Author name: 9u50fv

cod-liver-oil-embraced-amid-texas-measles-outbreak;-doctors-fight-misinfo

Cod liver oil embraced amid Texas measles outbreak; doctors fight misinfo

health, measles outbreak / /

US Health Secretary and long-standing anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing criticism for his equivocal response to the raging measles outbreak in West Texas, which as of Tuesday has grown to 159 cases, with 22 hospitalizations and one child death.

While public health officials would like to see a resounding endorsement of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine as the best way to protect children and vulnerable community members from further spread of the extremely infectious virus, Kennedy instead penned an Op-Ed for Fox News sprinkled with anti-vaccine talking points. Before noting that vaccines “protect individual children” and “contribute to community immunity,” he stressed parental choice. The decision to vaccinate is “a personal one,” he wrote, and merely advised parents to “consult with their healthcare providers to understand their options to get the MMR vaccine.”

Further, Kennedy seemed more eager to embrace nutrition and supplements as a way to combat the potentially deadly infection. He declared that the “best defense” against infectious diseases, like the measles, is “good nutrition”—not lifesaving, highly effective vaccines.

“Vitamins A, C, and D, and foods rich in vitamins B12, C, and E should be part of a balanced diet,” according to Kennedy, who has no medical or health background. In particular, he highlighted that vitamin A can be used as a treatment for severe measles cases—only when it is administered carefully by a doctor.

Vitamins over vaccines

But, Kennedy’s emphasis has spurred a general embrace of vitamin A and cod liver oil (which is rich in vitamin A, among other nutrients) by vaccine-hesitant parents in West Texas, according to The Washington Post.

A Post reporter spent time in Gaines County, the undervaccinated epicenter of the outbreak, which has a large Mennonite community. At a Mennonite-owned pizzeria in Seminole, the county seat of Gaines, a waitress advised diners that vitamin A was a great way to help children with measles, according to the Post.

A Mennonite-owned health food and supplement store a mile away has been running low on vitamin A products as demand increased amid the outbreak. “They’ll do cod liver oil because it’s high in vitamin A and D naturally, food-based,” said Nancy Ginter, the store’s owner, told the Post. “Some people come in before they break out because they’re trying to just get their kids’ immune system to go up so they don’t get a secondary infection.”

Cod liver oil embraced amid Texas measles outbreak; doctors fight misinfo Read More »

apple-refuses-to-break-encryption,-seeks-reversal-of-uk-demand-for-backdoor

Apple refuses to break encryption, seeks reversal of UK demand for backdoor

Apple, apple backdoor, Policy, UK Investigatory Powers Act / /

Although it wasn’t previously reported, Apple’s appeal was filed last month at about the time it withdrew ADP from the UK, the Financial Times wrote today.

Snoopers’ Charter

Backdoors demanded by governments have alarmed security and privacy advocates, who say the special access would be exploited by criminal hackers and other governments. Bad actors typically need to rely on vulnerabilities that aren’t intentionally introduced and are patched when discovered. Creating backdoors for government access would necessarily involve tech firms making their products and services less secure.

The order being appealed by Apple is a Technical Capability Notice issued by the UK Home Office under the 2016 law, which is nicknamed the Snoopers’ Charter and forbids unauthorized disclosure of the existence or contents of a warrant issued under the act.

“The Home Office refused to confirm or deny that the notice issued in January exists,” the BBC wrote today. “Legally, this order cannot be made public.”

Apple formally opposed the UK government’s power to issue Technical Capability Notices in testimony submitted in March 2024. The Investigatory Powers Act “purports to apply extraterritorially, permitting the UKG [UK government] to assert that it may impose secret requirements on providers located in other countries and that apply to their users globally,” Apple’s testimony said.

We contacted Apple about its appeal today and will update this article if we get a response. The appeal process may be a secretive one, the FT article said.

