Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
20hr ago
How is "Hannity" still on tv? In 14 years I don't think I've heard him have a single original or interesting thought. Maybe that's his secret. Everyone else on Fox prime time has been literally cancelled. He knows he can just play it safe and outlast everyone.
Well, until now. We're about 6 months from being able to completely replace his show with AI.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
The death toll seems to have come to a grand total of zero.
This isn't war, this is kayfabe. An event for the sake of having an event. Is the Iranian military truly this incompetent? They could do better than this if they really wanted to cause damage. It feels like the purpose was domestic propaganda. All regimes need some level of popular legitimacy. "We are the only state willing to open fire on the Zionist dogs," is good for Iranian prestige in the region.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Is the guidance the same for all children? If so, it's unironic, literal white supremacy.
It's easy to forget how much closer to the equator the United States is than Europe. White people did not evolve to tolerate the Summer Texas sun.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Found on Twitter:
This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.
To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.
Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
This is a miscarriage of justice in my opinion. If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter? The parents didn't shoot anybody. A school shooting is not a reasonably foreseeable outcome of storing unsecured weapons in the house. Its hard to say that the Crumbley parents didn't do anything wrong, but its a stretch to say that they caused the death of those 4 people, in a way that they should be feloniously liable for.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
The oft mocked cliché, "real communism has never been tried," is in a literal sense true. The USSR that defeated Nazi Germany and rivaled America had different wage levels for different jobs, and even higher wages for more productive employees with the same jobs.
Of course, the reason "real communism has never been tried," is that as soon as you have contact with ground-level economic reality, the idea of communism becomes absurd.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Women's College Basketball Update
The gap between the Super Bowl in mid-February and the start of the NBA playoffs in mid-April is a dead zone on the American Sports calendar. The only respite of any relevance is the three-weekend single-elimination tournament extravaganza that is March Madness. Interestingly, most of the hype this year has been from the women's bracket. The quarterfinal between LSU and Iowa was the most-watched women's basketball game of all time with 12.3 million viewers, which is more than last year's (men's) NBA Finals. It was a good game too.
What is going on? The WNBA is still completely irrelevant. Last year was a good year for them. They got about 700,000 viewers for the finals. The only active WNBA player I can name is Brittney Griner, and that's because she was the subject of an international incident.
As with most questions regarding women's social status, "is she hot bro?", is probably the best place to start. Here is the roster of current NCAA darlings Iowa. Here is the roster of the 2023 WNBA champion Los Vegas Aces. You'll notice I had to use a promotional Twitter post for that one. The Aces don't have photos of the players on their website. They aren't even trying.
How did this happen? What are the incentives that led to this?
The WNBA loses money. Not a massive amount of money (about 10 million dollars a year), but it isn't particularly close to being profitable. The NBA keeps the WNBA around for positive PR, and because getting little girls interested in basketball is good for the cultural relevance of the NBA. The NCAA Women's tournament exists because of Title IX. Any university that spends money on men's sports must also spend money on women's sports, lest they be sued for discrimination. Universities can't pay players directly, but recent court cases and rule changes mean that players are allowed to profit off of their "name image and likeness" ("NIL") through endorsements, sponsorships, and the like.
In men's sports, NIL has created a massive clusterfuck that is worthy of it's own post. In women's sports, results were much more banal and predictable. The hotties get all the money. There is an economic incentive to be and present oneself as attractive in order to get paid. You think Hailey Van Lith wears her hair like this because it helps her get buckets?
On the earned media side, Caitlin Clark is getting a lot of airtime on the sports networks. She is in fact putting up some impressive numbers, but I doubt she would be getting this much attention if she wasn't a cuteish white girl who isn't attractive enough to feel threatening to the middle-aged PMC women who complain about stuff.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
I started watching The Passion of the Christ, so yes.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
The embassy to the Vatican is in Rome, Italy. They didn't fly the trans flag inside Vatican City.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
Transgender Day of Visibility
2009 sounds about right. You can tell this idea is from the early stages of the "woke" wave that crested from 2013-2021. It is a completely sincere expression of what the classical MtF desires above all else, positive attention. The point isn't the internal experience of the trans person himself, the point is the internal experience of everyone else as they are forced to deal with the "visibility" of trans people. Note the conspicuous lack of the modern pretexts that have evolved to counteract later anti-woke resistance. Indeed, the entire point is to not invoke tropes like anti-trans violence.
