ObjectivityIncarnate

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • were those numbers perhaps cherry-picked to make the situation look more dramatic than it actually is?

    If anyone can go from 554th to 5th in any sport/event just by competing among the other sex, nothing else changing, then that obviously indicates something. You can’t handwave that away.

    Her personal 100m freestyle time dropping less than a quarter of a second post-transition is honestly a bigger indicator that transition is not making a substantial difference, because that angle completely removes the ‘chance’ element in your opponents being different people.



  • The fact that the University of Pennsylvania swimmer [Lia Thomas] soared from a mid-500s ranking (554th in the 200 freestyle; all divisions) in men’s competition to one of the top-ranked swimmers in women’s competition tells the story

    In the 100 freestyle, Thomas’ best time prior to her transition was 47.15. At the NCAA Championships, she posted a prelims time in the event of 47.37. That time reflects minimal mitigation of her male-puberty advantage.

    During the last season Thomas competed as a member of the Penn men’s team, which was 2018-19, she ranked 554th in the 200 freestyle, 65th in the 500 freestyle and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle. As her career at Penn wrapped, she moved to fifth, first and eighth in those respective events on the women’s deck.

    It may not be an issue to you, but it’s an issue to every woman whose ranking is lower as a result. I imagine it especially hurts if you’re pushed out of first place in that way.



  • Speaking of “paycheck to paycheck”:

    I certainly have compassion for people who live paycheck to paycheck because they’re struggling to make ends meet, but not those living “paycheck to paycheck” who have the ability to save, but choose not to. And, despite popular belief, the majority of people in the “living paycheck to paycheck” category are actually the latter. But it’s easy to assume the former meaning (it’s more intuitive, after all), so those two ‘subsets’ are almost always (basically everywhere other than within the depths of the methodology of the research that yields the figures) conflated, and so “living paycheck to paycheck” is often used to great effect in rhetoric as a result.

    The fact is, on average, Americans have more of an overspending problem, than an underearning one. Did you know that 48% of consumers earning over $100,000 a year, and over a third earning over $200,000 are “living paycheck to paycheck”? Meanwhile, 25% of those earning less than $50k aren’t living paycheck to paycheck (a demo I was part of until I eclipsed $50k a few years ago)—maybe it’s time to more closely examine what those people are doing, and follow their example.

    It’s absurd that anyone making less than $50k a year is saving more money than someone making $200k.




  • it’s such a serious threat to the country’s financial stability that we should chicken out and stop taxing the rich.

    No one’s saying this, this is a straw man.

    It’s just a simple fact that there is a ‘sweet spot’ when it comes to maximizing tax revenue. It’s the same as if you’re selling a product for $10, then 100 people buy it, and you assume that you’ll double your $1000 profit if you sell it for $20 instead, but then the number of buyers went down to 10, and now your bottom line is $800 less, instead.

    “Just tax them more” is not the simple/obvious solution it appears to be on the surface. Also, people don’t just not react when stuff like this changes, to protect themselves; just compare tax revenue presently to what it was when it capped out at (iirc) 91%.

    And even IF ‘turning that dial’ simply increased tax revenue, it needs to be combined with that revenue being spent productively, for it to make any difference at all. Hell, I think the US already brings in more than enough tax revenue to do everything we want it to do, if it was doing it as efficiently as it could be.







  • Yes. Those people consider things like this part of the “cost of living”, not the luxury that it is.

    On average, people have more of an issue overspending than they do underearning. That’s why even among people making six figures, 1 in 4 of them live “paycheck to paycheck”, which people assume to mean ‘barely make enough to make ends meet’, but what more commonly means ‘deliberately chooses not to save/spends every dollar earned’.