He did the thing!

So do you think we’ll stop selling NVDA chips to China

Tyler Cowen is surely familiar with the concept of “moral hazard,” not sure if he knows that Elizabeth Holmes had her kids after being exposed for her crimes. Maybe does know, and he views the incentive to have more kids as positive. Add to the tax base, avoid prison.

Never lost respect for someone so fast

In 2009, I was a university freshmen at orientation, and we were presented with a skit themed around alcohol and consent. The skit, carried out by two sophomore orientation leaders (OLs) went something like this: A guy and a girl are together at a party, drinking and having a good time together. The girl says "It's loud here, do you want to head back to my room?" The guy enthusiastically agrees. Back at her dorm room, the girl takes off her jacket. The guy offers her a massage, she says "yeah, that would be nice." As he sits behind her, massaging her shoulders, his hands wander toward her breasts. She lightly bats one of his hands away, and he backs off. Several seconds later, he resumes the massage, his hands again venture toward her breasts, she grabs one of his hands and places it back on her shoulder. Again, he accepts this, and continues massaging her shoulders, as the audience of 20+ freshmen orientees uncomfortably watches. The third time his hands venture breastward, she leaps up, and screams "what the hell are you doing?" and he says "I'm sorry, I thought you were into this!" She says "No, I'm not into you that way! I thought we were friends! I invited you here as my friend!" The sophomore actors freeze-frame, and one of the OLs asks the audience "what have we learned here?" I, as a naive 18-year-old, assumed that the moral of the story was something like, "ladies: if you get drunk with a guy, invite him to your dorm room for some alone time, and accept his offer of a massage, don't be surprised if he construes that as sexual or romantic interest, especially if his first two attempts to physically escalate aren't met with any kind of verbal protest or other indication that you would like the massage to end." In fact, as the OL explained, I had drawn entirely the wrong message here: the message was actually "fellas, if you're drinking with a girl, and she invites you to her dorm room and accepts your offer of a massage, you would be ABSOLUTELY WRONG AND PREDATORY to construe this as indicator of sexual or romantic interest. The OL then went on to quiz the audience to made sure they had internalized the lesson of the skit, establishing other facts, like "she never affirmatively indicated her interest in anything sexual" and "by the way, even if she did, she's intoxicated, and unable to consent." Several times during this session, I glanced around at my fellow freshmen, scanning their faces and wondering, "am I the crazy one here?" Throughout the remainder of the ensuing interactive discussion, no one questioned the premise the OL had offered. The year was 2009.

it hadn’t occurred to me that this might be a constituency but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised