty sure this graph means we’re all going to die.

And likewise, space programs by country:

Also a nicely done graphic.

You might have heard about India’s space program:

Test launch of India’s GSLV Mk III

But have you heard of the Congolese space program?

To be fair, it’s more “One guy with a rocket-building hobby” than a real space program, but I understand where he’s coming from. Rockets are cool.

The point of all of these maps and graphs is that homicide rates tend to be highest, both today and throughout history, in the places with the lowest levels of social organization/complexity.

Even in our own society, convicted criminals are overwhelmingly lacking in the ability to handle complexity. It looks like they aren’t really all that much more retarded (note: PDF) than the general population (the truly intellectually impaired are often pretty highly supervised and lack the ability to execute many crimes, but are often victims of violence,) but they are drawn disproportionately from the dumber half.

According to respondents in the AR15.com forum thread “Cops and Lawyers – What percent of criminals/clients are retarded?” (Note: I know nothing about this forum or its reliability)

“Not retarded per se. My personal experience is most criminals stopped developing emotionally at about 3 or 4. They live life for the moment, think only of themselves, have no impulse control, can’t control their emotions, throw temper tantrums when they don’t get their way, can’t think past the next 10 minutes, don’t understand consequence, etc……. They are basically little children in adult bodies. Of course, most 3 or 4 year olds are better behaved than the average criminal, but you get the point.”

“I found that better than 90% of them were functionally illiterate, so when they say reading is fundamental, they aren’t kidding!”

“With the advent of welfare, it became profitable to squirt out children.It relegated men to the status of semen injectors. No men, no fathering. down the spiral 40 odd years and we’ve got multiple generations of female children “raising” children.
The results aren’t retarded, they are more like Comanches or Lakota, they have regressed several thousand years.
It is painful to watch good officers try to “reach” these kids. Watching with an unsympathetic eye, it is plain that most of these kids don’t even understand what the officers are talking about.
That’s the brutal truth that no one wants to face. These kids aren’t just lost-they are damned in our society.”

Recall our discussion back in Two Kinds of Dumb–just because someone has a low IQ, doesn’t mean they are retarded. But anyone who is illiterate (in our society) with the emotional maturity of a 3 or 4 your old is not very bright or capable of thinking through the results of their own actions.

The art of killing large numbers of people, by contrast, requires organization. One guy with a pointy stick might kill a few dozen guys who don’t have pointy sticks, but one guy who convince a thousand other guys to stand next to you with their pointy sticks, and you get this:

Source: Chapleton

The Romans didn’t conquer an empire by poking barbarians with pointy sticks; they did it by organizing themselves into an unstoppable war machine.

Armies do not generally fund themselves; they depend upon a vast support structure producing weapons, food, transportation, shelter, technology, etc. The bigger the army and more advanced the weaponry, the bigger the support structure has to be. Nukes take far more people to produce than pointy sticks, from the farmers making the food to feed the scientists working out the details to the structural engineers building the research labs to the guys building the rockets or planes to drop the bombs.

Complex organization requires large numbers of people working in close proximity without punching each other; it requires that people be able to suppress their own personal desires in pursuit of the group goal. All of this requires being less violent, less impulsive, and less inclined toward murdering each other.

Increasing Diversity => Fascism: the difficulty of enforcing social norms via rules

I was recently reading a series of messageboard exchanges on the topic of increased integration of suburban neighborhoods, in which one person happily opined about the benefits of increased Section 8 housing in her neighborhood, and that any fears about declining home values could be solved by simply having stronger HOAs that enforced more rules.

And people call me aspie.

There are two major reasons why this is a bad strategy:

1. Laws are, at best, an imperfect approximation of social norms; more laws => less freedom
2. Disparate Impact

Let’s start with #1.

Most social norms are “unstated,” general rules of thumb that people understand almost intuitively, and apply with a fair amount of nuance. Failure to understand social nuance is annoying at best and a major symptom of certain mental disabilities; people who cannot understand social nuance are basically handicapped in social situations. The more rules are unstated, the worse off they are.

When two cultural groups mix, individuals often run into confusion due to having different cultural norms. In some cases these are easily worked out–just remember to take your shoes off when you arrive at your Chinese friend’s home–and in some cases they can’t be. If I think looking people in the eyes is rude, and you think not looking people in the eyes is rude, then we are going to have a conflict.

But let’s take an example that might actually come under an HOA’s jurisdiction. Let’s say you live in a community of about 100 households. The vast majority of the time–199 out of 2oo days, to be exact–everyone in the neighborhood takes their trash to the dumpsters, where it belongs. But 1 out of 200 days, each person has some unexpected thing come up–sickness, broken foot, whatever–and they leave a bag of trash out on their porch overnight. As such, even though everyone in the community agrees “people should not leave bags of trash on their porches at night, because rats,” every other night, there will be one bag of trash out on a porch somewhere in the neighborhood.

Then a new guy arrives. New Guy looks around, sees the bags of trash, and decides it must be okay in this neighborhood to leave bags of trash on one’s porch. New Guy starts putting his trash on his porch regularly–3 nights a week. The neighbors start to complain, but there’s not much they can do about it–the HOA has no rule on the subject, because it was never a problem before.

So after people get into shouting matches with the new guy a few times, the HOA passes a new rule: no trash on porches. New Guy gets a letter from the HOA notifying him that he’s going to get fined if there’s any more trash on his porch.

Pissed off, New Guy wanders around the neighborhood with his camera, photographing bags of trash on other people’s porches. By the end of the month, he has 15 photos of trash on other peoples’ porches, and accuses the HOA of singling him out for something other people are also doing.

