Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
If I see a disheveled black man on the Metro, I am vastly more worried he's about to regale me with an obviously made up sob story and ask for money.
To be fair, this is also a negative outcome.
Living in DC I've done this on hundreds of occasions and I've only been stabbed twice.
I’m assuming this is a joke?!?!? I like not being stabbed.
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
In 2016, a tourist family from Nebraska visiting Disney World allowed their toddler to wander around the edge of a small lake near their hotel without close supervision. The young boy was attacked and killed by an alligator. Anyone who grew up in the Southern United States knows not to let small children wander around bodies of water unattended. Nobody explicitly tells you this, but there is a general cultural understanding of alligators, how they work, and where they live.
I know it’s controversial even here to refer to the homeless urban underclass as vermin or wild animals, but I can’t think of a better metaphor.
Everyone who grew up in a major American metropolitan area knows that certain environments around the city are the natural habitat for a certain kind of predator. You don’t have to know these locations by heart. You can identify them simply by looking around at the ambient population. The (small-n) native American knows that these environments are significantly more dangerous than other areas of the city, and thus require a heightened level of vigilance when one is unable to avoid these areas in the normal course of city life. You cannot expose yourself by putting earbuds in and spacing-out on public transportation directly in front of a disheveled black man wearing a hoodie, especially if you are a small and vulnerable young girl who sticks out.
Quantumfreakonomics
26d ago
Why couldn't they make all those workers legal?
Work visas (H-1B and H-2B) are capped. They would be competing with every other company in the country that wants to bring in foreign workers.
Quantumfreakonomics
27d ago
ICE has conducted its largest ever raid targeting... Korean automotive workers at a Georgia Hyundai factory?
ICE has released a video of its raid on Hyundai–LG's Georgia battery plant site, showing Korean workers chained up and led away. South Korea's foreign ministry has confirmed over 300 of the 457 taken into custody are Korean nationals.
We don't have all the details, but from what I can glean most of the Koreans were in the country on B1 buisiness visas, which allows the visa holder to attend business meetings and conduct training, but does not allow for "labor". The factory involved is brand new, having opened less than a year ago, which would explain why they needed so many Koreans (Hyundai is a Korean company) to get operations off the ground.
One defense of these kind of raids is that it doesn't do America any good to have foreign companies build factories in the US if they are going to staff those factories with an imported workforce instead of Americans, but it is far from clear that was happening here. I don't doubt that many of these B1 visaholders were "working the line" and as such technically violating the terms of their visas, but that's how foreign investment works. If you build a brand new specialized factory in an area that doesn't have factories of that kind, the local workforce will inherently be inexperienced and unsuitable for the facility. You can't teach people how to run the factory without, well, running the factory.
The big question is what this means for foreign investment in the United States. If you were in charge of a foreign manufacturing corporarion, would you want to build a facility in the United States if there is a good chance your own employees would be arrested for running the company's facilities?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it
This is a very 2018 opinion. We live in a different world now. The problem is that the legal "check" against the president using executive authority to consolidate power is impeachment and removal. This would require support for Trump to collapse from among the Republican base itself. In 2025, what red line exists that would cause Trump's Republican support to collapse? Maybe if he gave a speach from the oval office announcing his personal surrender to Soros and the indefinite suspension of all border and ICE enforcement. I don't think there's much on the right-wing authoritarian side Trump could do to get impeached. Stringing prominent Democrats from lampposts might even turn out to be surprisingly popular.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
From what I can tell, the main factor in Netanyahu's persistence is the failure of the Oslo peace process. Nobody really believed in peace via negotiated settlement after that. At that point they're just arguing over how hard to stomp the boot.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Remember the time /r/fatpeoplehate got banned for posting images of imgur employees? (I think the implication was that they were fat, but this was 10 years ago)
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
There is a little Patio11 in my head screaming at me, "when you make a large payment to a sex services company, there is a special light that goes off in your bank's inteligence analysis department telling them to stop whatever they are doing and investigate you specifically"
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
You can't just blast out nudes and collect rent, you have to engage with the audience. This, to me, seems like an actually defensible moat vis-a-vis AI OF alternatives.
The messages are AI. Lots of times the bots aren’t even LLM quality. The thread mentions how concentrated revenue is for the top creators. You think they’re the ones responding to messages?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I think a lot of people are in denial about how much damage The Dark Knight movie did. Heath Ledger’s joker inspired an entire generation of social outcasts to become jaded antisocial nihilists. Are we really supposed to believe that this guy who shot up the sequel on opening night wasn’t inspired by The Joker? And now we have this:
”I’m the woker baby.
”Why so queerious?”
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
It seems pretty clear from the video that the girl was in fact threatening somebody. The only question is whether he deserved it or not.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I'm the kind of sicko that wants to see stuff like this when I travel.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
We got em. There they are just standing there, menacingly.
(They do look quite tan. I guess these are Romani?)
