Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
52m ago
showing up in red/black shirts and then posing for a group photo in the "costumes":
The gendered tyranny of… spontaneously organized dress codes? Is that what is being alleged here, that jurors were pressured into wearing one of two colors of shirt?
What am I missing?
Quantumfreakonomics
17hr ago
I think I just about died watching the Piers Morgan interview at the part where Piers asks with a completely straight face what “jestermaxing” is, and it takes a few back and forths to reveal that Clav thinks that jestermaxing is bad.
Quantumfreakonomics
18hr ago
In a very real sense, anyone running against a Trump-endorsed candidate is not a Republican. It makes all too much sense that Trump-endorsed candidates sweep Republican primaries. All of the Republican Party's political power (at least at the national level) comes from being willing to stand together behind Trump.
The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are fundamentally different in how power works internally. The Democrats are a collection of squabling interest groups, and the Republicans are a coalition of everyone who opposes these interests. The structure of the Republican base requires strong top-down discipline to hold the coalition together.
Quantumfreakonomics
19hr ago
That's the fun part. We all get to find out, together.
Quantumfreakonomics
20hr ago
Obligatory TracingWoodgrains post.
The normative standard that Clavicular violates is that exterior physical beauty is, and more importantly ought to be, reflective of inner beauty. An ugly person could not deliver this message, because he would also violate this normative standard. The catharsis of seeing Clavicular get "mogged" comes from Clavicular's unnatural, unearned, and unreflective beauty being shown to be vain in contrast to the natural "earned" beauty which is reflective of the true inner virtue of the gigachad interlocutor.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Looking into this, and wow, Congress really did pass an indefinite uncapped appropriation for the federal judgement fund with no substantive limitations. The statute for unauthorized tax information disclosure which Trump sued under allows punitive damages with no statutory cap. This settlement is actually 100% legal.
How many other loopholes like this are there in the United States Code?
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Yes, but we have 30 years more of technological development in lawfare now. Think of how many doohickeys and doodads you can bring up to the jury.
Did you ask whether the engine was governed at 70mph? "No"
Did you ask whether the 80,000 pound truck you hired was equiped with a collision detection system like you have in your personal Kia? "No"
Did you ask whether the truck was equiped with a lane depature warning system? "No"
Was it a red flag that the carrier you hired barely spoke English? "No"
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Islam is right about dogs.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Another data point I discovered today: There are multiple videos of university commencement speakers getting booed every time they bring up AI.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
There are a lot of leftist spaces where you would get a better response saying, “I think the West takes in too many immigrants,” than you would saying, “I think AI art is good.”
Some leftists think the technology itself is intrinsically evil, but almost all of them think that the people building the tech are evil oligarchs who can’t wait to banish 99% of the population to the permanent underclass (or worse).
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
If the Koch brothers wanted nukes I think the Constitution is very clear that they are allowed to have nuclear weapons.
My interpretation is that the phrase, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," modifies the noun arms, not the noun people. So all of "the people", regardless of whether or not they are part of the militia, get to bear arms, but the "arms" that they have the right to bear are militia arms, i.e. infantry weapons. This means that both you and the Koch brothers get to own assault rifles, RPGs, light machine guns, and mortars, but neither of you can own tanks, attack helicopters, or nuclear warheads.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Yeah, but then what? Do we launch a full nuclear strike? A conventional war? Just a blockade?
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
The question is if Israeli jailors would sic a dog on their captive with the intent for the dog to rape him. (Actually, how does that work mechanically: did they tie him head down ass up?)
I wouldn't have believed most of the things that happened at Abu Ghraib if there hadn't been pictures of it. Some people will do weird shit if they have the oppurtunity.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
We are now in the timeline where the journalistic integrity of the New York Times rests upon whether or not it is physically possible to train a dog to anally rape a human.
The New York Times ran an opinion article by Nicholas Kristof wherein a number of Palestinians report being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons. There’s not much in the way of physical evidence, but that is hardly unusual in rape crimes. Israel has strenuously denied the allegations, characterizing them as blood libel. It seems to be a he-said/she-said that comes down to whether you believe the Palestinian prisoners (who often have ties to Hamas or other extremist groups, hence why they ended up in Israeli prisons) or the IDF.
Certain enterprising young pro-Israel influencers think they can to better than appeal to untrustworthiness. They puport to have found a smoking gun that proves the NYT published a complete fabrication in order to libel the State of Israel, and by extension all Jews. One of the more salacious anecdotes regards a man from Gaza who alleges that he was raped by a dog.
On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
”They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.
