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Quantumfreakonomics


				

				

				
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User ID: 324

Quantumfreakonomics


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 00:54:12 UTC

					

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User ID: 324

The thing about the Louis CK incident is that it showed me how much power The NY Times has. Louis CK is a creepy weirdo. We knew that before 2017. Anyone who had ever listened to his comedy knew that he was a creepy weirdo. A third of his jokes were about him being a creepy weirdo. There were rumors floating around on the internet about him being a creepy weirdo in exactly the way described by the NYT article. No one cared. Then one day The NYT publishes a hit-piece about Louis CK being a creepy weirdo, and suddenly every respectable institution decides having a creepy weirdo around is NOT OKAY. The guy who had a stand up bit about wanting to go around in public shooting cum on everyone is kicked out of polite society because The NYT ran an article about him asking for consent to masturbate and then doing it.

Reddit Blackout Update: The Admins Strike Back.

Entering day 5 of the "48-hour" blackout in protest of the proposed API changes, many subreddits have chosen to stay private indefinitely until their demands are met. Over the last few days the admins have not-so-subtly telegraphed both on Reddit and in the media their intention to end the blackout and remove uncooperative moderators. But how? I have mentioned before Reddit's feudalistic structure which requires unpaid mods to do the dirty work of removing spam and enforcing content rules. If Reddit were to simply force open subs against the wishes of the mod team, the mods could simply revolt and refuse to work.

Well, Spez seems to have found a solution:

How to request an abandoned community or a mod list reorder.

We’ve received hundreds of inquiries regarding what to do if your mod team disagrees on how to reopen your communities. I am sure many of you are aware that mod teams of subreddits that have stayed private are receiving modmails from this account. Our goal with these messages is to restore community stability by establishing moderator consensus on how to move forward. In many cases, we've already helped teams reopen with no action beyond a conversation. In some instances, this might result in a reordering of the moderator list. In rare instances, this will result in mod removals. What this means is:

  • If mods disagree about how to moderate their community, we will reorder the moderator list to grant top slots to mods that want to keep their communities active and engaged. For example, if a top mod wants to stop moderating, but keep the community private indefinitely, they will be bumped down the list so a more active moderator can step in. (rule 4)
  • If a mod or mods are engaging in flagrantly disruptive behavior that compromises the stability of their community, they will be removed. For example, if an inactive top moderator comes back and decides to vandalize the community, they will be removed. (rule 1 & 2)

Both actions are against our Moderator Code Of Conduct.

How to request moderation privileges for an abandoned community or a top mod removal:

We’re experiencing a high volume of requests via our standard Reddit Request and Top Mod Removal Process. To expedite the process, if your mod team has an inactive top mod (or mods) and you would like to request to have that mod moved down the list, please reach out here.

Please include the usernames of inactive mods you wish to have reordered on the mod list, and be sure to inform your fellow mods of this request. When we say “inactive,” we do not mean overall activity on reddit – we mean activity within your subreddit specifically. Once we receive this message, we will reach out to the entire team to ensure we understand your needs and then work with you to rebuild community stability.

We understand this is a turbulent time and want to do our best to support you and your community’s needs.

Feudal problems require feudal solutions. In this case, the king (Spez), is checking the power of the upper nobility (power mods) by playing them off the lower nobility and peasants (small time mods and users). This ensures a smooth transition of power, as the lower mods who will be actioning these requests have moderation experience, familiarity with the communities they will be moderating, and they will be selected specifically for their collaboration with Reddit against other unaligned forces.

In reality, this process makes itself redundant by design. The power mods behind the blackout know they've been outplayed and outgunned. Subreddits that were committed to indefinite blackout as recently as this morning are reopening, much to the embarrassment of the mod team at the hands of the community. Reddit moderators now answer directly to Spez, and they know it.

Are we reading the same forum?

