Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
the original video of her has yet to make an appearance in any of the numerous "j'accuse" incendiary articles
You didn’t post the video either.
Honestly, this looks more like prudish Anglo-American business culture triumphing over Southern European romance culture than it does feminism v patriarchy. I can totally imagine Fox News running a few “groomer” segments if this had happened to the USWNT instead. As a certified American, my immediate reaction upon seeing the clip was, “WTF you can’t do that.”
Still, Rubiales does seem to be getting a truly excessive amount of hate, such that it’s hard not to root for him. America has a sort of natural immunity built up over centuries of moral panics. Seeing a relatively minor incident like this completely paralyze international institutions overseas really drives home the power of American cultural hegemony.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
You wouldn’t know it reading these judgements, but there is (theoretically) a controlling Supreme Court opinion regarding excessive punitive damages. State Farm v. Campbell, but since they didn’t say the magic words “punitive damages more than X are unconstitutional,” judges get discretion to pretend their favorite case is special and that these particular big meanies really do deserve it.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
The thing you have to understand about the German reaction to the Holocaust as it happened was that WWII was going on. This seems like a petty thing, but think about it. In war you learn not to question the government. There would have been massive factories built and converted to military production all over the country. A brand new smokestack with odd smells in your backyard wouldn’t have triggered much alarm. The government is rounding up the Jews? It would be imprudent not to. They might be resentful towards Germany and eager to help the resistance. We did the same thing in America. Would you be able to tell the difference as a citizen from the outside?
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
Robin Hanson on healthcare:
Education is the same way. The more human time and attention is dedicated to education (i.e. how much it costs), the more you signal that you care about educating children. The thing has been replaced by the symbolic representation of the thing. We would be in much less of a student debt crisis if middle-class women didn't have to get (subsidized) 4-year degrees in order to get childcare jobs at the government-run daycare.
If you had been keeping up with the dating discussions on here, ACX, and /r/slatestarcodex, you would have known this is false from signaling economics.
If there were any possible string of text characters one could put in one's profile to increase one's match rate this much, then dudes would be doing exactly that. Getting the date, hoping to click, and then hoping she becomes attached and doesn't care that you're not rich is a much better strategy than getting zero dates. Perhaps you have ethical hangups that would prevent you from doing this (as do I), but there are plenty of desperate or overly horny guys out there who would be willing to do this.
Of course, women are agents, and thus would change their behavior after getting ripped off constantly. Most likely by disregarding text on male dating profiles without a credible signal to back it up.
EDIT: Actually, a much simpler way would be by looking at his baseline Hinge matches. I've never used Hinge, but if it's anything like Tinder and Bumble, 20 matches a month for someone overweight, not particularly handsome, and 5'9" is almost an order of magnitude higher than what I would find likely.
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
Was it ever really a “team” though? A browse through Wikipedia makes it sound like Fivethirtyeight was Nate’s personal blog at first. It was only after he signed with the New York Times that “writers” started showing up. It was comical just how uninterested Nate seemed in the partisan hackery, even when it constituted the bulk of “his” website.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The death toll seems to have come to a grand total of zero.
This isn't war, this is kayfabe. An event for the sake of having an event. Is the Iranian military truly this incompetent? They could do better than this if they really wanted to cause damage. It feels like the purpose was domestic propaganda. All regimes need some level of popular legitimacy. "We are the only state willing to open fire on the Zionist dogs," is good for Iranian prestige in the region.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Apart from the direct culture-war implications, it is interesting to me how much the Google engineers obviously don't want to ship anything. This feels like a "blink twice if you need help" moment, like they got the call from corporate that they need to take whatever they have and ship, so they slapped the laziest content filter possible.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
What happens if the new state keeps shooting rockets at Israel and periodically sends death squads into Israeli territory to kill as many people as possible?
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Holocaust denial is a factually incorrect position to take
Well, how do you know that? Presumably you weren't there. Did you see it? Did you go into the lab in history class and measure it? Did you receive a vision from God whereby you were commanded to write seven comments to the seven forums of rationalism? No, you believe the Holocaust because you read about it or watched some YouTube videos (I hope you aren't relying on personal instruction from public schoolteachers for your epistemology). Why do you believe those sources? Was it eyewitness testimony from someone claiming to be a Holocaust survivor? You can watch interviews with people claiming to be abducted by aliens. Did they cite documents from the time period? Documents can be forged, important documents, documents which change the course of history because people believe them.
