The Planning Reform is proceeding towards approval and the whole system is going to be changed. The major change that will emerge, I suppose, is tha the green organizations have taken over the planning system and green considerations will be dominant in Israel's real estate development. The end result will be that almost no new infrastructure will be done in Israel and land will be left to "Nature". Except in Arab areas, where the Arabs themselves are "Nature" and no one dares to say anything nor protect any plant or animal.
In addition, on the basis of a proposal submitted by Minister of Social Services Isaac Herzog and the Prime Minister's Office, the ministerial legislative committee decided that the reform will strengthen the role of social and welfare aspects of planning procedures by, among other things, including a representative of social organizations in the National Planning and Building Commission. The committee also decided that a Ministry of Social Services representative will sit on the regional planning and building commissions. The minister of environmental protection will appoint representatives of environment organizations to planning commissions. In addition, the power of the regional infrastructures committees has been restricted on matters relating to open spaces.
20 comments:
On the one hand, Israel is a small country with limited "nature" to preserve, so I think it is something of a special case. On the other hand, Israel has to compete in an economic race with Asian competitors - those competitors run freely but enterprises in the West are entangled in a thicket of regulations, "green" , red and all other colors. Who do you think will win that race?
K
Fortunately, Asian competitors have their own problems. Like corruption.
But J's Dear Leader North Korea Opportunities Fund will be investing in a progressive place where these tiresome little details are not a problem!
Koko, fund manager, has moved the potplant out of her office in a gesture of solidarity with the workers of Pyongyang, and taken to wearing a shapeless monochrome pair of pyjamas to work. She has taken to muttering party slogans such as "Food is a bourgeois indulgence", and "There is only one fat person in our glorious country!!"
Anon.
Koko wrote a letter to Slate protesting the note titles "The land of the racist dwarves" which she felt was irrespetous toward her future business partners.
J, you say that "the green organizations have taken over the planning system and green considerations will be dominant in Israel's real-estate development." J, I guess that you and I both know that "Yahweh" is empirical nonsense. But Yahweh says that people are more important than greenery, and I think you and I agree with Yahweh on that. If people really are the most important resource, then do we need to know who is the world's greatest living genius? I think it might be Ray Kurzweil. (I think you and I both agree it was Einstein in 1906.) Here are 2 questions for you:
(1) Do you think avg Jewish IQ = 114, avg East Asian IQ = 108, and avg white European IQ = 100?
(2) Who, in your opinion, is the world's greatest living genius.
Answers:
1. Average White European IQ may be well under 100 because 100 is the average Native English adult intelligence quotient and I am sure that the majority of the Europeans are under 100. For example Spaniards, Portuguese, Bulgarians, Greeks, South Italy, Ukraine and even parts of Germany. The populations where IQ is higher live in Northern Italy, Austria, Bavaria, Switzerland. Averaging the 600 million or so wemay get, I estimate, about 95.
Regarding East Asian, I think it is about 104 - 105 because most of them live in the provinces of China, which are rural and low IQ. The higher IQ people live on the coast, in Korea and Japan.
Regarding Jews, we have at least 50 different populations, so averaging makes no sense. Most of them are under 100. Some pure Ashkenazi family groups may average 120 and more.
2. Genius? I think the Oracle of Omaha is.
Of course there are other Ashkenazi families that are lower. What is significant is the IQ of the Ashkenazim as a group (while they still exist as a more or less distinct breeding population, which may not be much longer). 114 +/-3 is not an unreasonable estimate for Ashkenazi IQ. Ashkenazim have earned 27% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans, 25% of ACM Turing Awards, and 26% of the Fields Medals. They account for more than half the world chess champions. Ashkenazic Jews, 2 percent of the US population, make up 30% of elite-college faculty, 30% of Supreme Court law clerks, and 27% of Ivy Leaguers. These % correspond with what you would expect for a population with an IQ that is approximately 1 SD smarter than the average - the "tails" of the IQ distribution out at the 145+ level where high performers are found are exceedingly small so the area under the Ashkenazi curve to the right of that point would indeed be 10x or more greater than the population average - maybe 2% vs. 0.2% (and 100+ times greater than the black population with a mean IQ of 85. For Ashkenazi Jews, the 145 level is only 2 SD from average but for blacks it is 4 SD out, where the tail is almost invisibly small - there has never been a black Nobel prize winner in any of the hard sciences.
