Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
The United States Navy is conducting a full-scale search-and-destroy campaign against alleged drug smugglers in the waters off Latin America and posting the results on Twitter.
The strikes have been going on for almost two months now and have killed over 50 people if Wikipedia is to be believed. I had no idea this was even an option. It turns out that You Can Just Do Things™.
I think that these are all probably smugglers of some kind. I have seen speculation that the some of the crew counts are higher than one would expect for drug running, which could imply human trafficking (consensual or otherwise) as well. If any of these boats were conducting legitimate business I suspect we would have had receipts by now.
The legal justification, to the extent that anyone cares about that anymore, seems to be that:
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Drug cartels are terrorist organizations.
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These boats contained cartel members targeting the United States (with drugs).
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Therefore, these boats contained terrorists targeting the United States (with drugs).
This seems kinda flimsy, but again, does anyone actually care? Democrats are backed into a corner here. They will probably lose if they attempt to litigate whether or not these boats were actually smuggling drugs, but the other strategy would be to condemn the strikes under the legal technicality that they weren’t authorized by congress, even though the boats were smuggling drugs. This makes them look like exactly the kind of out-or touch institutionalists that voters hate.
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
This doesn’t go far enough. We need to remove his games from Chessbase. Books on opening theory should contain the line, “and then one day in late 2000, for no reason at all, people started playing the Berlin defense.”
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
”If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes. If everything in life is videotaped and archived, then the real truth of these messy situations would be indisputable. But Hassan Piker's dog collar incident shows that this theory is catastrophically wrong.”
Does Taylor Lorenz think that it is impossible to archive financial transaction data? If we had Hasan’s credit card ledger, and cross-referenced his purchase history with the internal transaction records of every entity on the list that sells dog collars, we would be able to see exactly which model of dog collar he bought for his dog.
This seems like an odd place to make a “reality is fundamentally unknowable” argument.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
This is absolutely terrible. I want my 5 minutes back.
I have contacted the Charlotte police Department and asked them to investigate the death of Daniel, providing them some additional info . Hope will be done, and real truth about the curcumstances and cause of this tradegy will be revealed, despite all attempts to hide it
Best of luck to Kramnik in his search for the real killer.
One of the interesting undercurrents in all this is the culture gap between the Russian players and the American players (Kramnik of course is Russian, and Naroditsky despite his name is American). Kramnik's name has been mud in the West ever since he started making unfounded and unhinged accusations of cheating a few years ago, but in Russia he has a lot more cultural capital to burn. Russian GM Ian Nepomniachtchi is the only other top player I know of to even imply that there is anything suspicious about Naroditsky.
Postscript - I never understood the appeal of Anna Cramling, but seeing her in side profile in the video you linked made it click.
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex) (1933)
This is the most dangerous one of all. There is no historical context that softens the impact of watching [SPOILER: Literal Nazi Propaganda]
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
In some sense this is the most obvious conflict in the world. Prosecutors want criminals locked up. Defense attorneys want clients not to be locked up.
What, you thought San Francisco public defenders were less soft on crime than the district attorneys?
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
I have no logical or rational defense of this whatsoever, and yet I can't stop smiling every time I watch it.
The age of text is over. The time of the reel has come.
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
Scott has a new post on AI and money in politics. I'd like to take a step back and talk about how we got here.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda. But in the years after the decision, the feared corporate catastrophe failed to materialize. Trump didn't win in 2016 because of corporate support. In the primary, he bragged that he was self-funding his campaign and so wasn't beholden to special interests. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders got a lot of milage out of constantly reminding people that he didn't have a SuperPac.
In 2019, Scott wrote the prophetic Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, in which he pointed out that wealthy actors are probably underspending on politics and then brainstormed ways to turn money into political influence. By 2022, we started to see serious attempts at using previously-unheard-of amounts of money to systematically affect the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was too-clever-by-half donating money he didn't technically own, but Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter ended wokeness overnight and likely won Trump the 2024 election. If Scott is to be believed, the cryptocurrency and AI industries are well on their way to fulfilling SBF's dream of rooting the state.
Why did it take 10+ years for this to happen? My hypothesis: cultural inertia (and shame).
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
Quantumfreakonomics
25d ago
Here is the text of the 15th Amendment:
Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude–
Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Nothing in the text gives specific races any special representation. It gives citizens of all races the right to vote. A black person in any given electoral district has exactly the same voting power as a white person in the same district.
The issue is that Congress and the courts have used section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (text here) to enforce a collective right on the part of black people as a cohesive race to get their own majority-minority electoral districts. There are a lot of reasons why this sort of makes sense, but it’s weird and not a direct consequence of the right enumerated in the 15th Amendment.
Quantumfreakonomics
26d ago
Once you fully accept divine providence, you're sort of forced into rationalizing events in this way. There are still a bunch of biblical prophesies that God has to fulfil eventially. It is very convenient for the fulfilment of these prophesies to have the Jewish people concentrated in the holy land. It is reasonable to assume given these premises that God will prevent the United States from turning against Israel.
Quantumfreakonomics
26d ago
10 am on a Monday
I swear they do this on purpose. It's like they want people to ignore traditional eucharistic discipline.
Quantumfreakonomics
29d ago
The current buildout is about to run into the wall that is the electrical grid. AI will become unpopular overnight as soon as people realize that the brand new data center down the road is causing their electric bill to go up.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
They might if America itself turns against Israel
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Why do you exclude South Africa-style reintegration? Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
It doesn't nessesarily imply big-O Eastern Orthodoxy, but it does imply adherence to small-o Nicene orthodoxy, which nessesitates an organized church under a valid bishop.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Okay, who is his bishop?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
That whole section of Leviathan can be boiled down to honor as deference to and respect for power. There are some old Moldbug essays that try to flesh this out concretely.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
What is this supposed to prove exactly? The Italian locations look pretty, but the Californian infrastructure is more useful.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Let me just tell you from learning the hard way: These women are doing you a favor by making it clear this is a dealbreaker up front.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though.
I guess my question is, why are they resisting this? The hardest part of making a successful social media site is building the userbase. The current Bluesky userbase consists almost entirely of people who left Twitter because it wasn’t an ideological monoculture. Owning a site with an annoying userbase is better than owning a site with no userbase.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The specific prohibition is against “hot drinks”. Coffee and tea are brewed hot. Monster (as far as I know) isn’t.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I didn't know we had Mauritanian slavers on this forum. Truly nothing is beyond our reach.
Everyone who voted for the 2001 Authorization for use of Military Force (99% of congressmen) knew that the military was going to kill Al-Qaida people. That was the whole point.
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