Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
What's the deal with Kate Middleton? I can't make heads or tails of it, I think because of the culture gap. Feels like there is a subtle difference between the Bounded Distrust rules in America and the rules in Britain. Give it to me in freedom-speak.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I don't believe this. Go to any parking lot no matter how crowded and there will be handicapped parking spots open. You don't need to purge the genepool to fix parking violations. You just need to make the problem legible to the authorities.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash.
All-time great "solve for the equilibrium" moment.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Republican primary ballot propositions be like: "Authorize military force to deploy to the border to stop ILLEGALS yes/no" "Eliminate all taxes yes/no"
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Maybe the Constitution is just, you know, actually clear on this one. 14.5 says Congress has to do it.
If congress repealed the voting rights act could Alabama ban black people from voting? Sure, the 15th amendment says, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” but it also says, “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” You wouldn’t read that as giving Congress the option to decide whether the 15th amendment applies or not.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I was wondering when the Aella gangbang discourse would make its way here.
The surprising thing is that I can't think of anything interesting to say about it. I haven't seen anyone else have an interesting take either. Aella is such a unique human being that any minor updates that info from one additional gangbang could provide have approximately zero relevance to any other societal issue.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Senator Josh Hawley:
Huh? For reference, section 230 is here. In short, section 230 says that companies aren't liable for information posted on their websites by third parties. This means that Google can't be sued for showing ISIS.com on your search results, because ISIS is a third party, and ISIS.com is their content, not Google's. Section 230 doesn't apply to generative AI because generative AI isn't a third party. If Google Gemini replies to your prompt with, "Thank you for joining ISIS. Recommended pipebomb targets in your area are X, Y, and Z," Google can't use section 230 as a defense if Y sues them for being bombed, because Google generated the information.
If I were to steelman Hawley's point, I guess it would be that Google as a company benefits from section 230, and so repealing it would punish them for creating "woke" AI and cut off a source of funds for AI development, but I don't think Hawley's use of the phrase "these AI companies" is easily read as referring to only "AI companies which are bankrolled by social media products."
If you are familiar with simulacrum levels, you may have had a bit of difficulty grokking level 4. I think an intuitive definition of level 4 is, "politician speak that doesn't fit into levels 1, 2, or 3". Which level is the tweet by Hawley on? It's not 1, because it isn't true. It's not really 2, because it's not trying to convince you of a proposition. It's not 3, replace "conservatives" with "liberals" and "Google Gemini" with "𝕏", and it could be from AOC. That leaves 4. It's just word associations. Woke AI is bad. Tech companies make woke AI. Section 230 something something big tech censorship. Put it in a box, shake it up, let the manatees do their thing, post whatever comes out to Twitter.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Maybe they don’t want Russia to think they’re onto them?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
You think Putin doesn’t have the resources to murder someone and make it look like natural causes? He has access to tools you can’t possibly imagine. The doctors doing the autopsy don’t have to be in on it if they don’t know what to look for.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Unfortunately, golf can only be learned from your dad. If your old man croaked or became physically incapable before passing on the skill, you're SOL.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Always interesting to speculate about.
No it isn't. I have to go watch cat videos after reading this thread.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I think Obama's re-election campaign was the turning point.
No, it was pretty clearly the Trump campaign. That was the empirical proof (in their minds) that free speech cannot suffice to ensure the triumph of good over evil. They kept expecting that the negative coverage, universal condemnations, and yes, polite conversations with Trump supporters would work. They didn't.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Zvi has a pretty good writeup. I haven't used the tool, but from all the evidence, it looks like any time a picture of a human being was requested, it literally appended a bunch of diversity words ("Black", "Latina", "Middle Eastern", but never "White") to the user's request without notice or permission before feeding the prompt into the image generator. Hence, female popes and black Vikings. I see three possibilities:
-
They were too stupid to realize that adding "diversity" to as many requests as possible would lead to embarrassing results in many cases.
-
They knew this, but they didn't care/didn't anticipate the intensity of the backlash.
-
They did know, but nobody spoke up because there is a culture of silence at Google.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr 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
1yr ago
I think that about the third time I watched a "certified fresh" Marvel movie and walked out of the theater feeling like it was a mediocre waste of time I fully updated on critic reviews being compromised. To be clear, it's not just Disney movies that this applies to, but they do seem to be the biggest benefactors.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Solve for the equilibrium. When McDonald's has to pay staff $20/hour, the solution is to only be open for the lunch/dinner rush.
This post is art. It would only be degraded by specifying the pronoun.
More options
Context Copy link