Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
19d ago
The Harris Campaign Gives Their Side of the Story
Harris campaign staff joined establishment Democrat podcast Pod Save America for an election post-mortem.
What sticks out is how unsurprising everything is. These people are exactly the type of out-of-touch elite consultants that populists on both sides are always whining about. They come off as less woke than popularly imagined, but are every bit as uncreative, process oriented, and unaccountable as expected. Being on mobile due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I’m not in position to mine the transcript for key quotes, but clips from this podcast have been going viral on Twitter. A few highlights from memory:
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Campaign staff had no preparation for Biden dropping out of the race.
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They knew that the campaign message wasn’t getting through to young men. They still decided to prioritize on-the-ground campaigning in swing states over going on any of the bro podcasts. In their telling, Kamala was willing to go anywhere, but they simply ran out of time.
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They flat-out couldn’t figure out a response to the “Kamala is for they/them” ad. Nothing they tested seemed effective.
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They still think Liz Cheney is an avatar for moderate Republicans.
Quantumfreakonomics
21d ago
Cyanide tastes horrible. I would be insulted as a Kraft Heinz executive that Jim Jones didn’t trust Kool-Aid® to mask the flavor.
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
After the assasination of Franz Ferdinand, but before the outbreak of war, the Russian ambassador to Serbia, Nicholas Hartwig, died suddenly while visiting the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Belgrade. The official explaination was that he died of a heart attack.
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
Youtube comments sections have gotten signifigantly further right over the last 3 years. That's basically social media.
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
I saw very few yard signs at all this cycle. I thought everyone simultaneously realized they were cringe.
Sitting on kompromat against Trump to use when it's needed didn't work the last ten times they tried it, and it may well have cost them the election (Trump was able to stall his criminal cases for 18 months, but I doubt he would have been able to stall them for 40 months, especially if he couldn't point to ongoing elections as political cover).
I got the sense from some Democrat lawmakers that they were personally afraid of a Gaetz DOJ. This interview is a masterclass. People in the comments say it's sarcasm, but it's deeper than that. Everything the congressman says is literally true. Even the subtext is straightforward. It is only the emotional valence assigned to the facts laid out that differs between Republicans and Democrats.
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
This can’t be right. The number of doctors needed for any given discipline X should scale linearly with the number of cases in discipline X. If there are not enough cases to train doctors, then there is no doctor shortage.
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
Manufacturing is a surprisingly large portion of the economy in rural areas. In dollar terms, manufacturing is a larger sector of Iowa's economy than agriculture.
Quantumfreakonomics
29d ago
I’ve been struggling quite a bit to understand the whole Trump phenomenon. Despite the rivers of ink spilled on the topic, we still don’t have a robust theory of what makes him appealing to voters. A complex multicausal explanation involving loss of institutional prestige, social media, economic changes, and the like seems attractive, but there are good reasons to be suspicious of such explanations.
Maybe it’s just immigration. The single biggest failure of Western Democracies that sticks out like a sore thumb is their complete inability to control immigration. The UK is the prime example of this. The people voted to leave the European Union, causing easily foreseeable economic damage, because they were tired of immigration. Then the Conservative government in power proceeds to not actually lower immigration.
If you live in a Western Democracy and you want a secure border and less immigration, you can’t just vote for someone who says they want a secure border and less immigration. You have to vote for someone who viscerally hates immigrants. Someone who hates them personally, and who hates the very idea of what immigration represents. If their heart isn’t in it, they will predictably fold. Arguably Trump himself doesn’t go far enough here. We didn’t even get a wall last time.
Quantumfreakonomics
30d ago
Would Aileen Cannon be better? I'm honestly not sure.
I find it useful to look into the actual laws and regulations when media sources seem vague like this. From what I could find, the relevant law is 20 U.S. Code § 9621, which establishes the National Assessment Governing Board. You might have better luck finding the documents you want on the the NAGB website.
Here is a PDF which gives a broad outline of NAGB policy. Here is a longer PDF with more detail (the "procedures manual").
