Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
More concerned. The schizo who tries to murder politicians could potentially be used as a weapon by malicious interests in a way the subway bum can't
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Come to think of it, I don't think I've been bitten by a mosquito in years, and I live in Houston.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I'm going to say no. Turnout in midterms is substantially lower, and there were lots of mail-in votes in 2020 due to covid.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
There they passed a constitutional amendment that "prohibits the denial or abridgment of rights on account of an individual's race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry or national origin.
Will 5-year-olds be able to vote in Nevada next election? Is there any way to interpret the text of the amendment that wouldn’t preclude denying a person the right to vote on account of their age being only 5? Does anyone actually read these things?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Makes sense when you look at the text of the 13th amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Perhaps I'm underinformed on how amendments affect the interpretation of the previously ratified constitution. Does the amendment need to state a specific section being modified, or does the fact that it is more recent automatically give it supremacy in interpretation?
Reading Article 2 Section 1 carefully, it doesn't actually state that electors must be 18 or older, it says:
"All citizens of the United States (not laboring under the disabilities named in this constitution) of the age of eighteen years and upwards, who shall have actually, and not constructively, resided in the state six months, and in the district or county thirty days next preceding any election, shall be entitled to vote for all officers that now or hereafter may be elected by the people, and upon all questions submitted to the electors at such election"
It enumerates the positive right for people 18 and over to vote, but does not explicitly deny the vote to those under 18. Given that there is a brand new amendment specifically saying that the state can not deny rights on account of age, it seems to me that the only way to harmonize these two sections is to extend the right to vote to all ages.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
It's definitely prone to a sort of pathological utilitarianism. I mean, this is a guy who flat out admitted that he would risk the entire planet, you, everyone you love, everything you value, and himself, on a 51:49 bet to win a planet that nobody on Earth would ever interact with..
Someone downthread mentioned donating a kidney to save a random person's life. The problem with this thinking is that "I don't really need this kidney," is only a few culturally socialized norms away from, "you don't really need that kidney". Perhaps we should be relieved that it happened with bitcoins first, not kidneys.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I don't understand this line of argument.
A big part of black culture and identity is the idea that the black community has been/is being kept down by "the powers that be". The mainstream woke interpretation of "the powers that be," is that they are white people, specifically white supremacists, who keep black people down by creating systemically racist institutions. The point being made by Kanye and others is that it is not white people as a whole who are "the powers that be", but rather a much smaller subset consisting largely of Jews. The prospect of this becoming a mainstream opinion among the black community is, understandably, terrifying for Jewish people. Thus you see the massive backlash against Kanye, Kyrie, and anyone else who notices the religious heritage of finance and media executives.
none of the major actors besides Fried seem to be Jewish
If Caroline Ellison (CEO of Alameda Research) doesn't turn out to be Jewish I'll donate to the ADL personally. She met SBF at a Wall Street trading firm, her dad is the department head of economics at MIT, and she looks like this.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Sometimes there are lulls in the news cycle. I don't make it a priority to seek out culture-war content if it's not salient.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
He tweeted, "FTX has enough to cover all client holdings. We don't invest client assets."
He then deleted that tweet, as it was a bald-faced lie.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Its not that they got caught on a scam. They were the scam.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I don't see much input from the EA/rat circles into the scam.
You would be wrong. Here is Caroline explaining her trading philosophy literally replying to Scott Alexander.
The money quote: "Those people are lame and not EAs; this blog endorses double or nothing coin flips and high leverage". That's the smoking gun
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Maybe you misunderstood me. That person is the CEO of FTX-affiliated hedge fund Alameda research. She's the one making the trades (with Sam's approval).
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I can't stop thinking about this whole situation. These are, metaphorically, my people. They are about my age. They share my interests. They hang around similar online communities. Hell, SBF even looks and dresses like me (which is to say, poorly). How did they end up running a multi-billion dollar crypto empire? Was it just luck? Good market timing? Family ties and connections? I would have said that they're just smarter, but I think the events of the last week have shot holes in that hypothesis.
Why can't I get it out of my mind? Is it because I feel some sort of injustice at how the Ivy-league well-connected have life on easy mode? Is it because Caroline reminds me of the type of girl I always imagined I'd end up with but never met? Maybe it's just because there's nothing else going on in the world and this "happening" has expanded to fill my attention span. Hardly an idle moment goes by where I don't see that stupid wood nymph costume flash before my eyes or hear, "enormously valuable existence," "double or nothing coin flips and high leverage," go through my head.
It hasn't interfered with my normal productivity, but I don't think I watched a single minute of football this weekend.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I think this whole thing was just a big mistake of risk management on his part,
I don’t buy it. He was already a multi-billionaire, what normal incentive did he have to risk it all on high leverage plays?
There’s something else going on here. Either behind-the-scenes polyamorous status-jockeying, or a calculated high-risk high-reward play for something BIG.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I don’t think we can conclude this early that he enriched himself with billions of FTX customers proceeds
It’s even dumber than that. He didn’t use customer funds to enrich himself. He used customer funds to bail out his girlfriend’s hedge fund so she could keep trading shitcoins on margin.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Reading it leaves me legitimately wondering if she embezzled $10 billion to get Sam to like her more than those Asian girls he was living with.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
This is what’s so interesting about the whole thing. Sam and Caroline aren’t ordinary your everyday scammers. These are batman villains. It’s not enough simply to stop them, they must be refuted.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
True effective altruism has never been tried.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I had always wondered what would happen if you hooked up 4chan boys with tumblr girls. It turns out that it creates an autism singularity with the power to destroy global financial markets. Allegedly there’s a sex tape set to be released tomorrow. A week ago I would have dismissed this as utter horseshit, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised. We know their cybersecurity was godawful, so if a sex tape exists, it’s getting leaked.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Was the relationship between Justinian and Theodora irrelevant? Of course it’s relevant. The top two figures responsible for this whole fiasco were in a sexual relationship with one another (and possibly others). That matters. It affects incentives. It affects decision making. One of the criticisms of EA is that it’s just a front for nerds to get laid. The fact that the people involved may in fact have been nerds just trying to get laid is a factor that must be taken into account for a proper analysis.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Yeah, 80% is way too high. You could definitely run Twitter with less than 1000 people, but that doesn’t mean you can walk in, cut 6000/7000 jobs in the first month, and expect things to work.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Everyone seems to be dismissing the idea that Caroline had any influence on Sam. Is it because people think she’s ugly? No one wants to admit it, but she is in fact “nerd hot”. I don’t want to start unironic normies-will-never-understand-the-thrill-of-pinning-the-weaselposting, but I will if I have to.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Thatsthejoke.jpg
I saw someone on another forum say that the lesson to take home from all this was that everyone important in EA needs to read the sequences, which strikes me as saying we can prevent the next Stalin or Mao by making government officials read the Communist Manifesto. They read the sequences. They were thoroughly familiar with the concepts involved. They either didn’t care or thought they implied something different than you did.
I'm surprised this isn't a more widespread phenomenon in Catholic countries (or maybe it is and I'm just uninformed). Pope Francis is a walking counterexample to the infallibility of the Church. The natural response is either to give up the faith entirely, or go full sola scriptura.
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