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ALzE9JixLLEexTKSq/cea-statement-on-nick-bostrom-s-email

"We reject this unacceptable racist language, and the callous discussion of ideas that can and have harmed Black people."

(emphasis mine)

Once you start condemning the "discussion of ideas" for reasons other than obvious falsity or existential risk, you lose all credibility as a rationalist organization (and frankly even those two exceptions are debatable). There are a few people in the comments pushing back, but that's always how it starts out. The posts cited by DaseindustriesLtd in the below comment are quite damning. Its important to remember that, "making people feel comfortable," means conforming to the dominant culture, and we all know what the dominant culture in London and Berkeley is.

do you, and folks in this thread who agree with you, actually want to date a woman? Because it doesn’t seem like you fundamentally respect them.

Suppose there is an 18-year-old guy. He respects women. He cares about their wellbeing, and he cares about not making them uncomfortable. He also has basic reasoning capabilities. He notices that every time he hits on or asks out a women, the response is at best neutral. The overwhelming majority are straight rejection (n = 10-20 or so). He knows (or at least thinks) that hitting on women and getting turned down is not only embarrassing for him, but deeply uncomfortable for the women. He reasons that because the probability of success on any further attempts is so low, the expected discomfort he will almost certainly cause to the woman cannot be ethically justified. He thus decides to stop approaching women in person.

That person was me. This was, without exaggeration, the worst decision I have ever made in my life. I don't harbor resentment for any of these women. They were all well within their rights to reject me if they so wanted. Nobody made me stop approaching women. I made the decision myself.

Tell me, what was my mistake? Did I respect women not enough, or too much? Or was this in fact the right decision? Maybe there are inherently adversarial aspects of dating such that maxing out the "Respect Women™ " parameter zeroes out actual romantic prospects.

IMO, thinking about this in terms of "respect" is the wrong perspective. That concept doesn't map coherently onto human sexuality.

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.

> be born in 1920s Polish Galicia

> be Ukrainian-speaking peasant

> be oppressed by ethnic-majority poles

> West side of country gets invaded by Germany

> your side of country gets invaded by Soviet Russia

> have to deal with literal fucking Stalin for two years

> get invaded by Germany

> liberation.jpg

> ”Hey kid, wanna fight the Russians and Poles that have been oppressing you your whole life?”

> 80 years later

> “fuck you. You picked the wrong side”

The Harris Campaign Gives Their Side of the Story

Harris campaign staff joined establishment Democrat podcast Pod Save America for an election post-mortem.

What sticks out is how unsurprising everything is. These people are exactly the type of out-of-touch elite consultants that populists on both sides are always whining about. They come off as less woke than popularly imagined, but are every bit as uncreative, process oriented, and unaccountable as expected. Being on mobile due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I’m not in position to mine the transcript for key quotes, but clips from this podcast have been going viral on Twitter. A few highlights from memory:

  • Campaign staff had no preparation for Biden dropping out of the race.

  • They knew that the campaign message wasn’t getting through to young men. They still decided to prioritize on-the-ground campaigning in swing states over going on any of the bro podcasts. In their telling, Kamala was willing to go anywhere, but they simply ran out of time.

  • They flat-out couldn’t figure out a response to the “Kamala is for they/them” ad. Nothing they tested seemed effective.

  • They still think Liz Cheney is an avatar for moderate Republicans.

Zvi has a pretty good writeup. I haven't used the tool, but from all the evidence, it looks like any time a picture of a human being was requested, it literally appended a bunch of diversity words ("Black", "Latina", "Middle Eastern", but never "White") to the user's request without notice or permission before feeding the prompt into the image generator. Hence, female popes and black Vikings. I see three possibilities:

  1. They were too stupid to realize that adding "diversity" to as many requests as possible would lead to embarrassing results in many cases.

