Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
LAX has 4 runways. They all face the same direction. Why would they ever not use separate runways for takeoffs and landings?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Unofficial Motte Strawpoll: Tattoos on women yes/no
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
<tinfoil hat> Maybe someone at one of the AI labs discovered how to communicate with dolphins, then conspired with the Gibraltar Pod to take out The Bayesian (oh yeah, the name of the yacht is The Bayesian. Total coincidence right?).
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
This is a good point, but I do wonder if, “one trillion dollars in fraud against the American people,” plays better on the campaign trail than, “ten million illegal aliens”.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Does the US need an influx of Saudi royals?
"Need" is a strong word, but rich oil barrons would fit right in in Houston.
Plus you'd be bringing inflation and higher house prices. Australian and Canadian real estate has been rendered ludicrously expensive by rich Chinese buying it all.
My forex is a bit rusty. Wouldn't rich individuals trying to convert their foreign-denominated assets into dollars result in deflationary pressure on the dollar? My sense is that lots of the Chinese demand for real-estate is speculative in nature. Speculative demand will subside once supply catches up. America has much more developable land than Australia or Canada.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Should the United States switch to an explicitly pay-to-play immigration model? The twin axioms of immigration seem to be:
-
Elite human capital immigrants entering the country is good.
-
Low human capital immigrants entering the country is bad.
Much ink has been spilled on attempts to determine which specific groups of immigrants are good or bad, but isn't the most elegant solution simply to charge money for the privilege of immigrating to the United States? People who have acheived success in their home countries are more likely to be high human capital, and needless to say the unwashed hordes would be kept out by sheer inability to pay.
Ideally this would be a complete replacement of the current immigration regime, not an augmentation. I cannot think of any nessesary exceptions off the top of my head. Anyone worth bringing into the country is worth paying for. Passport bros can still exploit economic inequality to snag a mail-order bride, but they will be the ones footing the bill.
I propose a flat rate of $100,000 per green card. Why wouldn't this work?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Just started Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. I came for the philosophical musings on pseudo-environments and manufactured consent, but I am staying for the detailed accounts of how the WWI propaganda sausage was made.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Of course housing should be destroyed as an investment. Living in a house is consumption. It causes wear and tear on the house. A twenty-year-old house is inherently less valuable than a brand new house. In a healthy economy, a house should depreciate in value like a car, albeit more slowly.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Once we have self-driving cars, there will no longer be any pressing need to have the parking lots immediately adjacent to the places that people are going. The cars will be able to drive empty to the parking area after dropping off passengers. This will also increase the willingness of people to commutte long distances, since people spend most of their time on their phones and laptops anyway.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I don’t think so. Wokeness emerged out of the uniquely American experience of, “oh shit, we have to live next to all these black people we imported now,” which was then imported to Europe after we bailed them out in the World Wars.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Grok will let you make anything right now.
Okay, not literally anything. Hardcore porn appears to be banned. Still, I am not sure society is ready for a mainstream image model that lets you make sexy pictures of female congresswomen showing their feet.
I am really curious how this shakes out over the next few days/weeks. I am sure that the New York Times and Washington Post hitpieces are being typed right now. Was this level of freedom intentional, or an oversight? Will Elon fold immediately? My guess: he shuts down the ability to generate identifiable people in lewd situations. That is the one thing Americans won't stand for for some reason.
Things have been quiet on the AI front lately, despite or perhaps because of the election. I suspect that the major labs are afraid to rock the boat and risk getting blamed if things go poorly.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image”
Not sure how you get around this one. God specifies that the blood will be shed “by man” and then gives a justification, indicating that this is to be taken as a normative statement instead of a descriptive one.
This is immediately after Noah gets off the ark, so you can’t pull the “Mosaic covenant” stuff that gets you out of Leviticus.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
you're gonna have a Real Fun Time when the DoE starts talking about dumping low-level 'nuclear waste' somewhere.
I don’t have the time to write a whole post about this right now, but it is not widely-enough known how much of a complete clusterfuck the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act turned into. The only reason it didn’t turn into a national crisis is the fact that low-level waste isn’t actually very dangerous. You can tell universities, laboratories, and hospitals that there is no outlet for their waste, and they will just hold onto it in random cabinets for decades with no noticeable consequences.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Fixing the budget is quite easy conceptually. Just cut Social Security. Old people have had their whole lives to get their affairs in order. The “fat” is the fact that we pay people simply for being alive once they reach a certain age. Maybe you need someone with basic math skills to structure the phase-out so that people who have already paid in don’t get completely screwed, but this is a fundamentally simple problem from an operations standpoint.
