Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
There does seem to me more evidence coming out that police were aware that Haitians were taking waterfowl from public waterways, but that’s a far cry from killing pets.
Of course, those of us paying attention will remember that they tried to deny the ducks and geese too, but normies won’t care.
My first thought is that the real reason employers are so happy to have the Haitians is because they can pay them less, but not having been to the Midwest I may be underestimating the degredation of the native human capital.
Haitian-Americans seem to be doing okay so far, though one always has to be concerned about selection effects. Maybe Haiti's abysmal situation is due to instability and mismanagement. If only there were some way for an outside force to provide order, political stability, and facilitate foreign investment...
UPDATE: WE HAVE GEESE! The Federalist claims to have obtained a police report and non-emergency call from August where a citizen reports a group of Hatians who "all had geese in their hands." Finally, some actual journalism.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I am going to do the Yudkowskian thing and ask you to map out in your head what would actually happen if someone began developing and deploying biosphere-level sun-blocking technology, remembering what tends to go down in real history books.
I’m not necessarily against geoengineering, but there are in fact reasons not to go down that path until we need to.
Put a number to it. What percentage of those 20,000 do you think are slaughtering ducks in the park?
It seems plausible to me that they are rate limited by the number of ducks in the park available to slaughter. Assuming they have three or four ponds, each with 10 or so ducks, it might only take five or six guys to go through the entire population in a year. As we have seen with shoplifting statistics, these things tend to be dominated by the tails.
Nobody has gone to the park to check! Springfield isn’t in the middle of nowhere. There are big cities nearby. This entire tempest in a teapot is happening online with approximately no input from base-level reality.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
A somewhat similar event happened a few months ago with noted rich white man Scottie Scheffler. Public opinion was strongly on Scheffler's side, even though he violated the traffic pattern implemented by law enforcement.
People intrinsicly feel that important people deserve certain privileges. Faceless nameless CEO from CapitalCorp doesn't get the benefit of the doubt, but popular celebrities attending their prescribed functions do. People also expect cops to be judicious in the excersize of their power.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Can this also be blamed on Vatican II?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I was reading Scott's review of Hive Mind recently. The part that stands out to me is this:
The best guess is that the cognitive skill of elites really does matter more than the nation’s average score. When it comes to institutional quality, Potrafke and I found that the cognitive skills of the top 5 percent did the better job of predicting property-rights friendly institutions, although the nation’s average score also did a reasonably good job as a predictor…for the time being it’s reasonable to start with the belief that a nation’s top performers matter more for the economy than a nation’s average performers.
A decent manager would probably be able to find something productive to do with the functionally illiterate office worker Scott mentions in your link. The problem becomes compounded when that person's boss is also an idiot, and so on and so on.
If there really were 20,000 unemployable retards wandering the streets of Springfield, we would be seeing video clips, not second and third-hand rumors. So I am tentatively willing to believe that they are employed. Is there really that much demand for cheap low-skill labor? That is one of the things I am confused about.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The guy who did that was sentenced to 9 years in prison.. You would expect one or two traffic fatalities a year from a population of 20,000.
You would not go to prison for driving without a license or without plates either. These are minor offenses.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I have to admit that if the numbers are correct then I am surprised it's not worse. Listening to some of the comments at the town hall it certainly sounds unpleasant, but there wasn't much in the way of actual crimes and shit (no, no one actually cares about the sanctity of the migratory bird treaty act). Lots of "get your government hands off my medicaid" type stuff regarding lines at the welfare office.
Violence will only make it worse in the current political situation. Bearing through it might be the right move.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I think if Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of congress they could withdraw from global refugee treaties and totally reform immigration law.
They won't, because they're cowards/idiots/grifters, but the problem is solvable in principle.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Who are these nameless faceless NGOs carving up the ethnic map of middle America like post-war European diplomats? What is their motivation? Who is funding them? Why does nobody care? Is right-wing media too incompetent to weave a narrative more complicated than "Democrats open-borders bad"?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
What is going on in Springfield, Ohio? 20,000 Haitian arrivals into a town of 60,000 seems insane, but the New York Times seems to back it up. I definitely don’t trust the NYT to give an honest portrayal of what the situation is like on the ground, but I don’t really trust a lot of the rumors going around Twitter either. I am seeing reports of Haitians killing the ducks at the park and eating them. There are even secondhand reports of Haitians eating pet cats.