Quantumfreakonomics
30d ago
What do you guys think of the Matt Gaetz pick specifically? This seems to be a high-variance pick from a high-variance administration. Attorney General is IMO the most important cabinet position for domestic policy. As we all learned in high school, the executive branch enforces the laws. The Department of Justice is the agency tasked with boots-on-the-ground execution of that constitutional mandate. If nothing else, the Gaetz pick puts the fear of god back into a lot of people in Washington.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
My actual real IRL girlfriend did in fact break up with me over the election. No idea if she swore off men as a whole (probably not tbh). Social media is real. Online meltdowns are real.
I'm reminded of all those species of animal that for whatever reason don't breed in captivity. Some natural impulse or function is being blocked.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I suppose I could have called them, "unable or unwilling to understand the production function of medical goods, the capital structure of pharmaceutical corporations, the inherent unfairness of mass tort litigation, the difficulty for an individual consumer to determine the expected utility to himself of a given medical product, p-hacking, and the extent of the natural human disease burden," but that would be just padding the word count.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The 6 to 9 months between when most people were able to get the vaccine and when Omicron became prominent was worth a lot.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I am not going to die on the hill that COVID vaccine mandates were a good idea, but I am absolutely going to die on the hill that Pfizer deserved to make shitloads of money for developing and manufacturing the product that effectively ended the COVID pandemic as a going concern.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Listen here, you ignorant yokels. You might like to think that you're 'self-sufficient', but you're not. You depend on me, my tribe, the educated elites. Without us, you'd be dead. Specifically, you are dependent on the stock valuations of big megacorps continuing to rise. You know; stocks, the global finance market,
I mean, yeah. That is the implied connotation, because it's true. It's true the same way that you or I would tell the guys who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that their project is doomed without the support of public infrastructure. That's just not how the world works. If they can't tell the difference between investment in medical innovation being driven by the expectation of future profitable sales, and the nebulous forces driving the educated consensus on immigration, then they are just stupid.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The reason that vaccines need to be protected from liability is because the cost of a wrongful death lawsuit is orders of magnitude higher than the value the vaccine manufacturer can extract per life saved. Tort litigation is just a really terrible system for dealing with diffuse risks like this, especially when the expected net public good is overwhelmingly positive.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Donald Trump nominates RFK Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here. The sheer magnitude of human suffering prevented by vaccines and antibiotics is hard to comprehend. Due to complex structural and psychological reasons, the developers of these treatments capture a miniscule fraction of the total utility surplus created.
Enter the pharma skeptics: I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is, besides "more skeptical than the liberal establishment will accept", but I do know how Twitter works. Twitter is real. It affects real events in actual reality, up to and including the US presidential election. Trans issues are getting dumped from the mainstream Democratic Party agenda because of how much it gets dunked on on Twitter.
In this Twitter thread, the entire concept of rewarding companies for treating disease is getting dunked on like it's a Lia Thomas podium. This is of course not the only example I could have pulled, but it shocked me both because of it's location (Alex Tabarrok's feed), and because of the sheer intensity of what can only be described as concentrated stupid.
But perhaps the most alarming implications are for democracy itself. RFK's endorsement likely won Trump the election, not least because it paved the way for the Rogan endorsement. Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote. Indeed, no party can win a national election without winning large swaths of the stupid vote. There simply aren't enough smart people to win. Perhaps this explains the modern political environment. The decision between Democrat or Republican boils down to a decision on which party's concession to the stupid vote will do the least amount of damage.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
That's the glory of these judgements. They aren't punitive damages. They're compensatory damages. You can't put a dollar value on emotional distress, so who are you to say that "eleventy gazillion dollars" isn't appropriate compensation for mean phone calls?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
AOC is gearing up early for a 2028 run. It’s obvious how the Democratic Party can increase its appeal to young men. Stop trying to overthink it.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I'd be an asshole too if I had to defend my country from ISIS, Turkey, The United States, and Israel all at the same time.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Surely these picks are a smokescreen. I bet JD Vance is huddling with Yarvin, Musk, and Thiel in a smoke-filled room right now discussing which anon Twitter accounts and Mottizens will get the call to serve in the shadow cabinet. They must be cross-referencing the Gray Mirror Substack subscriber list to make sure they don’t accidentally double-count any alts.
Trans is a great attack surface against Democrats. They are constitutionally incapable of backtracking due to the culture and composition of their coalition. They can ignore the issue — many of them would like to ignore the issue — but they cannot answer the question, “why was my daughter posted-up by a 6’2” man during her high school basketball game?”
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