Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
7hr ago
The United States is going to expend massive amounts of financial and political capital ensuring that Israel doesn’t get nuked. We could have done this much easier via diplomacy. The benefit to Israel of doing it this way instead is that Iran also has all of its conventional weapons and economic power wiped out as well.
Quantumfreakonomics
8hr ago
Iranian Americans are extremely disproportionately religious minorities. My guess is that even a lukewarm Shi’ite Iranian would not have this reaction.
Quantumfreakonomics
12hr ago
The Supreme Leader is a dead man walking, but he also has access to 1000 lbs of 60%-enriched uranium.
There’s no way to deescalate. I don’t think Iran was inclined to preemptively nuke Israel before this war, but they probably are now. A nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran would increase the absolute risk WWIII by about 10% (anyone have different intuitions here?), which is obviously worth a giant ground invasion if that is the only way to disarm the threat.
I am ABSOLUTELY LIVID that it has come to this. We got completely played by the Israel lobby. We only needed nuclear nonproliferation. They wanted Iran disarmed completely.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I don't know what I expected, "black man stabbed to death at 60's music festeval," to look like, but this didn't dissapoint.
It's like a Family Guy sketch.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
It’s way too early to be reading blackpills like this.
Consider the implications for a hypothetical “no hook-ups” dating app. Are they really going to ban people for consensual encounters? How would they even know?
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
I was right by the way.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Dating is anti-inductive. A parable:
Back in the early days of Tinder it was common for women to mention that they love to watch tv, specifically Netflix. There wasn't any subtext to this. That was in fact what they loved to do, and so they put it on their dating profile. Men, wanting to get laid, responded by also putting how much they loved Netflix on their dating profile, and by asking women they matched with to "Netflix and chill".
This did not result in previously unheard of numbers of interest-matched couples forming relationships. It resulted in the word "Netflix" or "tv" becoming a gigantic red flag.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
One of the wonders of AI machine translation is that you can pull-up any Iranian state tv clip on YouTube get instant English subtitles.
One particularly amusing clip was when they had the Persian equivilent of Steve Kornacki at the big board breaking it down on the map, complete with animated missiles and drones blowing up American bases. I was surprised that the map they use for Israel The Occupied Territories includes the Golan Heights, but not the West Bank or Gaza.
Of course, despite the conspiracy theories, this works with Hebrew-language Israeli sources too. Channel 14 is what I have heard is the conservative news station in Israel. I'll let you know if I find any nuggets worth sharing.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
I giggle every time I see “Operation Epstein Fury”
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Lol. Obviously the mods, failing that the admins, failing that the government of the United States would never let footage of American troops getting brutally merc'd onto /r/combatfootage.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
There's an interesting rhetorical strategy I have been seeing lately from tankies and Islamic Republic apparatchiks: calling the Israeli-American alliance the "Epstein coalition", and describing American troops as "soldiers of the Epstein regime".
Does this idea have any traction among the local population, or is it entirely confined to extremely-online English-language propagandists? I imagine there is a lot of demand for conspiracy theories involving Judeo-Western debachery.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I'm also getting the vibe that the military is hiding how much damage they've taken. We know that missiles are getting through, but we haven't heard a casualty report since the first strike on Kuwait.
Reports are that Iran has hit one of our THAAD radars. These cost over $500 million and we only have(had) 13.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Fuentes has personal beef with GOP kingmakers because they have been shutting him out and getting him canceled for 10 years.
He was very public about not voting for Trump in 2024 too. Here’s a clip from Nick’s election night stream. I’ll let you decide whether or not he’s happy Trump won.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Iran sinking two or three oil tankers at the expense of Saudi Aramco is not a war-winning weapon. Sinking two or three oil tankers at the expense of the US taxpayer might be.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
The problem is that this policy makes oil tankers high-priority targets.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
Well if we’re going back to the 70s, you know which country killed a lot of Americans? Vietnam. We have the technology to find the current addresses of 80-year-old war veterans in Hanoi with American blood on their hands.
Obviously it would be completely deranged to go back and bomb them now 50 years after the fact.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
You can’t decide to switch from involuntary celibacy to voluntary celibacy. You are still involuntarily celibate.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
Referring to Iran, Trump says: "We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion they were going to attack first."
Oh, so he’s just lying.
The idea that Iran would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States is almost as absurd as Ukraine launching an unprovoked attack on Russia.
Trump as far as I can tell has been the only US official to take this position. Nobody else has mentioned a possible Iran first strike.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
If it’s the third or fourth time he’s done this I think I would have to let him learn the hard way that he needs to take care of himself.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
I would dispute whether it is inherently glorious to bomb shit and topple governments. I suppose it is cool, but not even I am callous enough to consider that a full justification.
I guess it comes down to what America is supposed to be getting out of the alliance with Israel. I can see the appeal of having a Westernized client state in the Middle East to hold down the fort, but typically one expects foreign policy optionally to be held almost exclusively by the suzerain.
If Israel can decide where and when to start major regional wars then I don’t see what the United States is getting out of this.
Top Administration Officials Are Now Openly Admitting That America Is Israel's Bitch.
