"Involuntarily Childless" is a term I'd apply to people who can't have children for medical reasons and not people who arranged their lives such that they were unlikely to have children.
Unless you think concepts like "genome" and "propagation" are somehow encoded in our DNA, it's ideological.
There are clear biological drives to sex and caring for young, but I don't see evidence for a direct biological drive for being fruitful and multiplying.
I suspect, like many human things, it's an underlying biological drive interpreted by our lawyer-as-narrator, the consciousness. I'm thinking of the "elephant and the rider" metaphor -- the elephant has drives for sex and care of young, the rider on the top rationalizes it.
The elephant turns left and goes into a river. After they're headed for the river, the rider thinks, "I'm hot, I should go to the river."
>Nice thing about wood power is that as long as you have a sustainable source of wood, you're 100% solar-powered and carbon neutral. That is to say, it's a source of energy that is (can be) non-fossil, nor derived from any fossil sources, and which recycles it's own CO2 emissions.
As long as you're happy pouring carcinogens into the air, sure. Also, compared to oil or coal there's not much energy in wood, so it doesn't scale very well.
Charcoal is made by burning wood in a low oxygen environment, driving off water and organics, while carbonizing lignin, cellulose, etc. Coal is a petrochemical mass formed underground from organic matter over long timescales.
Fresh wood contains ~50% water (up to 70% for certain species), 'dry' wood lies around 15% water. Depending on the type of gasifier you can feed it anything between fresh from the tree to kiln-dried wood. Starting a gasifier requires dry wood or charcoal but once it is going it will do a lot of the drying itself. The reduction process in the lower part of the hearth - where the gas production goes on, reducing CO2 to CO - can also reduce H2O to H2. The end product of a wetter wood will be gas with a higher H2 content next to the CO which forms the main combustible component in wood gas. Yes, wood gas is mainly carbon monoxide and as such highly poisonous, you do not want to start a gasifier in an enclosed environment nor open an unvented gasfier in such.
Dried wood suitable for burning is around 20% water at most, else it won't burn with much heat. It can go down to around 6% IIRC for kiln-dried wood suitable for construction.
AFDC and other Great Society programs are better candidates for a culprit if you're looking for a reason for increased out-of-wedlock births based on the timing.
When you set up incentives such that a woman loses money by marrying a guy with a small or nonexistent income, you're going to see fewer marriages in the lowest income bracket. It's rational in the short term, but the long term effects are corrosive.
>If it simply to incarcerate people for a while to make their lives difficult and make them not want to reoffend...
One thing I've noticed about ex-cons I've actually come in contact with is the people who are least afraid of going to prison are the people who've been there.
I think it's because they know what to expect, so there's less fear of the unknown. They already know what to look out for, and they already know people inside.
Plus, life for an ex-con is pretty hard on the outside.
The holding cell is actually worse in some cases. Here, it’s a concrete box that you can’t leave until you go to court or get transferred to jail. You get shit for food, banana for breakfast, pbj for lunch, etc. At least at the local jail, you get rec time, TV, and subjectively better meals. I caught a 4 day weekend in a holding cell with 3 of them without anther person. That really starts to eat away at you as it’s essentially short term solitary confinement.
Just to add, that’s 3 days solitary for not even being convicted of shoplifting. The charge was dropped for other reasons.
Laziness and CYA. Nobody wants to be the guy who didn't realize there was a useful section for making weapons, poisons, weakening bars, etc in a book he green-lighted.
>Getting a US VISA is hard and painful when you come from a populous country like China or India
Which is funny in the specific context of Chinese people, since you essentially have to get an internal visa to move to the city from the countryside, and it's difficult to get.
>When US sociologists and political scientists talk about “systemic and structural racism” this is one of the manifestations.
Which has always bothered me, since there are other explanations (lifestyle habits, genetics, poverty) that would explain the difference, in whole or in part. It's a politically convenient assumption that goes contrary to Occam's Razor.
I'm going to quote what someone said below because this is blatantly false
"This is not only false, but dangerously false. We are in the process of discovering that certain classes of popularly-prescribed drugs (eg ACE inhibitors for blacks, certain chemotherapy drugs for Asians) are ineffective or even toxic for populations not represented in the relevant drug development research cohorts. It's not identity politics to note that pharmacokinetics can differ between individuals and populations. These differences do not explain all of the population-level morbidity and mortality differences between ethnicities, but they are significant when investigating differences between groups on the same course of treatment."
Nothing you've said seems wrong to me, but the tone of how you write is too dismissive.
> since there are other explanations (lifestyle habits, genetics, poverty) that would explain the difference, in whole or in part.
This doesn't contradict the meaning of "structural, systemic racism", but it explains it. When pharmacies are making drugs that are only effective for white people, and not researching effectiveness on black people, that's structural racism almost by definition.
