Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
1yr 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
8mo 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
11mo 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
2mo 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
11mo 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
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
1mo 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
3mo 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.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
No, but do you believe that the official 12th-amendment electoral vote count is the normal official proceeding for such crime?
Quantumfreakonomics
22d ago
The embassy to the Vatican is in Rome, Italy. They didn't fly the trans flag inside Vatican City.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
I do think there's a pretty big gap in sexual maturity between 14 and 15-16. I feel no guilt for going "nice" whenever I see a hot teacher get fired for having sex with a male student 15 or older, but when he's 13 or 14 that seems fucked up.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
You’re forgetting the fact that Austin is in Austin. If this happened the national media would stir up George Floyd-level mob of “patriotic citizens” who would storm the governor’s mansion and the state capitol. If the Texas National Guard fired upon these protesters, it would be Fort Sumter all over again.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Would you rather your daughter grow up into a slut or an old maid? What if she is your only child?
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
@self_made_human made the point downthread that “Yudkowsky's arguments are robust to disruption in the details.” I think this is a good example of that. Caring about simulated copies of yourself is not a load-bearing assumption. The Basilisk could just as easily torture you, yes, you personally, the flesh and blood meatbag.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Yud should stop trying to convince the everyman. I’m not saying that no one should do that, just that Yud specifically should not bother with it. It’s not good for his mental health or morale to be dealing with people this dumb. It clearly disturbs him on an emotional level.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Uh, I hate to tell you guys this, but moral realism is false. There is no abstract “good” or abstract “evil”. Insofar as these concepts mean anything at all, they are emergent, not reductionist.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
2rafa also isn't American, so she already can't vote in the elections that matter.
SBF was right about books. Sorry bookworms, but they’re obsolete. Every good book should have been either a blogpost or a video lecture.
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