Sam Donald

Today experienced the 24th day of year hitting 30C in London. For perspective in whole of 1980s we had 21 days.

This is really great from @oliverwkim on the two Robert McNamaras indevelopmentmag.com/numbers-man/

Together with Good Ventures, we're increasing our 2026 commitment to @GiveWell's recommendations to $1 billion, up from the $175M we committed seven months ago.

@StefanFSchubert The more relevant metric would be growth in the number of very hot days (and nights), which would be larger than just looking at mean temperatures, e.g. see this article: ft.com/content/d78ed2…

It’s a myth you “didn’t need AC” in most of Europe 30-40 years ago. Yes summers have become hotter but the difference over time is modest compared with the geographical differences.

Articles: ft.com/content/19beee… cgdev.org/blog/battery-r… work from @leecrawfurd @y_james_hu

Over 250k schools educating >43m children are located within 5km of toxic sites recycling lead acid batteries. Cleaner lead acid battery recycling is one of the priorities for the Lead Exposure Action Fund @coeff_giving

Work at OpenAI is being transformed by agents, in every department. Across our entire company, people are using Codex to do work that is more complex, longer-running, and increasingly cross-functional. Our internal usage offers an early look at how agentic tools may reshape work as they become more capable and broadly available.

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease. This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit. The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London. A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box. These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel. They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains. They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep. Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”: > “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.” — The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates. It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption. SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins). The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill. With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment. Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two. It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place. All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now. That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective. If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

Based on FT analysis here: ft.com/content/d2ac48…

33 of Africa's top 50 fastest growing companies are in South Africa and Nigeria - maybe not that surprising. But 5 are in Mauritius? Sector-wise, fintech and financial services more dominant than I would have expected.

Not great that the UK's tax system is becoming more complex, but on the other hand pretty cool that we have data going back to the year 1000

China's cigarette consumption has risen 39% from 2003-2023, and China's tobacco/cigarette monopoly contributed >$200bn in fiscal revenue in 2024, equal to about 7% of China's total general public budget revenue

All of this (and some fascinating description of inventive money-laundering techniques) from this great review of Oliver Bullough's book by John Lanchester in the LRB: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/…

We don't really have any good data - but it's likely crime/money laundering, which is estimated at 2-5% of global GDP (!), and the third largest business in the world. And attempts to prevent it basically don't work, despite >$200bn/yr spent on compliance. (3/3)

In 2009 in the UK cash was used in 58% of transactions, and now it's 9%. And yet the value of banknotes in circulation globally has continued to rise dramatically - the value of all dollar bills in circulation has trebled between 2005 and 2025 to $2.4tn. What explains this? (1/3)

Today, @coeff_giving is launching the Strep A Vaccine Fund, a multi-donor initiative to accelerate vaccine development against one of the world's most neglected infectious diseases relative to its scale. Strep A kills ~639,000 people a year. There is no vaccine. I think that can change 🧵

Excellent piece on the crucial role played by US supply chain contracts in global health (in Haiti, in this example), most of which are due to be closed out by the end of September