The HOA now has to send letters to everyone. Now the vast majority of people getting letters about their trash are people who were leaving their trash out at socially acceptable rates in the first place, and the small utility of occasionally not hauling trash to the dumpsters due to crappy life circumstances has been eliminated.

The HOA could, if it were extremely motivated, pass a law based on frequency of trash bags, and keep track of exactly how often people leave trash on their porches. As long as your trash bags are separated by 200 days, you’re good. But put one out a mere 190 days after your previous one, and get fined. This is unlikely, would require an uncomfortable level of monitoring by the HOA, and would cost more. The more oversight you have to do, the more your HOA fees go up to pay for it all.

Now let’s suppose that there are several New Guys, and they run into more issue than just trash on their porches. They have large dogs, who bark a lot and whose pee starts killing the grass outside the building. There’s no rule against dogs, of course–lots of residents have one or two small dogs, but who has five big ones? The residents all scoop their dogs’ poop, but the New Guys don’t. The New Guys sublet their units to a bunch more new guys–there’s no rule against subletting, after all–creating a parking situation. Neighbors start complaining that their guests can’t park in the guest spots and have to walk a long way because the New Guys’ subletters are always parked in the guest spots, and there aren’t anymore parking spots in the lot. The New Guys have lots of friends who visit frequently, and neighbors complain about car doors slamming in the middle of the night and strangers coming and going in the halls. The New Guys complain that they just want to have a nice time with their friends, you assholes.

Are you going to make rules about all of these things? If you make a rule about subletting, will you also enforce it against guys whose gfs are sleeping over? They also contribute to the parking problem, after all. And how on earth are you going to enforce a rule about car doors at night or forbid people from having guests in their own units?

After about a hundred angry letters from the HOA, many fights with their neighbors, and a bunch of fines, let’s suppose the New Guys realize that they all come from a different ethno-cultural group than everyone else. If they’ve received more fines from the HOA than their ethnically different neighbors, then the HOA is guilty of Disparate Impact, (see, eg, Griggs,) and they can sue the HOA for being racist.

“In United States anti-discrimination law, the theory of disparate impact holds that practices in employment, housing, or other areas may be considered discriminatory and illegal if they have a disproportionate “adverse impact” on persons in a protected class. Although the protected classes vary by statute, most federal civil rights laws protect based on race, color, religion, national origin, and gender as protected traits, and some laws include disability status and other traits as well.” —Wikipedia

In the case of Griggs Vs. Duke Power, the SCOTUS found that Duke Power’s policy of only hiring employees with either a highschool diploma or who had received a particular score on an IQ test was racist because it disproportionately affected blacks, who are more likely than whites to drop out of highschool and score worse on IQ tests.

If the HOA’s rules impact people from different cultural groups with different norms of behavior at different rates–and it seems nearly impossible for them not to, given that, you know, different people are behaving differently–then you have disparate impact. If the HOA’s rules aren’t impacting people from different cultural groups differently, then you aren’t enforcing the community norms that you had in the first place.

The examples I have given are all minor ones. In real life, people have much larger issues. What do you do about the neighbor who decides to disassemble a car on his lawn, or the guy whose party guests crash drunkenly into your car? Or people with different norms about the acceptability of shoplifting or honor killing? Polygamy or child brides?

There’s a certain irony in this. When I think of “People I wish lived in my neighborhood,” (generally friends who have moved to far-flung places due to the vagaries of life, college, and jobs,) I don’t think, “So long as I clearly articulate all of my rules, my friends will be able to learn how to behave so they don’t crash the home values in my area,” because people I think are nice to be around are already people who share my ideas of acceptable behavior. Saying that people of other ethnic groups need to learn the rules of acceptable behavior implies, therefore, that you do not think these people know how to behave themselves or that their cultures are immoral/bad/incorrect.

I have mentioned before (though I can’t find it now, so maybe it wasn’t here,) that I think liberalism is (or ought to be) a meta-value of allowing other people in other places to do what they feel like without interfering, so long as they aren’t affecting you. The Amish can do their thing, and I can do my thing, and we don’t need to mess with each other. The Sentinelese and Pygmies aren’t hurting me, so I leave them alone. This breaks down when people with radically different beliefs live in close proximity to each other. If your neighbors believe in human sacrifice and you don’t, you will come into conflict. If your neighbors believe that women who don’t wear burkas are whores and you believe in sex-positive feminism, you will come into conflict. Then either someone will have to step in and start enforcing a bunch of new rules to sort the mess out, or you will punch each other until someone gives in.

There is nothing particularly wrong with trying to clearly articulate the rules, but it is not a solution for a lack of shared values and understanding of social norms.

Is gender dimorphism a luxury good?

So I was watching this documentary the other day, set in Norway, about whether or not gender dimorphism among humans is real.

Of course it’s real, but that’s not the point.

The documentary happened to interview a number of Norwegian women about why they chose to work in stereotypically “female” professions (the “paradox” here is that in one of the most “gender egalitarian” countries in the world, women are choosing to go disproportionately into stereotypically female professions instead of into STEM.) Then they interviewed female students somewhere in Africa, IIRC, who professed a desire to go into STEM and related fields.

African countries are not generally thought of as bastions of female equality and empowerment, though perhaps they should be.

Anyway, the Norwegian women wanted to go into feminine careers because they found those careers more “interesting”–they just wanted to do things that involved people, say, instead of boring old numbers. The African students, by contrast, wanted to go into technical or medical fields because they perceived these as high-pay and useful.

To make a Mazlow’s hierarchy of professions, we might say that doctors and civil engineers are necessities for a functioning society, while doing things you find fun and interesting is a luxury.

