Randall Parker #VaccinesForMoreViruses

In the year 2050 the US economy will be ranked by size at what level globally?

@FredipusRex @AlecStapp @besttrousers Are there desired outcomes of these regulations? Their effects seem quite negative.

@AlecStapp @besttrousers Figuring out a way to preserve some of the desired outcomes of these regulations while doing a wholesale streamlining of the process (shedding decades of judicial and administrative barnacles) seems like a necessary step to get enough political support to make a dent

The Davis-Bacon Act requires "prevailing wage" on federally funded construction. It's been on the books since 1931. Applying it to the CHIPS Act created a bunch of problems... 1. One company learned mid-negotiation that it might need to locate 20,000 construction workers who'd already cycled off the job & pay them hundreds of millions in retroactive backpay — for work done years before CHIPS funding was awarded. 2. Another company making chips critical to the auto industry & defense industrial base couldn't reconcile prevailing wage with its profit-sharing pay structure or the requirement to track every employee's hours by trade classification. Their deal died after Davis-Bacon challenges consumed 6 months of negotiations. 3. For leading-edge fabs costing $20-25 billion to build, the Davis-Bacon premium ran into the hundreds of millions. But because CHIPS grants only covered ~10% of project costs, a 1% increase in construction costs meant a 10% increase in program costs, and fewer total projects funded. 4. To be clear, no single compliance requirement broke the CHIPS program. But the accumulation — Davis-Bacon, NEPA, procurement rules, the Paperwork Reduction Act — made execution far harder than it needed to be. New at Factory Settings, by Mike Schmidt, former director of the CHIPS Program Office: factorysettings.org/p/an-inside-vi…

Agree 💯 with @ThomasHochman on this. I learn a lot from both Semianalysis and Dwarkesh, but the main headwinds are regulatory policy and social license to operate, not technology. Electricity is both institutionally and technologically complex, more the former than the latter.

I have enormous respect for Semianalysis, but people in this ecosystem consistently fail to appreciate that the energy bottleneck isn’t physics per se but 1. policy and 2. social license to operate

The reason that rape rates in Germany have been increasing over the past decade or two has very little to do with native-born ethnically-German men.

@salonium @lugaricano We need an easy way to find out all the reasons why results that are influencing public debates are false.

Many public discussions center around trends and statistics that are not real at all. For over a decade, there was widespread public discourse about the causes of high and rising maternal mortality in the US. But, as I've written about before , CDC analyses showed that the apparent rise from 2003 to 2017 was due to a change in measurement ourworldindata.org/rise-us-matern… , when a pregnancy checkbox was added to death certificates, which flowed directly into maternal mortality counts in most cases. Rather than mortality rising, the rate had been stable. Many deaths had been previously missed, and many other countries were undercounting maternal deaths. This isn't an isolated case. - People often cite the IHME's estimate of childhood height having fallen in the UK over the past decade. Looking at the data sources, it missed one of the key sources of data on height - a national dataset measuring the height and weight of almost all schoolchildren in the UK, which showed no decline (that data wasn't publicly available until an FOIA request) - and instead the IHME estimates were likely extrapolated based on a global model and smaller, less reliable surveys. neilobrien.co.uk/p/honey-we-did… - I often hear claims about disruptive science having declined over time based on a highly influential paper in Nature. nature.com/articles/s4158… But the key results were affected by a coding bug, which would have showed a decline simply due to this artefact arxiv.org/abs/2402.14583 - The idea that interstate migration in the US has collapsed has led to lots of concern about dynamism and unemployment. But recently, it's been shown that much of the apparent decline was a statistical artefact of how the survey filled in missing responses, causing it to systematically overcount non-movers. Correcting this shows only a very slight decline over time link.springer.com/article/10.100… - The dramatic rise in autism diagnoses, which has spurred lots of commentary about pesticide use and vaccines, actually reflects changes in how autism was defined. In the 1960s, autism described severely disabled, mostly nonverbal children: if a child was verbal or succeeding at school, they were excluded from the diagnosis by definition. The criteria then widened across successive editions of the DSM. Alongside it, it became much easier to get assessed, from requiring a specialist with months-long waiting lists to something that could be done in a few appointments. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25922345/ -- I think this is a persistent problem of people undervaluing data quality and measurement. It may sound dull or academic to care about these issues, but numbers and statistics are a big part of public discussions. They can be the premise of debates that can go on for years and sometimes even decades, and mislead people about social and policy interventions to fix them. So before spending time arguing about the causes and consequences of a trend or statistic and what should be done about it, it's worth digging into the data to see if it supports the premise at all. I suspect there are many other discussions affected by this too. Are there others I've missed?

