Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I totally believe that FEMA sent this money, but it doesn’t actually violate law.
Do you know of any non-federal entities that are equipped to relieve overcrowding in holding facilities? I can think of two: state holding facilities, and hotels.
One might reasonably assume that the proper response to overcrowding at immigrant detention facilities is to change the law to make deportations happen faster and raise throughput. What our congress actually does is give out money to NGOs to put detained illegals up in hotels instead.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Thirding this. I've been hungry for podcasts covering the DOGE story (preferrably not slop. There's lots of slop out there).
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
It's helpful to try thinking about it from the air-traffic controlers' perspective. Last year, the ATC scandal was a purely academic dispute. There was still pending litigation, but nothing that would affect the typical already-hired air-traffic controller either way.
Right now by contrast, federal employees are on a wartime footing. Subreddits like /r/fednews are almost certainly unrepresentative of the median federal worker's opinion, but there is good reason to be on edge if one is on Uncle Sam's payroll. Everyone hired before January 20, 2025, including able-bodied white males, is a presumed DEI hire until proven otherwise. Trace's ATC scandal going viral is a direct threat to their jobs. It puts a bullseye on the FAA. Is anyone surprised that the reaction is different?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Talk to some lawyers and see if you still think the LSAT weeds out bad-faith political arguments. Lawyers seem especially prone to bad-faith argument
That's the beauty of arguments. It doesn't matter whether they're bad-faith. It only matters whether they're valid.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
do some short test-prep site quiz like this.
Is the 5-question pop quiz the same for everyone? If so, can someone post the answers (spoilered for politeness of course)? I'm not going to give them my data.
Also, is that results graph accurate? I got 4/5. Is this really 94th percentile? The questions weren't obvious, but they didn't seem particularly difficult. I feel dumb for missing one tbh.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
The plaintiffs’ memorandum of law in support of the injunction is here. I can’t evaluate all of the claims in it (partly because I don’t see a memorandum of law from the defendants. Were they not allowed to submit one? Were they too busy? Did it just not get uploaded?). The Administrative Procedure Act is the big statute in these sort of cases, but it looks like they also cite some privacy statutes that I’m not familiar with. Ironically, the Administrative Procedure Act was passed to shrink the size of the administrative state, but its procedural safeguards are also held to slow down the pace of deregulation as well.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
It's not that these kind of complaints are invalid, but they miss the true utility of liscensing regimes.
One might even say that this is yet another workaround that society has settled on for distinguishing the people who suck from the people who don't suck. The set of people with six-figures of capital to throw around is just better in almost every way from the set of people who don't have six-figures of capital to throw around.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
It's Joever again: Judge blocks Musk team access to Treasury Department records.
Does anyone have the text of the injunction? I've seen some news articles that sort of imply that blocks all political appointees from having access to Treasury records (this would of course prevent the Secretary of the Treasury from having political (read "democratic") oversight of the Treasury)
Here’s what I’m confused about: if they can’t offer 8-months pay because there isn’t a budget after March, how come they can offer to not lay-off everybody in March? It seems like everyone expects that money to be there. The only question is if the employees in question will be required to work.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
IMO the right play would have been to announce massive unforgiving layoffs immediately after the deadline. Anyone who took the offer gets 8 months pay. Anyone who gets laid-off gets the absolute minimum. That’s how you establish credibility.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
It’s not about time and money. I had no “damages” (other than lost wages while work was closed), but that week was the coldest I have ever felt in my life.
Nothing Ever Happens
DOGE is as good as dead. They’ve hit the wall.
Federal judge pauses deadline for federal workers to accept Trump’s resignation offer.
DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts.
The one shining light of hope for true government reform was Elon Musk’s DOGE. They seemed to be making real progress. They may not have been loved, but they were feared, and Machiavelli said that’s enough.
Now they have lost the momentum. Stays and injunctions will start pouring in as district court judges stop fearing that their orders will be simply ignored.
If the deep state career civil service can draw blood with a trick as old as “drag-up old racist internet comments”, then DOGE really are toothless. No one will take them seriously anymore.