Back in the day–that is, back more or less in my childhood and nearby years–the gender split in the children’s aisles wasn’t so extreme. We didn’t have purple “girl Legos” and black “boy Legos;” they were just Legos:

1960 Legos Ad

The clothes have changed, too–these days, it is perfectly normal to send a girl to school wearing layers of sparkly fluff that would previously have been reserved for ballet recitals or Halloween. In my day, we just wore pants.

(There’s an obvious irony here, that the people who proclaim the loudest that male and female children [and adults] are neurologically the same and have the same preferences in jobs, toys, hobbies, etc., tend not to be the people who actually have children and have the most first-hand experience with their preferences.)

I was speaking with a friend recently, the youngest of five from a large extended family. They mentioned that as a kid, they always wore hand-me-downs; they received their first new piece of clothing (underwear excluded) at the age of ten. Which made me speculate that for poor people with several kids to clothe, clothing that could be worn by either gender might be seen as more useful than clothing that was obviously “for girls” or “for boys;” the same is true of toys, which are more useful if all of the kids are interested in them than if only one kid is interested in them. By contrast, rich people or people with only one kid may just get a specific item aimed at that kid.

 

Thus wealthier countries, despite their claims of egalitarianism, may use their wealth to indulge in more gendered behavior, goods, hobbies, jobs, etc., while less wealthy countries may focus their resources on high-utility, multi-use behaviors, goods, hobbies, jobs, etc.

Now, yes, I know that traditional societies did/do not dress their children in identical clothes; if you have 8 children, it is quite easy to have a set of dresses for four of them and a set of pants for the other four. But this is not necessarily any more gendered than our current clothing, and still leaves aside toys, jobs, etc.

Obviously I am just speculating; I’d be interested if anyone knows of any relevant data.

Judeo Ethnogenesis

Disclaimer: I had 3 hours of sleep last night. Weigh that carefully before testing my patience.

Ethnogenesis, as the name implies, is the process whereby a new ethnic group is created. An ethnicity is more or less a group with a shared culture, belief in common ancestry, and that preferentially marries within itself rather than outside of itself. Over time, this creates a group that is ethnically distinct from its neighbors, even under conditions of close proximity.

The Amish, for example, after splitting off from the Swiss in the 1600s over religious differences (remember, religion is ethnicity,) arrived in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, so we may mark Amish ethnogenesis around the mid 1600s or early 1700s People today make fun of Ben Franklin for complaining that the German-speaking immigrants to Pennsylvania were problematic and not integrating with the rest of the population, but you know, the Amish still haven’t integrated. They still speak German, follow their own religion and traditions, and don’t inter-marry with the rest of the Pennsylvania population, such that they are quite ethnically distinct, at least on a genetic level.

The Hui of China are another example; they were not really considered an ethnic group before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China circa 1949. The Chinese decided to just lump all of their Muslim minorities–some of them quite distinct–under one term. (Historically, the term “Hui” also referred to Christians and Jews and was just a general catch-all.) Hui now marry other Hui preferentially enough that the Wikipedia page goes into detail on known cases of inter-marriage with the Han, but a fellow Hui from across the country may be regarded as just another Hui, and so a preferred partner.

Anyway, so that got me thinking about the establishment of Israel. Normally when I think of Jews, I am actually thinking of Askenzim, and you probably are, too. But Israel is actually 61% Mizrahi Jews–Jews from predominantly Muslim countries.

You know the general story: Once upon a time, all of the Jews lived in Israel. These people were probably pretty similar, ethnically, to the Palestinians, assuming the Palestinians are anything like the region’s residents 2000 years ago, and don’t have a massive influx of Turkish DNA or something like that.

Then the Jews got conquered and scattered to the winds. Most famously after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, but also during the Babylonian  and Assyrian eras, etc. Anyway, for the past 2000+ years or so, there have been significant Jewish communities in a lot of places that aren’t Israel, eg:

Uzbeki Jews

Chinese Jews

Ethiopian Jews

Cochin Jews

Lemba Jews?

Then in the late 1800s, the Jews–mostly Ashkenazim, I think–got sick of this state of affairs and decided to exit Europe and go back to Israel. Unfortunately, they didn’t really succeed until 1948, at which point Jews from all over the world started pouring in.

Since most people are genetically similar to their neighbors, eg the Palestinians and Syrians, or Han and She, I began wondering how similar Jews were to their neighbors of millenia verses their similarity to each other.

Here’s a graph showing major genetic lineages of a bunch of different ethnic groups, including several Jewish ones:

Broad cultural zones are easily distinguished, like East Asians in yellow, South Asia in greens, Europeans with their large dark blue chunk, Middle Easterners with their big patches of light green and light blue, and the rust-tones in sub-Saharan Africa. This data set is great, because it lets us compare various Jewish groups to their immediate neighbors, eg:

I made a condensed version of the graph that highlights the measured Jewish groups and their neighbors, (sadly, some of the samples are pretty small, making them hard to read):

And an even more condensed version that just compares the Jews to each other:

(Note that the pure green section on the right-hand side is not a Jewish group, but just a chunk of the graph that happened to overlap the text due to the Cochin Jewish section being so small.)

Observations: Most Jewish groups are significantly more similar to their immediate neighbors than they are to other Jewish groups, especially when we look at the furthest-flung folks. Cochin Jews and Ethiopian Jews, for example, show almost no DNA in common (in this graph.)

Given what all Middle Eastern groups look like in the sample, we may speculate that the original Jewish group primarily had a large section of light blue and a slightly smaller section of light green, with probably a smidge of sub-Saharan. Several of the Middle Eastern Jewish groups still have this genetic makeup.