“The case could be heard as soon as this month, although it is unclear whether there will be any public disclosure of the hearing,” the FT wrote. “The government is likely to argue the case should be restricted on national security grounds.”

Under the law, Investigatory Powers Tribunal decisions can be challenged in an appellate court.

Apple refuses to break encryption, seeks reversal of UK demand for backdoor Read More »

on-writing-#1

On Writing #1

writing / /

This isn’t primarily about how I write. It’s about how other people write, and what advice they give on how to write, and how I react to and relate to that advice.

I’ve been collecting those notes for a while. I figured I would share.

At some point in the future, I’ll talk more about my own process – my guess is that what I do very much wouldn’t work for most people, but would be excellent for some.

  1. How Marc Andreessen Writes.

  2. How Sarah Constantin Writes.

  3. How Paul Graham Writes.

  4. How Patrick McKenzie Writes.

  5. How Tim Urban Writes.

  6. How Visakan Veerasamy Writes.

  7. How Matt Yglesias Writes.

  8. How JRR Tolkien Wrote.

  9. How Roon Wants Us to Write.

  10. When To Write the Headline.

  11. Do Not Write Self-Deprecating Descriptions of Your Posts.

  12. Do Not Write a Book.

  13. Write Like No One Else is Reading.

  14. Letting the AI Write For You.

  15. Being Matt Levine.

  16. The Case for Italics.

  17. Getting Paid.

  18. Having Impact.

Marc Andreessen starts with an outline, written as quickly as possible, often using bullet points.

David Perell: When Marc Andreessen is ready to write something, he makes an outline as fast as possible.

Bullet points are fine. His goal is to splatter the page with ideas while his mind is buzzing. Only later does he think about organizing what he’s written.

He says: “I’m trying to get all the points out and I don’t want to slow down the process by turning them all into prose. It’s not a detailed outline like something a novelist would have. It’s basically bullet points.”

Marc is saying that first you write out your points and conclusion, then you fill in the details. He wants to figure it all out while his mind is buzzing, then justify it later.

Whereas I learn what I think as I write out my ideas in detail. I would say that if you are only jotting down bullet points, you do not yet know what you think.

Where we both agree is that of course you should write notes to remember key new ideas, and also that the organizing what goes where can be done later.

I do not think it is a coincidence that this is the opposite of my procedure. Yes, I have some idea of what I’m setting out to write, but it takes form as I write it, and as I write I understand.

If you’re starting with a conclusion, then writing an outline, and writing them quickly, that says you are looking to communicate what you already know, rather than seeking to yourself learn via the process.

A classic rationalist warning is to not write the bottom line first.

Sarah Constantin offers an FAQ on how she writes. Some overlap, also a lot of big differences. I especially endorse doing lots of micro-edits and moving things around and seeing how they develop as they go. I dismiss the whole ‘make an outline’ thing they teach you in school as training wheels at best and Obvious Nonsense at worst.

I also strongly agree with her arguments that you need to get the vibe right. I would extend this principle to needing to be aware of all four simulacra levels at once at all times. Say true and helpful things, keeping in mind what people might do with that information, what your statements say about which ‘teams’ you are on in various ways, and notice the vibes and associations being laid down and how you are sculpting and walking the paths through cognitive space for yourself and others to navigate. Mostly you want to play defensively on level two (make sure you don’t give people the wrong idea), and especially on level three (don’t accidentally make people associate you with the wrong faction, or ideally any faction), and have a ‘don’t be evil’ style rule for level four (vibe well on all levels, and avoid unforced errors, but vibe justly and don’t take cheap shots), with the core focus always at level one.

I think this is directionally right, I definitely won’t leave a wrong idea in writing:

Paul Graham: Sometimes when writing an essay I’ll leave a clumsy sentence to fix later. But I never leave an idea I notice is wrong. Partly because it could damage the essay, and partly because you don’t need to: noticing an idea is wrong starts you toward fixing it.

