Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
IMO the right play would have been to announce massive unforgiving layoffs immediately after the deadline. Anyone who took the offer gets 8 months pay. Anyone who gets laid-off gets the absolute minimum. That’s how you establish credibility.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
It’s not about time and money. I had no “damages” (other than lost wages while work was closed), but that week was the coldest I have ever felt in my life.
Nothing Ever Happens
DOGE is as good as dead. They’ve hit the wall.
Federal judge pauses deadline for federal workers to accept Trump’s resignation offer.
DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts.
The one shining light of hope for true government reform was Elon Musk’s DOGE. They seemed to be making real progress. They may not have been loved, but they were feared, and Machiavelli said that’s enough.
Now they have lost the momentum. Stays and injunctions will start pouring in as district court judges stop fearing that their orders will be simply ignored.
If the deep state career civil service can draw blood with a trick as old as “drag-up old racist internet comments”, then DOGE really are toothless. No one will take them seriously anymore.
Maybe Congress can tap in…
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I feel like we ought to have better “Kremlinology” with regards to when Trump should be taken seriously. My gut is that this doesn’t mean anything, but that’s what I originally thought about DOGE.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I think it’s unrealistically optimistic to think that those polities care more about global warming or the consumer experience than they do about keeping Elon Must out of their business.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Why isn’t Tesla stock crashing? The intersection between the set of people who care enough about the environment to buy an electric car, and the set of people who don’t hate Elon’s guts doesn’t provide much room for growth.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
It's a cold and dreary Monday afternoon in Ottawa. The nation is awash in a newfound wave of pride and determination, yet there is an unmistakable fear in the eyes of every citizen. Lame duck prime minister Justin Trudeau enters the situation room with his closest aides and allies. The prime minister takes a deep breath as he awaits the call. The prosperity of his people hangs in the balance. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs could vanish by the end of the week. The phone rings. The unmistakable voice of the orange man in the White House booms out of the speaker. Will he demand an anschluss?
"Mr. President, these tariffs will lead to needless suffering and destruction. Is there any way we can set this aside for the moment?"
"Fentanyl is a big problem Justin. Hire someone to work on that and you've got a deal."
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
The whole thing was fake.
https://x.com/Claudiashein/status/1886434747238514776
https://x.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1886529228193022429
Trump likes tariffs, but there is one thing he likes more than tariffs: pushing around world leaders.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I think it’s pretty stupid to impose protectionary tariffs by executive order without a broad bipartisan consensus. Nobody is going to invest in building a brand new steel mill or whatever if the most-likely outcome is being made obsolete in four years.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
You're right that they do put limits, but they have no theoretical basis to do so. It's just an unprincipled hack that they tack on at the end to prevent their moral philosophy from ruining their life. Eventually someone is going to write "Famine, Affluecne, and Morality II" in which a good effective altruist is walking to work after just finishing their annual 10% donation for the year and sees a drowning child. Obviously you wouldn't let the child die just because you already donated 10% for the year right?
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
From Scott further down in the thread:
I think this hypothetical, as stated, is obviously correct. There is a pretty big assumption though, the assumption that this is a reciprocal arrangement. You can get into galaxy-brained decision theory stuff to argue that because of acausal trade, there is an unnegotiated policy that intelligent agents would automatically know they should follow where agents help each other. Its a bit hard to see how impovershed African children have any way to help Americans even if they wanted to, to say nothing of their intuitive understanding of functional decision theory. Still, I have to concede that it is at least conceivably possible.
Where this logic does not hold at all is in animal welfare. No one can seriously argue that animals would collectively decide to treat humanity better if only we would reduce the suffering associated with factory farms.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
It crossed my mind earlier that this is a distraction.
[tinfoil]
Right now DOGE is working around the clock to gain access to government computer systems. Elon is working with Trump to implement the purge as we speak. If the media went full-out covering this the way they reported on Comey in 2017, they likely wouldn't be able to get away with it. If everyone is worried about tariffs and the economy instead, then DOGE can work in the shadows to take control of federal agencies away from the career civil service.
[/tinfoil]
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I get what Trump wants from Mexico. I'm not sure what he wants from Canada. Is fentanyl coming in from Canada? I thought it was coming from Mexico.