Three Jewish groups show a more European makeup, with a large dark blue chunk characteristic of Europeans and North Africans: the Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Moroccan Jews. They look closest to Cypriots, though I compared them to Spaniards and Tuscans as their nearest neighbors in the graph.

Since the Ashkenazim are estimated to be about half Italian, it’s not surprising that they have about half as much dark blue as the Italians. Even within European groups, while they look fairly similar at this level of resolution, some groups are quite distinct from each other–Italians and Germans, for example, or Brits and Greeks. Geneticists can determine whether your ancestors were Italians or Germans or Greeks just by looking at your DNA, but those kinds of small details don’t really show up all that well on a graph that is trying to show the differences between Sub-Saharan Africanss and Asians. So while Moroccans, Sephardim, and Ashkenazim all look rather similar here, there may be finer grained differences that just don’t show up at this scale.

What’s up with the Moroccan Jews? They do not look like Moroccans; I therefore speculate a more recent migration of Moroccan Jews from somewhere else that’s not Morocco, like Spain.

The Jews who migrated to the East, however, lost a significant portion–almost all–of their light blue component, replacing it with dark green more typical of Indians and other SE Asian populations.

I don’t think this dataset contains Uzbeki Jews (or the Lemba, who are not Jewish enough to be considered Jewish, but still have a few Jewish traditions and folktales and a bit of Jewish ancestry,) which is sad, but I’d wager the Uzbeki Jews look a lot like other Uzbeks.

One of the things I’ve heard often from Jews is that all Jews are Jews, part of one great big Jewish family descended from Abraham (even the atheist ones!) and thus Jews should always try to be kind to each other, all Jews are welcome in Israel, etc. This is a perfectly sensible philosophy when you’re a peasant in Poland and the only foreign Jews you’ve ever met were from Lithuania. But 2000+ years of diaspora have resulted in far flung groups becoming quite ethnically distinct from each other. Like the Amish, isolated groups in Cochin or Ethiopia have become their own ethnies distinct from their ancestors, but unlike the Amish, they have inter-married significantly with the locals. (The Amish do not marry non-Amish.)

The Roman Exile, therefore, should be regarded as a major ethnogenesis event–the beginning of the creation of most current Jewish ethnic groups.

The creation of the state of Israel constitutes a second major ethnogenesis event, a bringing together of these multiple ethnic groups into one population that views itself as one population. I expect a great deal of mixing between these historically distinct groups into a more homogenous whole, (though some groups don’t mix terribly well, like certain Ultra Orthodox communities that haven’t been accepting of Ethiopian Jews.)

Different interest groups don’t bargain over the budget, they just add to it

Source: Forbes

(Note that I am a little cautious of any graph labeled total gov’t spending, due to it being a pain in the butt to add up the budgets of every city, county, and other municipality in the entire country over many years, but I think the graph may be accurate.)

So this graph came from a Forbes article, “Lessons From the Decades Long Upward March of Government Spending,” which notes that:

For me, the most notable fact about this chart is that the growth of government spending has been remarkably steady. The trend over the last 83 years has been for government spending to rise by 0.24 percent of GDP per year, and the correlation is strong: a linear regression on this trend has an R-squared value of 0.72, meaning that time explains most of the movement in government spending.

In other words, mission creep. If you’re clever, you might start to wonder what will happen if this trend keeps going. If you’re really clever, you might figure out that in 1847, the US must have had negative government spending.

Or maybe there’s more than just mission creep going on.
Here’s a graph of federal spending vs. GDP since 1791:

Wow. Spending pre-WWI looks radically different than spending post-WWII, and I don’t think it’s just the difference between GNP and GDP.

The graph ends at 2011, but 2015’s total gov’t spending is estimated at 6.2 trillion dollars, or 35% of GDP. (Though I’m wondering if that shouldn’t be 39%; someone take a look and tell me why they aren’t adding the 3% for debt. For that matter, they don’t seem to have Social Security listed, and SS is like 24% of the budget so that’s kind of huge if they left it out.) Federal spending seems to be at 21 or 24% of GDP. Obviously these are all estimates.

Prior to WWI, non-wartime government spending was practically flat. Spending as percent of GDP did remain elevated after the Civil war and even after the small bump of the War of 1812, but in both cases it gradually fell back toward pre-war levels, perhaps as much due to gradual economic recovery/growth as budget cuts. Immediately after WWI, it looks like the same process has begun, but then it doesn’t.

Let’s explore some possible reasons why:

1. Cold War Spending

Maintaining a nuclear arsenal plus a lot of aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and tanks costs a lot more than just trusting your citizens to bring their own guns to the next skirmish.

(“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”)

Defense spending is about 13% of the Federal budget, and 5% of total GDP, which is a bigger % than the entire Federal budget for the entire 1800s except for the Civil War.

The Cold War acts a lot like previous wars, but takes a lot longer.

 

2. The Income Tax

While there were some, shall we say, mini-income taxes proposed or passed to fund wars in the 1800s, the system really got going with the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913. Look back at the graph; other than the effects of wars ending, (including the Cold War,) spending as % of GDP has been steadily on the increase ever since.

