Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
You’d have to be an idiot to believe that Zelenskyy has a 4% approval rating. Has any wartime leader ever had an approval rating that low? I’m pretty sure even Tsar Nicholas in 1917 would break double digits.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I get a sensible chuckle every time I see how the retail trading apps have managed to turn the mandatory risk disclosures into a, “you must be at least this cool to trade options 😎, “ button.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
This really drives home why the Republican Party has been making inroads with blue-collar workers. These guys aren't acting. They talk about bombing the Middle East like it's the group-chat for subcontractors installing a new HVAC unit.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Prevost is believed to have shared Francis' views on migrants, the poor and the environment
Real snoozefest issues in this profile. I want to know if he has ever celebrated mass ad orientem. How does he feel about Latin and gregorian chant?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I mean, the facts bore out that this was an operation conducted in hostile territory. They really did need the help.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Zelenskyy fucked up. He needed to take the deal and negotiate a cease-fire, not because Russia can be trusted, but because he needed the time to let Europe ramp up defense production to make up for the impending US pullout.
I feel bad for the Ukrainians who are going to get rekt because of this, but Europe really doesn't seem to understand the American mindset. No, we aren't going to fund wars in perpetuity with no exit strategy purely because of the moral fortitude of the cause. Did we not telegraph this enough?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
A surprisingly large percentage of the population lives within shouting distance of an elementary school. Is the Catholic Church supposed to lock people in jail?
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
The simplest explanation in my eyes is:
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Male feminists, being feminists, tend to hang around with female feminists.
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Female feminists are more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness than are non-feminist women.
It’s Simpson’s Paradox all the way down.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
A quick google search indicates that Harvard’s annual operating expenses are over $6 billion. Ten years of cushion is a lot, but not so much that they never need to worry about money again.
Probably the next administration rolls all this stuff back, but that’s not guaranteed.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
This means that everyone who invested valuable early 21st century dollars into fixed-income dollar-denominated assets gets paid back in worthless middle 21st century dollars. Look at the underlying movement of goods and services. Printing money increases demand without increasing supply. A debt crisis is about not having enough stuff people want in order to pay for the stuff people expected to have. The numbers in account statements are just an accounting strategy
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
It's not quite true to say that he was "denied" due process, but there is definitely a sense in which his due process was "violated"
Say you are accused of a crime. You are put on trial. The trial proceeds as normal and results in a judgement of aquittal. The cops throw you in prison anyway. Were you "denied" due process? You technically got a trial. The issue is that the due process didn't actually do anything. Despite the aquittal, you were still imprisoned.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
As they say in the biz: post shorts.
While I agree with the sentiment here, I think this illustrates why successfully shorting the market is so much harder than it looks. If you looked at Trump’s economic proposals during the campaign, thought “man, this will wreck trade,” and then shorted the market immediately after he got elected, you ate shit. If you shorted the market early February when Trump signed an executive order to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, you didn’t make diddly squat. You would have had to short the market the last 6 weeks specifically in order to be in the money. There was no real way a priori to know that this is when the crash would be.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
I've been digging into some of these laws and regulations. I'm coming away more convinced than ever that democratic governance is a myth. No regular person could possibly comprehend the byzantine labyrinth of rules, regulations, and case law required to competently evaluate government decision making.
Every spigot of federal funds grows into a hydrothermal vent of highly-specialized fauna perfectly adapted for siphoning-off those sweet sweet grants. Congress can't fix the problem, because all they are able or willing to do is appropriate more funding for things.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Trump just kicked Zelenskyy out of the White House after a public shouting match.
I've never seen anything like this. I sort of expected Trump to give him a hard time just for the cameras, but this seems to have legitimately hurt relations. Zelenskyy was in town to sign the much-anticipated minerals deal. From what I can hear the deal was not signed.
Ukraine needs the US much more than the US needs Ukraine. Could Zelenskyy not keep his pride contained for a few hours?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I know that the county conceded that they would allow an opt-out for a Muslim student to not look at an image of Muhammad, but is that constitutionally required? I can imagine a hypothetical school district (backed by state law) deciding to use a picture book to teach kids about the Arab conquests. If Muslim parents complain? Tough shit. This is the kind of thing that makes school administration a nightmare.
It may be worth pointing out that coverage from outlets like NPR didn't include the name of the case or a description of the plaintiffs that brought it.
I don’t think this is because they are trying to hide who is suing here. News editing just sucks. I think the idea is that nobody wants to read a news article with a bunch of legal citations, so we end up with headlines like “Elon Musk’s DOGE Delt Legal Blow by Federal Judge”, when the substantive legal issue is that their motion to change venue was denied.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The wire fraud statute is pretty broad and seems like it would cover this kind of thing.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
It's their position that Article 3 and the Judiciary Act of 1789 do not give courts the power to issue nationwide injunctions
From a strict textualist point of view I think this is defensible. The judicial power extends only to “cases and controversies”. There is an implication that any action which contradicts binding judicial precedent is illegal, but technically this is only an implication. The judicial branch doesn’t have authority over an action until it becomes the subject of a case or controversy, i.e. when a specific plaintiff sues over a specific action.