However I also won’t leave a clumsy sentence that I wasn’t comfortable being in the final version. I will often go back and edit what I’ve written, hopefully improving it, but if I wasn’t willing to hit post with what I have now then I wouldn’t leave it there.

In the cases where this is not true, I’m going explicitly leave a note, in [brackets] and usually including a [tktk], saying very clearly that there is a showstopper bug here.

Here’s another interesting contrast in our styles.

Paul Graham: One surprising thing about office hours with startups is that they scramble your brain. It’s the context switching. You dive deep into one problem, then deep into another completely different one, then another. At the end you can’t remember what the first startup was even doing.

This is why I write in the mornings and do office hours in the afternoon. Writing essays is harder. I can’t do it with a scrambled brain.

It’s fun up to about 5 or 6 startups. 8 is possible. 12 you’d be a zombie.

I feel this way at conferences. You’re constantly context switching, a lot of it isn’t retained, but you go with the flow, try to retain the stuff that matters most and take a few notes, and hope others get a lot out of it.

The worst of that was at EA Global: Boston, where you are by default taking a constant stream of 25 minute 1-on-1s. By the end of the day it was mostly a blur.

When I write, however, mostly it’s the opposite experience to Graham’s writing – it’s constant context switching from one problem to the next. Even while doing that, I’m doing extra context switching for breaks.

A lot of that is presumably different types of writing. Graham is trying to write essays that are tighter, more abstract, more structured, trying to make a point. I’m trying to learn and explore and process and find out.

Which is why I basically can indeed do it with a scrambled brain, and indeed have optimized for that ability – to be able to process writing subtasks without having to load in lots of state.

Patrick McKenzie on writing fast and slow, formal and informal, and the invocation of deep magick. On one topic he brings up: My experience on ‘sounding natural’ in writing is that you can either sound natural by writing in quick natural form, or you can put in crazy amounts of work to make it happen, and anything in between won’t work. Also I try to be careful to intentionally not invoke the deep magick in most situations. One only wants to be a Dangerous Professional when the situation requires it, and you need to take on a faceless enemy in Easy Mode.

Patrick McKenzie also notes that skilled writers have a ton of control over exactly how controversial their statements will effectively be. I can confirm this. Also I can confirm that mistakes are often made, which is a Skill Issue.

Tim Urban says writing remains very hard.

Tim Urban: No matter how much I write, writing remains hard. Those magical moments when I’m in a real flow, it seems easy, but most of the time, I spend half a day writing and rewriting the same three paragraphs trying to figure out the puzzle of making them not suck.

Being in a writing flow is like when I’m golfing and hit three good shots in a row and think “k finally figured this out and I’m good now.” Unfortunately the writing muse and the golf fairy both like to vanish without a trace and leave me helpless in a pit of my own incompetence.

Dustin Burnham: Periods of brilliance would escape Douglas Adams for so long that he had to be locked in a hotel room by his editors to finish The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I definitely have a lot of moments when I don’t feel productive, usually because my brain isn’t focused or on. I try to have a stack of other productive things I can do despite being unproductive while that passes.

But over time, yes, I’ve found the writing itself does get easy for me? Often figuring out what I think, or what I want to write about, is hard, but the writing itself comes relatively easily.

Yes, you can then go over it ten times and edit to an inch of its life if you want, but the whole ‘rewriting the same three paragraphs’ thing is very rare. I think the only times I did it this year I was pitching to The New York Times.

What’s the best target when writing?

Visakan Veerasamy: Charts out for ribbonfarm.

I do endorse the core thing this is trying to suggest: To explore more and worry about presentation and details less, on most margins. And to know that in a real sense, if you have truly compelling fuckery, you have wiggled your big toe. Hard part is over.

I do not think the core claim itself is correct. Or perhaps we mean different things by resonant and coherent? By coherent, in my lexicon, he means more like ‘well-executed’ or ‘polished’ or something. By resonant, in my lexicon, he means more like ‘on to something central, true and important.’ Whereas to me resonant is a vibe, fully compatible with bullshit, ornate or otherwise.

