Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
Transgender Day of Visibility
2009 sounds about right. You can tell this idea is from the early stages of the "woke" wave that crested from 2013-2021. It is a completely sincere expression of what the classical MtF desires above all else, positive attention. The point isn't the internal experience of the trans person himself, the point is the internal experience of everyone else as they are forced to deal with the "visibility" of trans people. Note the conspicuous lack of the modern pretexts that have evolved to counteract later anti-woke resistance. Indeed, the entire point is to not invoke tropes like anti-trans violence.
"Unlike Transgender Day of Remembrance, Crandall said, the day of visibility aims to focus on all the good things in the trans community, instead of just remembering those who were lost. 'The day of remembrance is exactly what it is. It remembers people who died,' she said. 'This focuses on the living. People have told me they love Remembrance Day but it really focuses on the negative aspect of it. Isn't there anything that could focus on the positive aspect of being trans?'"
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
I suspect that most of the image generation capacity is being used by turboautists making 100+ pictures of the same thing in slightly different variations every single day. Not that I'd know anything about that of course.
Quantumfreakonomics
30d ago
Limit dispensing of oral contraceptives to married couples with verified children. Ban abortion.
Yes, it will be tough. Lots of terrible situations will pop up. The question to be asked is, “is this worse than literally running out of people?”
Quantumfreakonomics
30d ago
My previous hypothesis was that Trump would be literally in jail by election day, but that's looking increasingly unlikely given the delays he has been able to secure.
If you're expecting some external event to suddenly become the new "current thing" well, the smart money has to be on AI right? That's probably too soon for Doom™, but what if the October surprise is 40% of the workforce becoming obsolete?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I suppose I do have to give them credit for eventually coming around to the "kill pest infestations immediately" camp, but I don't find their stated reasoning to be particularly compelling. It seems to rest on the assumption that the pest insects live net-negative lives. If I were a carpet moth, I might like spending 6 months chowing down on yummy carpet fibers in a climate-controlled environment, then emerging from my cocoon to immediately mate. A quick SMUSH is insufficient to counteract that.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Wait, what’s wrong with opossums? (I assume that’s what you meant)
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
A polemic against the hubris of man? A defense of single-family greenspaces? A questioning of the practical expertise and experience of EA staffers? A concrete example of Kaszynskian oversocialization run amok?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I don't think that's correct. It seems explainable by the classic "people vs things" distinction. True crime is fundamentally interpersonal drama.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
If you've ever come across someone on the Effective Altruism forum or ACX comments section who cares a lot about wild animal/insect welfare, you might have wondered if they'd thought things through.
Well, you'd be right.
I'll be honest. My first reaction was of sneering contempt. Animal welfare is IMO the most counterproductive idea that gets serious traction in rationalist spaces, so there is a good bit of schadenfreude from seeing, "I never thought the bugs would eat MY utility," out in the wild.
Still, I don't know anything about this person other than that she lives in a London flat and works for an EA organization (80,000 hours). I am reminded of that XKCD where even the most obvious facts are learned by someone for the first time thousands of times a day. Maybe Europe really is a commieblock hellscape where man lives entirely divorced from nature, where supposedly well-informed people can enter their late 20s without an intuitive understanding of the exponential growth of pest biomass. I remember well the time as a wee lad I saw an entire summer's growth of backyard tomato plants devoured in a week by 2 or 3 hornworms. Not everyone grows up with such a visceral demonstration of what civilization is up against.
Maybe these people really do need to touch grass.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Does this model explain why his rube-whispering was ineffective prior to 2016, leaving him a joke candidate in the two previous elections where he tried to run?
My pet theory is that Jon Stewart retiring from the Daily Show in 2015 opened the door for Trump to ascend. Without effective, hard-hitting, thoughtful ridicule, Trump was able to surf the wave of sneering contempt all the way to the White House
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Did you guys know that Honey Boo Boo is still on television? I know everyone loves to hate this show, but it's still darn impressive that everyone's thoughts 12 years ago, "what on Earth are these people going to be like when they grow up?" are now being answered in the same shitty reality tv format. A nation truly in decline wouldn't be able to satisfy consumer demand like this.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Kate Middleton announces she has cancer.
This is a win for conspiracy theorists and "reading a wide array of primary sources and performing [your] own synthesis." I saw numerous mainstream media sources during the speculation frenzy flat out state that Kate Middleton did not have cancer, but the fine print of the sources they were basing these statements on did not say that.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
You’re kind of dodging the hypothetical. Petty criminals influenced by social media are destroying society. It’s protected speech so no court orders against the platform are available. How many, “in the department’s opinion, these memes are existentially damaging to the fabric of the national economy,” e-mails is the government allowed to send before it becomes illegal?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
To steelman the government and KBJ’s point a bit:
Imagine that shoplifting became memeified. I know that there are niche shoplifting communities in existence right now, but what if they got BIG? What if all the 17-year-old zoomers in your neighborhood were getting pro-shoplifting content shoveled into their feeds? What if the shoplifting epidemic spread beyond isolated city centers and became an existential threat to the whole economy? Nobody can sell anything. Delivery services pick up the slack, but then “porch pirating is shoplifting too,” becomes the meme and everything falls apart.