Practically, this creates some hurdles and perverse incentives, so I doubt the court will go for it.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
The core problem is that yeah, the general public is stupid. You can’t build your political ideology around asking the voters what they want. For one, they don’t know how things work. Their opinions are not constrained by the laws of reality. For another, the opinions of the public are ephemeral. The average voter cares little about policy qua policy. They only care about whatever thing is going on in their media sphere. Have you ever once pulled up the most recent edition of the Federal Register to see what newly-promulgated regulations the government is issuing? Have you ever once commented upon — or even just read — a notice of proposed rulemaking on Regulations.gov? Probably not, because you don’t actually care about that stuff, and neither does anyone else in the general public. The average voter has no opinion on (checks today’s edition of the FR) what the proper licensing regime for the 6 gigahertz radio frequency band should be. If tomorrow everyone suddenly had an opinion on that for some reason, it wouldn’t be because of any personal reasoning or thought, it would be because someone they trust told them what to think.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This may be a thing that happens, but it cannot explain the effect.
To be absolutely clear, what needs to be explained is the anomalous predominance of men on dating apps (and in the dating pool more broadly) when a naive gender-symmetrical model of monogamous pair-bonding would imply equal prevalence of men and women in such spaces when the population sex ratio is 1:1.
Pointing to the existence of even a large number of male-female pairings does not help explain the discrepancy because such pairings (should) remove one woman and one man from the dating pool, leaving the absolute discrepancy unchanged.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
So that Kindergarten teacher who likes to crochet and collect Disney Memorabilia would need only start up an Instagram account and post a couple photos of herself holding her cute Tinkerbell ornament wearing a hat she made herself and has a decent shot at getting a guy's attention.
This sort of implies that the optimal male dating strategy is shameless simping, which… would probably explain why there is so much male homosocial stigma against it.
Has this been the solution all along?
What is there to say? Trumpism is being exposed. Beyond that, democracy itself is being exposed. Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
How else are middle managers supposed to feel important if not by holding fancy conference calls where they get to say, “New York on the line”?
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Oceania was not after all at war with Eric Adams. Oceania was at war with The Federalist Society. Eric Adams was an ally.
A few days ago, news broke that the DOJ ordered the federal corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams dismissed. As of this writing, the charges have still not been formally dismissed. Apparently, the Attorney General's office can't find anyone willing to sign their name on the dismissal paperwork. The acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, resigned yesterday after refusing to carry out the order. If the name sounds familiar, she was the lead prosecuter in the SBF case. She must be some typical big-city liberal lawyer right? Well, apparently not.
The Federalist Society: "She was a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III."
The gorgeous Miss Sassoon wasn't the only casualty. Reports are at least six people have resigned rather than sign-off on this.
It's worth taking a step back here. Six months ago, anyone would have expected that a big-city Democrat mayor getting indicted on federal corruption charges would have been the reddest of red meat to the online right. How did we get to the point that right-wing law influencers are denouncing the Federalist Society for prosecuting Democrats for corruption? The monkey wrench thrown in the gears is Trump's decision to use the charges as leverage to extract concessions on immigration. A few offhand comments by Adams critical of mass immigration are retroactively cast as the Casus Belli for the initial investigation by Biden's DOJ. Am I missing something here? Why is this not an obvious quid pro quo? I can't tell whether the MAGA claim is that, "yes, this is a quid pro quo, and that's fine", or if the claim is that, "no, actually the corruption charges were themselves corruption. Dismissing the corruption charges is actually fighting corruption".
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The top comment is the correct synthesis in my opinion.
I thought the meaning was more something like “the system took these side effects into account and still considered that what it was doing was net positive in expectation, so the side effects are as much part of the system's purpose as the ‘positive’ outcomes”.
I take Scott's objection that this is a trivially obvious insight for what it is, but you do see a decent amount of "if only the Tsar knew"-type thinking in the wild and the phrase is a good counter to that.
Let’s say you’re walking down the street and a black guy steals your phone. Later that day, this same black guy is minding his own business when he is attacked, arrested, and beaten within an inch of his life by an unabashedly racist police officer who is an open member of the KKK. The police officer notices the cell phone, which he finds out later was reported missing by you, and returns it to you. Further investigation reveals that the police officer had no probable cause, and simply assaulted the man because he was black. Do you have to give him your cell phone back?
The answer is obviously no, right? Just because the black man has a clearly justified claim against the government, doesn’t mean that we have to recommit all of the crimes that the unlawful state action righted. Compensation should be made in a different way.
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