What I am not seeing however is geolocated footage or images. How hard can it be to send a guy to the park to see if there are any ducks left? I am legitimately confused. None of this seems to make sense.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Why is Haiti so much worse than other overwhelmingly-African Caribbean countries? Is the difference between 80% African DNA and 90% African DNA the difference between a functional and non-functional society? Is it because the other countries have residual institutions left over from colonialism, while Haiti blew everything up in the revolution and started from zero?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Things are looking up for the Texans, which is always when shit goes South and we completely capsize.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Maybe its 4D decision theory chess?
Now that people know that it is Russian policy to throw large amounts of money to vaguely pro-Russian influencers with no-strings attached, people with large platforms will be more willing to sprinkle in anti-interventionist rhetoric in the hopes of getting that sweet sweet kremlin money.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
My first thought was that the funding probably didn't have that much influence on the content produced (certainly it resulted in more videos and podcasts, but this doesn't nessesarily imply coercive editorial influence), but this clip from Tim Pool seems well beyond typical America-first isolationism. Does anyone know if there is context I am missing?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I guess this hinges on whether the Chinese got to those positions through merit by being legitimately better at them, or through corruption (there is a lot of gray area in between of course, but my point should be obvious).
If it turns out that the world’s greatest physicists, philosophers, writers, comedians, investors, and entrepreneurs were languishing in poverty for a century as a result of imperial subjugation, that would in fact be one of the pivotal events in world history!
It would be especially weird if the people most upset about this had some weird historical hangup like, “the Opium Wars were actually about tea, no one was trying to smuggle drugs into China.”
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The tunnels?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The theological differences run quite deep. The Catholic Church requires that there be a cross-with-corpus on or near the altar in full view of the congregation for the celebration of mass. This is as a reminder that the sacrifice of the mass is the re-presentation of the sacrifice of the cross, and that the bread and the wine presented on the altar are the real and substantial body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ.
The protestant view is to deny the physical presence of Christ in the church, and so the crucifix is disfavored over a symbolic cross.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Well for one thing, those sorts of edgy outbursts don't really count as apologetics, whereas his long-form work often does feel apologetic in nature.
I also feel a jarring disconnect between the two Darryls. Surely the long thought-out works are more representative of his true beliefs? I would like to know what drives him to Tweet like he does. Impulse control? Whatever Jordan Peterson has?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
When, if ever, is it appropriate to provide an apologetic defense of Nazi Germany?
Darryl Cooper, host of the widely acclaimed Martyr Made podcast, recently did a 2+ hour interview with Tucker Carlson. Darryl Cooper is known for two things. One: being meticulously empathetic with regards to the plight of the disaffected groups that are the subject of his 30-hour long history podcasts, bringing out the vivid details that form the background milieu for poorly-understood events like Jonestown. And two: his unhinged Twitter takes.
As one can imagine, jimmies were rustled. The most common line of attack was “Tucker Carlson platforms Nazi apologetics.” In a literal sense this is true. Cooper gives the German perspective on Winston Churchill. One might make the obvious point that Germany started the war by invading Poland, but the Soviet Union also invaded Poland. Yet the Western allies did not declare war on Stalin. This AskHistorians thread (no haven for Nazi apologetics!) is enlightening. What masqueraded as a mutual defense treaty was actually an anti-German treaty. Britain really was out to get them.
Once we dig deep enough, the real reason World War II started was to preserve Anglo hegemony over Europe, the exact same reason that Britain joined World War I. Post-hoc rationalizations are just that, post-hoc. It certainly isn’t irrelevant when studying World War II that the holocaust happened, but that isn’t part of the causal chain of events the way many seem to believe.
I want to emphasize that I personally like Anglo-American hegemony. Churchill’s aggressive stance towards Germany is good for me and for the vast majority of the people reading this, but in order to understand history (or current events for that matter) one has to understand the people who do not like Anglo-American hegemony. I do not know where on the doll Anglo imperialism touched him, but I do not believe that Darryl Cooper says the things that he does out of hate for his fellow man.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Why don't we just give parents a direct financial claim on a portion of their children's income? Obviously there will be some details that need to be ironed out (maybe this portion goes to the state when one's parents die, to prevent perverse dynamics), but this seems straightforwardly incentive-aligned.
It seems almost too obvious. Do any countries anywhere do anything like this, surely this is a cultural custom somewhere?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
What is going on with the church fires in France? The noticer accounts are not-so-subtly implying that they are due to arson. Is this the old Chinese Robber falacy, an artifact of France having lots of old highly-flammable churches wired with 220 volts, or actual arson?
EXCLUSIVE: Police Audio, Report Confirm Haitian Goose-Hunting In Ohio: ‘They All Had Geese In Their Hands’
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