My daughter is a member of something called the "Study of Exception Talent" sponsored by Johns Hopkins University. The way you qualify for this is to take the SAT college entrance exam before the age of 13 and score over 700 (the 95th percentile for high school seniors) on either the verbal or math section. It is estimated that this corresponds to an IQ of 160+, which is 1 in 10,000 of the general population (0.01%). I (proudly) attended the awards ceremony where the winners (several hundred - out of the US population of 300M, .01% would be 30,000 total of which several hundred are the right age group each year). Maybe half the winners were East Asian (after maybe the 20th consecutive "Kim" was called the audience began to laugh), the next most common group being Jews and then non-Jewish whites. There was also a fair sprinkling of South Asians (Indians). I recall seeing exactly one black (and I'm guessing that even that one won in the verbal category) and there were very few Hispanic names. Blessedly, this even is (so far) free from the affirmative action mania which has infected the rest of academia and was based on pure merit (test scores). I've also attended some parent events - generally the parents are the highly involved type and statistics gathered show that the great bulk of winners come from intact families (even though overall maybe 1/2 of all marriages end in divorce). Also I noticed that the Asian parents were uniformly 1st generation - not one was a native speaker of English (some of them spoke very poor English). So there is a social as well as genetic component to this. Unfortunately, the same groups that suffer from low genetic IQ also are low on social indices so there is a double hit.
It was clear to me that while the Jews were still holding their own in this group, they were a fading force and the Asians were a rising one. Between intermarriage and the loss of the 1st generation striving immigrant effect, the Ashkenazim will become more like average whites or a sort of Mestizo group with a mean of 107 or so, just as Hispanics are 1/2 way between blacks and whites on the other side of the hump. The Asian's representation, however, was skewed because a high score in EITHER the math or verbal realm was all that was required - the overwhelming % of Asians qualified on the basis of their math scores. While Ashkenazim show even (but high) performance in both realms, Asian IQ skews toward the mathematical. In areas such as law or literature which require verbal skills, Asians are still very poorly represented.
K
J and K, are both Israel and the USA going to have a "Planning Hell" with regard to the Muslims, especially the Iranians? Let us consider 3 hypotheses:
(1) A majority of Shiite Muslims traditionally believe that the 12th Imam shall miraculously emerge from hiding at the end of days.
(2) The tendency to believe in the 12th Imam is, genetically, strongly positively correlated with the tendency to have a below average IQ and with the tendency to be violence-prone against non-Muslims.
(3) In the modern world, fertility is negatively correlated with IQ.
If the preceding 3 hypotheses are true, then what? Can the Iranians buy an automated A-bomb factory from China or somewhere else?
Religious Jews also believe that the Moshiach (Messiah) will come someday - maybe even today, as do many Christians. Millenarian beliefs are fairly common among religions so it's hard to infer anything meaningful from them. That being said, a lot of Iranians are as crazy as loons.
I'm sure the N. Koreans are willing to sell the Iranians A-bomb technology for cash. I doubt the Chinese will. A-bomb technology is 1940's tech anyway and is not that hard to implement. The really hard problem is enriching uranium on an industrial scale - Iran is no industrial powerhouse and for security reasons all enrichment has to be done in hardened underground facilities. They may or may not win that race or maybe when they are 90% there (and the Israelis probably know to the gram how far along they are and what Pres. A. had for breakfast), the Israelis will blast their investment to bits and send them back to square 1.
