What a month. So much to cover. What this post does not cover beyond this introduction is the biggest news story of the month, a potential room temperature superconductor. If this discovery is real, it could be transformative. Think of the potential. We could be so back. Chances are that instead it is over, but even a small chance of something this big is huge. Even if it ends up being all over, it was amazing to see people around the world come together and do science to this to try and actually figure out something physical and real. Even in failure, we are so back.
#1 "no one has any leverage for enforcement once you lose the teeth of illegality."
This part didn't make sense to me. You say immediately after that "we enforce that be threatening your standing in society," which doesn't work on drug users, but the implicit previous status quo was that we did enforce drug laws against those people, for differing values of "worked." So what is the solution? Take whatever enforcement/penalty you had for "drug crimes", swap them to "whatever anti-social/destructive behavior that we actually don't want" and then you're done.
#2 " a gullible Verizon employee willing to swap SIM cards. "
My father-in-law got hit by this, but apparently just by someone getting into the phone provider's e-SIM system, so no physical access at all. Thankfully no major financial damage. e-SIM seems like a bad idea?
#3 re: "Crater being removed from Disney+ for cost-cutting reasons"
I don't get this? What are the fixed costs for having a single item listed in your streaming catalog? Zero, right? If no one streams it, it doesn't even consume bandwidth? If people are streaming it, then... shouldn't you be making money from it?
#4 "There are are remarkably large classes of transactions and business were AML/KYC is a gigantic effective tax on activity, often prohibitive. What do we get for this? Almost nothing."
You and I get nothing, but the government gets huge amounts of leverage over upstanding citizens. The question to ask is "what prosecutions/political attacks: "no banking for pot companies"/espionage" have been enabled by the information collected by those laws, and the answer is "a lot, and no way they're gonna give that up easily"
#5 "Many don't use statins, vaccines, or covid-19 therapies. Many choose to smoke cigarettes and eat the wrong food."
I want to highlight statins, because it is HIGHLY possible that they are a net negative on life expectancy, and this isn't a crazy opinion held only by anti-vaxxers. It is highly reprehensible - and indeed misinformation! - to list them in the same "great ROI on your life" category as vaccines or not smoking.
#6 "Will Newsome: it's pretty upsetting to see someone order a 10 piece mcnugget at McDonald's when paying one more dollar has gotten you a 20 piece instead for at least two decades years now."
As the parent of young children, I can confidently assert that the utility curve of mcnuggets (from the perspective of the person paying for the food: me) is extremely unorthodox, but for certain numbers of children in the car, that it does indeed bend in a negative direction after ~10 or so. There is value in not having things, or more accurately in this case, not having to do the work to dig them out of seat cushions to throw them out, or sop up the vomit of mcnugget-consumers with bad judgement.
#7 "Lab leak: extremely explicit that they're going to say the opposite in the paper for political reasons, and also lie to reporters."
While it does not justify this in any way, I will say that I distinctly remember articles (I think from India) being published very early on (maybe even before US outbreak?) that explicitly said covid was a designed bioweapon (potentially with HIV genetic extractions, for whatever value of "possible"), and that people were very worried that it would lead to military hostilities. I remember some very quick "debunking" and then never heard about that article or any of the others, ever again.
#8 "10/10: Rao’s"
Precisely correct.
#9 Re: "actual % of causes of death" vs "NYT coverage of causes of death" - doesn't this also constitute "misinformation"? If I start a paper and only headlines [murders by group X], while 100% truthfully, wouldn't it be obvious I was trying to just propagandize against X? Who is "X" for the NYT, or any other paper?
"So that means that there is a 2% car break-in rate per day." -- for Hertz, possibly, sure. But not sure that maps to cars more generally. Given known sophistication of modern gangs to track things like Bluetooth signals (see, e.g., https://www.wired.com/story/bluetooth-scanner-car-thefts/), entirely possible there's something distorting this like, "they're tracking Hertz's anti-theft locators to selectively pick off cars full of luggage."
Could easily be broadly predictive, just wanted to flag.
Re kosher restaurants, I think it boils down to a simple limit: You can only do one thing outstandingly, two things excellently, and three or more things moderately well.
