Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
I suppose I could have called them, "unable or unwilling to understand the production function of medical goods, the capital structure of pharmaceutical corporations, the inherent unfairness of mass tort litigation, the difficulty for an individual consumer to determine the expected utility to himself of a given medical product, p-hacking, and the extent of the natural human disease burden," but that would be just padding the word count.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
The 6 to 9 months between when most people were able to get the vaccine and when Omicron became prominent was worth a lot.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
I am not going to die on the hill that COVID vaccine mandates were a good idea, but I am absolutely going to die on the hill that Pfizer deserved to make shitloads of money for developing and manufacturing the product that effectively ended the COVID pandemic as a going concern.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Listen here, you ignorant yokels. You might like to think that you're 'self-sufficient', but you're not. You depend on me, my tribe, the educated elites. Without us, you'd be dead. Specifically, you are dependent on the stock valuations of big megacorps continuing to rise. You know; stocks, the global finance market,
I mean, yeah. That is the implied connotation, because it's true. It's true the same way that you or I would tell the guys who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that their project is doomed without the support of public infrastructure. That's just not how the world works. If they can't tell the difference between investment in medical innovation being driven by the expectation of future profitable sales, and the nebulous forces driving the educated consensus on immigration, then they are just stupid.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
The reason that vaccines need to be protected from liability is because the cost of a wrongful death lawsuit is orders of magnitude higher than the value the vaccine manufacturer can extract per life saved. Tort litigation is just a really terrible system for dealing with diffuse risks like this, especially when the expected net public good is overwhelmingly positive.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Donald Trump nominates RFK Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here. The sheer magnitude of human suffering prevented by vaccines and antibiotics is hard to comprehend. Due to complex structural and psychological reasons, the developers of these treatments capture a miniscule fraction of the total utility surplus created.
Enter the pharma skeptics: I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is, besides "more skeptical than the liberal establishment will accept", but I do know how Twitter works. Twitter is real. It affects real events in actual reality, up to and including the US presidential election. Trans issues are getting dumped from the mainstream Democratic Party agenda because of how much it gets dunked on on Twitter.
In this Twitter thread, the entire concept of rewarding companies for treating disease is getting dunked on like it's a Lia Thomas podium. This is of course not the only example I could have pulled, but it shocked me both because of it's location (Alex Tabarrok's feed), and because of the sheer intensity of what can only be described as concentrated stupid.
But perhaps the most alarming implications are for democracy itself. RFK's endorsement likely won Trump the election, not least because it paved the way for the Rogan endorsement. Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote. Indeed, no party can win a national election without winning large swaths of the stupid vote. There simply aren't enough smart people to win. Perhaps this explains the modern political environment. The decision between Democrat or Republican boils down to a decision on which party's concession to the stupid vote will do the least amount of damage.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
That's the glory of these judgements. They aren't punitive damages. They're compensatory damages. You can't put a dollar value on emotional distress, so who are you to say that "eleventy gazillion dollars" isn't appropriate compensation for mean phone calls?
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
AOC is gearing up early for a 2028 run. It’s obvious how the Democratic Party can increase its appeal to young men. Stop trying to overthink it.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
I'd be an asshole too if I had to defend my country from ISIS, Turkey, The United States, and Israel all at the same time.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Surely these picks are a smokescreen. I bet JD Vance is huddling with Yarvin, Musk, and Thiel in a smoke-filled room right now discussing which anon Twitter accounts and Mottizens will get the call to serve in the shadow cabinet. They must be cross-referencing the Gray Mirror Substack subscriber list to make sure they don’t accidentally double-count any alts.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
I still audibly chuckle every time I hear the phrase “subject-matter jurisdiction”.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
For those who don’t know, this guy’s trial got live-streamed. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. He represented himself, made a gigantic fool of himself, and constantly interrupted the proceedings with insane legal theories. The best part was the judge couldn’t do anything about it. Normally you would hold somebody like that in contempt of court, but this guy was already in jail, and already facing down almost certain life without parole. Holding him in contempt would have done nothing except delay the inevitable, so everyone had to just sit there and take it for weeks.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Can you steelman the "democracy in peril" argument?
