Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
18hr ago
For one thing, the winds at high altitude pretty much always blow from West to East in the mid lattitudes, posing issues if you're Russia in this scenario.
For another, I doubt that big slow balloons are that hard to shoot down, even at 70k feet. Modern multirole fighter planes can get to 55k-60k, and specialized interceptors can get to 80k. You wouldn't need a big fancy missile to get from 60k feet to 70k feet. You might even be able to hit it with an autocannon.
Quantumfreakonomics
19hr ago
My understanding is that the Vatican has been granting exemptions quite freely when the local bishop asks nicely, even under Francis. As far as I can tell, there are no recognized TLM society chapels within 200 miles of San Angelo, so it would be well within the current guidance to grant an exeption.
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
Why is high-fructose corn syrup bad (compared to cane sugar)? If it's not bad, why do people think that it's bad?
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
If there's one thing we learned about the Democratic establishment in 2024, its that they love themselves more than they hate Trump. Very possible that those in charge decided that the hit to Trump wasn't worth the risk to themselves or their friends from bringing additional scrutiny upon the Epstein story.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Of course Trump is in the Epstein files. It was deniable 2 weeks ago ("two more weeks" guys finally get a win), but there is really only one reason everyone in the administration would suddenly get cold feet and display the same suspicious nothing-to-see-here attitude at exactly the same time. They didn't just want this quietly ignored, they wanted this GONE.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Lol yeah. Have fun locking your capital up and missing literally everything.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
>He doesn't know about the red heifer
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
On the Protestant end, the number of things that are “demonic” are growing really fast.
This is in contrast to the Catholic view, in which everything is presumed demonic until exorcised (why do you think they bless things so much?)
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
If people won't make more people, the government needs to step in and do it instead. Project Kamino. Artificial wombs. We need to get the tech solved now so that we aren't stuck on square one when everyone realizes that we need this.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
It’s easy to forget with how much the revolutionary era has been romanticized, but John Adams (the only Federalist president) was seen as an authoritarian during his presidency. The Sedition Act almost neutered the first amendment in the crib.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
The funniest possible explaination is that Trump had no idea that the whole thing was about fucking 16-year-old girls. Trump thought everyone was angry about some other thing, and now he has to do damage control because he was totally fucking teenage girls on Epstein Island.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel.
Sure, they "support" Israel, but do they love Israel with all their heart and all their soul and all their might?
The one thing that sticks out about English-language media coming out of Israel is that approximately all of it is aimed at Americans. Some of it is aimed at the general population with, "look how cool and based Israel is amirite?" but dig a little deeper and you discover a massive operation aimed at getting American Jews to support Israel even more.
You're right that the Little St. James project doesn't quite fit with being a blackmail operation. Perhaps it was the proverbial carrot rather than the stick?
Quantumfreakonomics
11d 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
12d ago
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.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d 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
13d 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
13d 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
13d ago
Maybe some history I'm not aware of?
Yes. It's subtle, but once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d 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
14d 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
1mo ago
It sounds like the internet stuff started leaking out into her real life a bit too much, and that triggered an existential crisis.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo 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
1mo ago
I'm currently reading a deposition where the head of safety at the facility freely admitted that he had never actually looked at 29 CFR 1910.119.
I also really appreciate the one victim's mother who hired her own lawyer seperate from the ones representing the other plaintiffs just so he could ask if they knew that one victim in particular and to berate them especially hard for their failures.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I just finished the United States Chemical Safety Board Final Report on the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery Exploision. I vaguely remember as a kid when this happened, but I had never realized it was the same company that caused the massive oil spill just a few years later.
The report hits all the standard beats for this genre, penny-pinching management, shoddy maintenance, "procedures" that exist only on paper and which may or may not even work, but all of it is cranked-up to 11 for 300 pages.
One of my favorite anecdotes is that at one point the call came down from London for all facilities to cut fixed costs by 25%. Most BP refineries realized that this was insane and didn't do it, but Texas City really did cut 25% and ended up running the facility into the ground.
The person who actually approved the vaccine is Vinay Prasad, director of The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. He reports directly to FDA commissioner Marty Makary, who in turn reports to Secretary Kennedy.
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