@richcalhoun @JigarShahDC Do we need limits on what job an FERC or ISO employee can do after leaving the job?

@JigarShahDC @futurepundit Until we start being honest about $, captured regulators and revolving door hiring then most of these conversations ring hollow. From FERC and the ISO’s down to the local level, the system has been corrupted. Folks are squeezing the grid to get rich, at the people’s expense.

Capturing most of that $15B requires about $500m of grid enhancing technologies

Re-upping this post to provide some context for how "sewer socialism" worked in Milwaukee. In 1936, public-sector unions in Wisconsin were permitted to exist as organizations, but they did not have a legal right to collective bargaining. Socialists in Milwaukee cooperated with associations representing firefighters, police, and sanitation workers, but public-sector unions didn't have the power and influence they have today. In that era, Milwaukee city budgets were almost entirely funded by property taxes and fees. This was in the thick of the Great Depression, so large numbers of Milwaukee workers were paid by the WPA. However, Medicaid and other grant-in-aid programs were nonexistent. Under 1936-like conditions—no formal collective-bargaining rights for public employees, no federal grant-in-aid programs—I actually believe socialist mayors could do pretty well. They would operate under much tighter fiscal constraints, which would force prioritization and spending discipline. So yes, let's roll back collective-bargaining rights for government workers, cut state and federal aid from 35–40 percent of municipal budgets to 5–10 percent, and stipulate that municipal governments must rely on stable revenue sources (e.g., property taxes and sales taxes) rather than unstable revenue sources (steeply progressive local income taxes). nytimes.com/2026/04/11/nyr…

"Despite regulatory success, antibiotic developers face low initial uptake due to stewardship practices, limiting early revenues" "High development and post-approval costs, combined with limited pricing power and weak acquisition interest, continue to...drive company exits."

The progressive view of crime--that criminals are poor victims of circumstance and thus it is our responsibility to fix them rather than to punish and stop them--is a massive tax imposed on the law-abiding and industrious Think of the trillions of dollars of urban real estate in cities like Detroit, Memphis, East St. Louis, and so on that are essentially valueless because we refuse to deal harshly with criminals Meanwhile, Singapore just uses the cane and gallows as necessary, and the result is that it is a very pleasant place in which to live and lacks the blighted swathes of the cityscape that predominate in America

What if Trump were really playing 4D chess, but instead of being a China hawk as Hudson Institute types assume, he was actually Lemoine-pilled on the idiocy of geopolitics and was covertly working to make Chinese regional hegemony so inevitable that it's pointless for the US to even try to prevent it, thereby saving the world from a conflict that would be not only pointless but also incredibly wasteful?

Today I learned that @SFMTA_Muni, @MTA, and @SFBART all have ~20x - 70x more staffing costs on a per rider trip basis than Tokyo's Metro system. US public transit is a scam that exists to employ politically desirable populations in exchange for votes.

"Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm..." unherd.com/2026/04/how-ce…

Yes, many companies have been exaggerating the role that generative AI has played in layoffs because they don't want to admit that they overhired.

A fascinating debate about the war is gripping the Arab world, but no one is reporting on it. No one except for the redoubtable @zriboua. Here's a snippet from Ibrahim Issa, Egyptian Writer, speaking from Cairo with host @Nayef_tv: "Issa: I hold the Arab political culture responsible since the 1950s and ‘60s until now — the hegemony of the political Islam project and the Nasserist and leftist ideas that dominate Arab culture, control its keys, and reign over it. That is the real problem. "We are in an inheritance — the dung inheritance, the mental and intellectual dung that dominates and controls the Arab mind." Read Zineb's substack here: substack.com/home/post/p-19…

@brad_polumbo We’re in Rome. Unlike Catholic churches, you can’t just randomly walk in to a temple for services. Always security around. This was our experience in Peru as well. Need to register ahead of time.

The Jewish synagogue near me in the suburbs is the only church that has razor wire surrounding and armed guards. Most other churches don’t even have fencing. The cathedral I attend downtown where there is way more crime and a lot of vagrants has an open door policy. We do have volunteer security (large men who do handle disruptions), but I’m pretty sure they aren’t armed, no fencing, etc..

There’s a large building down my street in Miami that I walk by that always has one, sometimes two, armed guards in full bulletproof body armor standing outside it. Curiosity got the better of me one day, and I looked up what was inside—a jewelry store, perhaps—that needed that kind of heavy-duty protection. It’s a Jewish center with a daycare.

The reason you see dorms or co-living arrangements only in college or the military is because colleges and the military have the ability to summarily evict a troublemaker without going through the 9 month eviction process ordeal that progressives have inflicted on the rest of society.