Obviously pharma companies are responding to financial incentives, and if it's not profitable for a company to research treatments specifically helping a minority group then they're probably not going to. Less availability of pharmaceuticals makes treatment harder, causing what is available more expensive or leading to complications that require more further medical treatment (and cost more money); and those who choose not to get treatment will find themselves with further medical conditions later. In the end it would cost the minority more money, which they likely cannot pay for other systemic reasons, so more often they would be denied access to a hospital outright. Everyone involved is responding to natural incentives, but the net result still becomes [minority group] is neglected because of the color of their skin.
> Did you read the whole comment?
When you write like this it feels like you're attacking the character of the person you're talking to, which makes the whole conversation more toxic to follow.
I just finished reading "Color of Law", which, while not the best formatted book, gives a really really good overview of the systematic, government led, programs designed and enforced explicitly against african americans from the late 1870s until the 1980s. It's a pretty quick read and well worth it for anyone who thinks that "systematic racism" isn't real.
Black people have worse health outcomes controlling for obesity and poverty.
Blaming genetics for such a wide range of negative outcomes is silly if you're looking for a simple explanation. Consider this[1] paper on cervical cancer. There are nine different genes linked to it. Now do that for every relatively worse health outcome. That's the opposite of simple.
Lifestyle is even more nebulous. It encompasses so much that suggesting it's a kind of verbal jujitsu to suggest it's an adequate use of Occam's Razor. There are hundreds of lifestyle factors and you can weight them however you want to get the result you want.
All of those are about as broad and as simple as racism, which you appear to categorically disregard as a plausible explanation.
>You dismissed one assumption and named three more. Please explain which applies to Occam's razor.
Because there is a direct correlation between observable characteristics like obesity and poverty to health outcomes for people of all races. If a fat, poor white woman in Appalachia has heart problems in her 40s and receives low quality care, is that a result of systemic racism?
And as others have pointed out, we don't know the entire scope of genetic effects, but we know they exist to some degree (which was the whole point of the article).
The centuries-long existence of slavery, segregation (which was brutal oppression, including lynching), and racism isn't an "assumption", but indisputable fact. Occam's Razor is not a real arbiter of truth, but in this case it cuts the other way: Racism is the simpler and blazingly obvious explanation, backed by endless reearch and even the most casual observation. You really have to work to contrive explanations that don't include systemic and structural racism.
>Racism is the simpler and blazingly obvious explanation, backed by endless reearch and even the most casual observation.
Things that are wrong can be obvious to individuals and groups of people. It's certainly not obvious to half the country, and that "endless research" is tainted. How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out the primary drivers of black misery in the US (out of wedlock births, drugs, and violence) are self inflicted?
> How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out the primary drivers of black misery in the US (out of wedlock births, drugs, and violence) are self inflicted?
To "point out" something (in academia or elsewhere), that something must be a fact.
It's certainly obvious to the most of the U.S., and facts are not subject to a popularity vote regardless.
> "endless research" is tainted
Easily said, but completely unsubstantiated
> How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out ...
Can you substantiate that such a thing is true, and then answer your question? One thing that will lose you your job in academia is making intellectually weak, baseless claims. Academia doesn't run an affirmative action program to include all political ideologies; you have to actually have evidence and good arguments.
> How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out the primary drivers of black misery in the US (out of wedlock births, drugs, and violence) are self inflicted?
It's almost as if the sins of the past affects the lives of people in the present somehow.
It's almost as if people like to use the sins of others long dead to excuse their own shortcomings.
In any event, if free will isn't a thing, there's no point in trying to make the world a better place, right, so we should just leave things as they are?
You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's an abuse of the site which destroys its main purpose, so we ban accounts that do it. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, take its spirit to heart, and use HN as intended from now on?
You are suggesting that there isn't widespread racism now? What knowledge or basis do you have for all this?
> if free will isn't a thing
So either there is no free will or there are no systemic problems? Are poverty in Somalia and Kirghistan systemic issues, or is it just a failure of the people there that they don't live like people in the Bay Area? In the U.S., is poverty on Native American reservations, and among almost every group that isn't white men, just due to laziness? Society, health care, schools, the economy, racism, etc. - all have no effect?
Something like the negative effects of concentrated poverty seems to fit Occam's Razor well enough. "The most obviously-shared attribute amongst clusters of extremely poor minorities across the country is the clustering of poverty, and here are some potential causal ways this can lead to different lifestyle habits, different levels of education, different access to health care, etc."
That seems way more likely to me than oft-hinted-at-by-the-"politically-incorrect" "here's a cluster of people who all made the same bad decisions or were victims of the same bad luck in the same way, for no underlying reason other than genetic factors also associated with the color of their skin." That's pretty damn "politically convenient" if you're not in the minority population, too - "hey guys, it's not our fault! They just suck!" Hard to imagine something more politically convenient to the lucky than that.
