Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The mods are a lot harder on top-level posts than they are on replies. I get the impression that this is a considered policy on their part, but it does have side-effects
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The top comment is the correct synthesis in my opinion.
I thought the meaning was more something like “the system took these side effects into account and still considered that what it was doing was net positive in expectation, so the side effects are as much part of the system's purpose as the ‘positive’ outcomes”.
I take Scott's objection that this is a trivially obvious insight for what it is, but you do see a decent amount of "if only the Tsar knew"-type thinking in the wild and the phrase is a good counter to that.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
If ICE detention facilities are full, then via the pigeonhole principle any foreigners being required to enter the country increases the number of people on the loose.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Read literally, the original order requires the government to send in SEAL Team 6 to perform an extraction operation at CECOT in the event the Salvadorian government doesn’t hand him over in time.
I suppose a court could order the government to request Abrego Garcia back and to stop paying El Salvador to detain him, but beyond that I’m not really sure what they can do.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
What is current public opinion in China like regarding the tariffs? Are Americans public enemy number 1 yet?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I get a sensible chuckle every time I see how the retail trading apps have managed to turn the mandatory risk disclosures into a, “you must be at least this cool to trade options 😎, “ button.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Now of course the explanation is obvious
You’re right. The answer is obvious.
they're doing it as a dig on trump.
No, it’s because futures exchanges are open longer hours than stock exchanges. If you want to know what the market thinks of recent news that broke while the stock market was closed, you look at the futures market.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I can sort of understand if you didn’t think about the semantic content of what you wrote, but there’s a baseline level of general quantitative knowledge that one needs to know in order to meaningfully partake in discussions of civic importance. The all-inclusive annual cost of having an employee in a first-world country is about $50,000 - $100,000. The US military has a lot more than 15,000 active duty personnel. You don’t have to know anything about how much ships, tanks, or planes cost to know that $892 million will not come close to covering US military expenses.
Like, if you saw a headline tomorrow saying, “Trump to buy Greenland for 50 trillion dollars”, you should know immediately that that isn’t true. Even if Trump said those words, that would be orders of magnitude more than anyone has ever paid for anything ever.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
He came up with the funds to buy Twitter.
He did. This was
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Only $44 billion instead of $100 billion,
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Also collateralized by the value of Twitter itself as an asset, and
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The banks which financed the deal lost money, making Musk a less-than-desirable customer in the future.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
He took out a $45 billion credit line
That is not what the paragraph you cited means. He has $45 billion worth of Tesla stock pledged as collateral. That doesn’t mean he can borrow $45 billion USD against that collateral.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Elon does not have $100 billion in liquidity, nor does he have the capability of generating $100 billion in liquidity over a 1-year period. Even if a sucker bank could be found, a healthy financial regulatory apparatus would immediately step in to prevent massive systemic risk.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Even if all trade barriers (including the nonsensical things he includes as trade barriers) are completely gone, there is no easy way for say, Australia to force their businesses to start buying more American made products.
Think outside the box. Zero is not the lowest number. Australia could put a negative 20% tariff on all American imports, directly paying American manufacturers to ship their products to Australia.
Is this flat-out extortion? Yes. But the mechanisms for enforcement are already in place. Just change the sign in the relevant Excel templates.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The market went up after this announcement IIRC. 50% on top of the already existing and already announced tariffs is almost too absurd to take seriously, bayesian evidence that Trump is bluffing.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
There is some precedent (arising from the Guantanamo Bay detainees) that people held in a foreign country on behalf of the United States can still pursue relief in US courts.
Wasn't the key fact in those cases the fact that the United States had physical command and control over the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center? It doesn't seem immediately applicable to the Salvadorian prison situation. Is there any precedent for the United States sending prisoners to foreign countries? That seems like the more interesting novelty to me.
What is there to say? Trumpism is being exposed. Beyond that, democracy itself is being exposed. Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Wasn’t Scott a philosophy major in undergrad? He seems interested in Christian thought to the extent that it overlaps with the overall western philosophical tradition. There are also plenty of Bible references peppered throughout his work.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
First, globalization didn’t suppress the wages of blue-collar workers, it suppressed the wages of manufacturing workers. Blue-collar service workers are doing fine.
Second, it did suppress their cost of living. The idea of going to work “to put food on the table” is an idiom in modern-day America. When an American loses his job, he doesn’t stop being able to literally feed his family. He doesn’t lose the clothes off his back. He doesn’t lose his refrigerator. He doesn’t lose his microwave. Instead, he loses his house, his healthcare, and his children’s formal educational opportunities.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
So, MSM consumers? Were they really 'more informed'? I dunno...
The typical Gell-Mann amnesia take is that the consuming mainstream media about a topic is significantly less informing than engaging with a topic in a personal capacity. This is almost certainly true. But it can also be true that reading the New York Times buisiness section makes one more informed about the state of the national economy than not doing that.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
As they say in the biz: post shorts.
While I agree with the sentiment here, I think this illustrates why successfully shorting the market is so much harder than it looks. If you looked at Trump’s economic proposals during the campaign, thought “man, this will wreck trade,” and then shorted the market immediately after he got elected, you ate shit. If you shorted the market early February when Trump signed an executive order to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, you didn’t make diddly squat. You would have had to short the market the last 6 weeks specifically in order to be in the money. There was no real way a priori to know that this is when the crash would be.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Do you ever see “Product of USA” at the grocery store? Food is a decently-sized export.
The main exports are refined petroleum products and capital goods. You don’t see these at the general store with “Made In USA” labels on them, but your country’s infrastructure runs on American products.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
No. Less trade means less stuff is available that people want, period. Everything is worth less because there are less things to buy (except food I guess).
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I know Haiti is Haiti, but how bad are things on the ground in Guatemala?
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
3 is not even better than 7, which only has one really good movement.
There are not many composers who have ever written a piece better than Beethoven 3.
Not many worth talking about. Any composer worth remembering 100 years later has at least one piece better than Beethoven 3.
it quite literally inaugurated the romantic era
Okay, I’ll bite. I don’t like the C# in measure 7. It’s not set-up, and it doesn’t go anywhere. I know people always talk about how it “changed classical music forever”, but really that just means that everyone else used it as a jumping-off point for ideas that work much better.
We did it Reddit!
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