Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
19hr 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
19hr 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
21hr ago
I know Haiti is Haiti, but how bad are things on the ground in Guatemala?
Quantumfreakonomics
2d 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.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Let’s say you’re walking down the street and a black guy steals your phone. Later that day, this same black guy is minding his own business when he is attacked, arrested, and beaten within an inch of his life by an unabashedly racist police officer who is an open member of the KKK. The police officer notices the cell phone, which he finds out later was reported missing by you, and returns it to you. Further investigation reveals that the police officer had no probable cause, and simply assaulted the man because he was black. Do you have to give him your cell phone back?
The answer is obviously no, right? Just because the black man has a clearly justified claim against the government, doesn’t mean that we have to recommit all of the crimes that the unlawful state action righted. Compensation should be made in a different way.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
A perfectly fine symphony that will adorn the Hall-of-Very-Good for eternity to come.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Beethoven 5, 6, and 9 are the best obviously. Everybody knows them because they really are that good.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
The 30-year mortgage is not an economically sound transaction when considered as a bilateral agreement between a lender and a borrower. It only makes sense in the context of the greater financial system and with the explicit backing as a core policy goal of the government. No one would lend money under these circumstances
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
You left out the most ambitious crossover event since the Avengers
Actually, after browsing Aella’s current timeline, I think it might be finally over for 3D women this time. Sure, real Aella is attractive, but Ghibli Aella is an absolute smoke show.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
Yes, but one would think that this is the kind of thing that would be discussed in those “nonpublic, sensitive, high-stakes” negotiations.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
What caught my eye in recent filings is the accusation that the Salvadorian Government refused to accept female deportees, even going so far as making the US Government return female inmates to the United States.
I can sort of see how this could happen. The original Alien Enemies Act of 1798 only applied to males aged 14 and up. The amended version currently on the books was updated during WWI to include all persons aged 14 and up. Maybe they accidentally cited the 1798 version during negotiations with Bukele. That would only be the second most embarrassing foreign policy blunder this week.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
This really drives home why the Republican Party has been making inroads with blue-collar workers. These guys aren't acting. They talk about bombing the Middle East like it's the group-chat for subcontractors installing a new HVAC unit.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
My completely baseless speculation based only on reading the OP and skimming the Wikipedia page:
The series isn’t actually about violence, at least not thematically. The series is about sexualization, and the violence of the framing narrative serves as a grand metaphor. The series is cathartic because it validates the “ick” that women feel at unwanted sexual attention as being homoousian with physical violence.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
In areas near the border they have border patrol checkpoints where you have to stop the car and roll-down the window to talk to someone. I’ve never had any issues whatsoever, but I’ve also never been through one with somebody who has a strong Mexican accent.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
There is a quirk in United States immigration law. It is illegal to enter the United States without authorization, however, anyone physically present in the United States can apply for asylum. The fact that somebody applied for asylum does not retroactively make their unauthorized entry into the US legal. Even if they do have some level of protection from removal, they are still an illegal immigrant.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
One thing I noticed while reading through the immigration laws is that since Tren De Aragua has been designated as a terrorist organization, all noncitizen members of Tren De Aragua are deportable under 8 U.S.C. 1227(a)(4)(b). All the Trump administration has to do is prove by clear and convincing evidence (which is a lower standard than beyond a reasonable doubt) that these aliens, legal or not, are members of TDA and they can be deported.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
Because the state’s citizens pay federal income tax that funds these grant programs regardless, so turning down the money is functionally equivalent to funding other states’ education systems at the expense of one’s own
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
Likewise, they were all being held on at least probable cause for a crime.
Do we know this? I looked into the court documents and found this in an affidavit:
”While it is true that many of the TdA members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
If they are held on probable cause for a first offense, does that count as not having a criminal record?
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
The same session of congress that passed the Alien Enemies Act also passed the Alien Friends Act (which expired and is no longer on the books) which authorized the President to deport any alien that “he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, or shall have reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government thereof”, so it seems like they contemplated a difference between insidious conduct that just happens to be committed by an alien, and an alien hailing from a hostile foreign nation.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
The court order is a red herring. Trump using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans is illegal because the predicate condition of the act, “whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government,” is not satisfied. Is the assertion that the Venezuelan government is behind the Aurora apartment takeovers?
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
The series is worth it alone for the part where Darryl describes his experience with woke counterintelligence training.
That said, I kept waiting for another shoe to drop, and it never did. “Powerful people use their power to have sex with teenage girls,” isn’t exactly the jaw-dropping beyond-the-pale perversion it’s presented as.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
The presumption in the West ever since Augustine is that acts of official power derive their efficacy ex opere operato. The official acts of the president derive their authority not from the president personally, but from the constitution.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
Three possibilities stand out:
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Actually, there are no Epstein files. We already know everything that there is to know (or at least everything that it is possible at this point to know). This is the null hypothesis.
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Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset, and thus releasing the files would damage US-Israeli relations (I’m sure some of our less-plilosemitic users will gladly explain how exactly this translates into leverage over the Trump Administration).
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The contents of the Epstein files personally implicate Donald Trump.
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
Well yeah, omniscient AI will end war by taking over the world, leaving no possible adversaries.
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.
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