Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron [DeSantis], but I co-sign this.
As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.
-Senator John Fetterman
Lol. LMAO even.
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
I wonder how much of this is just boredom? It’s a slow news cycle. The Iran stuff turned out to be a nothingburger. What are the politically-active class supposed to get riled up at this week, Trump’s courtroom farts? (I’m not kidding. That was the other option here.) The masses demand a current thing at all times. I mean really, endowment divesture? Would anyone care about this if there were a salient mass shooting anywhere in the country over the weekend?
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
I don’t doubt for one minute that Trump had classified documents, but it does suggest that the intended audience for the indictment was the American Electorate rather than a federal judge. Thinking back to the political situation at the time the charges were unsealed, Jack Smith and the Justice Department probably thought this was the kill-shot for Trump’s campaign.
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
They all seem pretty tame to me. “Group of protesters tries to exclude person who disagrees with them from their protest,” isn’t exactly the kind of thing that made “mostly peaceful” a meme.
Yeah, it’s a shame that Universities cancel classes at the drop of a hat nowadays, but Kristallnacht this ain’t.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
America was already attacking German submarines in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbour
Hitler's speech declaring war on America is quite interesting, in much the same way as Osama Bin Laden's Letter to the American People. Having it all laid on the table like that makes you realize why some people hate us.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
It's eerie to see a twitter thread like that one these days that isn't overflowing with noticeposting. It's easy to forget that the Austrian School focus on individual human motivation and action is by no means universally held. To see concepts like "white flight" or "the car lobby" tossed out as explanations as if they are fundamental forces of society, and not simply the aggregate preferences of individual actors, is jarring. The real questions are, why are the white people fleeing? and why was the car lobby so popular?
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
In theory, they could get Columbia to completely cave and put out a sufficiently groveling statement that it triggers a respectability cascade, causing all the other universities to cave and put out groveling statements. This would be followed by major media outlets, and finally the White House.
It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
For what it’s worth, I thought you were going to say that news cycles have shortened.
Quantumfreakonomics
27d ago
They're trying to model it off of the Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes, which are obnoxious, but balanced out by the fact that smoking literally causes 5-20% of all deaths in the United States.
Quantumfreakonomics
27d ago
Massive L for our system of government. Who the hell wants to ban porn? And yet, it happened.
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function."
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses."
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."
Are these things even true?
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
Much like the SAT requirement rollback, I suspect what happened was that internal metrics/vibes were so laughably bad that everyone started to hate it. Nobody actually wants to read that drivel anyways.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
By definition, one party in a lawsuit is always wrong, so imposing sanctions or liability on being wrong is a dangerous game.
Lawyers can get sanctioned for filing frivolous lawsuits, but that's a higher standard than filing meritless lawsuits.
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
DeSantis seems to think connecting lab-grown meat to "elites" and the "World Economic Forum" is winning rhetoric. We on the inside know that those aren't great descriptions of "rationalist nerds", but this is the same rhetoric that red-tribe conservatives used about SBF. To Joe Shmoe of Nowheresville Baptist Church, those secularist eggheads are all the same.
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?
American sports was completely canceled for 48 hours because a domestic abuser in the process of kidnapping a child and holding a knife was shot by police.
They got Starbucks locations to act as a public restroom for a few years. Not even that was able to stick.
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