Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
10hr ago
There needs to be an autopsy on the autopsy report. I am 100% serious. Figuring out all the things that went wrong to allow this to happen would solve half of the party's problems. Reinterview witnesses. Reconstruct lines of thought and inquiry. Find the points of failure and conduct root-cause analysis.
The report is poorly written, unprofessional, and incomplete yes, but above all it is vapid. It doesn't even ask the questions that matter. The overwhelming majority of effort is focused on ad targeting and campaign spending.
"The pollsters were involved in discussions around the Trump attack ads – in particular the attack ad focused on the Vice President’s prior statements on transgendered Americans. They all recognized the attack as very effective, and felt the campaign was boxed – the ad was a video of her saying what she said, and it was framed as an attack on her economic priorities.
If the Vice President would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response. The pollsters generally concurred with the opinions shared by campaign leadership - given the stakes and timing, the focus needed to be on attacking Trump."
Okay, what was the mistake then? What should be done differently next time around? Should the Vice President have changed her position or not? In fact, there is almost no discussion of issues in the report at all. A model of why anyone would want to vote for one party or the other is conspicuously absent.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
This was a clear violation of established civil rights and the victim deserves restitution.
But $835,000 is a lot of money. That is more money than I have made in my entire life. Even in the "good" endings, I shudder to look directly at the massive roulette wheel that is American tort litigation. A back-of-the-envelope calculation for what I think would be a fair settlement (all figures approximate):
Lost wages: $10,000
Physical discomfort: $100,000
Emotional distress: $15,000
Missing life events: $10,000
Legal fees: $50,000
This comes to a total of $185,000. I cannot imagine a fudge factor big enough to make up the extra $650,000. That's pure profit in my book. This isn't even particularly large for a civil rights settlement. Insane that we just accept this.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Real OGs remember that Trump was Freak of the Year in 2011
Quantumfreakonomics
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d ago
That's the fun part. We all get to find out, together.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d ago
Islam is right about dogs.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Another data point I discovered today: There are multiple videos of university commencement speakers getting booed every time they bring up AI.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d 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
8d 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
9d ago
Yeah, but then what? Do we launch a full nuclear strike? A conventional war? Just a blockade?
Quantumfreakonomics
9d 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
9d 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
9d ago
What happens if China takes Donald Trump hostage?
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
As we all know, no virus that is slightly transmissible between humans could ever mutate to become more transmissible between humans.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d 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
11d 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
11d ago
This is the same stuff people were saying about Covid well into March 2020
Quantumfreakonomics
12d 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
13d 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
Ken Martin insisted on Pod Save America that no money was spent on the autopsy. That is the only claim from him that was believable.
It also shouldn't be self-reflection necessarily. They should have brought in NTSB and USCSB alumni to do an deep-dive independent investigation the way you'd analyze a plane crash or plant explosion. Toes will be stepped on. It will be embarrasing. If you really thought that, "Democracy was on the ballot", and then Democracy lost, then none of that stuff matters.
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