John came to the US with his family when he was 11 or 12 years old. He learned English watching Sesame Street reruns, and then he kept watching TV and practicing until he could speak without an accent. His English is better than mine. He met my brother in college, where they were both studying computer science. Since turning 18 John is here on a student visa, so he wasn't allowed to work. He got jobs under the table during the summers, and apparently did the work of 10 programmers setting up entire services from scratch. To hear my brother tell it, John pretty much dragged my brother across the finish line. After they both graduated, my brother got a mid job at a giant code mill, but John had to find someone willing to sponsor him for a work visa within months or face deportation. He did actually find a company willing to sponsor him, but there were too many applicants that year and apparently he lost some kind of lottery with immigration. His application was denied. Rather than be deported back to a country he hasn't lived in since he was 11, John decided to extend his student visa and get his masters degree. He doesn't particularly want a masters degree, but this buys him more time to get a work visa.
John has lived in the US for the last 15 years. He went to American public schools, drives on American roads, and when he calls 911 it goes to the same emergency services as everyone else. Whatever costs are associated with his immigration, we as a society have already paid them. John is now desperately trying to pay the IRS tens of thousands of dollars a year in income tax, and immigration won't let him. Instead he's paying more tuition to a public university in the hopes of being able to try again. This is the state of US immigration law.
I remain intrigued with the idea, which I've seen expressed independently several times by others, that legalizing drugs could work if we would simply enforce _all the other crimes_ that (some) drug users commit. E.g. shooting up is fine, but not _also_ occupying a public restroom for too long, or vandalizing other's property, or assaulting someone. Requiring those arrested (detained) while intoxicated to 'sober up' before being released seems like it could also help.
I think 'mindfulness' isn't quite a scam, just extremely overrated and overly 'mysterized'. I do think that regular periods of quiet reflection or, e.g. staring at the sky/clouds/stars, can be soothing/relaxing/calming, and that that provides _most_ of the benefits from practicing 'mindfulness' or meditation. Some meditation practices _are_ somewhat interesting, independent of whether there are significant benefits from long-term regular practice.
Car colour: same in the UK. I recently bought a new car and started noticing colours, and I too could not believe how large a fraction was monochrome once I started paying attention. We got a blue one.
Re Online Safety Bill, again in the UK: the passage of the bill itself does not create the anti-e2e requirements that these services are finding most objectionable. The Bill grants Ofcom the _power_ to enact such regulations. A lot of coverage and discussion is loose about this distinction.
So if Bill passes I don’t expect anyone to leave immediately, though if Ofcom does follow through then it could well happen then.
It’s worth noting that in addition to the anti-e2e stuff that is drawing these predictions of departures, there are quite a few other vague and onerous requirements that make this a bad bill, so even if the worst doesn’t happen it’s not going to be good for UK.
And finally - if I’m wrong about any of the above, please let me know! It’s incredibly hard to figure any of this out by reading the media.
For what it's worth, KYC regulations seem kind of bad now but will probably become more valuable as we try to prevent AI agents from moving money around pretending to be people.
You wrote: "The actual answer is the FAA told airlines to prioritize saving fuel over passenger comfort, despite passengers having a strong revealed preference for spending the extra cost of fuel to have a more pleasant flight."
Careful reading of the Twitter thread does not support this assertion.
Furthermore, the FAA actually thinks OPD will make flights MORE pleasant, not less (https://www.foxweather.com/lifestyle/airline-industry-changes-faa-airports-opds-descents). The other headlines blaming turbulence on "climate change", may or may not be correct or misleading, but the Twitter user (covfefeanon, -50 rationality points) trying to connect these dots is being excessively speculative.
"Yes, Substack Notes technically exists, which is what caused Elon’s fit of pique, but I’ve never seen a link to it..." Lots of people -- and a growing number -- use Substack Notes. The reason you haven't seen a link to one is that Twitter/X's algorithm makes them hard to see. That's the case for links to Substack blogs, so it's surely the case for Notes.
The following 2 observations seem mutually contradictory:
> Are we indeed this lame? It seems that we are. We also don’t value unique identifiers sufficiently, also the people choosing this many white cars seem low-level insane.