I would say to cut Medicare too, but I worry that many families would literally bankrupt themselves pouring money into the pit that is the US healthcare system in order to save granny. It is quite hard to evaluate costs and benefits in a dispassionately economic manner in these areas, which is probably why we’re in this mess.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Breakdancing (or "breaking" as they call it) is new to the Olympics this year. The Australian contestant is Rachell Gunn, AKA Raygun, a communications professor who specializes in "the cultural politics of breaking". Lets see how she does.
How the hell did this happen?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I still don't understand why having highways that go to the places worth going to is bad. I guess some people hate driving, but once we get self-driving cars this will be seen as obviously correct right?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
It almost doesn't matter. Anyone from that long ago who got around across Eurasia is most likely a direct ancestor of the bulk of the human population.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I do suspect they've stumbled upon a winning formula. Typically, the party that is having the most fun is the party that wins. Note just how happy Democrats seem when they call JD Vance and other Republicans "weird". It doesn't reach quite the mania of 2015-16 Trump, but it is a stark change from what we expect to see from Dems.
The dominant emotion that Reds feel towards Blues is resentment. The dominant emotions that Blues feel towards Reds is contempt. These can appear superficially similar, but there are deep and subtle differences. Vance can't call Democrats "weird" anymore than Hillary could turn around and call Trump "Crooked Donald". "Weird" is fundamentally a contemptuous insult, while "crooked" stems more from resentment. The decision to explicitly embrace and harnass contempt could be the left's Trump revolution.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
This proves way too much. Any crime commited by an immigrant, is a crime which wouldn't have happened had the immigrant been prevented from entering the country. Your general dismissal of "counterfactuals" leads to erasure of immigrant crime.
Here's one for proving too much: 99% of all crime is committed by descendants of Genghis Khan. Any crime commited by a descendant of Genghis Khan, is a crime which wouldn't have happened had Temujin been strangled before he was old enough to ride a horse. Your general acceptance of "counterfactuals" leads to a superexponential mess of hypothetical actions which would have prevented any arbitrary incident via the butterfly effect.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I think “DEI candidate” could have been an effective attack. Unfortunately Trump decided to go with “she’s not really black,” which sort of accepts the premise that being black is a notably positive attribute.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few days. The short answer is, no, Republicans are not shamelessly sexually humiliating their opponents enough to win the election. The long answer is, it’s not enough simply to sexually humiliate one’s opponents, one must imply that one’s opponents have something to gain from giving up or switching sides. The subtext of the “these guys are just weird” campaign is that if you young man simply stop trying to police women’s sexual behavior, you too can get laid. Consider the following:
This woman is a “gender and society” columnist at the Washington Post. The message is clear; submit to power [ours] and you will get pussy. What is the Republican message to young women? Become based or you will grow into a childless cat lady? That could work, but it is inherently a multi-step argument. Frankly, conservative media just isn’t good enough to get across a message that complex.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr 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.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I have no idea how serious they are about enforcement, though.
Given that I can't remember any media frenzies about students being disciplined for having gay sex, I can conclude that the level of enforcement is somewhere between zero and zero.
I am confronted with Kamala or Walz's face every other time I open a YouTube video. In contrast, the only Trump ads I see is garbage like this, hyping stuff like the "no tax on tips" policy.
I feel kind of insulted. First of all, tipping is dumb. I tip decently because I have sufficient disposible income that I can pay a little extra, but these sorts of illegible culturally-mediated costs are bad and unfair. Why on Earth would I want to incentivize more tipping by exempting tipped income from taxes? Has anyone gamed out the equilibrium here? (Is this some sort of 4D chess to get black people de-facto excluded from middle-class economic areas? Think about it.)
Secondly, why does this feel like a Hooters ad? Obviously you don't want ugly people in your marketing, but this is borderline offensive. This woman is way too hot for me to believe she was selected for any reason besides her looks.
On the other hand, JD Vance is quite relatable, in the sense that his campaign feels like what would happen to me if I were to run for office.
More options
Context Copy link