Matt Yglesias reflects on four years of Slow Boring. He notes that it pays to be weird, to focus where you have comparative advantage rather than following the news of the week and fighting for a small piece of the biggest pies. He also notes the danger of repeating yourself, which I worry about as well.

Thread from 2020 on Tolkien’s path to writing Lord of the Rings. I’ve never done anything remotely like this, which might be some of why I haven’t done fiction.

Roon calls for the end of all this boring plain language, and I am here for it.

Roon: I love the guy, but I want the post-Goldwater era of utilitarian philosophical writing to be over. Bring back big words and epic prose, and sentences that make sense only at an angle.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: I expect Claude to do a good job of faking your favorite continental styles if you ask, since it requires little logical thinking, only vibes. You can produce and consume it privately in peace, avoiding its negative externalities, and leave the rest of us to our utility.

Roon: Eliezer, you are a good writer who often speaks in parables and communicates through fiction and isn’t afraid of interesting uses of language. You’ve certainly never shied away from verbosity, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

Perhaps some day I will learn how to write fiction. My experiences with AI reinforce to me that I really, really don’t know how to do that.

I usually write the headline last. Others disagree.

Luke Kawa: Joe Weisenthal always used to say don’t write a post until you know the headline first. More and more on short posts I find myself thinking “don’t write the post until you know the meme you can post with it first.”

As I said on Twitter, everyone as LessOnline instead gave the advice to not let things be barriers to writing. If you want to be a writer, write more, then edit or toss it out later, but you have to write.

Also, as others pointed out, if you start with the headline every time you are building habits of going for engagement if not clickbait, rather than following curiosity.

Other times, yes, you know exactly what the headline is before you start, because if you know you know.

I confirm this is sometimes true (but not always):

Patrick McKenzie: Memo to self and CCing other writers on an FYI basis:

If when announcing a piece you make a self-deprecating comment about it, many people who cite you will give a qualified recommendation of the piece, trying to excuse the flaw that you were joking about.

You think I would understand that ~20 years of writing publicly, but sometimes I cannot help myself from making the self-deprecating comment, and now half of the citations of my best work this year feel they need to disclaim that it is 24k words.

You can safely make the self-deprecating comments within the post itself. That’s fine.

Don’t write a book. If you do, chances are you’d sell dozens of copies, and earn at most similar quantities of dollars. The odds are very much doubleplusungood. Do you want to go on podcasts this much?

If you must write one anyway, how to sell it? The advice here is that books mostly get sold through recommendations. To get those, Eric Jorgenson’s model is you need three things:

  1. Finishable. If they don’t finish it, they won’t recommend it. So tighten it up.

  2. Unique OR Excellent. Be the best like no one ever was, or be like no one ever was.

  3. Memorable. Have hooks, for when people ask for a book about or for some X.

If you are thinking about writing a book, remember that no one would buy it.

Michael Dempsey and Ava endorse the principle of writing things down on the internet even if you do not expect anyone to read them.

Michael Dempsey: I loved this thread from Ava.

My entire career is owed to my willingness to write on the Internet.

And that willingness pushed me to write more in my personal life to loved ones.

As long as you recognize that most people will not care, your posts probably will not go viral, but at some point, one person might read something you write and reach out (or will value you including a blue link to your thoughts from many days, weeks, months, or years ago), it’s close to zero downside and all upside.

Ava: I’m starting to believe that “write on the Internet, even if no one reads it” is underrated life advice. It does not benefit other people necessarily; it benefits you because the people who do find or like your writing and then reach out are so much more likely to be compatible with you.

It’s also a muscle. I used to have so much anxiety posting anything online, and now I’m just like “lol, if you don’t like it, just click away.” People underestimate the sheer amount of content on the Internet; the chance of someone being angry at you for something is infinitely lower than no one caring.

