Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
9hr ago
Weighted by screentime, the majority of the film is about the aesthetics of 90s furniture stores. It's hard to convey this feeling by text, so I focused on the thematic subtext of class and relationships.
Having thought on it more, the one healthy relationship in the film is between Male Lead's two employees. They are both lower-middle class. They even have the exact same job!
Quantumfreakonomics
19hr ago
Kino Review: Backrooms
Spoiler warning obviously.
Backrooms the movie is superficially based on the 4chan meme “the backrooms”, and yes, there are lots of fun found-footage scenes visually exploring the aesthetics of liminal spaces, but good horror movies are never about the monster, they are about what the monster represents. Backrooms is about the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you.
Male Lead is a black entrepreneur who runs a local furniture store. Female Lead is his upstanding attractive white PhD therapist. Male Lead is in therapy primarily because his financially dependent law student wife (who is also an attractive white woman) left him.
It is hinted that Female Lead is also lonely and wants children. From a purely narrative perspective, it might seem as if Male Lead and Female Lead are destined to get together at some point. Taking into account their respective biographies, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course that wouldn’t happen. He is a schlubby loser from a lower social class and an unprestigious career. You can practically taste the ick she feels behind the professional facade in every scene they have together. It's great.
The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
It takes two people for that.
I'm not the one saying no.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
"I don’t endorse female secondary school teachers getting pregnant by raping their male students"
On the off chance that I become an oyster farmer and run for senate 10 years from now, let the digital record unequivocally reflect that I am 100% in favor of attractive single female teachers """""raping""""" their male students to get pregnant.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
The purpose is to use them in certain hypothetical situations. If there are no hypothetical situations in which they are to be used, then they are entirely useless.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
The only openly trans person I have ever encountered IRL was a Cracker Barrel host(ess) in small-town Louisiana.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Ken Martin insisted on Pod Save America that no money was spent on the autopsy. That is the only claim from him that was believable.
It also shouldn't be self-reflection necessarily. They should have brought in NTSB and USCSB alumni to do an deep-dive independent investigation the way you'd analyze a plane crash or plant explosion. Toes will be stepped on. It will be embarrasing. If you really thought that, "Democracy was on the ballot", and then Democracy lost, then none of that stuff matters.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
There needs to be an autopsy on the autopsy report. I am 100% serious. Figuring out all the things that went wrong to allow this to happen would solve half of the party's problems. Reinterview witnesses. Reconstruct lines of thought and inquiry. Find the points of failure and conduct root-cause analysis.
The report is poorly written, unprofessional, and incomplete yes, but above all it is vapid. It doesn't even ask the questions that matter. The overwhelming majority of effort is focused on ad targeting and campaign spending.
"The pollsters were involved in discussions around the Trump attack ads – in particular the attack ad focused on the Vice President’s prior statements on transgendered Americans. They all recognized the attack as very effective, and felt the campaign was boxed – the ad was a video of her saying what she said, and it was framed as an attack on her economic priorities.
If the Vice President would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response. The pollsters generally concurred with the opinions shared by campaign leadership - given the stakes and timing, the focus needed to be on attacking Trump."
Okay, what was the mistake then? What should be done differently next time around? Should the Vice President have changed her position or not? In fact, there is almost no discussion of issues in the report at all. A model of why anyone would want to vote for one party or the other is conspicuously absent.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
This was a clear violation of established civil rights and the victim deserves restitution.
But $835,000 is a lot of money. That is more money than I have made in my entire life. Even in the "good" endings, I shudder to look directly at the massive roulette wheel that is American tort litigation. A back-of-the-envelope calculation for what I think would be a fair settlement (all figures approximate):
Lost wages: $10,000
Physical discomfort: $100,000
Emotional distress: $15,000
Missing life events: $10,000
Legal fees: $50,000
This comes to a total of $185,000. I cannot imagine a fudge factor big enough to make up the extra $650,000. That's pure profit in my book. This isn't even particularly large for a civil rights settlement. Insane that we just accept this.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
Real OGs remember that Trump was Freak of the Year in 2011
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
showing up in red/black shirts and then posing for a group photo in the "costumes":
The gendered tyranny of… spontaneously organized dress codes? Is that what is being alleged here, that jurors were pressured into wearing one of two colors of shirt?
