Quantumfreakonomics
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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?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
This is a tale as old as environmental law. In the 1970's, the discovery of the endangered snail darter blocked completion of the almost-finished Tellico Dam by the Tennessee Valey Authority. Congress had to pass a specific exemption to complete the project.
We later found out that the snail darter also lived in other rivers in the area, and the completion of the dam did not drive it to extinction.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Here is an interesting development: Kamala Harris is now demanding unmuted microphones for her debate with Donald Trump.
It's been memory holed, but I seem to remember the general opinion being that allowing Trump to interrupt his opponent during debates gave him an unfair advantage since he would interrupt more often. This appears to be a complete 180. It's tempting to model this as a reflexive reaction to Trump's dominance in the June debate with Biden (which muted the candidates' microphones when it wasn't their turn to speak), but I get the sense that there are deeper strategic considerations at play. A few possibilities:
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The Harris Campaign wants Trump to come off as unhinged by giving him the oppurtunity to make a complete ass of himself. This didn't work for Jeb, Rubio, Cruz, or Hillary, but maybe it will work for Harris? (I am pressing X to doubt)
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Kamala wants to unleash her inner prosecutor and roll around in the mud with Trump. This could work, but it strikes me as the kind of thing that sounds better in the shower than it does in real life.
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This is just mind games. The Harris Campaign is using meaningless nitpicks to bait Trump into doing something stupid. I think this is an underrated strategy in general. It would be very bullish for Harris if the people in charge are this smart.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
the dumpster was there illegally already - the company ended up being fined (a trivial amount, but still it was illegal)
Ok, so the dumpster was brought to the site by the construction company? This makes more sense given what I see in the picture. Looks like they needed to get a street occupation permit.
My opinion on who is in the wrong here depends both on the details of the nature and urgency of the construction work being done, and on whether to permitting authority is capable of processing applications in a timely and reasonable manner.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I'm sure top men are scouring through out treaty obligations with Brazil as we speak to see if there's something to pin him on.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Last month a woman was killed while cycling in one of these lanes when she was forced to merge out of it because a construction company had illegally put a dumpster in the middle of it
Is there a diagram of the incident somewhere? Why was stopping, walking the bike around the dumpster, and then getting back on not an option?
Less rhetorically, I can’t tell from the information provided whether this is a reasonable law, or if it’s just entitled “not-in-my-bike-lane”ism that would jack the cost of construction and services to astronomical levels if strongly enforced. Where would you have put the dumpster?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Since 1948, the tomb guards, a special platoon within the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard), work on a team rotation of 24 hours on, 24 hours off, for five days, taking the following four days off. A guard takes an average of six hours to prepare his uniform—heavy wool, regardless of the time of year—for the next day's work. In addition to preparing the uniform, guards also conduct physical training, tomb guard training, participate in field exercises, cut their hair before the next workday, and at times are involved in regimental functions as well. Tomb guards are required to memorize 35 pages of information about Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including the locations of nearly 300 graves and who is buried in each one.
When I was in Arlington many years back, I couldn't understand what the big deal was about the tomb of the unknown soldier, until I went. Pictures and video don't do it justice. There is an aura there. The way everyone is dead silent. The framing. The location. You have to walk through a quarter mile of perfectly-maintained memorial graves to get there.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The solution that comes to my mind is using the North runways for departures and the South runways for arrivals (or vice-versa). Would this cause taxi times to be unreasonabe? Aerodynamic turbulence issues?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Amazing that we now have a machine that will answer arbitrarily-worded questions about any commonly-taught topic, and the only education implications people talk about are fake assignment submittions.
Like no, the whole structure of the industry is now obsolete.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I am confronted with Kamala or Walz's face every other time I open a YouTube video. In contrast, the only Trump ads I see is garbage like this, hyping stuff like the "no tax on tips" policy.
I feel kind of insulted. First of all, tipping is dumb. I tip decently because I have sufficient disposible income that I can pay a little extra, but these sorts of illegible culturally-mediated costs are bad and unfair. Why on Earth would I want to incentivize more tipping by exempting tipped income from taxes? Has anyone gamed out the equilibrium here? (Is this some sort of 4D chess to get black people de-facto excluded from middle-class economic areas? Think about it.)
Secondly, why does this feel like a Hooters ad? Obviously you don't want ugly people in your marketing, but this is borderline offensive. This woman is way too hot for me to believe she was selected for any reason besides her looks.
