Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Those statistics don't look so small once they're concentrated in demographic areas you care about.
In the very specific demographic of "healthy upper-class American preteen girls", this flooding event will likely be a double-digit percentage of all deaths this year.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap
The Zach Snyder DC movies are good actually. People love to hate on Lex Zuckerberg for some reason. Maybe because every line he speaks sounds like a cheesy villain monologue, but that’s the point. Killing Superman is less fulfilling than making Superman read your tweets and watching him squirm because he doesn’t have a good response.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Okay, so maybe there's no convenient list of Epstein clients in the files. Who was doing the raping? Look at the videos. Who is fucking the teenage girls in the videos? This is knowable information.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
This is an interesting political theory case study. What happens when congress passes a law, but then everyone realizes that the law is bad before it even comes into effect? One might think that the obvious answer is that congress would repeal the law, but that would be profoundly embarrassing for the congresspeople who just voted for the law last year. Much easier for them to simply look the other way as the law is openly flaunted.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
80+ dead and rising in Central Texas floods.
Kerr County is the Summer Camp capital of Texas. It's rugged hill country terrain and proximity to the Guadelupe River is perfect for exotic adventures outdoors, and it is close enough to major population centers to be convenient for parents to drop-off their children.
The downside is that low-lying cabins get completely wiped out in flood events. Camp Mystic for girls has double-digit casualties alone.
It is a common refrain to bemoan the fact that, "we don't let kids be kids anymore," and that may be true, but a big part of it is that we as a society simply don't consider the inherent risks acceptable anymore. I shudder to think about making 10-year-olds sit through a 30-minute site-specific emergency preparedness seminar, but that's where this is going, and given what's happened, I'm not entirely sure it would be a bad thing.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Maybe some history I'm not aware of?
Yes. It's subtle, but once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Use good photos of yourself. Digging any deeper than that will make you go insane. Most people here are reasonably-high decouplers, but it hits differently when it’s your appearance and your social status and your geneline at stake.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
What the fuck is happening?
Elon isn't an idiot. He knows how math works. He successfully gutted foreign aid. Congradulations, DOGE shaved 0.5% off of the federal budget, maybe, who really knows?
Anyone who has ever spent more than ten seconds investigating the federal budget already knows that the bulk of the money goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. I suspect that Elon has finally discovered the haunting truth that the rural white underclass loves gibs almost as much as the urban black underclass. Arguably, it is insulting to human dignity to be tasked with cutting waste while at the same time being barred from touching the giant money pit.
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
So I read the free preview of Nate’s guest post on Aella’s Substack. If you can believe it, I think that she and the people close to her are confused as to why people respond to her with disgust. Maybe she isn’t stinky. Maybe she isn’t riddled with STDs. Maybe she adheres to the highest standards of Bayesian data hygiene. None of that had anything to do with the why the Sankey diagram went viral.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The FBI this morning arrested a Wisconsin state judge on charges of concealing an illegal alien from arrest.
The initial criminal complaint is here. For those of you who prefer to watch TV instead of read, here is attorney general Pam Bondi giving the details on Fox News. The accusation is that upon seeing federal agents waiting outside her courtroom to serve an administrative warrent for the arrest of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz (who is an illegal alien currently being charged with battery), Judge Hannah Dugan escorted Flores-Ruiz out of the courtroom through the jury door so that he could evade arrest.
For all of the "Kash Patel Arrests Judge" headlines I saw this morning, this seems totally fine? It looks like an open and shut case if the facts alleged in the complaint are true. It sounds like there ought to be plenty of witnesses (it literally took place in a courthouse). State-law judges don't have jurisdiction over federal agents executing federal functions. An illegal alien in court for an unrelated violent crime is an incredibly unsympathetic defendant. All of the smarter left-leaning commentators I follow seem to be keeping quiet on this, which seems smart.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Big W for the iron law of bureaucracy. Nobody outside the clergy had ever heard of this guy, but he was in charge of the diacastry for bishops, basically the church’s HR department.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Assuming for a moment that the purpose of tariffs is to shift consumer spending away from foreign imports and towards domesticly manufactured products,
Shouldn't you want retailers to break-out the tariff cost into a seperate legible line item?
A story broke this morning that Amazon was going to start labeling products with the tariff charged on each item to make the price changes legible to the consumer. From the perspective of a protectionist economic policy, this is a good thing. It makes it unignorably clear which items are made in China and which items are made in America. It also shows the direct monetary incentive for you the consumer to but the Made in America item over the Made in China item.