> He calculated that if materials such as Purdue's ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth's surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.
It's obviously nowhere close to 1-2% of the planet's surface, but there is at least one very good reason to choose a white (or light gray) car over other options, especially if you live in a warmer latitude.
Former debater here (around 2009-2011). The discussion about kritik strategies in policy debate has been frustrating to read, (even where I agree with parts of the critique of kritik!). Frankly, I think the kritik-critical bloggers have been following the model of "strongest statement I can make while still being true", and should be read accordingly. (This makes me sad! They are good people and I wish they would do better!)
Some specific notes, some quite relevant, as sub-comments:
I would expect to see links to Notes in a Substack Post. With Twitter, the tweet is the main thing (most of the time). It's where you want people to engage you. On Substack, it seems to me that the Post is clearly the main thing. Notes are primarily to enable more people to find your blog, so the links would be from Notes to Post and rarely the other way around. Sorry, I don't have any numbers on usage. It's quite new so probably the numbers are still developing. It's silly of Musk to see Notes as a threat to X. They serve quite different purposes. Perhaps Notes will develop in a direction that makes it more of a threat but I suspect that would raise objections from bloggers who don't want another Twitter/X.
This is not the kind of mistake I'd expect to see you make so it's surprising to see two instances of it here: $40 million on tax prep lobbying and ~1% recovered from AML are equilibrium quantities not indicators of fundamentals. Intuit et al would spend more if they felt more threatened and $40m is likely nowhere close to the actual max they're willing to spend. Budgetary return on AML was never the point, complete success would look like 0% return and if returns are anywhere near 100% you're trivially spending too little; AML is semi-deliberately burning money to deter hard-to-measure negative-sum activity elsewhere (ie crime). $300b / year is certainly excessive (FBI only spends $10b / year?!) but it's not obvious that scaling it back would net the economy 90% let alone 99% of the difference.
In short: solve for the equilibrium! Surely >90% of good-faith policy mistakes come from holding quantities constant that are likely to change under intervention...
#1 "no one has any leverage for enforcement once you lose the teeth of illegality."
This part didn't make sense to me. You say immediately after that "we enforce that be threatening your standing in society," which doesn't work on drug users, but the implicit previous status quo was that we did enforce drug laws against those people, for differing values of "worked." So what is the solution? Take whatever enforcement/penalty you had for "drug crimes", swap them to "whatever anti-social/destructive behavior that we actually don't want" and then you're done.
#2 " a gullible Verizon employee willing to swap SIM cards. "
My father-in-law got hit by this, but apparently just by someone getting into the phone provider's e-SIM system, so no physical access at all. Thankfully no major financial damage. e-SIM seems like a bad idea?
#3 re: "Crater being removed from Disney+ for cost-cutting reasons"
I don't get this? What are the fixed costs for having a single item listed in your streaming catalog? Zero, right? If no one streams it, it doesn't even consume bandwidth? If people are streaming it, then... shouldn't you be making money from it?
#4 "There are are remarkably large classes of transactions and business were AML/KYC is a gigantic effective tax on activity, often prohibitive. What do we get for this? Almost nothing."
You and I get nothing, but the government gets huge amounts of leverage over upstanding citizens. The question to ask is "what prosecutions/political attacks: "no banking for pot companies"/espionage" have been enabled by the information collected by those laws, and the answer is "a lot, and no way they're gonna give that up easily"
#5 "Many don't use statins, vaccines, or covid-19 therapies. Many choose to smoke cigarettes and eat the wrong food."
I want to highlight statins, because it is HIGHLY possible that they are a net negative on life expectancy, and this isn't a crazy opinion held only by anti-vaxxers. It is highly reprehensible - and indeed misinformation! - to list them in the same "great ROI on your life" category as vaccines or not smoking.
#6 "Will Newsome: it's pretty upsetting to see someone order a 10 piece mcnugget at McDonald's when paying one more dollar has gotten you a 20 piece instead for at least two decades years now."
