Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
What the fuck is happening?
Elon isn't an idiot. He knows how math works. He successfully gutted foreign aid. Congradulations, DOGE shaved 0.5% off of the federal budget, maybe, who really knows?
Anyone who has ever spent more than ten seconds investigating the federal budget already knows that the bulk of the money goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. I suspect that Elon has finally discovered the haunting truth that the rural white underclass loves gibs almost as much as the urban black underclass. Arguably, it is insulting to human dignity to be tasked with cutting waste while at the same time being barred from touching the giant money pit.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Even if all trade barriers (including the nonsensical things he includes as trade barriers) are completely gone, there is no easy way for say, Australia to force their businesses to start buying more American made products.
Think outside the box. Zero is not the lowest number. Australia could put a negative 20% tariff on all American imports, directly paying American manufacturers to ship their products to Australia.
Is this flat-out extortion? Yes. But the mechanisms for enforcement are already in place. Just change the sign in the relevant Excel templates.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
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.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
An uncomfortably large amount of human behavior, even at the very top, is just blindly following the herd. YouTube and Twitter banned Fuentes? Guess Facebook will too. They banned the president of the United States? Right behind you. Zuck’s heart was never in it. I don’t think he sees himself as a particularly ethics-driven person to begin with. Onlyfans-shilling thots are considered spam on the other platforms; on Instagram, they’re the content.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
The hi-vis vest seals the deal. Blue-collar workers will always side with the manager who isn't above putting on the same PPE that they do.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This isn't a real schedule. This is an artifact of legal and bureaucratic processes. Some polity passes a law that says, "Entity X must formulate and implement a plan to do Y." Entity X doesn't actually want to do Y for whatever reason (usually political opposition, but not nessesarily). The thing that Entity X always does in this situation is spend their time coming up with insane plans that will take forever and hope that they will never be implemented. The endgame is to abruptly cancel the project years later and hope nobody notices. Radioactive waste disposal projects are the poster boy of this phenomenon. Yucca Mountain was abruptly cancelled for no reason as soon as the planning was done, $10 billion over decades for absolutely nothing.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Huh? I think this is entirely consistent with what Yarvin lays out. The owner of the LA Times was unable to make the paper print what he wants. He was only able to prevent it from printing what he doesn’t want. This can always be trivially accomplished by firing everyone and closing the paper, which Yarvin readily concedes that Bezos would be able to do with the Washington Post. Indeed, the editorial chief of the LA Times did in fact, “laugh at him and quit.”
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
4mo 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
5mo 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
7mo ago
My actual real IRL girlfriend did in fact break up with me over the election. No idea if she swore off men as a whole (probably not tbh). Social media is real. Online meltdowns are real.
I'm reminded of all those species of animal that for whatever reason don't breed in captivity. Some natural impulse or function is being blocked.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
That's the glory of these judgements. They aren't punitive damages. They're compensatory damages. You can't put a dollar value on emotional distress, so who are you to say that "eleventy gazillion dollars" isn't appropriate compensation for mean phone calls?
I am legitimately worried that my girlfriend will break up with me if/when she finds out that I voted for Trump. She has always been an incredibly sweet and kind person, but her social media since the election has become unhinged. Like, some are more hateful than the worst comments I have seen on Reddit. We basically don't talk politics at all with each other, and I have no intention of changing that, but I am a bad liar with a terrible poker face, so if she becomes suspicious there’s not much I can do (I also have ethical qualms with lying, but these are essentially moot given the concerns above.)
EDIT: She found out. She was VERY upset. I'm like 75% sure its over.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Folk epistemology really does boil down to literal witch hunts and blood libel if it festers long enough. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Go back to mainstream institutions controlling national discourse?
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
It is really funny seeing Twitter accounts that just yesterday were decrying the campaign to remove Biden as playing right into Republican hands suddenly shift their tune and celebrate Joe heroically doing the best thing for his party.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
At long last we will build and distribute the Experience Machine from the classic philosophical thought experiment “Don’t Get Into the Experience Machine”.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
Nick Fuentes doesn't even like girls. I don't just mean that he's a mysoginist. I don't even think he likes them sexually.
I'm certainly not going to say, "your body, my choice," is good rhetoric, but there is a kernel of reducto ad absurdam to it. It's saying, "Hey, y'all were the ones saying, 'my body, my choice,' was on the ballot. Y'all lost, so now by your own reasoning that means your body is my choice, because we won."
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
This one paragraph explains more about the American political situation than a thousand thinkpieces.
New slogan- Trump/Vance 2024: Stop Changing the Fucking Flags.
Actually, I think the nuance is lost. Social justice warriors weren’t simply inspired by Christianity. They don’t have similarities by coincidence. They are a direct evolutionary branch of mainline Protestantism. There is path dependency.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
We’re reaching levels of cope that shouldn’t be possible.
Noting first that this isn’t literally a concession, where is the curiosity here? If someone who is racist and has bad data nevertheless gets the right answer, shouldn’t you like update on that? Shouldn’t you at least consider the possibility that your preconceived notions about at least one of
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Racism,
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Lynn’s data quality, or
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The scientific method
Is wrong?
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
Trans is a great attack surface against Democrats. They are constitutionally incapable of backtracking due to the culture and composition of their coalition. They can ignore the issue — many of them would like to ignore the issue — but they cannot answer the question, “why was my daughter posted-up by a 6’2” man during her high school basketball game?”
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
The stock market and bitcoin are in fact at all-time highs. To be fair, they were already close to all-time highs before the election, but there was a large spike immediately after the election that can only be attributed to Trump. (The popular cope is that the markets were reacting to a decisive result, not nessesarily to Trump himself. This is cope.)
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
If this is true, why is shoplifting as a societal problem so localized? All of the factors you mention should also apply to Texas, but I have seen exactly one shoplifting event in my entire life. People in LA or San Francisco say they see it every week.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I remember reading this book review of Hillbilly Elegy on /r/slatestarcodex years back. Hard to believe this guy is now the favorite to be vice president of the United States out of nowhere. From the review, Vance sounds like a smug liberal; rural Americans just seem to suck on a deeply personal level. I’m also seeing on Twitter that he had some choice words for Trump back in the day. I can imagine that Washington changes people.
There is exactly one question that matters for any Trump running mate. Will he count the votes on January 6, 2029?
In recent years, it really did seem like the media put in the effort to not glorify mass shooters by plastering their image all over the place, fueling speculation as to their motives, and generally making them look cool. There are major shooting incidents to which I don't even remember the perpetrator's name. It finally sank in that this kind of attention was counterproductive.
Which is why I am fascinated by the Luigi Mangione story. He cracked the code. News outlets are showing his face 24-7. Everyone is talking about the issues that he wants us to be talking about. This guy is the most famous, most popular, and, if the ladies are to be believed, sexiest criminal of the 21st century. Why? Basic competence at not being immediately apprehended? Selecting an unpopular target? Being attractive? Not being unattractive?
The mood on social media feels like the end of Joker. Full mask-off glorification of murder, but it's gleeful -- giddy even. Part of the thrill of voting for Trump was the idea that the people, through sheer collective desire, could will one person out of prison, to look at someone prosecuted by the justice system and say, "no, we have his back". Can it be any surprise that the left wants in on this intoxicating elixir?
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