Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Are you really trying to lawyer lawyers out of their lawyer jobs? I am reminded of my favorite ACX comment:
Wow- I once worked for a US company that was shut down by the police for exploiting the sweepstakes loophole.
The company founders included a couple of lawyers with decades of experience in the gambling industry. They had these long company-wide legal compliance meetings twice a week, where every aspect of the company, from IT to customer support, was optimized to be as consistent with the letter of sweepstakes law as possible. The company had been fighting legal battles over their business model for years, and had actually won a string of cases in several states. At one point, they switched over from regular sweepstakes to charity sweepstakes under the theory that the courts were slightly more friendly to the latter. They were all extremely confident that they could beat any legal challenge.
Then, one day, I arrived at work to find the police loading office equipment into vans. When I asked what was happening, they led me to the company lobby, where all of the employees who hadn't immediately turned their cars around upon seeing the cops were waiting to be individually interrogated in a confiscated accountant's office. The police left after a couple of days- taking with them my personal laptop, which I never got back- and what followed was a week of showing up for half-days of "work" to a gutted office building where executives gave impassioned speeches about how proud they were of the company we'd built, and about how we'd followed the letter of the law perfectly and would definitely get our accounts unfrozen and be back in business soon. Then, a couple of those executives were arrested and the company was dissolved.
Apparently, what had happened was a local newspaper had written a hitpiece about the company which called out the DA by name for allowing such a degenerate law-skirting gambling operation to take root under their nose- a story which got picked up by a bunch of other papers. So, the DA got a judge to interpret the regulations in an entirely new way that our lawyers hadn't anticipated, and pressured the police to make an example of the company. Turns the legal system isn't like a computer that you can hack with the right exploit- if someone with power feels that you're skirting their authority, they will find a legal avenue to regain that authority, loophole be damned.
Until AGI takes over the world, all power comes from people. Lawyers have a lot of power. It's not that they're smarter than everyone else (though they are), it's that they have a license to lie and conspire.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
It’s hardly even on Fox. They love to report on trans shooters. I don’t buy it.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?
There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.
The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.
No wonder Bezos laid these people off.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Female figure skating is irrelevent now because the Russians are essentially banned.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
It might literally be climate change. Snow and ice aren't omnipresent in most of the country during the winter months anymore.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Open an E*Trade account and trade your own capital first. Show that you’re good at it.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
There’s a great bit in the last Harry Potter book where Ron is absolutely dumbfounded that his muggle-raised friends don’t have an deep attachment to The Tales of Beetle the Bard.
It’s VeggieTales man! Everybody loves VeggieTales.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I don't think that's it. There are plenty of other genres that all sound the same but still sound good.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
You have three suggestion slots before I permanantly write-off the genre for the rest of my life.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I'm also reminded by how annoyed I was a couple years ago to discover the parallels between Yud's thought and various branches of ancient and modern philosphy that Yud likes to pass off as his own original thoughts.
Did those philosophers write 10-paragraph blog posts? The alpha is all in the execution.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Why is country music so bad? I turned on the TPUSA half-time show and its honestly worse than the "real" show that's in Spanish.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
NBA Superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo announces that he is now a shareholder in prediction market Kalshi. Looks like prediction markets are finally breaking into the mainstream. Let's see what the normies think of this:
This "platform" literally held bets on whether Israel would bomb Gaza
Some of these comments are also in response to the Kalshi CEO's now infamous quote that, "the long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion."
Turns out people hate this. Scott posted a partial mea culpa last month when he realized that the most common use of prediction markets is negative-sum sports gambling. I don't think the rationalist community has fully internalized how bad this makes us look. Not that we should be overwhelmingly concerned with optics, there are a lot of good things that are very unpopular, but I do wish that when the theory of prediction markets was being hashed out we had gotten more objections like, "theory implies that this machine will systematically extract money from stupid people. Are we prepared to deal with the social consequenses of that?"
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
The value of a house is that you have a place to live. A house is not an “investment”. It has no cash flow. It does not generate wealth. A house becomes less useful with time due to entropy (albeit more slowly than most other physical assets). One would expect the real value of the average house to go down with time.
I feel bad for the people who got duped, but this really should have been obvious. Artificial scarcity is not wealth. Abundance is wealth.
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
Is there any rule for which decisions come with opinions and which ones don’t?
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
One would expect him to outline the factual circumstances of the arrest and why a warrant would be required in the first place.
Michael Vassar has a lot of hits in the database. Epstein even asks for his contact info. Is this where he learned his "techniques"?
EDIT: Okay, he definitely went to the island. Everything makes sense.
Literally in an email chain named, “Forbidden Research” LMAO
EDIT: Did Epstein fund MIRI? Eliezer Yudkowsky had a Skype with Epstein during a MIRI fundraiser.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
STOP
BUILDING
SKYNET
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
Potentially related: Will Stancil has been kicked out of ICE Rapid Response for allowing journalists to ride along and cover his activities. It will not be good for the defense of the activists in the church case that Don Lemon livestreamed the whole thing. I'm not sure how Stancil got this far without realizing how much his compatriots yell, "we love crime," while doing crime, but his youthful innocence goes a long way towards explaining why it is so much fun to make fun of him.
The entire livestream is still up on his personal YouTube channel (the action is all in the first hour or so). He travels with the group from the staging area to the church. It is clear from how he covers the lead-up that he is in on the plot.
I'm not sure how they'll get him specifically on the FACE Act charges, but he does seem to be part of the conspiracy, and that's what they need for the KKK Act charges.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
Prior to the Maduro operation, the US Navy was blowing up alleged smuggling boats in the Carribean and Eastern Pacific every week. The speculation was that the purpose of these was to put pressure on the Maduro regime. After Maduro was captured, they seem to have quietly stopped.
According to Wikipedia, there was one strike in the Pacific on January 23, so I guess it's a yellow light.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
I don't know why Trump wants lower rates. That seems stupid given that he just won an election due to high inflation.
I suspect that Trump's true objection is out of principle. Trump is the unitary executive theory personified. The idea that there is government policy that he has no ability to influence is offensive to him. The Federal Reserve is simply too important for Trump to not care about it.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
Thomas Jefferson was terrible at running a plantation (he was more interested in rewriting the bible).
Oh Thomas Jefferson was interested in his plantation alright. He just wasn't interested in the farming, the harvesting, or the marketing.
If you google legal cases on your personal computer on your personal time, then the prosecutor will put it on a powerpoint to show the jury as evidence of your guilt. If you pay $500 an hour for a lawyer to do it though, then you're fine.
PS: Watch the whole video. It's probably the greatest opening statement I've ever seen.
More options
Context Copy link