Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
SBF was right about books. Sorry bookworms, but they’re obsolete. Every good book should have been either a blogpost or a video lecture.
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
The fertility crisis is in some sense a fake problem. It could be solved tomorrow with common-sense birth control control. Make it illegal to give hormonal BC to a woman with less than 3 children (number adjustable as needed). All the proposals to increase fertility with tax-breaks and other incentives feel like responding to the lead crisis by increasing access to chelation therapy. Just take the lead out the fucking gasoline.
See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.
I flat-out do not believe this. At most you would get about 10 LEO deaths on the first day, and then the military gets called in to put down the insurrection. Rules of engagement are always optional. "There is absolutely no difficulty in using any level of the American security forces against the barbarians."
PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.
Can you 3D print gunpowder?
I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres
I do concede that. The standard economic result is that when one good is banned, some of that demand goes towards a substitute good, but not enough to completely make up for it. I would expect the new rate of vehicular massacres to be somewhere between the current rate, and the current rate + the gun massacre rate. I also suspect that "massacre-prevention software" would soon become standard on cars if this became an issue.
And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.
Oh, I am absolutely not advocating for large-scale gun confiscation. I am simply pointing out that it is both possible to do, and that it would achieve it's primary goal of reducing gun murders (and murders in general).
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
I guess short-term it's the right strategy, but it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder. It's not quite as bad as the people who insist that those racial crime statistics don't mean what you think they mean, but it's the same kind of politically-convenient reality denial. If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
How does the military respond to disparate Americans shooting at LEOs knocking on their own doors?
If you shoot at the cops, they know your address. After the first week all patrols will be accompanied by Predator drone air support. You'll have two Hellfire missiles crashing through your roof in minutes after opening fire. If they can't get officers to shoot at Americans in person, they can sure as hell get some loyal private to sit at the drone terminal in Alexandria.
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
In general, I don’t buy the “we should ban sharing true information because someone else might do something bad with it,” argument, but there are certain extreme cases where it may be valid. This is not one of them. Some guy getting on the hood of a car sounds a lot more like inconvenience than injury, even if it is scary. “Won’t somebody think of the children,” hits a lot harder when it’s your children, so it’s understandable why Elon might overreact, but it’s still a bad decision, and it shows that Elon’s principles cave hard and fast when they run up against something he personally cares about.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
It seems like there’s a pattern in what forms of corruption are acceptable on the right -
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Diverting taxpayer money to family members or pet causes: Evil, ought to get you thrown out of a helicopter.
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Selling the performance of official acts to private interests for money or other services: No big deal. Everybody does it. Just an excuse to railroad somebody like they did to Trump.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Article II Section 1 Clause 2 of the Constitution gives states the power to determine how to select electors. Amendment 12 says that all of the certified ballots are to be counted and the winner is the next President of the United States. It doesn’t matter whether Trump “thinks” the results are illegitimate. He has no jurisdiction here. The electoral college had already voted when the call happened. It was over.
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
You are pattern-matching to some random commune in Philadelphia. You should be pattern-matching to Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor, because that is what questioning American sovereignty (the kind that elites care about) amounts to. It’s pretty undignified to die on a million-dollar battleship in port from a dive bomber hitting the magazine. Did America look at that and decide, “whoops, our bad. We’ll stay on our side of the Pacific and mind our own business from now on”? No, they hunted down and killed every single Japanese soldier who wouldn’t surrender. How many collateral casualties were acceptable in that conflict? Do you think there will be sympathy for the terroristic gunmen on American media? Fox canned Tucker despite much better ratings than anyone else on their network because nobody would advertise on his show. Can you imagine if there was an actual shooting civil conflict and a host sided with the “bad guys”?
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
In your life try to be like Magnus
No, he’s a coward. Why isn’t he playing in the world chess championship right now?
Of course, he’ll say that he doesn’t like preparing for big championships. Okay, fine, don’t prep. Have the courtesy to sit there and let someone better prepared beat you. Show some respect to the game.
If you don’t have Magnus’s respect, and you beat him, he will ruin you.
How did chess of all things become about hanging out with chicks?
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
Really shows how stupid it was for Germany to join an organization dedicated to "keeping the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down". Frog, meet scorpion.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I'm actually not so sure about that. CEOs are, no offense, more important than regular people. This is true descriptively if not normatively. If CEOs stop maximizing shareholder value because they have concerns for their physical safety, that could have sizable effects on the economy.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
Listen here, you ignorant yokels. You might like to think that you're 'self-sufficient', but you're not. You depend on me, my tribe, the educated elites. Without us, you'd be dead. Specifically, you are dependent on the stock valuations of big megacorps continuing to rise. You know; stocks, the global finance market,
I mean, yeah. That is the implied connotation, because it's true. It's true the same way that you or I would tell the guys who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that their project is doomed without the support of public infrastructure. That's just not how the world works. If they can't tell the difference between investment in medical innovation being driven by the expectation of future profitable sales, and the nebulous forces driving the educated consensus on immigration, then they are just stupid.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo 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
1yr ago
To steelman the government and KBJ’s point a bit:
Imagine that shoplifting became memeified. I know that there are niche shoplifting communities in existence right now, but what if they got BIG? What if all the 17-year-old zoomers in your neighborhood were getting pro-shoplifting content shoveled into their feeds? What if the shoplifting epidemic spread beyond isolated city centers and became an existential threat to the whole economy? Nobody can sell anything. Delivery services pick up the slack, but then “porch pirating is shoplifting too,” becomes the meme and everything falls apart.
“Shoplifting is cool,” is protected speech, so is “those big corporations deserve it.” Imagine it’s clear as day that this is a social contagion mediated by online social media, but the tech companies refuse to take moderator action against shoplifting content. Does the government have to send in the troops and declare martial law before it can send a series of strongly worded emails to social media companies asking them to stop the madness?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
The culture in public schools seems to have changed a lot in the 1-2 decades since I've been there, but surely they still tell kids, "drugs are bad, mkay"? I have a similar reaction to this as I do when people talk about the "suicide epidemic". There is a very simple solution, don't kill yourself.
Quantumfreakonomics
2yr ago
You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms
Thought experiment: Set aside the 2nd and 4th amendments for a second. Suppose the United Stated banned civilian firearms, all of them. No manufacture, no sales, no ownership. All citizens must surrender their guns to the authorities. Anyone who has ever posted a gun on social media gets their house searched for contraband. Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home. What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The "walls guarded by men with guns" in the clip relates to the wall (well, barricaded door) guarded by a man with a gun in the footage of the shooting.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
The 6 to 9 months between when most people were able to get the vaccine and when Omicron became prominent was worth a lot.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
While I think this is stupid, anybody can print out a voter registration form off the internet whenever they want. Having physical forms available does not meaningfully change anything.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
The embassy to the Vatican is in Rome, Italy. They didn't fly the trans flag inside Vatican City.
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
Have you read the letter? If you take Islam as a given, it is a pretty reasonable argument.
I think a lot of the latent antisemitism on the right was being masked for most of the last century by the popularity of dispensational theology. Now that dispensationalism is going out of style, and secularization has progressed to the point where even the right is being affected, you are seeing a lot of the antisemitism pop back up.
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 statecareer 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…
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