The reason I believe the Holocaust is because of bounded distrust. There are enough eyewitness accounts that make sense considered together, enough plausible-seeming documents that match up with everything else we know well enough, and perhaps most importantly, there is a small army of people dedicated to poking holes in all of this who have come up mostly empty. They are the mechanism by which distrust is bounded. It is vital for a healthy information ecosystem that people be allowed to question everything.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I could sit here and list practical reasons why these so-called "gangster methods" are preferable to banana republic show-trials, but I want to emphasize something else. They're just cooler.
Ethical concerns aside, it's hard to overstate just how badass the polonium-210 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko was. Russian informant and known enemy of Vladimir Putin shows up at a London hospital with strange symptoms. Doctors can't figure out what's wrong. Radiation poisoning is suspected, but Geiger counter readings are negative. It takes military-grade equipment to detect radiation in his blood samples. Unlike almost all other radiation sources, samples of polonium-210 only emit alpha radiation. Alpha particles can't penatrate skin and can barely penetrate air. That's why the Geiger counter couldn't detect anything, but when emitted from inside the body, alpha radiation causes massive DNA damage. He never had a chance.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Not every pro-lifer is religious, but the anti-abortion movement is fundamentally a religious movement. If you analyze it the same way you analyze the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, or Black Lives Matter, you will see bizarre and inexplicable results.
Every year, the annual March for Life draws tens to hundreds of thousands of people to Washington DC. Nobody cares. Why do they do it? Has one single person ever waked by and thought, "Wow, those people sure do have an opinion. Maybe I should vote Republican?" The elements that we now know make protest effective (media support, implied threats, elite backing) are wholly absent.
The audience isn't you. The audience isn't voters or politicians. The audience is God.
There were not ten righteous men in Sodom. If you were Abraham, and you had until election day to save Sodom from fire and brimstone, what would you do? Would you consult with leading Sodomite political theorists? Run cuneiform ads on clay tablets? Your best bet would be to do whatever you think God wants and hope you earn enough grace points to bail your friends out of trouble. If you were a kid going to Jesus Camp in the 90s and 2000s, then Donald Trump getting 3 Supreme Court Justices and overturning Roe v Wade looks like divine intervention. Obviously God wants you to close the deal right? Sure it will take a few more miracles, but if God can save Nineveh he can save America.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Breaking Down the Trump Indictment.
Here is the charging document. It's filed in the Southern District of Florida, which could become important for jury selection reasons. The core of the case is the allegation that Trump instructed his personal assistant to move boxes containing classified documents in order to hide them from his attorneys and the grand jury.
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In January 2021, while he was still president, Trump and his "body man" Waltine Nauta moved dozens of boxes containing records and documents (presumably including the classified documents at issue in this case) from The White House to Mar-a-Lago.
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On two separate occasions in 2021, Trump referred to and displayed classified documents during conversations with individuals who had no security clearance or need-to-know. Trump mentioned in these conversations that he had not declassified the information and that he shouldn't be showing it to anyone.
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In May 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told Trump to turn over presidential records that he kept after his presidency.
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In January 2022, Nauta, on behalf of Trump, turned over some (but not all) of the boxes to NARA.
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The boxes turned over to NARA contained 197 classified documents, prompting a Department of Justice criminal grand jury investigation.
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On May 11, 2022, the grand jury issued a subpoena ordering Trump to turn over all classified documents in his possession, custody, or control.
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In the following weeks, Nauta is seen on security footage moving 64 boxes from the Mar-a-Lago storage room and bringing them to Trump's residence, and moving only 30 boxes from Trump's residence back to the storage room.
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Trump also makes numerous suggestive and mafioso-esque statements to his lawyers about how great it would be if there were no documents and praising Hillary Clinton's lawyer for deleting 30,000 of her emails.
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On June 2, 2022, 'Trump attorney 1' visited the Mar-a-Lago storage room and searched through the boxes there for classified documents to comply with the subpoena. He finds 38 classified documents. Only the boxes in the storage room were searched. He then asked 'Trump attorney 3', who did not take part in the search for documents, to sign the certificate of compliance with the subpoena and turn over the 38 documents.
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In July 2022, the grand jury obtained the surveillance footage of Nauta moving boxes mentioned above, prompting the court to issue a search warrant authorizing the FBI to seize all classified documents from Mar-a-Lago.