I think it’s because everyone always sees outrage going viral, and you think “oh, that could be me,” and forget that most people causing outrage are trying very hard to be outrageous. By default, no one cares, or maybe five people care, and maybe some nice strangers like your stuff, and that’s a win.

Also, this really teaches you how to look for content you actually like on the Internet instead of passively receiving what is funneled to you. Some of my favorite Internet experiences have been reading a personal blog linked to someone’s website, never marketed, probably only their friends and family know about it, and it’s just the coolest peek into their mind.

I think the thing I’m trying to say here is “most people could benefit from writing online, whether you should market your writing aggressively is a completely different issue.” I wrote on Tumblr and Facebook and email for many years before Substack, and 20 people read it, and that was great.

I would not broadly recommend “trying to make a living off your writing online,” but that’s very different from “share some writing online.”

What is the number of readers that justifies writing something down? Often the correct answer is zero, even a definite zero. Even if it’s only about those who read it, twenty readers is actually a lot of value to put out there, and a lot of potential connection.

Paul Graham predicts that AI will cause the world to divide even more into writes and write-nots. Writing well and learning to write well are both hard, especially because it requires you to think well (and is how you think well), so once AI can do it for us without the need to hire someone or plagiarize, most people won’t learn (and one might add, thanks to AI doing the homework they won’t have to), and increasingly rely on AI to do it for them. Which in turn means those people won’t be thinking well, either, since you need to write to think well.

I think Graham is overstating the extent AI will free people from the pressure to write. Getting AI to write well in turn, and write what you actually want it to write, requires good writing and thinking, and involving AI in your writing OODA loop is often not cheap to do. Yes, more people will choose not to invest in the skill, but I don’t think this takes the pressure off as much as he expects, at least until AI gets a lot better.

There’s also the question of how much we should force people to write anyway, in order to make them think, or be able to think.

As Graham notes, getting rid of the middle ground could be quite bad:

Robin Hanson: But most jobs need real thinking. So either the LLMs will actually do that thinking for them, or workers will continue to write, in order to continue to think. I’d bet on the latter, for decades at least.

Perry Metzger: Why do we still teach kids mathematics, even though at this point, most of the grunt work is done better by computers, even for symbolic manipulation? Because if they’re going to be able to think, they need to practice thinking.

Most jobs don’t require real thinking. Proof: Most people can’t write.

One could argue that many jobs require ‘mid-level’ real thinking, the kind that might be lost, but I think mostly this is not the case. Most tasks and jobs don’t require real thinking at all, as we are talking about it here. Being able to do it? Still highly useful.

On the rare occasions the person can indeed do real thinking, it’s often highly valuable, but the jobs are designed knowing most people can’t and won’t do that.

Gwern asks, why are there so few Matt Levines? His conclusion is that Being Matt Levine requires both that a subject be amenable to a Matt Levine, which most aren’t, and also that there be a Matt Levine covering them, and Matt Levines are both born rather than made and highly rare.

In particular, a Matt Levine has to shout things into the void, over and over, repeating simple explanations time and again, and the subject has to involve many rapidly-resolved example problems to work through, with clear resolutions.

The place where I most epicly fail to be a Matt Levine in this model is my failure to properly address the beginner mindset and keep things simple. My choice to cater to a narrower, more advanced crowd, one that embraces more complexity, means I can’t go wide the way he can. That does seem right.

I could try to change this, but I mostly choose not to. I write too many words as it is.

The case for italics. I used to use italics a lot.

Char: “never italicise words to show emphasis! if you’re writing well your reader will know. you don’t need them!” me: oh 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺? listen up buddy, you will have to pry my emotional support italics from my 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘥, 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥, 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘴, they are going 𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦.

Richard White: I’m coming to the conclusion that about 99.9% of all writing “rules” can safely be ignored. As long as your consistent with your application of whatever you’re doing, it’ll be fine.