As the parent of young children, I can confidently assert that the utility curve of mcnuggets (from the perspective of the person paying for the food: me) is extremely unorthodox, but for certain numbers of children in the car, that it does indeed bend in a negative direction after ~10 or so. There is value in not having things, or more accurately in this case, not having to do the work to dig them out of seat cushions to throw them out, or sop up the vomit of mcnugget-consumers with bad judgement.
#7 "Lab leak: extremely explicit that they're going to say the opposite in the paper for political reasons, and also lie to reporters."
While it does not justify this in any way, I will say that I distinctly remember articles (I think from India) being published very early on (maybe even before US outbreak?) that explicitly said covid was a designed bioweapon (potentially with HIV genetic extractions, for whatever value of "possible"), and that people were very worried that it would lead to military hostilities. I remember some very quick "debunking" and then never heard about that article or any of the others, ever again.
#8 "10/10: Rao’s"
Precisely correct.
#9 Re: "actual % of causes of death" vs "NYT coverage of causes of death" - doesn't this also constitute "misinformation"? If I start a paper and only headlines [murders by group X], while 100% truthfully, wouldn't it be obvious I was trying to just propagandize against X? Who is "X" for the NYT, or any other paper?
"So that means that there is a 2% car break-in rate per day." -- for Hertz, possibly, sure. But not sure that maps to cars more generally. Given known sophistication of modern gangs to track things like Bluetooth signals (see, e.g., https://www.wired.com/story/bluetooth-scanner-car-thefts/), entirely possible there's something distorting this like, "they're tracking Hertz's anti-theft locators to selectively pick off cars full of luggage."
Could easily be broadly predictive, just wanted to flag.
Re kosher restaurants, I think it boils down to a simple limit: You can only do one thing outstandingly, two things excellently, and three or more things moderately well.
Also, would love if some people read this: https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/tsuyoku-naritai-does-the-torah-weaken
Bug: Nabeel S. Qureshi link is wrong, goes to unrelated journal post
Re Immigration:
My brother has a friend, let's call him John.
John came to the US with his family when he was 11 or 12 years old. He learned English watching Sesame Street reruns, and then he kept watching TV and practicing until he could speak without an accent. His English is better than mine. He met my brother in college, where they were both studying computer science. Since turning 18 John is here on a student visa, so he wasn't allowed to work. He got jobs under the table during the summers, and apparently did the work of 10 programmers setting up entire services from scratch. To hear my brother tell it, John pretty much dragged my brother across the finish line. After they both graduated, my brother got a mid job at a giant code mill, but John had to find someone willing to sponsor him for a work visa within months or face deportation. He did actually find a company willing to sponsor him, but there were too many applicants that year and apparently he lost some kind of lottery with immigration. His application was denied. Rather than be deported back to a country he hasn't lived in since he was 11, John decided to extend his student visa and get his masters degree. He doesn't particularly want a masters degree, but this buys him more time to get a work visa.
John has lived in the US for the last 15 years. He went to American public schools, drives on American roads, and when he calls 911 it goes to the same emergency services as everyone else. Whatever costs are associated with his immigration, we as a society have already paid them. John is now desperately trying to pay the IRS tens of thousands of dollars a year in income tax, and immigration won't let him. Instead he's paying more tuition to a public university in the hopes of being able to try again. This is the state of US immigration law.
> sequence has limited memory so it will repeat in a loop
I used a script to generate the sequence. It is very clearly not periodic.
Thanks for the post!
I remain intrigued with the idea, which I've seen expressed independently several times by others, that legalizing drugs could work if we would simply enforce _all the other crimes_ that (some) drug users commit. E.g. shooting up is fine, but not _also_ occupying a public restroom for too long, or vandalizing other's property, or assaulting someone. Requiring those arrested (detained) while intoxicated to 'sober up' before being released seems like it could also help.
I think 'mindfulness' isn't quite a scam, just extremely overrated and overly 'mysterized'. I do think that regular periods of quiet reflection or, e.g. staring at the sky/clouds/stars, can be soothing/relaxing/calming, and that that provides _most_ of the benefits from practicing 'mindfulness' or meditation. Some meditation practices _are_ somewhat interesting, independent of whether there are significant benefits from long-term regular practice.
Car colour: same in the UK. I recently bought a new car and started noticing colours, and I too could not believe how large a fraction was monochrome once I started paying attention. We got a blue one.
