Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
European food is bad across the board, but my life would be materially worse if I didn't live in a city with lots of ethnic food options.
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
If only we had some sort of LGBT (ex-)Mormon furry who could make sense of this all...
and when the world needed him most, he vanished.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Here is the Yglesias tweet. Note that this is very specifically a response to a screenshotted Matt Walsh tweet.
The Walsh argument (if you can call it that) is thus:
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There exists at least one place in the United States (Dearborn) which has a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms.
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It would be bad if the entire country was majority Muslim and had Islamic cultural norms.
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Therefore Dearborn Michigan having a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms is bad. (This isn’t explicitly stated, but I think it is strongly implied.)
Matt Yglesias responds to this by pointing out a counterexample; Little Italy 100 years ago had a majority Italian population and Italian cultural norms, and yet this didn’t result in the Italianification of American society.
This is not intended to be a fully general argument in favor of immigration. It is a response to a specific bad argument. If you are already anti-immigration, you probably read Walsh’s argument and fill in the gaps with your own pre-existing cognitive scaffold, but none of that is actually there in the text that Yglesias is responding to.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
How did this work? What was the gears-level social fabric (heh) that prevented people from changing jobs?
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Who is Brilyn Hollyhand, and why is he suddenly a subject of discussion as if everyone knows who he is?
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
There job is to make sure the district is eligible for funding and doesn’t get sued. These are much more important functions to the district than educating the children.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
The theory I heard is that the call came down to “write Anti-ICE messages” on the bullets and the grunts took that extremely literally.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
If they have secret actually-good evidence, then I invite them to show it. From what I’ve seen, the evidence presented has all the classic red flags:
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No proposed causal mechanism
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a plausible non-causal mechanism (pain and inflammation would be correlated both with Tylenol use and poor fetal health).
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tiny effect sizes.
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effects collapse when confounders are controlled (via sibling studies in this case).
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
If we had organ markets we would be able to track the damage in real time.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
It means they didn't find shit.
Of course, they can't say that. You saw how the base treated Kash Patel and Pam Bondi when they came up empty-handed after the Epstein investigation. Much easier to put-out some face-saving press release. "Uh, it was the uh, the pills. You know, the red ones. That's where autism comes from. Tylenol. Yeah..." No one ever got fired for telling pregnant women not to take drugs.
Does this mean she will ask for clemency at the sentencing hearing? I don't want to say it's easy to say you forgive your husband's murderer at his own funeral, but there aren't actually any negative consequenses for saying that. I suspect that this is virtue signaling.
It's also bad game theory. "The Left" didn't kill Charlie Kirk, but Tyler Robinson DID kill Charlie Kirk. It's okay to retaliate against him specifically.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
Grading on the curve of being a leftist podcaster/streamer I think Vaush is quality. He is legitimately funny and doesn't give off the kind of feminine energy that typically drives men away from the left.
It was fun watching him tee-off on the snowflakes in his chat about trying to get Jesse Singal banned from Bluesky for... something I guess?
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
I have a lot of nostalgia for The SkepticsTM and that entire era of YouTube talking head. (Often not even a head, just an avatar pic.) Now whenever I fish around for that level of quality, it simply isn't to be found.
I'm old enough to remember the time TheAmazingAtheist got in trouble for a leaked video of him sticking a banana up his ass. There are a lot of words one can use to describe that era of YouTube influencer. "Dignified" is not one of them.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
because it's seemingly within the Overton window to both say "fascists should be shot", and "this person I don't like is a fascist, trust me".
But this has been the case for at least ten years, and the so-called "fascists" remained remarkably unshot until about a week ago. There is a sense in which politics has become higher stakes now, but that is a function of the underlying reality, not a function of the words we use to describe that reality. I think it's far more likely that Tyler Robinson was pushed over the edge by the (AFAICT accurate) report that the DOJ was considering a ban on transgenders owning firearms than he was by people on the internet calling Republicans "fascists" or "Nazis" instead of less offensive terms like "stupid" or "insensitive".
Keep in mind that Charlie Kirk might be the most assassinatable conservative in modern history. His whole schtick was going into hostile territory at universities across the country and holding open-air events in locations with great sniper cover and sightlines.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
For reference, the video is here.