The argument is pretty straightforward: Any democratic system of government relies upon the ruling party being willing to cede power when it loses an election, otherwise the elections would be meaningless (lemma: if any power existed that could force the ruling party to cede power, that entity would be the de facto ruling party). Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Donald Trump did not conced the election until after his schemes to change state vote counts, appoint fraudulent electors, and pressure Mike Pence to not count the electoral votes failed. Donald Trump's schemes failed because his underlings in the government were not willing to go along with his plans. Given the level of influence that Donald Trump has over the Republican Party, in his second term, he could appoint only underlings who he is sure will go along with his schemes next time.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
For the last 25 years, the number 1 test for any GOP nominated SCOTUS judge should have been “Will you rule birthright citizenship unconstitutional”, because this is the ONLY thing that matters when it comes to immigration.
I think appointing judges who would rule the constitution unconstitutional is bad actually.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
The purpose of a system is what it does. This is related to the iron law of bureaucracy. The reason campaigns want money isn’t so that they can win elections. The reason campaigns want money is so that they can run the campaign. More money = more stuff for the people running the campaign.
As for why it seems to affect Democrats more than Republicans, guess which party has non-profit employees as a constituency.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
The stock market and bitcoin are in fact at all-time highs. To be fair, they were already close to all-time highs before the election, but there was a large spike immediately after the election that can only be attributed to Trump. (The popular cope is that the markets were reacting to a decisive result, not nessesarily to Trump himself. This is cope.)
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Nick Fuentes doesn't even like girls. I don't just mean that he's a mysoginist. I don't even think he likes them sexually.
I'm certainly not going to say, "your body, my choice," is good rhetoric, but there is a kernel of reducto ad absurdam to it. It's saying, "Hey, y'all were the ones saying, 'my body, my choice,' was on the ballot. Y'all lost, so now by your own reasoning that means your body is my choice, because we won."
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
We had been dating for over a year. None of that mattered. It was like it retroactively made everything we went through together a lie to her.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
We did have a discussion. She was willing to hear me out. I am also surprised it didn’t come to light earlier. I think her logic was: “Obviously no respectable person would ever vote for Trump. My boyfriend is a respectable person. Therefore, my boyfriend obviously wouldn’t vote for Trump.”
The conversation was very 2015 Tumblr. The one thing I didn’t have a response to was when she brought up the fact that she has friends who are “undocumented”. I could probably salvage this by going full Hanania and pledging my opposition to deportations and my support for abortion, which is a quite tempting option at the moment tbh.
I am legitimately worried that my girlfriend will break up with me if/when she finds out that I voted for Trump. She has always been an incredibly sweet and kind person, but her social media since the election has become unhinged. Like, some are more hateful than the worst comments I have seen on Reddit. We basically don't talk politics at all with each other, and I have no intention of changing that, but I am a bad liar with a terrible poker face, so if she becomes suspicious there’s not much I can do (I also have ethical qualms with lying, but these are essentially moot given the concerns above.)
EDIT: She found out. She was VERY upset. I'm like 75% sure its over.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
The big thing Matt Yglesias leaves out of this list that makes him a Democrat is that he wants to expand social welfare programs and raise taxes.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
If anyone wants to make a name for himself as a right-wing policy wonk, coming up a regulatory scheme that makes for legitimate medical exceptions without allowing doctors to give away get-out-of-birth-free cards would be a good place to start.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Overheard in a Wilmington nursing home:
"Mr. Biden, we need you to tell us who you want making decisions for you."
"NO! I'm the only one... with the medicare... to defeat Donald Trump... and the maga..."
All things considered, I think he did okay on inflation given the hand he was dealt. I think inflation is a big reason why Kamala lost, but I don't think people realize how much worse not implementing those inflationary COVID policies would be.
My actual real IRL girlfriend did in fact break up with me over the election. No idea if she swore off men as a whole (probably not tbh). Social media is real. Online meltdowns are real.
I'm reminded of all those species of animal that for whatever reason don't breed in captivity. Some natural impulse or function is being blocked.
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