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On August 8, 2022, the FBI executes the search warrant. 75 classified documents were found in the storage room, and 27 classified documents were found in Trump's office.
What is quite interesting here is that attorney-client privilege between Trump and 'Trump attorney 1' was pierced under the "crime-fraud exception". The theory is that because Trump misled 'Trump attorney 1' as to the location of the documents in order to violate the subpoena, that means his legal services were "rendered in the commission of a crime," and therefore not protected by privilege. I am curious if any of our resident lawyers can weigh in on if this meets the typical threshold, because it seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
Trump also lost the two lawyers who were representing him immediately after the indictment was unsealed. It's not clear if they quit or if they were fired. Its amazing how fast the guy burns through lawyers. It seems like half of them end up with their career in ruins too. I can't tell if Trump is a nightmare client, or if the powers that be are targeting his legal representation in order to leave him stuck with bottom-of-the-barrel attorney's to defend against federal charges.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
At first I was going to say that this is simply a prominent example of emotivism, but really it’s not even that. The “hurrah trans kids” isn’t disguised as a proposition, it’s disguised as a command. “Protect trans kids”, is an imperative sentence, exactly the same as, “Workers of the World Unite.” It’s the Greengrocer’s Sign. What it means is, "I, the movie studio Sony Pictures work here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Is this how the single-issue posting rule is going to be applied? I see multiple comments on non-dating subjects in /u/SkookumTree‘s first two pages of comments.
Ordinarily I wouldn't post personal Reddit drama here, but the thread is slow and I'm mad.
Here is a post that I saw on /r/baseball:
Anthony Bass promoting anti-LGBTQ propaganda on his Instagram
You probably noticed that the thread is locked with a moderator message: "The trolls are flooding in, and the conversation has run its course at this point. Friendly reminder to love your neighbor, and that it's not intolerant to oppose bigotry. Everyone have a nice holiday Monday!"
This message was posted only a few minutes after I was permanantly banned from /r/baseball for comments in that very thread! In fact, I believe they are referring to me as one of the "trolls flooding in". Lets take a look under the hood to see what counts as perma-ban and threadlock-worthy comments.
First, the actual article in question. Anthony Bass is a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays. He posted an Instagram story saying Christians should boycott Target and Bud Light. That's it. That's the "anti-LGBTQ propaganda". I posted a top-level comment in the thread sarcastically making this point.
Is this a high-effort comment? No, but if you are familiar with the sports subs at all then you know that this type of low-effort sarcasm is all over the place. That's the posting culture there. I also got involved in another comment thread.
JaysRaineman73 -18 points 2 hours ago: "Who the fuck cares. So tired of this shit. I only care about how he plays on the field. If he’s not abusing or hurting anyone, it’s irrelevant."
realparkingbrake 11 points 2 hours ago: "On what planet does denying people the same rights as everyone else not qualify as abusing or hurting them?"
QuantumFreakonomics -4 points 2 hours ago: "What rights do they not have? Name them? How is he hurting anyone? How does asking people to not purchase products from a specific mega-corp hurt anyone? Am I hurting people every time I go to Walmart and not Target? Please, I’m begging you. Actually think about the things you are saying. Don’t just parrot the same irrelevant lines you’ve seen other people use."
PuppyPunter21 4 points an hour ago: "Well, if any players live in Florida, they have recently passed quite a few laws targeted against them. The continued promotion of these types of boycotts encites more hate. Covid caused more hate towards Asians, Kayne West promoted more antisemitism. Ignoring it isn't a solution."
QuantumFreakonomics 3 points an hour ago: " 'Well, if any players live in Florida, they have recently passed quite a few laws targeted against them.' What rights did these laws take away? The right to have teachers come out in front of their students? I had never heard of that "right" before a few years ago. 'The continued promotion of these types of boycotts encites more hate. Covid caused more hate towards Asians' Is your position that someone shouldn't be allowed to talk about an issue if it could possibly cause someone else to hate another group? I don't see how that is a workable position at all. Should we not have instituted Covid restrictions or even complained about covid in order to prevent Asian hate? 'Ignoring it isn't a solution.' Why not? People speaking their mind on public issues is the bedrock of Democracy. Some of those people are going to say things you don't like. A democracy where certain issues are not free to be discussed is not much of a democracy at all.
