Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Do you actually think that building concentration camps is something you do when you're expecting to negotiate peace with the population you're interning in them?
Im pretty sure this was a big part of US Native American policy. It helped that the population differential was way higher, but people in Santa Fe don’t have to worry about Radical Navajo Terrorism anymore.
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
The media reports on events that happen in New York City differently than they report on events that happen elsewhere. A Trump rally in Michigan or Western Pennsylvania might as well be in American Samoa or Guam. It’s different when Trump brings his ilk to defile Madison Square Garden. There are more Jews than Trump voters in Manhattan. The people who live there don’t even have cars. It probably does feel like Nuremberg to them.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
This one actually does seem quite sketchy. Hmmm.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
Consider the possibility that a squirrel living indoors in close proximity to a raccoon would be more likely than wild squirrels to be infected.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
It was trading at 25% ish before the election. Kamala's lead in Nate Silver's polling average was 1%, well within a single standard deviation.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
The Washington Post weighs in:
"The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake." - The Washington Post.
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
Oooh, that’s smart. The evidence is literally destroyed, along with the ballots. Authorities would be able to switch to fire-resistant envelopes if this became a problem, but not until the next election cycle.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Suppose Alice is having a picnic at the pond with her parents. Her parents are clumsy eaters, and their plates and utensils get blown into the pond. A local cop sees the trash floating in the pond and asks Alice, “why did you dump your garbage in the pond?” Alice replies, “The only garbage I see floating out there is my parents’.” This is a completely normal way to use possessives in colloquial American English. It’s not the most likely interpretation of what Biden said, but it is a reasonable interpretation.
Quantumfreakonomics
26d ago
Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors?
If they interviewed doctors in Gaza, they interviewed pro-Hamas doctors. No one would voluntarily put themselves under the jurisdiction of Hamas unless they were okay with what that implied. If someone from a foreign country volunteered to work in German hospitals during WWII, one would assume that they were a Nazi sympathizer.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
One of the themes of Patrick McKenzie's legendary essay The Story of VaccinateCA is that the government is perfectly willing to let private citizens assist with emergency relief efforts if the government is allowed to take credit for it. Tweets like this are a declaration of war in that context. If you go into a disaster area with the intention of undermining the legitimacy of the official response, you are going to have a bad time.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
The only way I can see something like that working is if congress repealed the Administrative Procedure Act, putting Trump and his immediate appointees in direct control of federal regulations.
Curtis Yarvin talks a lot about how no president has been truly in charge of the government since FDR. The reason for this is the Administrative Procedure Act.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.
This doesn't get the causality right in my opinion. When you look at the big censorious changes that happened on Reddit, they were usually demanded by the volunteer moderators, not by the paid admins. Mods going on strike is what caused Reddit to ban /r/NoNewNormal just days after the the CEO posted a poorly-recieved announcement defending free speech and debate. Mods also whined for years about "brigading" by /r/TheDonald. What they were really upset about was that TheDonald was attracting a right-wing userbase.
This is part of why it was such a big deal when Reddit decided to steamroll the mods on the unpopular API changes last summer. They had literally never done that before. They always caved.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
I think that’s what it ultimately boils down to. Trump started his campaign promising to deport illegals. Then there was the Muslim ban. Now Vance is saying that Haitians on Temporary Protected Status are basically illegal and should be deported. The next step is to look into canceling green cards. Then revoking naturalized citizenship. Couple that with relaxing civil-rights laws, and you see where this is going.
Whether or not Trump himself wants to do all these, a sizable chunk of the population does. That is the demographic that attends Trump rallies.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
No. I think if someone threw a match inside they would be able to catch him. My assumption is that this was some kind of delayed chemical reaction that was engineered to take place within one of the envelopes, the kind of thing that takes planning.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
Just say you don't talk about politics and/or that it's none of their buisiness. It is socially acceptable to berate people for not voting, and it is socially acceptable to berate people for voting Republican, but it is not (yet) socially acceptable to berate people into telling who they voted for.
Quantumfreakonomics
25d ago
My guess is that they have some sort of internal polling to try to figure out what the common factors are amongst black men who support Trump, and they came up with buisiness ownership and cryptocurrency investments.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I think if elections were rigged then we wouldn’t see different parties win in different years. Also, if it was rigged against Trump, wouldn’t one expect him to underperform the polls? In reality, he overperformed the polls in both of his elections. (You can try to account for this by supposing that pollsters are in on the game, but now we’re just adding epicycles.)
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo 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
23d ago
The Zapruer Film of the 21st century. Obama had just given the order to kill Bin Laden. Seal Team Six was making final preparations as he spoke. The newly-released long-form birth certificate listed the time as 7:24PM, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
A few thoughts on flood risk:
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There are huge swaths of the United States that have only been populated by literate civilization for 100-200 years. This isn’t enough data to get good risk estimates on the 100-year flood zone, much less the 500-year flood zone.
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Rainfall is NOT NORMALLY DISTRIBUTED! If you try to take historical rainfall totals, calculate the mean and standard deviation, and then use basic statistics to predict the likelihood of out-of-distribution events, you are going to get rekt because you didn’t have a term for “giant hurricane dumps five months worth of rain in two days”.
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Because of this, there is essentially no market for private flood insurance in hurricane-prone areas. The federal government has to operate a flood insurance program at a loss in order to make the market. These policies are often underpriced given the true risk, and thus are a source of moral hazard.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
What is going on in Springfield, Ohio? 20,000 Haitian arrivals into a town of 60,000 seems insane, but the New York Times seems to back it up. I definitely don’t trust the NYT to give an honest portrayal of what the situation is like on the ground, but I don’t really trust a lot of the rumors going around Twitter either. I am seeing reports of Haitians killing the ducks at the park and eating them. There are even secondhand reports of Haitians eating pet cats.
What I am not seeing however is geolocated footage or images. How hard can it be to send a guy to the park to see if there are any ducks left? I am legitimately confused. None of this seems to make sense.
Quantumfreakonomics
29d ago
Twitter has recently updated its monetization scheme. Here are some Tweets by mid-level accounts celebrating their pay raise: Tiffany Fong, Richard Hanania, Kyle Mann, Crémieux, i/o, Austen Allred
Notice anything? All of these accounts are followed by @elonmusk. I did some additional digging. This looks to be the official announcement.
Content quality, not ad impressions: Our algorithms evaluate viewer engagement by analyzing interactions such as replies, likes, bookmarks, and the time spent viewing your content. These factors directly contribute to your payout. Only genuine interactions from Premium users will be counted toward your earnings.
Higher signal engagements: Certain engagements are worth more than others. Engagements from users on higher premium tiers are also worth more.
Audience analysis: We also consider the characteristics of your audience, including who they follow and who follows them. This holistic approach can influence your monetization scores and payout weights.
It flew a bit under the radar at the time, but with checks going out today we have a much better idea of how the scheme works in practice. It sure looks to be a patronage system for tech-adjacent influencers and intellectuals crossed with a pyramid scheme.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
It’s not going to go well for Jewish Americans if we start having ethnic purges. They have a sixth sense for this kind of thing. If Puerto Rico can be a floating pile of trash, so can Brooklyn.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
No? Her flaws are completely different.
I’m still not convinced that she lied about working at McDonald’s. I think it more likely that she lied on her resume about not working at McDonald’s. Of course, that shows not just ignorance, but shame at being associated with the working classes.
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