  2. They knew this, but they didn't care/didn't anticipate the intensity of the backlash.

  3. They did know, but nobody spoke up because there is a culture of silence at Google.

Quoting my favorite Scott article,

"How could such a smart guy make such a stupid mistake? My guess: the Soviet government didn’t officially say “We will kill anyone who criticizes us”. They officially said “Comrade Stalin loves freedom and welcomes criticism from his fellow citizens”, and you had to have some basic level of cynicism and social competence to figure out that wasn’t true."

Now of course, dating advice isn't Stalin-era Soviet academia, but it is absolutely an adversarial information environment. If you're a 20-year-old dude and you see the top comment in a Reddit advice thread saying, "Tee-hee, just ask us. Girls like sex as much as guys do.😊" and then you take this literally and use your own sex-drive as a baseline to model the mental state of women you might be attracted to, you are going to end up like poor little OP here. You have to be smart enough to know immediately that this is obvious bullshit even though you still don't know what the correct answer is. You have to notice things like:

  • You see a lot of men trying and failing to get laid, but almost never see women trying and failing to get laid.

  • The overwhelming amount of porn is geared towards men.

  • There seems to be a whole lot of anger and vitriol on places like /r/creepyPMs towards guys who do in fact just ask.

Now, most guys don't end up like OP. It's not that hard to figure out some upper bound on how creepy and assertive you can be, below which you can be sure not to suffer social embarrassment (or worse). The main issue is that many men (myself included) will adopt the "never initiate a conversation with a woman IRL about anything except academic or professional topics," rule.

Real mask-off moment from the author on Twitter:

“The greatest joy I get from this kind of reporting is sending such a fine selection of people into a spiral of seething cope on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. Don’t want the smoke? Don’t be this kind of person”

Spoken like a fox on Rottnest Island. Of course this guy took the flimsiest possible excuse to list the worst things people he doesn’t like have ever said. That’s just “responsible journalism”. What you never get from these kinds of articles is any sort of intellectual curiosity about the ideas in question.

Is The Pope Catholic? No Really

Rumors are swirling that Pope Francis will demand the resignation of Joseph Strickland, the popular conservative bishop of Tyler, Texas. He is notable as the only bishop to personally attend the protest against the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at Dodgers Stadium. Meanwhile, bishops in Germany are now openly blessing same-sex couples in direct violation of Catholic doctrine. A cursory search reveals no disciplinary action against any of these bishops in response. By their fruits you will know them. In rationalist terms, this is called revealed preference.

This would be less of a problem for religions like Mormonism that allow for continuing revelation. Contrary to popular belief, the Pope is not a prophet. He can not walk out onto the balcony of St. Peter's and say, "Sorry guys, just talked to Jesus. The second coming is canceled." He would be immediately recognized as a fraud. He is bound* both by the deposit of faith and the dogmatic pronouncements of the church.

This leads to an interesting Ship of Theseus problem. The Catholic Church has had it's parishioners, officials, and doctrine replaced. Is it still the Catholic Church? It's not even just the gender stuff. Here is Pope Francis participating in a literal pagan ritual. I have seen him apologize for the residential school system, but I have yet to see him apologize for violating the first commandment.

*in theory lol

Is the whole point of Effective Altruism to be a place for nerds to meet women? I’ll be honest, I never really “got” EA, but once I applied the “rationalist nerd dating scene” lens, everything suddenly made sense. No one actually cares about the mental wellbeing of shrimp. It’s just an excuse to show girls how nice and empathetic and smart and well-connected you are. The tone of this comments section is very much, “you’ll have to pry the polyamory from my cold dead hands.” Empirically, I see lots and lots of married couples and casual sex, but very little global improvement. By their fruits you shall know them etc.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few days. The short answer is, no, Republicans are not shamelessly sexually humiliating their opponents enough to win the election. The long answer is, it’s not enough simply to sexually humiliate one’s opponents, one must imply that one’s opponents have something to gain from giving up or switching sides. The subtext of the “these guys are just weird” campaign is that if you young man simply stop trying to police women’s sexual behavior, you too can get laid. Consider the following:

“Since #TamponTim is trending I'll point out that in high school, any boy who casually was like "Oh you got ur period? I stashed a pad from the bathroom in my backpack in case one of my friends needed it" -- that boy would be king stud. That boy would be drowning in prom invites.”