Re Online Safety Bill, again in the UK: the passage of the bill itself does not create the anti-e2e requirements that these services are finding most objectionable. The Bill grants Ofcom the _power_ to enact such regulations. A lot of coverage and discussion is loose about this distinction.
So if Bill passes I don’t expect anyone to leave immediately, though if Ofcom does follow through then it could well happen then.
It’s worth noting that in addition to the anti-e2e stuff that is drawing these predictions of departures, there are quite a few other vague and onerous requirements that make this a bad bill, so even if the worst doesn’t happen it’s not going to be good for UK.
And finally - if I’m wrong about any of the above, please let me know! It’s incredibly hard to figure any of this out by reading the media.
For what it's worth, KYC regulations seem kind of bad now but will probably become more valuable as we try to prevent AI agents from moving money around pretending to be people.
You wrote: "The actual answer is the FAA told airlines to prioritize saving fuel over passenger comfort, despite passengers having a strong revealed preference for spending the extra cost of fuel to have a more pleasant flight."
Careful reading of the Twitter thread does not support this assertion.
Furthermore, the FAA actually thinks OPD will make flights MORE pleasant, not less (https://www.foxweather.com/lifestyle/airline-industry-changes-faa-airports-opds-descents). The other headlines blaming turbulence on "climate change", may or may not be correct or misleading, but the Twitter user (covfefeanon, -50 rationality points) trying to connect these dots is being excessively speculative.
"Yes, Substack Notes technically exists, which is what caused Elon’s fit of pique, but I’ve never seen a link to it..." Lots of people -- and a growing number -- use Substack Notes. The reason you haven't seen a link to one is that Twitter/X's algorithm makes them hard to see. That's the case for links to Substack blogs, so it's surely the case for Notes.
The following 2 observations seem mutually contradictory:
> Are we indeed this lame? It seems that we are. We also don’t value unique identifiers sufficiently, also the people choosing this many white cars seem low-level insane.
> He calculated that if materials such as Purdue's ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth's surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.
It's obviously nowhere close to 1-2% of the planet's surface, but there is at least one very good reason to choose a white (or light gray) car over other options, especially if you live in a warmer latitude.
Former debater here (around 2009-2011). The discussion about kritik strategies in policy debate has been frustrating to read, (even where I agree with parts of the critique of kritik!). Frankly, I think the kritik-critical bloggers have been following the model of "strongest statement I can make while still being true", and should be read accordingly. (This makes me sad! They are good people and I wish they would do better!)
Some specific notes, some quite relevant, as sub-comments:
"Nabeel S. Quershi on puzzles" links to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30237320/
Should be either https://nabeelqu.co/puzzles or https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/notes-on-puzzles
I would expect to see links to Notes in a Substack Post. With Twitter, the tweet is the main thing (most of the time). It's where you want people to engage you. On Substack, it seems to me that the Post is clearly the main thing. Notes are primarily to enable more people to find your blog, so the links would be from Notes to Post and rarely the other way around. Sorry, I don't have any numbers on usage. It's quite new so probably the numbers are still developing. It's silly of Musk to see Notes as a threat to X. They serve quite different purposes. Perhaps Notes will develop in a direction that makes it more of a threat but I suspect that would raise objections from bloggers who don't want another Twitter/X.
This is not the kind of mistake I'd expect to see you make so it's surprising to see two instances of it here: $40 million on tax prep lobbying and ~1% recovered from AML are equilibrium quantities not indicators of fundamentals. Intuit et al would spend more if they felt more threatened and $40m is likely nowhere close to the actual max they're willing to spend. Budgetary return on AML was never the point, complete success would look like 0% return and if returns are anywhere near 100% you're trivially spending too little; AML is semi-deliberately burning money to deter hard-to-measure negative-sum activity elsewhere (ie crime). $300b / year is certainly excessive (FBI only spends $10b / year?!) but it's not obvious that scaling it back would net the economy 90% let alone 99% of the difference.
In short: solve for the equilibrium! Surely >90% of good-faith policy mistakes come from holding quantities constant that are likely to change under intervention...