Prior to 1913, the Federal government got most of its money from tariffs, customs, and certain sales taxes. The Income Tax obviously made it much, much easier to increase tax revenues, regardless of the reason. One may wonder about the wisdom behind such a move:

During the two decades following the expiration of the Civil War income tax, the Greenback movement, the Labor Reform Party, the Populist Party, the Democratic Party and many others called for a graduated income tax.^[6]

The Socialist Labor Party advocated a graduated income tax in 1887.^[7] The Populist Party “demand[ed] a graduated income tax” in its 1892 platform.^[8] The Democratic Party, led by William Jennings Bryan, advocated the income tax law passed in 1894,^[9] and proposed an income tax in its 1908 platform.^[10]

“The federal income tax was strongly favored in the South, and it was moderately supported in the eastern North Central states, but it was strongly opposed in the Far West and the Northeastern States (with the exception of New Jersey).^[14] The tax was derided as “un-Democratic, inquisitorial, and wrong in principle.”^{[15]” source: Wikipedia} 

Looks like poor farmers and laborers wanted to increase taxes on the wealthy and get rid of taxes that fell on themselves. The government decided to go along with the scheme because hey, free money. So you I guess you have the socialists to thank for your nukes.

Interestingly, William Jennings Bryan, one of the populist popularizers of the idea of the income tax as a means of freeing the people from the shackles of the gold standard, (“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!“) was an anti-Darwinist who lobbied for (and got) state laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools and represented the prosecution in the Scopes Trial in 1925. According to the Wikipedia, he opposed evolution not only on the regular religious grounds, but also because he feared its use as an weapon of war, ie the Social Darwinism being promoted by the Germans.

The US officially switched to fiat money in 1976, well into our long rise.

Anyway, here’s a graph showing the prominent role of income taxes in the Federal Budget:

If the Federal government were still limited to customs and excise taxes, this would be a much smaller pie.

 

3. The Federal Reserve

Like the Income Tax, the Federal Reserve Bank of the US was founded in 1913–boy was Woodrow Wilson busy. It purpose was to stabilize the banking industry and prevent bank runs from wrecking the economy, and I believe it serves as one of the major lenders to the US government, letting them spend more than they take in.

I am basically  ambivalent on questions like, “Is the Fed a good thing?” or “Should we allow fractional reserve banking?” until I know more, but I am a little sympathetic toward the Fed just because QE is one of the few things anyone in government has actually done to try to fix the economy.

Here’s a graph for you, showing the growth of deficit spending:

 

4. Suffrage

The percent of Americans who are legally allowed to vote and actually do so has increased from <5% in the late 1700s to almost 45% today. (Wikipedia)

Back in the 1700s/early 1800s, only free adult males who owned property were allowed to vote; the laws were set by state and so varied a bit–in some places property owning women could vote, for example; ethnicity was probably a concern here and there.

The first major expansion of the franchise occurred between 1792 and 1856, as the property requirements were repealed state-by-state. Looks like several states abolished theirs around 1820, including NY and AL. (Actually, looks like Alabama entered the Union around them with no property requirement to start with.)

I’m guessing the 1866 dip is due to disenfranchisement of Southerners due to the Civil War.

Racial restrictions on voting were removed in 1869. The black vote does not represent a very large expansion in suffrage just because black men were a relatively small % of the overall population at the time and the KKK and other groups were effectively preventing them, especially by the early 1900s, from voting.

The biggest single jump in the graph begins around 1920, when women were allowed to vote–an expansion that more than doubled the size of the voting population.

Since then, there have been a few small expansions–the elimination of poll taxes and other impediments to voting; the voting age switched from 21 to 18, etc.

Overall, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that women seem to prefer spending on social welfare projects, and men prefer spending on armies.

You might think that different interest groups would argue over the budget until they come to a reasonable compromise, or that one year Democrats would pass all of their ideas, and then a Republican administration would come along, repeal it all, and pass their own agenda.

But this doesn’t happen; it’s been over 40 years since Roe vs. Wade, and Republicans still haven’t gotten rid of it.

Once one side passes a spending program, it’s virtually guaranteed to stay.

 

5. Modern Mass-Media

As I have discussed before, recent (ie, in the past 100 or so years) technological advances have created a completely novel memetic environment. For almost the entirety of human history, people got almost all of the information about the world around them from the people around them, principally their parents, grandparents, and tribal/village elders. Information passed vertically in this way I refer to as “meme mitochondria,” due to their similarity to the mitochondrial DNA passed down from mother to child.

Since the invention of the printing press, and increasingly since radio, TV, and the internet, people have gotten more and more of their information about the world from these sources. Information thus passed horizontally I call “meme viruses,” due to the similarity with the horizontal spread of conventional viruses. (I’d call them “viral memes,” but that name’s taken.)

I theorize that evolution selects for meme mitochondria that maximize the chances of their own reproduction, that is, since they are passed largely from parent to child, they are ideas that encourage high natality, personal survival, and loyalty to family and tribe. Meme mitochondria do not need to encourage any kind of loyalty to people outside one’s tribe or protect their lives in any way.

Meme viruses, being spread horizontally, succeed by promoting the common good of the group, but do not need to promote the welfare of the individual, nor natality.

Modern mass communication technologies, therefore, have created a completely evolutionarily novel selective environment in which horizontal meme transmission has become dominant over vertical transmission for the first time in all of human history, which may in turn cause people to demand radically different things of their governments, like social welfare spending or legalized gay marriage.

 

6. Longer Life Expectancies

The single biggest expense in the government budget is old people:

At the state and local level, pensions become a big deal.

Here’s a different graph:

Source: Policy Basics “Where tax dollars go“

Anyway, Social Security is the single largest item in the Federal budget at 24%, and pensions and Medicare add quite a bit more–overall, I wouldn’t be surprised if old people received a full half of government budget dollars.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Social Security is totally special and not a real government expenditure because I paid into it and therefore it’s something I’m entitled to but totally not an entitlement.”

Well, no. Not really. Sorry, but Social Security is a ponzi scheme. You don’t pay into it and then get your own money back out. The money you put in now goes to pay retirees right now. When you retire in the future, future workers will pay for you.