Kira: Italics are important for subtlety and I will fight anyone who says otherwise

It’s a great tool to have in your box. What I ultimately found was it is also a crutch that comes with a price. You almost never need italics, and the correct version without italics is easier on the reader.

When I look back on my old writing and see all the italics, I often cringe. Why did I feel the need to do that? Mostly I blame Eliezer Yudkowsky giving me felt permission to do it. About 75% of the time I notice that I can take out the italics and nothing would go wrong. It would be a little less obvious what I’m trying to emphasize, in some senses, but it’s fine. The other 25% of the time, I realize that the italics is load bearing, and if I remove it I will have to reword, so mostly I reword.

Scott Alexander does his third annual Subscribe Drive. His revenue has leveled off. He had 5,993 paid subscribers in 2023, 5,523 in 2024, and has 5,329 now in 2025. However his unpaid numbers keep going up, from to 78k to 99k to 126k.

I’ve been growing over time, but the ratios do get worse. I doubled my unpaid subscriber count in 2023, and then doubled it again in 2024. But my subscription revenue was only up about 50% in 2023, and only up another 25% in 2024. I of course very much appreciate paid subscriptions, but I am 100% fine, and it is not shocking that my offer of absolutely nothing extra doesn’t get that many takers.

Paywalls are terrible, but how else do you get paid?

Email sent to Rob Henderson: The hypocrisy of the new upper class he proclaims as he sends a paid only email chain…

Cartoons Hate Her: Sort of a different scenario but most people say they think it should be possible to make a living as a writer or artist and still shout “LAME!! PAYWALL!” whenever I attempt to *checks notesmake a living as a writer.

Rob Henderson: Agree with this. Regrettably I’ll be adding more paywalls going forward. But will continue to regularly offer steep discounts and free premium subscriptions.

I am continuously grateful that I can afford to not have a paywall, but others are not so fortunate. You have to pay the bills, even though it is sad that this greatly reduces reach and ability to discuss the resulting posts.

It’s great to be able to write purely to get the message out and not care about clicks. Unfortunately, you do still have to care a little about how people see the message, because it determines how often they and others see future messages. But I am very grateful that, while I face more pressure than Jeff, I face vastly less than most, and don’t have to care at all about traffic for traffic’s sake.

Ideally, we would have more writers who are supported by a patron system, in exchange for having at most a minimal paywall (e.g. I think many would still want a paywall on ability to comment to ensure higher quality or civility, or do what Scott Alexander does and paywall a weird 5% of posts, or do subscriber-questions-only AMAs or what not).

Scott Sumner cites claims that blogging is effective. I sure hope so!

Patrick McKenzie suggests responding to future AIs reading your writing by, among other things, ‘creating more spells’ and techniques that can thereby be associated with you, and then invoked by reference to your name. And to think about how your writing being used as training data causes things to be connected inside LLMs. He also suggests that having your writing outside paywalls can help.

In my case, I’m thinking about structure – the moves between different topics are designed to in various ways ‘make sense to humans’ but I worry about how they might confuse AIs and this could cause confusion in how they understand me and my concepts in particular, including as part of training runs. I already know this is an issue within context windows, AIs are typically very bad at handling these posts as context. One thing this is motivating is more clear breaks and shorter sections than I would otherwise use, and also shorter more thematically tied together posts.

Ben Hoffman does not see a place or method in today’s world for sharing what he sees as high-quality literate discourse, at least given his current methods, although he identifies a few people he could try to usefully engage with more. I consistently find his posts some of the most densely interesting things on the internet and often think a lot about them, even though I very often strongly disagree with what he is saying and also often struggle to even grok his positions, so I’m sad he doesn’t offer us more.

My solution to the problem of ‘no place to do discourse’ is that you can simply do it on Substack on your own, respond to whoever you want to respond to, speak to who you want to speak to and ignore who you want to ignore. I do also crosspost to LessWrong, but I don’t feel any obligation to engage if someone comments in a way that misconstrues what I said.

