Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I think if elections were rigged then we wouldn’t see different parties win in different years. Also, if it was rigged against Trump, wouldn’t one expect him to underperform the polls? In reality, he overperformed the polls in both of his elections. (You can try to account for this by supposing that pollsters are in on the game, but now we’re just adding epicycles.)
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Isn’t the obvious use case for election prediction markets to hedge agains unfavorable election outcomes? Why do we assume that people betting on Trump are Trump supporters? Shouldn’t, for example, Israeli settlers be betting big on Kamala to win so that they have money to relocate if Trump loses and they get kicked out of the West Bank? DEI consultants betting on Trump so they have insurance against losing their cushy jobs?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The thing about building new nuclear power is that you have to be willing to literally run over protesters. If you aren’t willing to literally run people over, they will physically block you from brining equipment to the site.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Look at a map. Think logistically. There is absolutely no reason to be flying fixed-wing aircraft from Greenville to Asheville. Fixed-wing aircraft have longer ranges than helicopters. Those supplies can be flown in from further away locations. However, there are a limited number of airports within helicopter range of the affected area. Greenville is one of them. It is the correct move to dedicate the Greenville airport to helicopter missions.
If this hadn't happened, would FEMA have an extra $300 million to use on other things, or would they simply be appropriated $300 million less?
Same question for the illegal migrants program that everyone on Twitter seems to be talking about.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
One of the themes of Patrick McKenzie's legendary essay The Story of VaccinateCA is that the government is perfectly willing to let private citizens assist with emergency relief efforts if the government is allowed to take credit for it. Tweets like this are a declaration of war in that context. If you go into a disaster area with the intention of undermining the legitimacy of the official response, you are going to have a bad time.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I’m going to classify both of these stories as “technically true”.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
It would be very Seeing Like a State for government agencies to dump a shitload of assets and supplies in the major regional cities with no real plan to get aid to the isolated residents in the mountains whose roads have been washed out.
FEMA in Asheville doesn't nessesarily mean FEMA in wherever the hell this is.
I think we need subject-mater expertise here. How is airspace usually regulated? What would happen if all restrictions were lifted? How hard is it to operate in the mountains (especially takeoff and landing)?
I'm sure FEMA considers Starlink to be low-priority compared to food, water, gas, etc. It's plausible that SpaceX flying wildcat deliveries of Starlink is net-negative to the relief efforts, but I would like to know why specifically they think that.
EDIT: Per CNN's Pete Muntean, "an unprecedented number of airplanes, helicopters, and drones swooping in to help with Hurricane Helene recovery efforts are now posing a safety hazard. There were 30 near-mid-air collisions last Saturday, a federal source tells me." I guess that's the official line. No idea if it's accurate or not.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
How many people are too stupid to read and follow the directions?
Hundreds of people OD on Tylenol every year in the US. I cannot imagine the carnage that would result from OTC fentanyl.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I have to assume that the glow is from compressive heating during atmospheric reentry.
Pretty cool tbh. I hope Hollywood was watching. This is some Avengers shit.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Why does Iran care about Israel so much? I get why the Arab states hated them, but what has Israel ever done to Persia? Palestinians are Sunni, not Shia, so there’s no obvious alliance there. Is it all about Jerusalem? Why don’t Pakistan or Bangladesh or Indonesia fund resistance groups? Is it just a cynical power play?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Is there any pro-Hezbollah content in English that I can read? I’m not talking about standard anti-colonial junk from “leftist religious-studies activist #17354”, I mean legit Shia Islamist propaganda, the kind of stuff they feed their own people.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Goddamn… I knew that jurisdictions were outsourcing medical policy to doctors’ associations, but I didn’t know it was this bad.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The president controls air assets that could be used to airlift supplies to isolated mountain communities.
Probably it’s the sort of thing where once we know who needs what and where then conditions have improved enough that normal emergency responders can get through.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
A few thoughts on flood risk:
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There are huge swaths of the United States that have only been populated by literate civilization for 100-200 years. This isn’t enough data to get good risk estimates on the 100-year flood zone, much less the 500-year flood zone.
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Rainfall is NOT NORMALLY DISTRIBUTED! If you try to take historical rainfall totals, calculate the mean and standard deviation, and then use basic statistics to predict the likelihood of out-of-distribution events, you are going to get rekt because you didn’t have a term for “giant hurricane dumps five months worth of rain in two days”.
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Because of this, there is essentially no market for private flood insurance in hurricane-prone areas. The federal government has to operate a flood insurance program at a loss in order to make the market. These policies are often underpriced given the true risk, and thus are a source of moral hazard.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Some base rates for callibration: In the United States, about 20 people are executed a year. Every few years, a story like this about a supposedly innocent man who is (about to be) executed gains traction in the media and online. Is it plausible that one out of every 50 or so executions is of someone falsely accused? I think so. I would expect the false positive rate to be about that order of magnitude.
On the other hand, there is an entire legal-industrial complex that exists for the sole purpose of fighing tooth and nail for every single person on death row to be granted clemency. The tiniest procedural hiccups or missing puzzle pieces can be blown up into claims of actual innocence. The only proper description of the evidence is the evidence itself. There is a reason that findings of the trial court are given deference. The judge and jury who tried the case were much more familiar with the evidence than you or me.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Elsewhere in the thread, we are provided with a link to this Japanese highschool gymnasium as a positive example of Eisenman's general style of architecture.
Some hostile alien race has clearly colonized Earth. I feel the sudden urge to pick up a crowbar and break out to repair the dimentional wormhole.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I am not reluctant to say, "the reason [Issue X] is a problem is because people are stupid," but I don't see how it applies here. "Ugly buildings are bad" is not the kind of proposition that 90IQ (hell, even 70IQ) people would find hard to understand.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Cutting welfare in general is a mainstream conservative position (cutting any specific program tends to be quite unpopular, but you gotta start somewhere). Poor people actually tend to be fatter than middle class or rich people, so there seems to be a caloric excess on the margin among food stamp recipients.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I guess this begs the question of: what exactly do Republican voters think they're voting for? What do they even want to vote for? I can understand why Trump himseld would want to distance himself from Project 2025, but why would conservative voters not want to support it? Are they just stupid?
Maybe this is exactly the expected result? Is 4% the actual proportion of non-stupid conservative voters in the general population? Everyone else is either not conservative, or just thinks whatever Trump tells them to? I can't say I have any evidence against this hypothesis.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
So like, are there hundreds of explosive pagers that ended up in god-knows-where that they just didn't detonate?
I think one needs to treat every single device manufactured in Israel as compromised in some way by Mossad. I would not want Israeli chips in my smartphone.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The issue here is that the government had abdicated the role of deciding what counts as "medically necessary treatment" to doctors. This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now we have reams and reams of court precident citing professional standards generated by private doctor's associations as evidence of medical nessesity, such that it now overrules state laws attempting to regulate medical care.
Twitter has recently updated its monetization scheme. Here are some Tweets by mid-level accounts celebrating their pay raise: Tiffany Fong, Richard Hanania, Kyle Mann, Crémieux, i/o, Austen Allred
Notice anything? All of these accounts are followed by @elonmusk. I did some additional digging. This looks to be the official announcement.
It flew a bit under the radar at the time, but with checks going out today we have a much better idea of how the scheme works in practice. It sure looks to be a patronage system for tech-adjacent influencers and intellectuals crossed with a pyramid scheme.
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