The whole system was thought up during a time of expanding population growth, when there were plenty of new workers around to pay for old workers to retire. As growth has tapered off, this system has become less viable.

There was actually a Supreme Court case in which the court decided that Social Security is not, in fact, an entitlement.

By the way, “not an entitlement” means “there is no guarantee you will get this because you are not entitled to it.” If the government decides that it just can’t afford to fund Social Security anymore, well, then you just won’t get Social Security anymore.

(Yes, I have had some very annoying discussions with people who complain about the evils of “entitlements” while defending their right to never, ever have their Social Security cheques cut.)

Medicine and hygiene being what they were back in the 1800s, there were just fewer old people around. Even if they’d had Social Security back then, it would have been a much smaller program.

 

Changes in the composition of the budget over the past 50 years:

Of course, there was a war going on in 1964, but it still shows just how much Social Security and related programs have expanded over the decades.

I have a two more graphs that might be of interest:

Grey bars mark recessions

Interesting how local spending crashed between 1933 and 1945 as Federal spending took off.

 

I always look at people funny when they complain that proposed government program X or Y is socialist. “We’re already socialist,” I tell them. When government spending is 25% of the entire nation’s GDP (and I’m not sure if that even includes Social Security,) you are already living in a socialist country. If the theory that politics is really just people arguing over the budget is correct, then as the budget becomes an increasingly large percent of GDP, then I expect the political discourse to only become more heated and nastier as people’s entire livelihoods become increasingly dependent on whether or not they qualify for a government handout or program of some sort.

Finally, the Forbes article also notes:

Most importantly, trends on entitlements look a lot more unfavorable than they did in 1992. Baby boom retirements will continue to push Social Security spending upward, by about a percentage point of GDP over the next 25 years. Medicare costs actually aren’t growing as fast as they did in the early 1990s, but they are starting off a larger base, making medical inflation a more significant fiscal problem than it used to be.

I don’t think the upward trend can continue forever.

 

Things from the internet

Things from around the internet, without much commentary:

(I found these for sale at Toys R Us. Why is Toys R Us trying to market football-themed snuggies to grown women? No, none of their ads show snuggies being worn/used by men. Do you know what women do not like? Football. Don’t fuck with that, Toys R Us. It’s one of the few things I’ve got in common with most other women.)

(EvolutionistX supports no particular political candidates at this point, but does find the ways other people go about displaying and discussing their political preferences interesting.)

 

Some thoughts for homeschooling parents

You can’t build up immunity to a disease by never experiencing it.

I hear a lot of people around these parts vowing to homeschool their kids because of this that or the other public schools are doing–usually something related to modern liberal politics. They’re afraid of their kids learning about gay marriage, or social justice, or something similar, so they decide that the solution is just to keep the kids at home where they can learn without the agenda.

Now, to be clear, I have nothing against homeschooling–all of the evidence and studies I’ve seen on the subject indicate that it is a perfectly fine way to educate a kid, so long as the parents are mentally healthy, not-abusive, etc. If you happen to live in an area where there aren’t a lot of other people around, then you might want to consider conventional schools just because your neighborhood makes it difficult to associate with other humans, but otherwise, I see homeschooling as just another method of educating a kid. If your goal is merely to provide your kid with the best education possible, this post is not for you.

However, if your goal in homeschooling is to prevent your kid from learning about broad social trends, political ideologies, or ideas you don’t like, anecdotal evidence suggests you will fail.

Your kid will grow up, they will leave the house, and then they will learn about all of the stuff everyone else believes. If everyone out there believes X, and your kid is even remotely neurologically normal, then your kid will learn about X and start believing it.

Remember, the vast majority of normal people pick up their ideas and beliefs from the other people around them. This is not a bug. This is a very important ability. Other people are treasure troves of useful information about how to stay alive and not die. Imitating others is how you learned to talk, which things are good to eat, and how to behave in new situations. If you’re standing near a road with your friend, and they suddenly jump back, it’s in your interest to jump back, too.

Inability to properly imitate others is extremely problematic and one of the basic symptoms of autism.

So, like I said, if your kids are remotely normal, they will pick up the values of the dominant culture upon exposure. And then they will decide that you were a looney nutcase.

I’m going to talk about the personal experiences of 5 people I know who were homeschooled by conservative Christians. I’m not cherry-picking; they are all the homeschooled people I know.

One went to Bible college, got pregnant, dropped out, and got married. This person still professes Christian faith, but believes far more in materialism.

The second dropped out of college, became a die-hard SJW, and changed genders. I doubt they are still Christian, and they regard their parents’ faith as a cult.

Third completed college, but has become a die-hard SJW. Has a very dim view of conservative Christianity. No children.

Fourth became an atheist liberal who believes in gay marriage and abortion.

Fifth became a die-hard SJW who hates conservative Christianity, thinks their parents were culty, and makes pornography.

If you want an in-depth look at how this happens, I recommend the webcomic Dumbing of Age.

What happened?

In all of these cases, the parents homeschooled to keep their kids isolated from certain ideas, ideologies, or behaviors. The kids graduated with very little experience of the world. They did not have a thorough understanding of how the world works, the philosophies out there, and why, exactly, their parents disagreed.

As a result, when exposed to the meme-viruses of the world, they get infected. They have no defenses.

In my experience, the vast majority of conservatives cannot articulate a coherent explanation for their beliefs, and do not attempt to explain their underlying reasoning to their kids. Many of them, I suspect, simply believe as they do because of habit, convenience, or because everyone else in their area does. Liberalism, by contrast, has put a lot of effort into making arguments against conservative beliefs.

