Thank you. Enlightening info.
Piketty: the poorest half of Americans saw a "total collapse" in their share of the country's wealth
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This was in the same period?
You know about the coup that the Dupont family tried to do with Smedley Butler back in the day? It was quietly hushed up but he testified to congress about it when he ratted them out.
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It’s depressing 
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Yes.
When the Zuckerbergs announced he was “giving away” 99% of their net worth, $45 billion at the time, I calculated (hopefully correctly) that the remaining 1% would leave them with the median US household income, for the next eight-thousand years.
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Math in general?
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The fact that so many people are below 100 IQ.
Depressing.
I’m not sure how Math could be depressing. It’s just Math.
Not really. It’s only depressing if you buy into IQ as a measure of anything other than “how to do IQ tests”.
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But lf we massively increased our intelligence then half of all people would still be below 100 IQ. It’s like grading on a curve.
By definition half is always below the median no matter how intelligent we get.
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Yeah, that was the one Prescott Bush was involved with (he was also directly connected to the Nazis)…
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Butler was the inspiration for this, IIRC:
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There are also statistics on how well immigrants and their children do in various countries. USA is not #1.
One of the recurring themes that I see in pretty much any graph like this about quality of life stuff is that Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand almost always come out on top. The lowest are usually equatorial areas like Central America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The low end of the high scores are usually the Mediterranean countries (Italy, Greece, Spain) and the U.S.
It’s led to an impression that the quality of life is better (at least socially) the farther you go from the equator. Crime rates and instability are lower, health care is better, social security nets are stronger, etc. Closer to the equator, where nature is much more hospitable to human life, people are more inhospitable to each other.
But these things are always by country rather than by latitude. It makes me wonder why South Africa, Chile, and Argentina don’t score better, and whether things are any better in northern Siberia than southern Russia.
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http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2014/09/04/4081144.htm
TLDR: “Heatwaves have killed more Australians than all other natural hazards combined”.
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Bhutan is supposedly the happiest country, and it’s at the same latitude that runs through Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and pretty much the entire Sahara. Not places you associate with quality of life.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/01/bhutan-wealth-happiness-counts
Other counterpoints are: lots of South Pacific islands. Singapore. I don’t know if people are happy in Siberia or Kamchatka, but at least they don’t have crowds.
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…which is almost certainly a result of cultural shifts leading people to be more familiar with written test-taking and abstract reasoning, rather than an overall increase in cognitive ability.
Rather than getting smarter, we’re specialising our intelligence towards the sorts of tasks that are measured by these tests. We make some gains from this process (turns out that abstract reasoning is really useful), but we also pay a price for it (there ain’t a lot of people these days who can recite epic poetry for hours without notes, or recognise and name every piece of flora and fauna they encounter).
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The “visual intelligence” factor is pretty compelling too. Much of today’s movie/TV editing would seem to our great grandparents like looking through a broken kaleidoscope during a tornado. Not to mention video games, where you have to interact with that tornado kaleidoscope to achieve goals.
It’s been a while since I had to take any kind of IQ test, but as I recall they had pretty big chunks of visual puzzles. Tangrams for instance. Or those cubes that have red faces, white faces, and faces split diagonally, and you have to arrange them to make the prescribed shape. I don’t know their name.
I can very easily imagine that practice in quickly making sense of fast-paced disjointed visuals, or practice in solving Rubik’s Cubes or SpaceChem problems would sharpen one’s facility with Tangrams or the like. Conversely, evenings without television or radio or much of anything else in the way of lamplit entertainment would be more conducive to memorizing the Bible and lengthy poems.
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