This woman is a “gender and society” columnist at the Washington Post. The message is clear; submit to power [ours] and you will get pussy. What is the Republican message to young women? Become based or you will grow into a childless cat lady? That could work, but it is inherently a multi-step argument. Frankly, conservative media just isn’t good enough to get across a message that complex.

Found on Twitter:

"This video on recycling old turbine blades into concrete has a funny twist at the end. Are they doing all this work to make something valuable? That people will pay for? Perhaps as aggregate for concrete? How low is the bar they claim they have cleared? Watch and find out."

The answer is they turn the blades into concrete by shredding them and then paying a concrete plant to burn it as fuel.


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.

The simplest explanation in my eyes is:

  1. Male feminists, being feminists, tend to hang around with female feminists.

  2. Female feminists are more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness than are non-feminist women.

It’s Simpson’s Paradox all the way down.

Kino Review: Oppenheimer

Last week in the Friday Fun Thread, I posted my first reactions upon seeing the film, written literally from my car in the parking lot. My initial negative reaction was almost entirely because I sat down expecting to like the character of Oppenheimer. I went in mostly blind. The only thing I knew about J. Robert Oppenheimer was that he ran the Manhattan Project, said the meme words, and invented the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, so when he turned out to be a pretentious asshole from the first scene it colored my whole experience. I saw enough glowing reviews in the following week that I decided to see it again with fresh eyes, in IMAX this time, just in case that was the missing ingredient.

I liked it much more the second time. In fact, I think this is the best film I've seen since 1917 (2019). The nonlinear storytelling works well overall, but on first viewing some of the early sequences are confusing as it's not obvious when they occur chronologically. Not having to concentrate so much made it much easier to relax and let the music and cinematography wash over me.

I liked Nolan's treatment of science in Interstellar, and I like his treatment of science here. I'm the kind of guy who would have enjoyed a 30-minute sequence figuring out the fission cross-section of plutonium, so I was a bit disappointed in the lack of technical details. Still, the film adequately captures the feel of science. There's an early scene where Niels Bohr asks Oppie, "Can you hear the music Robert?" It sounds like the kind of cliché 'math isn't everything' line you would expect in a dumbed down Hollywood film, but everyone who's ever studied quantum mechanics knew exactly what he meant. The disbelief when the first reports of uranium fission come in is perfect; everyone knows splitting the atom is impossible. Next they'll telling us they've synthesized a room-temperature superconductor.

My favorite character in the movie was Ernest Lawrence. I felt a spiritual connection with how he too is pissed off that everyone in Berkeley is a communist. What's he gonna do, leave academia and live amongst the proles? Roll your eyes at the leftist Jews running the show all you want, they're legitimately the smartest people around. At least he, as a native-born American, was able to see which way the wind was blowing and bail on the Oppenheimer hearing, unlike Teller, who naively told the truth and ended up blackballed.

The one creative mistake that stands out (other than having the setup for the Bhagavad Gita be a sex scene) is the use of practical explosion effects for the Trinity test. The buildup to the test is fantastic -- I was on the edge of my seat both times -- but the explosion itself is a bit anticlimactic. It's very clearly a gasoline fire in certain shots. There's just no way to use practical effects to replicate a white-hot ball of glowing plasma growing by radiation diffusion. Nolan almost makes up for this by delaying the arrival of the shock wave. The observers were miles away, and it took a long time for the sound to reach them. By the time it finally hits you've almost forgotten it was coming.