Maybe Congress can tap in…
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I feel like we ought to have better “Kremlinology” with regards to when Trump should be taken seriously. My gut is that this doesn’t mean anything, but that’s what I originally thought about DOGE.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I think it’s unrealistically optimistic to think that those polities care more about global warming or the consumer experience than they do about keeping Elon Must out of their business.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Why isn’t Tesla stock crashing? The intersection between the set of people who care enough about the environment to buy an electric car, and the set of people who don’t hate Elon’s guts doesn’t provide much room for growth.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
It's a cold and dreary Monday afternoon in Ottawa. The nation is awash in a newfound wave of pride and determination, yet there is an unmistakable fear in the eyes of every citizen. Lame duck prime minister Justin Trudeau enters the situation room with his closest aides and allies. The prime minister takes a deep breath as he awaits the call. The prosperity of his people hangs in the balance. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs could vanish by the end of the week. The phone rings. The unmistakable voice of the orange man in the White House booms out of the speaker. Will he demand an anschluss?
"Mr. President, these tariffs will lead to needless suffering and destruction. Is there any way we can set this aside for the moment?"
"Fentanyl is a big problem Justin. Hire someone to work on that and you've got a deal."
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
The whole thing was fake.
https://x.com/Claudiashein/status/1886434747238514776
https://x.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1886529228193022429
Trump likes tariffs, but there is one thing he likes more than tariffs: pushing around world leaders.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I think it’s pretty stupid to impose protectionary tariffs by executive order without a broad bipartisan consensus. Nobody is going to invest in building a brand new steel mill or whatever if the most-likely outcome is being made obsolete in four years.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
You're right that they do put limits, but they have no theoretical basis to do so. It's just an unprincipled hack that they tack on at the end to prevent their moral philosophy from ruining their life. Eventually someone is going to write "Famine, Affluecne, and Morality II" in which a good effective altruist is walking to work after just finishing their annual 10% donation for the year and sees a drowning child. Obviously you wouldn't let the child die just because you already donated 10% for the year right?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
From Scott further down in the thread:
I think this hypothetical, as stated, is obviously correct. There is a pretty big assumption though, the assumption that this is a reciprocal arrangement. You can get into galaxy-brained decision theory stuff to argue that because of acausal trade, there is an unnegotiated policy that intelligent agents would automatically know they should follow where agents help each other. Its a bit hard to see how impovershed African children have any way to help Americans even if they wanted to, to say nothing of their intuitive understanding of functional decision theory. Still, I have to concede that it is at least conceivably possible.
Where this logic does not hold at all is in animal welfare. No one can seriously argue that animals would collectively decide to treat humanity better if only we would reduce the suffering associated with factory farms.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
It crossed my mind earlier that this is a distraction.
[tinfoil]
Right now DOGE is working around the clock to gain access to government computer systems. Elon is working with Trump to implement the purge as we speak. If the media went full-out covering this the way they reported on Comey in 2017, they likely wouldn't be able to get away with it. If everyone is worried about tariffs and the economy instead, then DOGE can work in the shadows to take control of federal agencies away from the career civil service.
[/tinfoil]
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I get what Trump wants from Mexico. I'm not sure what he wants from Canada. Is fentanyl coming in from Canada? I thought it was coming from Mexico.
I mean, He's said that he wants Canada to become part of the US, but that can't be his motivation here, can it?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Counterpoint: Trump acheived all this because he followed the Moldbug plan of having a tech CEO bring in a bunch of 20-year-olds to run the executive branch like a startup. Curtis Yarvin is becoming whitepilled as we speak.
This feels like those people who think Yudkowsky is discredited because recursive self-improvement looks a bit different than what he imagined in 2007 or whatever. No one else was even thinking that deeply about AI in 2007.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Counterpoint: I can think of a few potential reasons helicopters would want to fly over the Potomac (ease of navigation, soft landing in case of emergency, less concern about collateral damage in case of emergency, etc.). We didn't know until today which side was more important.
I sort of agree with you. But I think this would fall under the funding freeze issued by President Trump. This isn’t a brand new program. There are migrants in New York hotel rooms right now. It’s not like Concentration Camps Incorporated has the tent cities in Nevada ready to go. If the funding gets stopped, then the migrants get kicked out onto the streets of New York with nowhere to eat, shit, or sleep.
It’s sort of a hard sell to say, “oh yeah, we had money appropriated to shelter these migrants, but the hotels they were at didn’t fit the president’s criteria, so we let manhattan turn into a biohazard slum instead. No impoundment act implications here.”
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