For example, let’s take gay marriage. Common conservative arguments against gay marriage are “Ew! Gay people are gross!” “God says homosexuality is a sin,” and “The purpose of marriage is to make children.”

Liberals have all sorts of counter-arguments, like, “Ellen DeGeneres isn’t icky,” “Separation of Church and State,” and “But we let infertile people get married.”

In short, if it is really important to you that your kid think gay marriage is a bad idea, you’d better have a better, more coherent argument than that. Same for everything else in your memeplex/ideology/worldview–up to and including the existence of god. You might think your proof for the existence of god is pretty solid, but most of the people your kids will be associating with will probably think rather little of your proofs.

If you can’t explain your ideology and rigorously support it, showing your kids that your explanations of how the world works is better than the dominant ones, then you’d be better off just letting your kid go to public school and then doing your best to defend any objections to the curriculum when they come up. Your kids might think you’re kind of weird (just as I thought my parents were kind of weird in the early 90s for defending the use of aerosols/CFCs and not being concerned about the hole in the ozone layer), but they won’t hate you or think you’re a loon.

Adulterations in the Feed

It’s no secret that sperm counts have been dropping like rocks over the past 70 years or so (though the trend may have recently leveled out.)

” Sperm counts in the 1940s were typically well above 100m sperm cells per millilitre, but Professor Skakkebaek found they have dropped to an average of about 60m per ml. Other studies found that between 15 and 20 per cent of young men now find themselves with sperm counts of less than 20m per ml, which is technically defined as abnormal.” — from The Independent, “Out for the count: Why levels of sperm in men are falling“

While environmental effects (like smoking,) have effects on sperm counts in adults, these appear to be basically small or short-lasting. The biggest, longest-lasting effects on sperm counts appears to be the unterine environment where the future-low-sperm-count-male’s testicles were developing. Improper fetal testicle development => low sperm count for life. Eg,

“A man who smokes typically reduces his sperm count by a modest 15 per cent or so, which is probably reversible if he quits. However, a man whose mother smoked during pregnancy has a fairly dramatic decrease in sperm counts of up to 40 per cent – which also tends to be irreversible.”

What elsecould make a uterine environment hostile to testicular development?

How about too much estrogen?

I’ve posted before about Diethylstilbestrol, (or DES,)  is a synthetic nonsteroidal estrogen. Between 1940 and 1971, DES was given in large quantities to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages. Unfortunately, it turns out that pumping babies full of unnaturally high levels of estrogen might be bad for them–DES was discontinued as a medication for pregnant women because it gave their daughters cancer, (an actual epigenetic effect) and the sons appear to have high rates of transgender, transexual and intersex conditions.

Quoting the Wikipedia:

“In the 1970s and early 1980s, studies published on prenatally DES-exposed males investigated increased risk of testicular cancer, infertility and urogenital abnormalities in development, such as cryptorchidism and hypospadias.^[38][39]

“… The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) has documented that prenatal DES exposure in males is positively linked to a condition known as hypogonadism (low testosterone levels) that may require treatment with testosterone replacement therapy.^[43]

“… Research on DES sons has explored the long-standing question of whether prenatal exposure to DES in males may include sexual and gender-related behavioral effects and also intersex conditions. Dr. Scott Kerlin, a major DES researcher and founder of the DES Sons International Research Network in 1999, has documented for the past 16 years a high prevalence of individuals with confirmed prenatal DES exposure who self-identify as male-to-female transsexual, transgender, or have intersex conditions, and many individuals who report a history of experiencing difficulties with gender dysphoria.^{[45][46][47][48]}

“… Various neurological changes occur after prenatal exposure of embryonic males to DES and other estrogenic endocrine disrupters. Animals that exhibited these structural neurological changes were also shown to demonstrate various gender-related behavioral changes (so-called “feminization of males”). Several published studies in the medical literature on psychoneuroendocrinology have examined the hypothesis that prenatal exposure to estrogens (including DES) may cause significant developmental impact on sexual differentiation of the brain, and on subsequent behavioral and gender identity development in exposed males and females.”

Here is an excerpt from a paper, published in, I think, the early 40s.

Since the image quality is low, I’ve done my best to type it up for you:

“Experimental Intersexuality: The Effects of Combined Estrogens and Androgens on the Emryonic Sexual Development of the Rat

“RR. Greene, M. W. Rurrill and A. C. Ivy

“Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, Illinois

“In previous publications the authors have reported and described in detail the effects of large doses of sex hormones on the embryonic sexual development of the rat. Androgens, when administered to the pregnant female, cause a masculinization of the female embryos (Greene, Burrill and Ivy, ’38, ’39 a). The female type of differentiation of most sexual structures is inhibited and a male type of differentiation of those structures is stimulated. Administered estrogens cause a femininization of the male embryos (Greene, Burrill and Ivy, ’38, ’40) in that they inhibit the masculine type of differentiation of some sexual structures and, instead, cause a female type of differentiation.

“…The experimental demonstration that estrogens do have a profound effect…”

What are external sources of estrogens in modern life?

Birth control pills. I know FTM trans folks birth control pills for the hormones in them. (They are often cheaper and easier to get than hormones specifically prescribed for trans folks, especially if you have a female friend.)

Can those hormones stick around in a mother’s body even after she discontinues taking the pills?