It was very strange. I do think she is overreacting, but the video crystalized for me why the reaction to Kirk's assassination has been so disproportionate. Every media personality and politics influencer to the right of Ezra Klein either knew Charlie personally or is close to someone who knew Charlie personally. That impacts their rhetoric. It impacts their state of mind. People are a lot more willing to throw the constitution in the trash when their friend is murdered than when state politician #586 is killed. I think the liberals are right that this is "unfair" in some abstract sense, but that's just how the world works.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
But if they're state-run, people won't notice if they're losing money! Medicare/medicaid are massive money pits, and yet Trump became dominant not despite but because of his comittment to not cutting them.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Nybbler already pointed out that riots are pretty rare in the USA, so I am assuming that you are not American.
It wasn't the riots themselves, it was how the media -- not just the news media, but sports media, entertainment media, and social media too -- reacted. Everyone lost their minds. Those of us who had even a passing familiarity with the actual events got to see how the consent-manufacturing sausage was made.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
It depends on if capital would have rallied around Donald Trump if the alternative was Sanders. I just don't think sophisticated people were ready to do that in 2016. I think Bernie could have won. If you think our timeline sucks, there's an alternate one where the United States ends up like Germany or the UK.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
There aren't enough intelligent, thoughtful people in the country for a viable party to get away with only making valid arguments and espousing only reasonable policy positions. If you don't make a serious play for the stupid vote you just get creamed, and that means both parties end up making stupid arguments for stupid positions.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
Here is a Twitter thread speculating on the specific regulatory mechanics and corporate interests at play here. This is quite an ingenious maneuver that the administration has employed several times now. If they try to use the stick to prod private corporations to do what they want, the companies will sue and win, but if they dangle the tasty carrot of deregulation in front of them, they get enthusiastic compliance.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
Those viewers aren't coming back. NFL football ratings bounced back after dropping the politics stuff, but that was because there was massive demand for the product and no real substitute.
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
Good find. The author was quite prescient. One could make the argument that the Woke Era was brought about by progressives grabbing hold of the language we (or at least PMC types and elites) use and subtly shifting it into a worldview more favorable to them. The real question is why this tactic eventually failed.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
”You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech.’”
What did she mean by this? I guess she’s referring to posting somebody’s address online, but that isn’t illegal! It’s not even about constitutional issues, you could probably get a narrowly-tailored anti-doxing statute past judicial review (factual circumstances have changed since Cox Broadcasting v. Cohn), but nobody’s done that yet. Does she think posting someone’s address is incitement to violence?
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
Inspired by this tweet, a thought experiment:
Imagine a a country with a two-faction democratic political system. Faction A is anti-free speech. Faction B is (currently and historically) pro-free speech. In the current environment, both factions are approximately equally matched, with majorities in government seesawing between either faction much like in our own government.
Question: Should Faction B also become anti-free speech?
I am interested in both, “would this be good for the country?” and “would this be good for the party?”
Some arguments I would imagine to hear as part of Faction B’s internal debate over the subject:
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“We’re suckers for letting Faction A speak when we control the government. They don’t let us speak when they are in charge, so why should we let them speak when we are in charge?”
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“We already get half the vote letting Faction A speak openly in favor of their policies. Imagine how much better we could do in the next election if we didn’t let them speak!”
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“When people aren’t worried about consequences for their speech it makes them feel more free. We get more votes when voters think we will make them feel more free than Faction A will.”
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“It is important for us to have honest feedback on our policies and the state of the country. If we didn’t let Faction A speak we would be flying half-blind.”
In case you need me to spell-out the subtext: a lot of discussion has been treating the free speech issue as a bargaining chip, rather than a straightforwardly good policy. I’m not sure how much I buy that argument. It sounds a little convenient, like people are looking for excuses to descend into an orgy of vengeance.
Mormon cosmology is completely different from the Abrahamic religions. In Mormonism, God did not create the universe, he simply organized preexisting matter. God himself is part of and subservient to the material universe.
This leads to a bunch of strange (though arguably coherent) beliefs, many of which are explained in this less-than-sympathetic cartoon, although from what I can tell everything in it is technically correct.
Also, endless celestial sex. You can decide for yourself whether this is a positive or a negative.
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