What am I missing?
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
I think I just about died watching the Piers Morgan interview at the part where Piers asks with a completely straight face what “jestermaxing” is, and it takes a few back and forths to reveal that Clav thinks that jestermaxing is bad.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
In a very real sense, anyone running against a Trump-endorsed candidate is not a Republican. It makes all too much sense that Trump-endorsed candidates sweep Republican primaries. All of the Republican Party's political power (at least at the national level) comes from being willing to stand together behind Trump.
The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are fundamentally different in how power works internally. The Democrats are a collection of squabling interest groups, and the Republicans are a coalition of everyone who opposes these interests. The structure of the Republican base requires strong top-down discipline to hold the coalition together.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
That's the fun part. We all get to find out, together.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
Obligatory TracingWoodgrains post.
The normative standard that Clavicular violates is that exterior physical beauty is, and more importantly ought to be, reflective of inner beauty. An ugly person could not deliver this message, because he would also violate this normative standard. The catharsis of seeing Clavicular get "mogged" comes from Clavicular's unnatural, unearned, and unreflective beauty being shown to be vain in contrast to the natural "earned" beauty which is reflective of the true inner virtue of the gigachad interlocutor.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Looking into this, and wow, Congress really did pass an indefinite uncapped appropriation for the federal judgement fund with no substantive limitations. The statute for unauthorized tax information disclosure which Trump sued under allows punitive damages with no statutory cap. This settlement is actually 100% legal.
How many other loopholes like this are there in the United States Code?
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Yes, but we have 30 years more of technological development in lawfare now. Think of how many doohickeys and doodads you can bring up to the jury.
Did you ask whether the engine was governed at 70mph? "No"
Did you ask whether the 80,000 pound truck you hired was equiped with a collision detection system like you have in your personal Kia? "No"
Did you ask whether the truck was equiped with a lane depature warning system? "No"
Was it a red flag that the carrier you hired barely spoke English? "No"
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
Islam is right about dogs.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
Another data point I discovered today: There are multiple videos of university commencement speakers getting booed every time they bring up AI.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
There are a lot of leftist spaces where you would get a better response saying, “I think the West takes in too many immigrants,” than you would saying, “I think AI art is good.”
Some leftists think the technology itself is intrinsically evil, but almost all of them think that the people building the tech are evil oligarchs who can’t wait to banish 99% of the population to the permanent underclass (or worse).
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
If the Koch brothers wanted nukes I think the Constitution is very clear that they are allowed to have nuclear weapons.
My interpretation is that the phrase, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," modifies the noun arms, not the noun people. So all of "the people", regardless of whether or not they are part of the militia, get to bear arms, but the "arms" that they have the right to bear are militia arms, i.e. infantry weapons. This means that both you and the Koch brothers get to own assault rifles, RPGs, light machine guns, and mortars, but neither of you can own tanks, attack helicopters, or nuclear warheads.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
Yeah, but then what? Do we launch a full nuclear strike? A conventional war? Just a blockade?
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
The question is if Israeli jailors would sic a dog on their captive with the intent for the dog to rape him. (Actually, how does that work mechanically: did they tie him head down ass up?)
I wouldn't have believed most of the things that happened at Abu Ghraib if there hadn't been pictures of it. Some people will do weird shit if they have the oppurtunity.
I have only seen the film once, but I think the Wikipedia summary is an overly literal interpretation. In the context in which the monster is first fully revealed onscreen, it is a metaphorical extention of the frustration and aggression of Male Lead towards Female Lead.
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