Alec Stapp

Many such cases

Looking for an even more considered take on the state of modern systems neuroscience? Read my piece in Macroscience, IFP’s fantastic (meta)science newsletter! I explain why systems neuroscience is like the Matrix, delve more into state-of-the-art neuroscience tools, and explain why sustained team science efforts are essential if we someday hope to upload our brains to the cloud. macroscience.org/p/how-close-ar…

Very useful measure of pre-NEPA delays. Federal agencies measure NEPA timelines from Notice of Initiation (NOI) to Record of Decision (ROD). But sponsors and agencies do years of work *before the NOI. This is widely known but rarely measured. x.com/ThomasHochman/…

😂

A shame that this will destroy the robust US shipbuilding industry

@LeahLibresco Me but with Caro (just finished book one of LBJ series)

My entire new personality is telling people to read Ivanhoe. (I’m a third of the way through Ivanhoe)

Why is the Center for American Progress running interference for the Jones Act americanprogress.org/article/how-th…

Brad @delong’s book, Slouching Towards Utopia lays out this case in crystal clear terms. Economic growth was outpacing population growth by the ~1880s. Synthetic fertilizer was driving sustainable agricultural yield gains by the 1930s. By 1970, fertility rates had been dropping for ~200 years! Ehrlich’s whole thesis was based on obvious lies to any expert at the time. He was a horrific monster.

Big ideas coming out of the @IFP Economics of Ideas, Science and Innovation PhD course ifp.org/economics-of-i…

Extremely under told story: NEPA defenders call the law the "Magna Carta of Environmental Law". But Nixon and the 1969 Congress had virtually no idea what they were creating when they passed NEPA. The law was never meant to be a vehicle for litigation or require 1,000+ page reviews. The framers of NEPA wanted to make major changes to protect the environment but they had little to no grasp on the lawsuits or the project-by-project review they were creating. Congress focused their debate on the creation of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) but they barely discussed section 102(2)(C) of NEPA that created the requirement for Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) that now require agencies to produce 1,000+ page reviews. Congress seems to have had no clue that the bill they were passing would become a vehicle for citizen-suits under the APA. NEPA itself has no judicial review section and senior negotiators do not appear to have debated the potential for the law to allow lawsuits against every reviewed project. The bill passed the Senate in July 1969 by unanimous consent — it appears no senator was aware of the bill's far reaching consequences. In December 1969 the bill was rushed through conference so members could go home for Christmas, passing the amended version through Senate without a roll call vote. In a retrospective Professor Lynton Caldwell said: "The disruptive effects of the Act on the business-as-usual economy do not appear to have been foreseen by the Congress or by those interests most likely to have been affected." Nixon's White House seems to have completely missed the costs of the EIS requirement. No WH agencies flagged the costs of the EIS requirement when reviewing the bill. NYTimes coverage of NEPA's passage barely discussed the EIS provision, focusing on an "anti pollution" headline that was inaccurate to the focus of NEPA. The EIS requirement was only mentioned in the second to last paragraph of a companion article. Judicial review was not discussed at all. And nobody foresaw or debated the possibility that CEQ would claim authority to issue binding regulations and expand NEPA far beyond the scope of NEPA's authorization. Categorical exclusions, environmental assessments, rules for community engagement, cumulative impacts, the meaning of major federal action were all invented by CEQ despite Congress never giving them formal authority to issue binding NEPA regs. Far from being the Magna Carta of Environmental Law NEPA is a poorly drafted law that Congress didn't understand before it was passed and has mostly been built out by regulation. fhwa.dot.gov/highwayhistory…

@jpmckenna15 still need to play it!

@AlecStapp Unless you're playing Gloomhaven. Then the risk is you go insane haha

jacob works at @blueprintbio and dramatically undersells how consequential they have been in pushing pathogen-agnostic defenses closer to the overton window. e.g.: if you're curious about far-UVC, they have published a 146 page report over it here: blueprintbiosecurity.org/u/2025/06/Blue…

@Ryan_Weller lol

@AlecStapp Without the Jones Act, what would the president waive in an emergency?

My "Jones Act is a national security law" t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt

"There is now unambiguous, solid economic evidence, not just abstract economic theory, that rent control would make the affordability problems facing [Massachusetts] worse, not better." - Jon Gruber, Chairman of the Economics Department at MIT

It is a special kind of insanity for a city to make it illegal to build buildings that are the same character as the existing neighborhood, and insist that anything new be smaller than what came before

This is supposed to be the “Future Land Use Map” but it coincidentally looks exactly the same as the “Current Land Use Map.”

manufacturing requires inputs that are often imported?

Per @AndyMasley's new tool, alfalfa growers in Colorado alone use 16 times as much water each year as all the data centers in the United States.

tariffs are bad. there is no plan

Crazy how this only lowers prices in a crisis