I mean, He's said that he wants Canada to become part of the US, but that can't be his motivation here, can it?
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Counterpoint: Trump acheived all this because he followed the Moldbug plan of having a tech CEO bring in a bunch of 20-year-olds to run the executive branch like a startup. Curtis Yarvin is becoming whitepilled as we speak.
This feels like those people who think Yudkowsky is discredited because recursive self-improvement looks a bit different than what he imagined in 2007 or whatever. No one else was even thinking that deeply about AI in 2007.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Counterpoint: I can think of a few potential reasons helicopters would want to fly over the Potomac (ease of navigation, soft landing in case of emergency, less concern about collateral damage in case of emergency, etc.). We didn't know until today which side was more important.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I consider this the equivilent of blaming global warming whenever a hurricane or wildfire hits. You can tell a convincing story about how these processes increase the risk from their associated disasters, but it's still pretty nebulous whether any given event can be attributed to them.
The takeaway for me is to avoid operating helicopters in crowded airspace. I think this should retroactively update our assesment of the FAA's airspace restrictions in response to Hurricane Helene.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
No business im aware of would not fire you instantly if you get caught.
You’re right, but the federal government is not a business. It has special rules and laws it has to follow that private businesses don’t. The key sections of law here are 5 U.S.C. §2301-§2306 and 5 U.S.C. §7511-§7515 if you want to get a feel for what the administration is going up against, but there are reams and reams of rules like this.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Wasn’t the Heritage Foundation part of the existing GOP blob in 2017? The difference between 2017 and 2025 is that conservative think tanks have had four to eight years to go over all of the failures of the first Trump administration and figure out how to do it right the next time. What they came up with was Project 2025.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Leaving aside the merits of the issue for a moment, this is totally Project 2025 right? They are clearly implementing some sort of plan for steamrolling the federal bureaucracy, the implementation of which looks suspiciously similar to what is outlined in this particular 922-page PDF.
I guess I’m wondering, are there any interpretations of why Trump tried so hard to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign other than the maximally-cynical one? All I can come up with is that there are a whole lot of names on that document that aren’t his, and Trump doesn’t want them taking credit for his glorious presidency.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
There is no evidence for negative ramifications of the pause.
I mean, “negative” is in the eye of the beholder, but tautologically, the consequence of pausing federal grantmaking is that the people who were doing jobs funded out of federal grants are now no longer getting paid.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Disease eradication is good for everyone. It is bad for global health to have a giant reservoir of AIDS, Malaria, Ebola, and god knows what else just waiting to make the jump to the developed world.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I’m not sure what the internal political situation in Colombia is at the moment, but I expect there’s lots of pressure on the president to “stand up to Trump” in some way. Hence the aforementioned Spanish-language Twitter rant.
It reminds me a bit of ritual tribal warfare. Everyone gets dressed up, lines up on opposite sides of a valley, shakes their spears and yells at each other for a few hours, then everybody goes home satisfied that they really showed the outgroup who’s boss this time.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Someone once said that the great question of modernity is, “how do I get management to take my side?” I’m not sure that’s entirely correct, but it’s an interesting framing.
Right now major subreddits like /r/nfl, /r/nba, and countless others, which as recently as this morning had front pages covered with Twitter links, have all decided to ban links to X/Twitter.
Making this little stunt go viral was incredibly effective at getting management to take one’s side. Whether or not anyone was convinced of Elon’s Naziism as a result of his gesture, the fact that it was being discussed made it socially acceptable to bring up that Elon is a Nazi and demand something be done about it.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
/r/The_Donald proved years ago that the Reddit algorithm can be trivially gamed. Tribal groups are really good at this kind of informal coordination. Users of these subs are already used to regular political content. Users who don't like it get driven out. Users who agree with the political content see their upvotes as a way to influence public opinion. Emotions are high due to the inauguration. All it takes is a few tens of thousands of Redditors who hate Elon Musk to upvote every single clip to the top of every single sub.
Here’s what I’m confused about: if they can’t offer 8-months pay because there isn’t a budget after March, how come they can offer to not lay-off everybody in March? It seems like everyone expects that money to be there. The only question is if the employees in question will be required to work.
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