K
K, you seem to have studied and thought deeply about demographic issues. Have you studied fertility rates among various groups by occupation and success levels? In Japan and the European countries it seems that remarkably few women want to have more than 1 or 2 children — are there significant subgroups where that is a false impression? Does it seem to you that the world is more likely headed to (1) an astonishing AI/robotic transformation or (2) a global breakdown exacerbated by demographic and environmental factors?
Generally, except among certain religious groups (the ultra-Orthodox Jews) income is negatively correlated with # of children in the modern world.
As for which way we are headed, I think that depends where - I think we may have an increasingly polarized world divided between failed states and ever more advanced ones, with a certain # of people escaping from the first group to the second to perform menial tasks. The escapees will have the status of guest workers, as in the Gulf States today, and will not be allowed to assume citizenship.
K
...while they still exist as a more or less distinct breeding population, which may not be much longer
I think that "they" will continue existing for foreseeable generations. Yet "their" proportion in the general population will be minimal, maybe something like 0.3 - 0.5%. I am of the opinion that East European percentages were totally unsustainable (in Poland it arrived to 15% and 50% and more in most cities). Even half a percent is too salient and exasperating for the general population. I think there is much wisdom in the Haredi lifestyle of focusing in the study of the Tora, living on an extremely modest (poor) economic level and giving up the opportunities to be compared (or to compete) with the goyim. It is life in a ghetto, but there seems to be no other way to be tolerated in the long term.
So that the era when the Jews came into contact with the West and produced great geniuses - Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Einstein, Freud, etc. is drawing to a close - the remaining Jews will either assimilate and their special genius will be diluted into nothingness or a remaining few will return to the bet hamidrash to pore over the mishna and gemara forevermore. I hope you are wrong because this would be a loss to the world.
K
K, it is better that some of the Ashkenazim preserve themselves, even if such preservation involves retreat into religious colonies instead of being completely obliterated.
Personally, I would prefer that instead of having the Ashkenazi retreat into religious communities in NY that they move to Israel.
In fact, I would prefer that you move to Israel. In another thread you suggested that the Jews of the world should begin to colonize China, and thinking about the matter I could swear that you want a Permanent Diaspora, wherein Jewry wanders the earth homeless, but distinguished forever.
The Ashkenazi Jews as we know them are a product of the diaspora. The ancient Israelites were not noted for their intelligence. Israelis are a new sort of people, who consciously rejected "Yiddishkeit" (Jewishness in the European sense) and I don't feel "home" there at all. I'm not sure in this age of nuclear weapons that gathering all the Jews in one concentrated group is really the best idea.
K
I'm not sure in this age of nuclear weapons that gathering all the Jews in one concentrated group is really the best idea.
The Jewish state is also nuclear-armed. I'm not sure attacking the Jewish state in this age is really the best idea. Like you said, no in Israel wants to look like a "freier", and so their first instinct is to screw the other party first.
Are you trying to screw me over?!?!?!! Are you trying to make me look like a freier?!?!
Besides, your ancestors may not have been geniuses, but I doubt they were dunces either. You've noted the Jews of America have a 50% intermarriage rate. If your fellow Ashkenazi are going to marry outside their group then they might as well do it in Israel where they will at least b marrying their fellow Jews.
Besides, I know you feel uncomfortable in Israel, but what of your children?
Who will they marry?
I don't know. We are not in control of our children once they become adults. If I am lucky the boy will marry a girl and vice versa but in this age we can't even take that for granted, much less anything else. I did my best to set an example. What will be will be.
K
K, I am confident that your children were born with the right inclinations and will follow your example. It is amazing how children grow to be so similar to their parents and how they end by following their ways.
For example, my wife is becoming each day more like her mother (that is not a compliment). My daughters are also showing budding signs of the same chaleyra obnoxiousness. No need to worry.
J, thank you. I hope you are right.
I am reminded of the old saying :
"Be careful what you ask [God] for - you just might get it."
But in truth, sometimes you will see the trial of some murderer or other horrible criminal and in the courtroom you will see the criminal's elderly parents and they are usually not the monsters that their children are.
K
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