There are some minor thematic issues, particularly in the last act. It's not entirely clear how we are supposed to feel when Oppie loses his security clearance. I had the same reaction as Richard Hanania to the plain text of what is on screen, but the subtext as conveyed by the score and cinematography is that his wife is a hero for pretending to not remember if she ever got an official Communist Party USA membership card. I do think we needed an extended sequence after the bomb test to wrap up the Strauss storyline, but they definitely could have cut 10-15 minutes out of it.

Overall 9/10. Surprisingly worth seeing in IMAX, despite most of the scenes consisting of guys talking in rooms.

I don't recall ever seeing dating advice, even from feminists, suggesting that any woman wants a proposition like "How about being my no-strings-attached fuck buddy?"

I did a quick Google search for the phrase "Women want sex as much as men". On the first page I came across this article titled Science Proves Once and For All That Women Want Sex Just As Much As Men Do. Now, this article is not framed as dating advice, but it is the kind of thing a naïve young man trying to understand female sexuality might stumble across. Here are some choice quotes our young hero might focus on:

  • "Breaking news: Women like sex. Furthermore, we're pretty cool with having it outside of marriage and we're increasingly becoming more comfortable demanding it include (at least) an orgasm."

  • "according to a recent survey from the fertility awareness app Kindara, what they want is to get laid — not only at least as much as their male partners do, but actually more often."

  • "In terms of basic desire, though, most women want more sex than they're having. More than half of respondents said they weren't entirely satisfied with the amount of sex they currently have"

  • "As the journalist Daniel Bergner described in his seminal 2013 book, What Do Women Want? scientists have begun to uncover what could be "a new, unvarnished norm" for female sexuality, which could confirm that women's libidinousness is, "at base, nothing if not animal." All of that is to say, it's distinctly more similar to men's than was previously thought."

  • "A study released earlier this year, for instance, found women were as likely as men to be interested in casual sex — but only when there was no threat of sexual violence or of social judgment."

"Women were as likely as men to be interested in casual sex — but only when there was no threat of sexual violence or of social judgment," Hmm, I have an idea. I'll show her that I am trustworthy and nice and nonviolent by being totally honest with her what I want, and I'll show her that I won't socially judge her for having casual sex by acknowledging that FWBs are perfectly ok to have.

NO NO NO NO NO

You know why this is obviously wrong. I know why this is obviously wrong. It is not obvious from first principles why this is wrong. The reasons why it is wrong have to be learned. I would have expected someone 21 years old to have figured it out by now, but do also consider that he was 18 (the age I was when I finally put it all together) when Covid hit. He was locked down while he should have been experimenting.

I am surprised that you had trouble understanding the economic gap between men and women. Women dominate the economic sectors of health-care and education (especially administration). These are also the two sectors being pumped-up by government-subsidized demand. Of course they won’t vote for the gravy train to end. The male computer engineering graduates aren’t the ones who are expected to default on student loans. It’s the female psychology majors.

The presidential debate is on right now. I was somewhat skeptical of the Biden age narrative, but wow, he sounds awful. It's literally like he walked out of a nursing home. I suppose I should say something about the substance, but it's almost superfluous fluff at this point. Tariffs won't raise prices? Come on. Biden says fewer obviously false things, but that's mainly because he doesn't make as many factual assertions that could be falsified.

I feel dirty watching this. Trump is wiping the floor with Biden simply because he can string together multiple syntactically correct sentences on a single topic without stammering. For the first time I now believe Trump will win the election.

NYT: Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding

The NYT scooped everybody. We finally know why Sam Altman was fired:

A few weeks before Mr. Altman’s ouster, he met with [OpenAI board member Helen Toner] to discuss a paper she had recently co-written for Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, according to an email that Mr. Altman wrote to colleagues and that was viewed by The New York Times.

In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.

Ms. Toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and companies developing A.I. But Mr. Altman disagreed.

“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.”

Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever, who is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity, later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed, a person involved in the conversations said.