“Shoplifting is cool,” is protected speech, so is “those big corporations deserve it.” Imagine it’s clear as day that this is a social contagion mediated by online social media, but the tech companies refuse to take moderator action against shoplifting content. Does the government have to send in the troops and declare martial law before it can send a series of strongly worded emails to social media companies asking them to stop the madness?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
They lose market share every year and their stock prices trail the S&P by huge margins. I just checked the stock price of GM and it's the same price today as it was in 2014.
These stocks have been paying 5% dividends for the last 10 years. They have single-digit P/E ratios. People aren't going to stop wanting cars anytime soon unless the singularity happens, at which point it doesn't really matter what your portfolio allocation is. EVs aren't going to take off as expected. They're too inconvenient. You can't buy-low/sell-high without buying low, and right now automakers are low.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This post is art. It would only be degraded by specifying the pronoun.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The price of an HVAC repair is skyrocketing. But the quality is plumetting.
I thought this link was going to be the recent muckracking shakedown of HVAC contractors from Asterisk Magazine. The claim is that HVAC as an industry is uniquely fucked in ways that other skilled-labor services aren't. I don't know enough about HVAC specifically to evaluate that claim, but having worked in other highly-regulated skilled labor contractor industries, the failure modes the author mentions are quite familiar to me.
The core problem is that intelligent, skillful, educated, motivated people don't want to do manual labor in non climate-controlled conditions. By the time you get someone trained and up-to-speed to competently execute the job, they're gone. You might get people to do it for six-figure salaries, but if performance metrics aren't legible to all parties, there is little incentive to burn profit margin on that.
I'm not sure exactly what effect the pandemic has had on all this. Sure there were layoffs and job-shuffling in 2020, but that was almost 4 years ago now. One thing I have noticed (admittedly small sample size) is that people who were in college during covid cannot be relied upon to know any specific knowledge one might expect someone with such a degree to know. They are still more generally intelligent than candidates without a degree, but very little learning seems to have happened 2020-2021.
The way a free market works is that consumers get to choose, for whatever bespoke reasons they so desire, which products they will purchase and consume. Producers would much prefer that they themselves got to choose which products consumers had to purchase. Corporate PR gets a lot of flak for being simple and predictable, but it is glaringly apparent when these simple predictable rules are violated. The fact that companies wish that their customers were pigs who they could shovel slop to every day and come home with an easy profit should be apparent from first economic principles, but consumers understandably take offense to that. Imagine if the CEO of InBev posted a tweet publicly asking Elon Musk to shut down all Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light trending topics and ban Kid Rock. I’m sure that’s exactly what they wanted, but InBev has enough sense and tact to understand how condescending and contemptuous that would come off as.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Porn is legal, but it almost feels like it was grandfathered in. I can imagine a world where Google search was released in the modern day and every official communication from Alphabet included something about how diligent they are at filtering all "inappropriate content".
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This if it is implemented, will have educators select the real life version of Will from Inbetweeners as its senior male role model and think themselves of sound mind for doing so. You are only ever going to get uncool loser types volunteering, and it is the fear of becoming an uncool loser (or worse) that motivates young men to go and consume manosphere content.
This is the most likely (and least interesting) outcome. More interesting is what would happen if they got the actual cool kids to do it. Coolness is sort of inherently unteachable. It would be like implementing a program to provide role models for trading stocks. Some poor sap (i.e. a rather large fraction of the male population) is going to follow all of the advice and get left holding the bag because he bought Bear Stearns in 2007 and not 2005.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I don't mean to be flippant, but more substantive points have been already addressed. More than anything else, his stuff was a slog to read. I can't tell you how many times I've noticed a potentially interesting post, seen a giant subthread started by Hylinka, and had my eyes glaze over trying to read it. I do remember having vaguely positive associations with his name in the past, but I can't think of anything specific in the last couple of years.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I notice that the palace statement is oddly specific and does not explicitly preclude the original question. It would be quite odd for cancer unrelated to the presenting condition to be discovered during surgery, but not unheard of.
If it was an infection she would be in the hospital on IV antibiotics. That doesn't make sense either.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
She might be literally dying. It’s not uncommon for relatively young people to get a metastatic cancer diagnosis and try to hide it from the world. Maybe it’s embarrassment, maybe it’s some deeply-felt sense of regal responsibility.
The embassy to the Vatican is in Rome, Italy. They didn't fly the trans flag inside Vatican City.
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