Discussion about this post

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kaizen:-a-factory-story-makes-a-game-of-perfecting-1980s-japanese-manufacturing

Kaizen: A Factory Story makes a game of perfecting 1980s Japanese manufacturing

gaming, Japan, japanese culture, kaizen, kaizen: a factory story, manufacturing, puzzle games, zachtronics / /

Zach Barth, the namesake of game studio Zachtronics, tends to make a certain kind of game.

Besides crafting the free browser game Infiniminer, which inspired the entire global Minecraft industry, Barth and his collaborators made SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, Opus Magnum, and Exapunks. Each one of them is some combination of puzzle game, light capitalism horror, and the most memorable introductory-level computer science, chemistry, or logistics class into which you unwittingly enrolled. Each game is its own thing, but they have a certain similar brain feel between them. It is summed up perhaps best by the Zachtronics team itself in a book: Zach-Like.

Barth and his crew have made other kinds of games, including a forward-looking visual novel about AI, Eliza, and multiplayer card battler Nerts!. And Barth himself told PC Gamer that he hates “saying Zach-like.” But fans of refining inputs, ordering operations, and working their way past constraints will thrill to learn that Zach is, in fact, back.

Announcement trailer for Kaizen: A Factory Story.

Kaizen: A Factory Story, from developer Coincidence and comprising “the original Zachtronics team,” puts you, an American neophyte business type, in charge of a factory making toys, tiny electronics, and other goods during the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s. You arrange the spacing and order of operations of the mechanical arms that snap the head onto a robot toy, or the battery onto a Walkman, for as little time, power, and financial cost as possible.

Kaizen: A Factory Story makes a game of perfecting 1980s Japanese manufacturing Read More »

salty-game-dev-comments,-easier-mods-are-inside-command-&-conquer’s-source-code

Salty game dev comments, easier mods are inside Command & Conquer’s source code

Command & Conquer, EA, Electronic Arts, gaming, real time strategy, source code / /

Inside the source code are some wonderful reminders of what Windows game development from 1995 to 2003 was really like. One experienced modder posted some gems on Bluesky, like a “HACK ALERT!” text string added just to prevent the Watcom IDE from crashing because of a “magic text heap length” crash: “Who knows why, but it works,” wrote that poor soul.

This writer’s personal favorite is this little bit in the RampOptions.cpp file in Generals, credited to John K. McDonald Jr., which expresses concerns about “TheRampOptions” existing with a set value:

if (TheRampOptions)

// oh shit.

return;

In addition to helping out modders and entertaining experienced coders, the GPL-licensed source code releases do a lot to help preserve these games, such that they can be reworked to run on future platforms. Projects like OpenRA and OpenSAGE already offer open source reimplementations of those games’ code, but having the original source can only help. C&C community stalwart Luke “CCHyper” Feenan worked with EA leaders to get the code back into a build-ready state and said in a press release that the updated code should make the classic games easier to patch in the future.

As part of the source code release, the Command & Conquer team dropped off 35 minutes of footage, newly found in the archives, of alpha and archive footage from the later Sage-engine based Generals and Renegade games.

Archival footage from alpha versions of Command & Conquer: Generals and Renegade, released by EA as part of their source code release.

It’s heartening to see that with the right combination of people and purpose, classic games can find renewed interest and longevity inside a big publisher.

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europol-arrests-25-users-of-online-network-accused-of-sharing-ai-csam

Europol arrests 25 users of online network accused of sharing AI CSAM

ai csam, AI-generated images, child exploitation, child sex abuse, csam, European Union, europol, Policy / /

In South Korea, where AI-generated deepfake porn has been criminalized, an “emergency” was declared and hundreds were arrested, mostly teens. But most countries don’t yet have clear laws banning AI sex images of minors, and Europol cited this fact as a challenge for Operation Cumberland, which is a coordinated crackdown across 19 countries lacking clear guidelines.