From the perspective of whatever the hell the Trump administration is trying to do, this is a disaster. I understand that governments would prefer the populace not be particularly mindful of how much money they pay in taxes, but it is another thing alltogether to hear this articulated by the press secretary as something that they think makes the administration look good to the public. The official line from the MAGA infuencer types on Twitter is that retailers are doing this as a distraction from the fact that they sell cheap slop from Asian sweatshops, but this is actually highlighting the fact that they sell cheap slop from Asian sweatshops.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these,
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This isn't a real schedule. This is an artifact of legal and bureaucratic processes. Some polity passes a law that says, "Entity X must formulate and implement a plan to do Y." Entity X doesn't actually want to do Y for whatever reason (usually political opposition, but not nessesarily). The thing that Entity X always does in this situation is spend their time coming up with insane plans that will take forever and hope that they will never be implemented. The endgame is to abruptly cancel the project years later and hope nobody notices. Radioactive waste disposal projects are the poster boy of this phenomenon. Yucca Mountain was abruptly cancelled for no reason as soon as the planning was done, $10 billion over decades for absolutely nothing.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
What makes this case so deliciously ironic is that the only reason that Abrego Garcia was granted withholding of removal in 2019 was because his life was in danger due to rampant gang activity. The thing that actually solved the problem was locking up all the gangsters with little to no due process.
This kind of thing is exactly why trust in institutionalism is collapsing. I originally thought that this was a stupid hill for the administration to die on. It may still turn out to be a bad idea, but Trumps instincts have once again shown a method to his madness.
Actually, I think the nuance is lost. Social justice warriors weren’t simply inspired by Christianity. They don’t have similarities by coincidence. They are a direct evolutionary branch of mainline Protestantism. There is path dependency.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Protip: on the off chance you end up dating a woman who is a virgin in her 20s, be sure that it isn’t because of SSRIs interfering with her sex drive.
People are biochemically different now than they used to be.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
In preparation for the currently ongoing papal conclave, I decided to read the official rules currently in force, UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS, issued by John Paul II in 1996. The document contains this provision (emphasis added):
”In the present historical circumstances, the universality of the Church is sufficiently expressed by the College of one hundred and twenty electors, made up of Cardinals coming from all parts of the world and from very different cultures. I therefore confirm that this is to be the maximum number of Cardinal electors”
Seems simple enough right?
”On Wednesday afternoon, under the gaze of Michelangelo’s frescoes, the 133 cardinals taking part in the 2025 conclave entered the Sistine Chapel.”
Here I was, a schmuck, reading the canonically promulgated apostolic constitution as if it mattered, as if the supposed men of God involved in this 2000-year-old institution might care about established procedures.
Sure, Francis could have changed the rules, as many popes have done throughout the centuries, but he didn’t. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and neither did anyone else with influence within the Vatican either. How am I supposed to take this seriously if the cardinals and popes don’t even take it seriously?
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense. The inconsistency I cited above is relatively minor, but it is illustrative of what one finds everywhere when one digs into the claims of Christianity and treats them with the truth-preserving tools of logic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus and Vatican II, Matthew 24:34, these are fundamental truth claims that can’t be handwaved away like the finer points of ecclesiastical law.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Studies consistently show that approximately 75-85% of Tinder users identify as male, while women make up only 25-15%.
Accepting these facts as true, what are all the young single women doing?
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Do they not care about being single for the rest of their life?
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Are they stupid and can’t comprehend cause and effect? (i.e. “If I make a Bumble profile, I am more likely to get a boyfriend”)
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Are they slutting out? (I’m including having a Chad fwb who obviously won’t commit in this category)
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Are they in church and expect to find a worthy man there?
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Are they mindkilled with wokeness to the point where they fail to understand normal human behavior?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
A lot of people wonder why Curtis Yarvin is taken seriously. There’s been a lot of drama lately about whether Moldbug Sold Out, or whether there is any reason to take him seriously. A lot of this comes from an overfocusing on his monarchy prescriptions, but this really misses a lot of the deeper intellectual content. Social justice came from American Mainline Protestantism. They are the same thing.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I had about 60 first dates in 2022
Uh, what? Are we even talking about the same concept at this point? How does one both have the opportunity to go on 60 first dates in a year and also none of them go well enough to terminate the process? Is this some poly thing?
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
Now of course the explanation is obvious
You’re right. The answer is obvious.
they're doing it as a dig on trump.
No, it’s because futures exchanges are open longer hours than stock exchanges. If you want to know what the market thinks of recent news that broke while the stock market was closed, you look at the futures market.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
What is to stop the slim majority of one political party of censuring enough members of the opposing party based on similar fig-leaf reasons, depriving them of the ability to vote, and thus gaining the super-majority?
I don't know anything about the Maine constitution, but it's interesting to consider the US constitution. Article 1 Section 5:
"Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members [...] Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member."
Technically, yeah, any majority could sieze housewide legislative power for itself by changing the rules. The real reason they don't do this is that political legitimacy does not stem from the plain text of the constitution alone. There are the written rules, and there are the real rules. Sometimes, they even overlap.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This is actually pretty easy to figure out.
Swipe right on everyone. Then, observe whether you get zero matches, or whether you get matches with obese single moms and MtFs.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I don't think Amazon is angry at Trump. I think Amazon is angry at tariffs for the exact same reason that consumers are angry at tariffs. They aren't using this as some proxy conflict to get back at MAGA. They want to cut costs and lower prices.
Like, did they think that uncensored AI wouldn’t do this?
I guess part of the shock is that they gave Grok its own public account, so anyone can ask for whatever fucked-up shit they want and have it be public under Grok’s name, rather than having to post the output oneself.
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