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
They were BULGARIANS? I can't stop laughing. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Everyone's all like, "Migrants huh? We know what these Pakis are all about," and then it turns out it was a Bulgarian couple. Bring back @BurdensomeCount, we deserve the effortpost about white-on-white crime.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I think the uh, cosmopolitan financial executives will conveniently discover all those old media manipulation tricks that were so effective from 2012-2022 in the event that this comes close to happening. If nothing else, Vance will get an explicit endorsement if Trump's donors beg him enough.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
It feels like it’s actually Americans who have the hang-up about underage girls, and that this cultural disconnect is what is driving a lot of the “WTF is going on in the UK” discourse from American commentators.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
but very rarely will this shitty slop rise to the top over real artists.
Sorry to break it to you, but uh, yeah it does.
https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1833154509222129884?lang=en
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1905332049021415862?lang=en
Turns out demand was elastic. The ability to respond to the current thing in minutes with trivial input costs changes the game. Memes were a big part of Trump's 2016 win, but this is the next level.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
AI Propaganda, Deepfakes, and the Law of Undignified Failure
A few days ago, a video appeard on Twitter of two white Scottish girls, 12 and 14, yelling, "DON'T TOUCH US," at an unseen cameraman and weilding a knife and a hatchet. Allegedly (though not shown) the cameraman was a migrant or other ethinc foreigner, was trying some form of assault or harassment, and the girls were trying to defend themselves.
The video is real. The event, insofar as it was depicted in the video, is real. Scottish police really did charge a 14 year old girl with brandishing a bladed weapon.
What is not real is this AI-generated image of a young girl emblazened with Scottish garb and Celtic war paint defending her home and honor with sabre and battleaxe. The image does not even purport to be real. No one could possibly believe that this is a real image. And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video. I know that the AI image is not real, it is operating on me at a cognitive level below logical propositions concerning real entities and events. One might say that the AI image represents certain ideals and concepts in a more-or-less true way (a sort of "truthiness" if you will), but the image itself is not evidence of anything.
Unless you are brand new to internet political discussion boards (in which case, welcome aboard) you have heard the concerns that AI-generated images and video will usher in a brave new post-truth world in which you can no longer trust the evidence of your own eyes and ears. Concerns typically center around some sort of incindiary event which is in reality totally fake, but which is indistinguishable from reality due to the photorealism of the AI media generation (so-called "deepfakes"). More sophisticated commentators point out that even just the threat of such "deepfakes" renders all multimedia depictions of events questionable, since it would no longer be possible to use the media artifact itself to determine the underlying truth or falsity of the events it depicts.
The sad truth is that none of that shit matters, because reality itself hardly matters. The law of undignified failure states that, "when plans and people fail, they do so in a less dignified way than you imagined." Perhaps you imagined that the forces of goodness would fight valiantly against the forces of epistemic darkness, only being finally overwhelmed by an exploitable quirk in the degeneracy of the vectors that make up abstract image space. In undignified reality, we get done in by anime girls waving flags.
You might object, "yes, but the rape of white British girls really is that big of a deal! We need propaganda to get across how bad the problem is." Maybe! but I hope you can see that this is not exactly an asymetric weapon as far as truth is concerned. I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment, if only because conservatives live in more of an inherently audio-visual culture compared to liberals.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I don’t buy the dating app hate. It wasn’t smart phones that ruined the OkCupid model. Women were always going to gravitate to a system where all men are filtered by default and they get to opt-in to who gets the privilege of messaging them.
There was a temporary window wherein there was a structural advantage to being verbose and tech-savy. This was always going to be temporary.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Going on ill-fated Antarctic expeditions is exactly the kind of long-lost British passtime that could reutite civic pride.
What drives me insane is how many of these multi-thousand-dollar fuck-ups are the result of someone not on the hook for the bill (sometimes the doctor, sometimes the patient) choosing the vastly more expensive option just because it’s slightly more convenient. This guy gets told to take his infant to the emergency room for a UTI because hey, why not? Insurance will pay for it.
You can see why insurance companies turn into money-grubbing assholes.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
It doesn’t seem obviously retarded to me to have both a per-patient complexity-weighted administrative charge, and also a per procedure/per doctor-hour charge. Invoices for complex professional services are incredibly dense like this in many industries.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
OK, but then you charged us separately for the ultrasound and the doctor's time, so you are essentially double-counting.
What about the nurses’ time? What about the time spent in the facilities? What about liability risk? The time spent by the doctor is not the only institutional decision-makinng cost that the hospital incurred.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Reading the text of the chant (“The power of one. The power of two. The power of many.”) is doesn’t sound so bad, but when you watch the scene itself it sounds like a cross between “Gen-Z boss and a mini” and a cringe college protest chant. Just absolutely awful sound design.
No. Charlie Kirk’s value over replacement commentator is essentially zero. He will be replaced tomorrow. Fuentes has actual talent and social capital. Things which the groypers would be hard-pressed to find if Fuentes were to disappear.
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