Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
At least hospital administrators pay attention to how much things cost.
In many cases, doctors literally do not know how much the treatments they provide cost. This means that they simply don’t do any cost-benefit analysis. They will prescribe an expensive brand-name drug instead of a generic drug that does basically the same thing for no reason other than because they heard about it more recently.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
SBF made a mockery of the financial system. That is a bigger offense against the United States and civilized society than all but the worst gangbangers.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I don’t think the crime needs to be charged to be pardoned, but I do think it needs to be specified. Look at the text of the constitution, it refers to the pardoning of offenses, not the pardoning of persons. You should have to specify the offense.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I saw this about an hour ago. Then just now I see that the stock is up over 1% since the shooting (other health insurance stocks are level or lower, so this isn’t some broader-market phenomenon).
Did he suck as a CEO? Imagine being the guy’s wife rn.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Maybe sorority thots aren’t going to stop sorority thotting, but marginal effects affect the margins. Maybe the drab psychology major decides dating isn’t worth the hassle and dedicates her attention to social causes instead. Maybe the shy hypochondriac is afraid of health complications of getting pregnant (my god have those been bullhorned lately), and decides to keep to herself instead of downloading a dating app.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Oooh, this is a good one. The information in question isn't exactly secret, but nobody involved has an interest in publicizing it. Hedge funds are legendary for getting alpha from physical reconnaissance.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I think that hypothetical is correct. It shares a lot of similarities with post-birth abortion, which, while aesthetically repugnant, is probably okay in the strict metaethical sense I am talking about.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?
Utilitarianism doesn't just lead to insane antisocial results in bizzare edge cases, it leads to insane antisocial results in real life. You see it with SBF and FTX, you see it with the shrimp welfare people, and you see it here.
There is no metaphysical or metaethical reason why one should inherently care about the suffering of those who are not even constitutionally capable of agreeing to or following the social contract. There may be contengent reasons to care about their suffering (i.e. family members of impulsive low IQ prisoners who themselves are capable of agreeing to and following the social contract), but this is distinct from the utilitarian framing.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
They were wiped out in the tidal wave of black identity politics that swept the nation in 2020. Native Americans themselves had almost nothing to do with it.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I think that’s a bit unfair. It’s not their job to pick the candidate. That decision came from above.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Trans is a great attack surface against Democrats. They are constitutionally incapable of backtracking due to the culture and composition of their coalition. They can ignore the issue — many of them would like to ignore the issue — but they cannot answer the question, “why was my daughter posted-up by a 6’2” man during her high school basketball game?”
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
The Harris Campaign Gives Their Side of the Story
Harris campaign staff joined establishment Democrat podcast Pod Save America for an election post-mortem.
What sticks out is how unsurprising everything is. These people are exactly the type of out-of-touch elite consultants that populists on both sides are always whining about. They come off as less woke than popularly imagined, but are every bit as uncreative, process oriented, and unaccountable as expected. Being on mobile due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I’m not in position to mine the transcript for key quotes, but clips from this podcast have been going viral on Twitter. A few highlights from memory:
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Campaign staff had no preparation for Biden dropping out of the race.
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They knew that the campaign message wasn’t getting through to young men. They still decided to prioritize on-the-ground campaigning in swing states over going on any of the bro podcasts. In their telling, Kamala was willing to go anywhere, but they simply ran out of time.
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They flat-out couldn’t figure out a response to the “Kamala is for they/them” ad. Nothing they tested seemed effective.
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They still think Liz Cheney is an avatar for moderate Republicans.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Cyanide tastes horrible. I would be insulted as a Kraft Heinz executive that Jim Jones didn’t trust Kool-Aid® to mask the flavor.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
After the assasination of Franz Ferdinand, but before the outbreak of war, the Russian ambassador to Serbia, Nicholas Hartwig, died suddenly while visiting the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Belgrade. The official explaination was that he died of a heart attack.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Youtube comments sections have gotten signifigantly further right over the last 3 years. That's basically social media.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I saw very few yard signs at all this cycle. I thought everyone simultaneously realized they were cringe.
Sitting on kompromat against Trump to use when it's needed didn't work the last ten times they tried it, and it may well have cost them the election (Trump was able to stall his criminal cases for 18 months, but I doubt he would have been able to stall them for 40 months, especially if he couldn't point to ongoing elections as political cover).
I got the sense from some Democrat lawmakers that they were personally afraid of a Gaetz DOJ. This interview is a masterclass. People in the comments say it's sarcasm, but it's deeper than that. Everything the congressman says is literally true. Even the subtext is straightforward. It is only the emotional valence assigned to the facts laid out that differs between Republicans and Democrats.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
This can’t be right. The number of doctors needed for any given discipline X should scale linearly with the number of cases in discipline X. If there are not enough cases to train doctors, then there is no doctor shortage.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Manufacturing is a surprisingly large portion of the economy in rural areas. In dollar terms, manufacturing is a larger sector of Iowa's economy than agriculture.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
I’ve been struggling quite a bit to understand the whole Trump phenomenon. Despite the rivers of ink spilled on the topic, we still don’t have a robust theory of what makes him appealing to voters. A complex multicausal explanation involving loss of institutional prestige, social media, economic changes, and the like seems attractive, but there are good reasons to be suspicious of such explanations.
Maybe it’s just immigration. The single biggest failure of Western Democracies that sticks out like a sore thumb is their complete inability to control immigration. The UK is the prime example of this. The people voted to leave the European Union, causing easily foreseeable economic damage, because they were tired of immigration. Then the Conservative government in power proceeds to not actually lower immigration.
If you live in a Western Democracy and you want a secure border and less immigration, you can’t just vote for someone who says they want a secure border and less immigration. You have to vote for someone who viscerally hates immigrants. Someone who hates them personally, and who hates the very idea of what immigration represents. If their heart isn’t in it, they will predictably fold. Arguably Trump himself doesn’t go far enough here. We didn’t even get a wall last time.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Would Aileen Cannon be better? I'm honestly not sure.
I find it useful to look into the actual laws and regulations when media sources seem vague like this. From what I could find, the relevant law is 20 U.S. Code § 9621, which establishes the National Assessment Governing Board. You might have better luck finding the documents you want on the the NAGB website.
Here is a PDF which gives a broad outline of NAGB policy. Here is a longer PDF with more detail (the "procedures manual").
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
What do you guys think of the Matt Gaetz pick specifically? This seems to be a high-variance pick from a high-variance administration. Attorney General is IMO the most important cabinet position for domestic policy. As we all learned in high school, the executive branch enforces the laws. The Department of Justice is the agency tasked with boots-on-the-ground execution of that constitutional mandate. If nothing else, the Gaetz pick puts the fear of god back into a lot of people in Washington.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Romanian Supreme Court Cancels Election, Overthrows Results of First Round
Recently, unknown dark horse anti-NATO candidate Călin Georgescu shocked the world by winning a plurality of the vote in the first round of Romania's presidential election. Key to his victory was an intense social media campaign, with a particular emphasis on Tik-Tok.
Romania's Supereme Court has today declared these results null and void. The full opinion setting out their reasoning has yet to be published, but this is almost certainly due to allegations of Russian interference. I have not seen any credible accusations that votes themselves were fraudulently cast, only that Georgescu's campaign recieved improper (illegal?) assistance from Russian media operations. This is IMO the most important outstanding question.
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