There are a few other minor issues mentioned in the article, but this sounds like the big one. Rationalist/EA types take being told that they can't criticize "allies" in public very negatively, a position I am quite sympathetic to. Helen Toner works at an Open Philanthropy-funded think tank, so she's as blue blood an effective altruist as they get. My guess is that this was the moment that she decided that Sam had to be eliminated before he took control of the board and jeopardized OpenAI's mission.

What gets me is how disingenuous this makes the original firing announcement: "Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." It sounds like he was perfectly candid. They just didn't like what he was about.

In completely unrelated news, ChatGPT has been down for the last three hours.

I had to look this guy up to find out that he’s married. For some reason the articles about the scandal don’t seem to think that’s relevant. Really shows how these low-level journalists think. His wife won’t give quotes to the media, or file publicly-available court documents, and of course, it would be unethical to speculate on how she feels about her husband trying to sleep with his coworkers, so the biggest victim is left unadvocated for. In Vice News’s America, the worst sin one can commit against a woman is triggering the almighty ick.

WNBA Coach Becky Hammon Suspended.

The WNBA is rescinding the Las Vegas Aces' 2025 draft pick and suspending head coach Becky Hammon for two games without pay, the league announced Tuesday. [...] In one probe, the league found the Aces promised "impermissible benefits" during negotiations for [Dearica] Hamby’s player contract. The other investigation found Hammon violated the league's Respect in the Workplace policies with comments about Hamby's pregnancy.

The WNBA? Do I care? Does anyone care? Well no, but the twist here is that Becky Hammon is (supposedly) actually good. She was a top assistant in the NBA for years under legendary coach Gregg Popovich, and she has gotten numerous head-coaching interviews with NBA teams, some as recently as this month. Every year when the coaching carousel starts, we are treated to at least one thinkpiece asking why Becky Hammon hasn't gotten an NBA head-coaching job yet. So what exactly happened to tarnish her sterling reputation?

Hamby claimed the Aces were dishonest with her during contract negotiations this summer, adding that they falsely accused her of signing an extension while knowingly pregnant. The two-time Sixth Player of the Year announced her second pregnancy after the Aces won their first-ever WNBA title last September, prompting Aces management to question her commitment to the team because, according to Hamby, they didn't "expect" her to get pregnant within the following two years.

"I was asked if I planned my pregnancy," Hamby wrote. "When I responded, 'no,' I was then told that I 'was not taking precautions to not get pregnant.' I was being traded because 'I wouldn't be ready and we need bodies.' I planned to play this season, and I have expressed my desire to play this season. I have pushed myself throughout my entire pregnancy and have continued to work out (basketball included) on my own and with the team staff -- even on days where it was uncomfortable to walk, only to be inaccurately told that 'I was not taking my workouts seriously.'"

"Season-ending pregnancy" strikes again.

It appears Miss Hammon's mistake was taking the WNBA seriously. She has experience in the NBA, a real league, where players are expected to do whatever it takes to win. She thought the same would be true in the women's league. In reality, the WNBA is a loss-leader. It's PR. It's advertising. It's sole purpose is to produce good media coverage and to get little girls interested in basketball. WNBA players aren't paid enough to ignore labor violations (Jordan Poole got a $140 million contract extension shortly after this). The audience of the WNBA doesn't care about women's sports or winning, they care about "women's sports"™. It should be obvious that the core idea of "women's sports"™ is "respect women"™, and you can't "respect women"™ by telling them when they can or can't become pregnant.

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.

You’d have to be an idiot to believe that Zelenskyy has a 4% approval rating. Has any wartime leader ever had an approval rating that low? I’m pretty sure even Tsar Nicholas in 1917 would break double digits.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.

No no no no no. This is the Order of the White Feather strategy. The target audience for the ad is young women who are already committed to Kamala. The intended outcome is not to get the target audience to vote (they already intend to vote), but to get the target audience to pressure the men in their life to vote for Kamala.