This wasn't clipped and quoted from a fringe groyper. This was posted by an official White House account.
I can't believe this shit. The United States has abdicated strategic initiative to Israel. The American armed forces in the Middle East have been reduced to reacting to and mitigating damage from Israel's operations in the theater. The straightforward interpretation of the above quote is that Israel started a war that killed American troops.
I was watching Tucker Carlson lay out this exact theory and thought, “well that’s an interesting idea. Too bad we’ll never know for sure.” And then the first thing I see when I tab over to Twitter is Marco Rubio making the exact same thought.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
Here's my question: What would have to happen for Iran to stop being attacked by the United States and Israel? There are three reasons that people give for why Iran should be attacked:
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Iran funds terrorism and Islamist militias. This is true, but they mostly fund Shia militias and direct resistance to Israel (i.e. Hamas). Islamic terrorism in Western countries is almost always ISIS or Al Qaeda inspired. The Shia militias are the ones who did the dirty work of defeating ISIS on the ground, so it's not clear to me that removing Iran's funding of these groups would reduce terrorism in the United States and Europe.
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Iran is building a nuclear weapon. We had a deal on this, and Trump tore it up. If they were deadset on building a bomb, they would have done it by now. This seems like the kind of concession we could get in negotiations if the United States and Israel participated in good faith.
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Iran oppresses its own people. Okay, what's your plan for a regime in Iran that doesn't opress its own people? Here are some common options and why they don't work:
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An Islamic Authoritarian Regime - This is what we have now. It resulted in massive protests from the secular urban population which had to be repressed by force.
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A Truly Democratic Regime - Lots of potential problems here, but even if it had mass buy-in and legitimacy the Iranian population hates Israel and would likely continue support for the Axis of Resistance.
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A "Democratic" Regime - This would be a US puppet government. Devout muslims would be disenfranchised and oppressed (obviously we can't allow terrorist parties to run).
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A Secular Autocratic Regime (i.e. The Shah) - Same problem of being a US puppet as the "democratic" regime, but even less popular legitimacy.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
I went back into the archives to figure out how we ended up with the "safety" company running The Pentagon's KillNet.
June 26, 2024 - Anthropic announcement: "Expanding access to Claude for government". This one flew under the radar at the time. Key quote:
"we have crafted a set of contractual exceptions to our general Usage Policy that are carefully calibrated to enable beneficial uses by carefully selected government agencies. These allow Claude to be used for legally authorized foreign intelligence analysis, such as combating human trafficking, identifying covert influence or sabotage campaigns, and providing warning in advance of potential military activities, opening a window for diplomacy to prevent or deter them. All other restrictions in our general Usage Policy, including those concerning disinformation campaigns, the design or use of weapons, censorship, and malicious cyber operations, remain."
November 7, 2024 - Palantir announcement: "Anthropic and Palantir Partner to Bring Claude AI Models to AWS for U.S. Government Intelligence and Defense Operations". I couldn't find an official Anthropic communication about this, but I did find former-MIRI/current-Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger defending the deal on LessWrong:
"I got a question about Anthropic's partnership with Palantir using Claude for U.S. government intelligence analysis and whether I support it and think it's reasonable, so I figured I would just write a shortform here with my thoughts. First, I can say that Anthropic has been extremely forthright about this internally, and it didn't come as a surprise to me at all. Second, my personal take would be that I think it's actually good that Anthropic is doing this. If you take catastrophic risks from AI seriously, the U.S. government is an extremely important actor to engage with, and trying to just block the U.S. government out of using AI is not a viable strategy. I do think there are some lines that you'd want to think about very carefully before considering crossing, but using Claude for intelligence analysis seems definitely fine to me. Ezra Klein has a great article on "The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism" and I sometimes worry about Everything-Bagel AI Safety where e.g. it's not enough to just focus on catastrophic risks, you also have to prevent any way that the government could possibly misuse your models. I think it's important to keep your eye on the ball and not become too susceptible to an Everything-Bagel failure mode."
June 6, 2025 - Anthropic announcement: Claude Gov models for U.S. national security customers. Notable quote:
"Claude Gov models deliver enhanced performance for critical government needs and specialized tasks. This includes:
- Improved handling of classified materials, as the models refuse less when engaging with classified information"
July 14, 2025 - Anthropic announcement: Anthropic and the Department of Defense to advance responsible AI in defense operations. Note the difference in tone and detail from the original June 2024 announcement.
August 27, 2025 - Introducing the Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council. Basically a bunch of military-industrial complex blob people were brought in to do... something.
Speaking of the school strike, I'll take this opportunity to post a contender for the Hall of Fame of cope tweets.
This guy thinks that a KH-55 (air-launched) cruise missile was fired by Iran, and then got jammed by the US in a way which just so happened to cause it to nosedive straight down into a school that was 100 feet away from an IRGC facility which completely unrelatedly was targeted by real US-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles. His evidence? AI analysis of the grainy video of a high-subsonic missile puts the wing fins at 40-45% of the way down the fuselage, whereas a Tomahawk has wing fins 50% of the way down the fuselage.
7.4 million views and 34k likes by the way.
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