On the other hand, JD Vance is quite relatable, in the sense that his campaign feels like what would happen to me if I were to run for office.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
LAX has 4 runways. They all face the same direction. Why would they ever not use separate runways for takeoffs and landings?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Unofficial Motte Strawpoll: Tattoos on women yes/no
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
<tinfoil hat> Maybe someone at one of the AI labs discovered how to communicate with dolphins, then conspired with the Gibraltar Pod to take out The Bayesian (oh yeah, the name of the yacht is The Bayesian. Total coincidence right?).
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
This is a good point, but I do wonder if, “one trillion dollars in fraud against the American people,” plays better on the campaign trail than, “ten million illegal aliens”.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Does the US need an influx of Saudi royals?
"Need" is a strong word, but rich oil barrons would fit right in in Houston.
Plus you'd be bringing inflation and higher house prices. Australian and Canadian real estate has been rendered ludicrously expensive by rich Chinese buying it all.
My forex is a bit rusty. Wouldn't rich individuals trying to convert their foreign-denominated assets into dollars result in deflationary pressure on the dollar? My sense is that lots of the Chinese demand for real-estate is speculative in nature. Speculative demand will subside once supply catches up. America has much more developable land than Australia or Canada.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Should the United States switch to an explicitly pay-to-play immigration model? The twin axioms of immigration seem to be:
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Elite human capital immigrants entering the country is good.
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Low human capital immigrants entering the country is bad.
Much ink has been spilled on attempts to determine which specific groups of immigrants are good or bad, but isn't the most elegant solution simply to charge money for the privilege of immigrating to the United States? People who have acheived success in their home countries are more likely to be high human capital, and needless to say the unwashed hordes would be kept out by sheer inability to pay.
Ideally this would be a complete replacement of the current immigration regime, not an augmentation. I cannot think of any nessesary exceptions off the top of my head. Anyone worth bringing into the country is worth paying for. Passport bros can still exploit economic inequality to snag a mail-order bride, but they will be the ones footing the bill.
I propose a flat rate of $100,000 per green card. Why wouldn't this work?
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Just started Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. I came for the philosophical musings on pseudo-environments and manufactured consent, but I am staying for the detailed accounts of how the WWI propaganda sausage was made.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Of course housing should be destroyed as an investment. Living in a house is consumption. It causes wear and tear on the house. A twenty-year-old house is inherently less valuable than a brand new house. In a healthy economy, a house should depreciate in value like a car, albeit more slowly.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Once we have self-driving cars, there will no longer be any pressing need to have the parking lots immediately adjacent to the places that people are going. The cars will be able to drive empty to the parking area after dropping off passengers. This will also increase the willingness of people to commutte long distances, since people spend most of their time on their phones and laptops anyway.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
I don’t think so. Wokeness emerged out of the uniquely American experience of, “oh shit, we have to live next to all these black people we imported now,” which was then imported to Europe after we bailed them out in the World Wars.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
Grok will let you make anything right now.
Okay, not literally anything. Hardcore porn appears to be banned. Still, I am not sure society is ready for a mainstream image model that lets you make sexy pictures of female congresswomen showing their feet.
I am really curious how this shakes out over the next few days/weeks. I am sure that the New York Times and Washington Post hitpieces are being typed right now. Was this level of freedom intentional, or an oversight? Will Elon fold immediately? My guess: he shuts down the ability to generate identifiable people in lewd situations. That is the one thing Americans won't stand for for some reason.
Things have been quiet on the AI front lately, despite or perhaps because of the election. I suspect that the major labs are afraid to rock the boat and risk getting blamed if things go poorly.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image”
Not sure how you get around this one. God specifies that the blood will be shed “by man” and then gives a justification, indicating that this is to be taken as a normative statement instead of a descriptive one.
This is immediately after Noah gets off the ark, so you can’t pull the “Mosaic covenant” stuff that gets you out of Leviticus.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
you're gonna have a Real Fun Time when the DoE starts talking about dumping low-level 'nuclear waste' somewhere.
I don’t have the time to write a whole post about this right now, but it is not widely-enough known how much of a complete clusterfuck the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act turned into. The only reason it didn’t turn into a national crisis is the fact that low-level waste isn’t actually very dangerous. You can tell universities, laboratories, and hospitals that there is no outlet for their waste, and they will just hold onto it in random cabinets for decades with no noticeable consequences.
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?
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