"Unlike Transgender Day of Remembrance, Crandall said, the day of visibility aims to focus on all the good things in the trans community, instead of just remembering those who were lost. 'The day of remembrance is exactly what it is. It remembers people who died,' she said. 'This focuses on the living. People have told me they love Remembrance Day but it really focuses on the negative aspect of it. Isn't there anything that could focus on the positive aspect of being trans?'"
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
I suspect that most of the image generation capacity is being used by turboautists making 100+ pictures of the same thing in slightly different variations every single day. Not that I'd know anything about that of course.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
Limit dispensing of oral contraceptives to married couples with verified children. Ban abortion.
Yes, it will be tough. Lots of terrible situations will pop up. The question to be asked is, “is this worse than literally running out of people?”
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
My previous hypothesis was that Trump would be literally in jail by election day, but that's looking increasingly unlikely given the delays he has been able to secure.
If you're expecting some external event to suddenly become the new "current thing" well, the smart money has to be on AI right? That's probably too soon for Doom™, but what if the October surprise is 40% of the workforce becoming obsolete?
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
I suppose I do have to give them credit for eventually coming around to the "kill pest infestations immediately" camp, but I don't find their stated reasoning to be particularly compelling. It seems to rest on the assumption that the pest insects live net-negative lives. If I were a carpet moth, I might like spending 6 months chowing down on yummy carpet fibers in a climate-controlled environment, then emerging from my cocoon to immediately mate. A quick SMUSH is insufficient to counteract that.
Quantumfreakonomics
21d ago
Wait, what’s wrong with opossums? (I assume that’s what you meant)
Quantumfreakonomics
21d ago
A polemic against the hubris of man? A defense of single-family greenspaces? A questioning of the practical expertise and experience of EA staffers? A concrete example of Kaszynskian oversocialization run amok?
Quantumfreakonomics
21d ago
I don't think that's correct. It seems explainable by the classic "people vs things" distinction. True crime is fundamentally interpersonal drama.
Quantumfreakonomics
21d ago
If you've ever come across someone on the Effective Altruism forum or ACX comments section who cares a lot about wild animal/insect welfare, you might have wondered if they'd thought things through.
Well, you'd be right.
I'll be honest. My first reaction was of sneering contempt. Animal welfare is IMO the most counterproductive idea that gets serious traction in rationalist spaces, so there is a good bit of schadenfreude from seeing, "I never thought the bugs would eat MY utility," out in the wild.
Still, I don't know anything about this person other than that she lives in a London flat and works for an EA organization (80,000 hours). I am reminded of that XKCD where even the most obvious facts are learned by someone for the first time thousands of times a day. Maybe Europe really is a commieblock hellscape where man lives entirely divorced from nature, where supposedly well-informed people can enter their late 20s without an intuitive understanding of the exponential growth of pest biomass. I remember well the time as a wee lad I saw an entire summer's growth of backyard tomato plants devoured in a week by 2 or 3 hornworms. Not everyone grows up with such a visceral demonstration of what civilization is up against.
Maybe these people really do need to touch grass.
Quantumfreakonomics
22d ago
Does this model explain why his rube-whispering was ineffective prior to 2016, leaving him a joke candidate in the two previous elections where he tried to run?
My pet theory is that Jon Stewart retiring from the Daily Show in 2015 opened the door for Trump to ascend. Without effective, hard-hitting, thoughtful ridicule, Trump was able to surf the wave of sneering contempt all the way to the White House
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
Did you guys know that Honey Boo Boo is still on television? I know everyone loves to hate this show, but it's still darn impressive that everyone's thoughts 12 years ago, "what on Earth are these people going to be like when they grow up?" are now being answered in the same shitty reality tv format. A nation truly in decline wouldn't be able to satisfy consumer demand like this.
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
25d ago
Kate Middleton announces she has cancer.
This is a win for conspiracy theorists and "reading a wide array of primary sources and performing [your] own synthesis." I saw numerous mainstream media sources during the speculation frenzy flat out state that Kate Middleton did not have cancer, but the fine print of the sources they were basing these statements on did not say that.
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
You’re kind of dodging the hypothetical. Petty criminals influenced by social media are destroying society. It’s protected speech so no court orders against the platform are available. How many, “in the department’s opinion, these memes are existentially damaging to the fabric of the national economy,” e-mails is the government allowed to send before it becomes illegal?
Quantumfreakonomics
28d 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?
It’s not super important, but it is quite nice to have space for extra stuff.
A lot of what you are seeing is that big houses are a status/wealth symbol in America. That’s why it was so easy for the banks to get people to sign up to buy mortgages they couldn’t afford.
It does seem to matter less now that everything is online.
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