This was the extent of my participation in the thread. I did not expect my comments to be particularly well-received by the Reddit population, but I felt that I pointed out enough legitimate issues that I would be safe from accusations of trolling. I was wrong.
Here is the modmail message I received informing me of my permanent ban, along with the brief conversation we had before they muted me with their absolute power.1 For reference, here are the /r/baseball rules. Would an honest reading of these rules give you any reason at all to think that anything I posted would not be allowed, much less permaban worthy? You would have to be steeped in internet leftist culture to understand that, "Trolling, threatening, harassing, or inciting violence towards individuals or groups will not be tolerated. Racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant language in both comments and submissions will be removed." means that pointed questions against the progressive consensus will get you tossed out.
I understand why so many subreddits are complete circlejerks now. It's not about echo-chambers and voting dynamics. They literally just banned everyone who disagreed.
1. Here is the source they cited for their "62%" figure. I'll let you decide for yourself whether this poll is applicable
Quantumfreakonomics
9d 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
23d 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.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The oft mocked cliché, "real communism has never been tried," is in a literal sense true. The USSR that defeated Nazi Germany and rivaled America had different wage levels for different jobs, and even higher wages for more productive employees with the same jobs.
Of course, the reason "real communism has never been tried," is that as soon as you have contact with ground-level economic reality, the idea of communism becomes absurd.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Luckily, a brand new article just dropped with details about that:
Some executives said they were getting questions from regulators and law-enforcement entities such as the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan over the charge of Altman’s alleged lack of candor, the people said. The truth was going to come out one way or another, they told the board.
People familiar with the board’s thinking said there wasn’t one incident that led to their decision to eject Altman, but a consistent, slow erosion of trust over time that made them increasingly uneasy. Also complicating matters were Altman’s mounting list of outside AI-related ventures, which raised questions for the board about how OpenAI’s technology or intellectual property could be used.
The board agreed to discuss the matter with their counsel. After a few hours, they returned, still unwilling to provide specifics. They said that Altman wasn’t candid, and often got his way. The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives.
Not entirely related, but here's a particularly eye-popping quote:
OpenAI leadership and employees were growing increasingly concerned about being painted in the press as “a bunch of effective altruists,” as one of them put it.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
The main problem, other than the general trend lately of MCU movies losing steam, is that the first one wasn't any good. Nobody walked out of that theater wanting to see more of Carol Danvers. This simple fact was extensively covered-up. With Rotten Tomatoes changing it's rules not once, but twice in order to prop up the audience score.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
I’m sorry bro. We’ve all been there.
They say “the worst thing she can say is no” but I asked a woman who I’m sorta friends with on a date via text and she read the message but hasn’t responded for 11 days and that’s so much worse than “no.”
You now understand how completely unhinged conventional-wisdom dating advice is. You’re not supposed to tell bright-eyed youngsters, “actually the worst thing that can happen is that she becomes viscerally disgusted by the thought of being with you,” but that’s the truth. That’s not necessarily what happened here, but it is a realistic option that one needs to be aware of.
If not, it's not a big deal, we can pretend this didn't happen and keep being friends lol
I get what you were going for here. You heard somewhere that the biggest thing women fear about dating is feeling unsafe, so you wanted to be as non-threatening as possible. Women hate this for some reason. I don’t know why, but they do. You will drive yourself insane if you try to figure out the deeper operating principles at play which cause this bizarre-seeming behavior. Just accept it.
Unfortunately I don’t have any practical advice for what to do going forward. If you wanted a sanity check, you are making the typical mistakes that a young man reasoning from male-brained priors would be expected to make, so no, you are not going insane.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Is there any possible string of characters which could predictably lead to meaningful damage to Putin if leaked? I kind of doubt it.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I mean, the twist is obvious isn’t it?
Trump wins a majority of pledged delegates in the primaries. He then gets handily convicted of multiple felonies, and is sentenced to what amounts to life in prison right before the Republican National Convention. Hilarity ensues.
I would expect having hundreds of extra murderous terrorists on the loose would be worse for morale. This isn't just theoretical. At least 6 Israelis were killed by prisoners released in the Shalit deal in 2014-2015 alone.
And that's just the first order effects. It's pretty likely that the moral hazard stemming from a policy of lopsided prisoner exchanges is what motivated the October 7th operation.
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