If, in fact, such a thing were impossible, then it would prove without doubt that the paper of record recklessly printed unverified falsehoods. We are now in the “doctors arguing with the author about the medical literature” stage of the discourse. See, even though we have documented evidence that dogs can cause rectal injury to humans, in none of those reports was the initial contact involuntary on the part of the human.
I am not well acquainted with dogs, but my understanding is that it is not particularly hard to get them to hump things. I guess the people making this argument are hoping that others won’t want to think too hard about the mechanics of dog rape.
Despite calls and rumors to the contrary, The Times so far has declined to retract the article.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
What happens if China takes Donald Trump hostage?
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
As we all know, no virus that is slightly transmissible between humans could ever mutate to become more transmissible between humans.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
COVID was such a complete mess that we never even bothered to do a proper post-incident debriefing report. Nobody even wants to think about what we should do differently next time. A lockdown would have worked in December 2019. By mid-January it was too late.
We should have kept everyone on the boat in the middle of the ocean and resupplied them by helicopter.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
The only known use for a large stockpile of HEU is to create nuclear weapons.
No, it is also needed for naval reactors. They have to use highly enriched uranium in order to be small enough to fit on a boat.
Sort of absurd to think about, but it sure would be a pain in the ass if the US navy had to worry about fast attack submarines sneaking up on their carrier groups.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
This is the same stuff people were saying about Covid well into March 2020
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
I feel like I've read similar things 5 times in the past few weeks.
Most of the fake scoops have been from Barak Ravid of Axios. He is Israeli so one would expect his "scoops" to be for the purpose of advancing Israel's interests, but from my POV it looks like he's the Trump administration's mouthpiece for market manipulation leaks.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
The first policy position you see on his website is "Medicare for All". I'm not sure if that plus Palestine makes him part of the Squad
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
Lets talk about the Senate Democratic Primaries.
Maine
Graham Platener, aka nazi tattoo guy, aka "disabled" veteran oyster man, is the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine after 78-year-old former governer Janet Mills dropped out. Platner will be running against the incumbant moderate Republican Susan Collins in the general.
Susan Collins has won five straight terms in Maine, but she is the underdog in the upcoming election due to the expected blue wave.
The Maine election is interesting because the conventional wisdom is that Democrats need to run an unusually moderate candidate to win, and Platner shows that we don't have a good conception of what "moderate" even means. On policy positions Platner is leftist, but culturally he has the effect of a rural white tough-guy (as one might have expected from the Nazi tattoo). Expect the results of this one to be poured-over for years in candidate selection debates.
Michigan
The Michigan Democratic primary is complicated by having three candidates instead of two. Haley Stevens, Mallory McMorrow, and Abdul El-Sayed all have viable campaigns. Looking in from the outside, the big issue in the race is Israel.
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Haley Stevens is "establishment" in the machine sense. She is openly pro-Israel. Not much grassroots support. I expect her to lose barring shenanigans.
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Mallory McMorrow is the traditional liberal PMC candidate. Very white woman coded. Backed by literal Anthropic employees. Her public position is skeptical of certain aspects of the US-Israel relationship, but it is clear that she doesn't have deep convictions on the issue.
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Abdul El-Sayed is the leftist anti-Israel candidate. As his name suggests, he is an Arab Muslim. He is best known at this point for campaigning with leftist streamer Hasan Piker.
The attempts to cancel El-Sayed for his Israel position and Hasan connections seem to have backfired, as he has catapulted into the lead on Polymarket. What I think is happening here is that Israel is by default a low-salience issue, but if Israel is made into an issue by e.g. a US-involved war in the Middle East or constant media coverage of campaign tactics, then the anti-Israel faction of the Democratic party will simply win because they have an overwhelming numerical advantage among the Democrat base.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
Having heard nothing about this controversy before this thread other than that it had something to do with a video game, I simply could not believe the cover art was real. I still kinda don’t.
You buried the lede. They made the little girl look like an age 9 version of the hottest chick in the college sorority, complete with makeup, bedroom eyes, and long flowing hair.
Spec Ops: The Line was controversial for intentionally making the player feel like a war criminal. Is part of the artistic vision of Pragmata to make the player feel like a pedophile?
I appreciate the resistance to ideological uglification in games, but that doesn’t mean we need to make preteen girls look like Kate Upton.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
(This is for Variant 1:) The number that Alice should put into the computer is not her credence that in her side of the experiment, right now, the coin came up tails. Alice should put p, the weight of the coin, into the computer. All of the weird anthropic probability shifting only occurs because Alice doesn't know what day it is. Because of the way the computer works, it will only transmit the message to Bob if it is Monday. This is why the probability that Alice should put into the computer is the naive weight of the coin, and not the anthropically shifted probability that she should bet herself.
Real OGs remember that Trump was Freak of the Year in 2011
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