Fat and estrogen appear to be correlated:

“Other conditions that cause low estrogen levels in younger women include excessive exercise, eating disorders and too little body fat.” (source)

“Excess estrogen in the body causes weight gain around the abdomen and upper thighs. … Weight gain caused by estrogen starts a vicious cycle. Excessive body fat produces the aromatase enzyme that synthesizes estrogen, thus creating more estrogen in the body, which then promotes additional weight gain, and so on, says Hofmekler.” (source)

“Researchers have found a correlation between estrogen and weight, particularly during menopause, when estrogen levels drop, but weight tends to rise. But since fat cells can produce estrogen, the issue facing researchers is how to target the estrogen receptors that will boost energy and manage hunger and not contribute to menopause-related weight gain.” (source)

“For postmenopausal women, estrogen levels increase with increasing BMI, presumably because conversion of androgens to estrogen in adipose tissue is a primary source of estrogen…” (source)

Since Americans have been getting fatter over the past century, I’d expect estrogen levels to be up, but I’ve found no studies on the subject so far. (Also, the Wikipedia claims there’s no evidence that birth control pills make people fat.)

However, I have found quite a bit of evidence that giving synthetic estrogen to animals makes them fatter:

(Stilbosol is another name for DES, as you may note in the ad’s upper right hand corner.)

Since the picture quality is bad, I’ll try to type it up for you:

Ralph:

“Ralph has been feeding cattle in New York state for 20 years. He runs 300 head a year through his feed lot, buying mountain (?) calves at 400 pounds and finishing them to about 1,000 pounds.  …

“”I lean very heavily on college tests and they’re in favor of Stilbosol. The first time we tried it, back in 1955, I noticed a very definite improvement in appetite.

“”Stilbosol is a ‘must’ in our feeding operations. It has added to our profit. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be using it.””

Dan:

“We bring our cattle into the lots around 600 pounds. Feed for about 150 days. … We feed to all weights (950 to 1150 pounds) and take a little chance from time to time and feed t heavier weights,” Dan stated.

“We get about 2.75 lbs. daily gain. And I figure Stilbosol accounts for (unreadable) to 1/2 lb. of that daily gain. …

“Does Stilbosol make us money? There’s no doubt about it! Stilbosol has revolutionized the cattle business. I guess it’s the only good break through in the last ten years.”

Bill:

“”I tested Stilbosol. Took a bunch of 315 Montana yearlings and split them up. One group was actually lighter than the other. The only change I made in their rations was the addition of Stilbosol. The lighter group received Stilbosol. I figured that the lot fed Stilbosol gained over 1 1/2 lb. per day more than the lot which had no Stilbosol.

“”With all the competition, a man can’t afford to pas up anything that will lower his cost of grain. Stilbosol is one of them.””

John:

“We were trying to find the cheapest, most efficient ration. One group of calves received a ration containing Stilbosol. Another received a similar ration without Stilbosol. The group receiving Stilbosol had a feed conversion of (I can’t tell the number, but it’s clearly a single digit followed by .4). The group receiving no Stilbosol had a feed conversion of 10.35. The Stilbosol group gained 2.49 pounds per day. The group that did not receive Stilbosol gained 2.13 pounds per day.

“With Stilbosol, we figure our cost of grain to be substantially lower than similar rations without Stilbosol.) “

Four farmers wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

Interestingly, eating large quantities of beef while pregnant was one of the things that The Independent article (linked at the top) noted was correlated with low sperm counts years down the road in the all-grown-up-fetuses.

Of course, people who eat more beef may just weigh more, or have some other factors besides adulterations in the cattle feed.

DES was also put in chicken feed, for the exact same reasons as cattle feed, until it came out that DES causes cancer in humans. It was discontinued as a feed additive in the late 70s.

These days, I don’t know what–if anything–they’re using to finish cattle, but we may note that the vast majority of cattle are still finished in feedlots where they get much fatter than they would naturally. (That is, by wandering around eating grass like they normally do.) Feedlot cattle are, to put it bluntly, unnaturally fat.

Now I’m going to do a little math. The Independent article was published in 2010, and states that the article on falling sperm rates was published 19 years prior, or in 1991. The study therefore compared men in the 1940s to men in the 1980s and 1990. Men in the 1940s were fetuses before the age of feedlots, birth control pills, DES, or DES-fed cattle and chicken. Young(ish) men in 1990, by contrast, were born between 1950 and 1970–all within the era of feedlots, BCPs, DES, and DES-fed cattle and chicken.

If it is true that sperm counts have stabilized since the 90s, that is a point potentially in favor of my theory, since after the 70s, DES was basically gone.

This is all me speculating out loud, of course.

 

 

 

Once a political position becomes fashionable, it has already won

Edit: I feel like this post is badly written and doesn’t get its point across. As soon as I finish the post I’m working on right now, I’m going to try to fix it. My apologies for any confusion and delay.

I observed a decade or so ago that support for gay marriage had become very popular among the young and fashionable. At that point, I stopped worrying about the issue, on the assumption that support would soon tip 50%.

I never expected trans people to get much popular support, simply because there are so few of them. Facebook and Twitter have proven me wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue fell off people’s radar screens. Trans folk are still considered pretty ‘weird’ by a lot of people.

“Feminism” and “Critical Race Theory” had become quite popular on the internet and among the cool people (at least, by my standards of cool), and have only become more prominent.

Racial issues I expect to continue being fairly high-profile, while feminist issues will remain largely in the background (by which I mean that no one stages large street protests over murdered women.)

Illegal immigration seems like an issue with high potential to become the next big popular thing, especially since it can ride on anti-racism’s coat tails and increasing numbers of young people in this country are people whose families immigrated from Mexico in the first place.

What do you think? What will be the next big thing?

 

On an unrelated note, I just realized that the “pus” in platypus is from the Greek for foot, eg, octopus, not from Latin, so the plural platypi is pseudo-Latin. I’d go with “platypodes”, since podes is the plural of pus, but then no one would have any idea what I’m saying.