Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
6hr ago
Good point. I had forgotten how much regulatory authority the fed has over banks. Seems like these powers could be spit-off and given to Treasury though. I think you could make a principled exception for open-market operations.
Quantumfreakonomics
6hr ago
The insane activist types are where all the energy is. Yglesias-style slow boring can't compete for low-information voters in the modern media environment. Cut the leftists out and the vibes die.
Zohran Mamdani won three US House of Representatives seats last week. Claire Valdez in NY-7, Brad Lander in NY-10, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in NY-13 each won the Democratic primary after being endorsed by Mamdani, knocking-off two incumbants in the process. These are all 80-20 Democratic districts, so there is no realistic chance of any of them losing in the November.
Darializa Avila Chevalier is the one still making headlines a week later. She is, as far as anyone can tell, an actual communist. Rumors are that she personally founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest when she was a student there in 2016. Her stance on policing? She's against it.
Center-left politicos are currently melting down that someone like this won and is being accepted by the party apparatus. Credit to them for denouncing socialism I guess, but did they not know who their base is? Did they completely forget all of those "defund the police" chants from 2020? Did they not know that those people vote Democrat?
Some people want to kick Chevalier out of the party, bless their hearts. This wouldn't work even if it were feasable. Democrats need votes from leftists to be competative nationally. A party at war with its own base cannot stand.
Quantumfreakonomics
14hr ago
Okay, let’s apply the new Slaughter test to the Federal Reserve. What executive power does the fed wield?
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Who among us could resist the chance to write a manifesto about pesticide failure-to-warn tort preemption.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Does anyone know of a way to get Civ II on Windows 11?
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Does SCOTUS normally "save the best till last"?
Yes. They have done this for at least my entire adult life. Charitably, it is because controversial opinions are longer, have more dissents, and require more careful reasoning that takes time to write. Uncharitably, it is so that the justices can skip town after the judgement drops.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
It’s pretty annoying that every gun case now is constitutionally required to be an 18th-century literature review, especially if we have to do the extra work of figuring out which laws were and weren’t racist.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
There is no more wretched hive of scum and villainy masquerading as a pillar of respectable society than college football. The players are at best academic frauds -- enrolled in fake classes and pretending to earn a fake degree -- and at worst are public nuisances empowered by administrators and politicians. The coaches are all snakes, recruiting young men with promises of loyalty, comradery, and respect, then skipping town on a private jet the moment a bigger school calls. Not even manslaughter will prevent an overperforming coach from falling up.
And then there are the conferences. Not content with sharing the financial benefits of America's culture of amateur college sports, the big schools collude amongst themselves to hoard all of the viewership and revenue. The resulting turf squabbles are more dramatic than the on-field product, reminding one of European diplomacy during the Long 19th Century.
I still watch it of course.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Before I waste any more of my time thinking about this, is there any evidence that the degradation of the new reflecting pool coating was caused by vandalism as opposed to run-of-the-mill incompetence?
I don’t really care about the algae. That seems like a fixable problem.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
There is almost no demand for small, cheap, low-performance cars in the United States. People have tried. They don’t sell.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
No. The Milky Way is 13 billion years old, but only 100,000 light years across. A sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to colonize the galaxy using only sublight tech.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
There are loads of exoplanets, dust clouds with organic chemicals, and strange radio sources discovered every week. The reason you never hear about them is that you need an advanced background in spectroscopy to make sense out of the data.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
With modern technology, one would think that it would be possible to put women in frontline combat roles. Yet empirically, this doesn’t happen. Watching videos of the shooting, it hit me that there must be some psychological “it” factor for tactical situations that women don’t reliably have.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
A far wiser man than either of us once noted that the principled application of left-wing equality and classism rhetoric results in sexual justice for incels.
A not insubstantial reason for the rightward shift of young men is that they notice that the left applies Marxist logic to every problem except the one problem that they are bothered by most of all.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
There is a gigantic difference between the male-line/female-line extinction rate ratio and the number of women who reproduce per every male.
From a leftist perspective, Scott Weiner has a questionable record on Israel. He’s funded by J-Street and supports providing Israel with “defensive” weapons.
Given the opinions of the base, one really would expect the left-flank of the party to take a harder line on this.
More options
Context Copy link