“Operation Cumberland has been one of the first cases involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM), making it exceptionally challenging for investigators, especially due to the lack of national legislation addressing these crimes,” Europol said.

European Union member states are currently mulling a rule proposed by the European Commission that could help law enforcement “tackle this new situation,” Europol suggested.

Catherine De Bolle, Europol’s executive director, said police also “need to develop new investigative methods and tools” to combat AI-generated CSAM and “the growing prevalence” of CSAM overall.

For Europol, deterrence is critical to support efforts in many EU member states to identify child sex abuse victims. The agency plans to continue to arrest anyone discovered producing, sharing, and/or distributing AI CSAM while also launching an online campaign to raise awareness that doing so is illegal in the EU.

That campaign will highlight the “consequences of using AI for illegal purposes,” Europol said, by using “online messages to reach buyers of illegal content” on social media and payment platforms. Additionally, the agency will apparently go door-to-door and issue warning letters to suspects identified through Operation Cumberland or any future probe.

It’s unclear how many more arrests could be on the horizon in the EU, but Europol disclosed that 273 users of the Danish suspect’s online network were identified, 33 houses were searched, and 173 electronic devices have been seized.

Europol arrests 25 users of online network accused of sharing AI CSAM Read More »

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Serbian student’s Android phone compromised by exploit from Cellebrite

Amnesty International, android, Biz & IT, Cellebrite, nso group, Security, zero days / /

Amnesty International on Friday said it determined that a zero-day exploit sold by controversial exploit vendor Cellebrite was used to compromise the phone of a Serbian student who had been critical of that country’s government.

The human rights organization first called out Serbian authorities in December for what it said was its “pervasive and routine use of spyware” as part of a campaign of “wider state control and repression directed against civil society.” That report said the authorities were deploying exploits sold by Cellebrite and NSO, a separate exploit seller whose practices have also been sharply criticized over the past decade. In response to the December report, Cellebrite said it had suspended sales to “relevant customers” in Serbia.

Campaign of surveillance

On Friday, Amnesty International said that it uncovered evidence of a new incident. It involves the sale by Cellebrite of an attack chain that could defeat the lock screen of fully patched Android devices. The exploits were used against a Serbian student who had been critical of Serbian officials. The chain exploited a series of vulnerabilities in device drivers the Linux kernel uses to support USB hardware.

“This new case provides further evidence that the authorities in Serbia have continued their campaign of surveillance of civil society in the aftermath of our report, despite widespread calls for reform, from both inside Serbia and beyond, as well as an investigation into the misuse of its product, announced by Cellebrite,” authors of the report wrote.

Amnesty International first discovered evidence of the attack chain last year while investigating a separate incident outside of Serbia involving the same Android lockscreen bypass. Authors of Friday’s report wrote:

Serbian student’s Android phone compromised by exploit from Cellebrite Read More »

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Google will finally fix awesome (but broken) song detection feature for Pixels

android, Google, pixels, Tech / /

Google’s Pixel phones include numerous thoughtful features you don’t get on other phones, like Now Playing. This feature can identify background music from the lock screen, but unlike some similar song identifiers, it works even without an Internet connection. Sadly, it has been broken for months. There is some hope, though. Google has indicated that a fix is ready for deployment, and Pixel users can expect to see it in a future OS update.

First introduced in 2017, Now Playing uses a cache of thousands of audio fingerprints to identify songs you might encounter in your daily grind. Since it works offline, it’s highly efficient and preserves your privacy. Now Playing isn’t a life-changing addition to the mobile experience, but it’s damn cool.

That makes it all the stranger that Google appears to have broken Now Playing with the release of Android 15 (or possibly a Play Services update around the same time) and has left it that way for months. Before that update, Now Playing would regularly list songs on the lock screen and offer enhanced search for songs it couldn’t ID offline. It was obvious to Pixel fans when Now Playing stopped listening last year, and despite a large volume of online complaints, Google has seemingly dragged its feet.

Google will finally fix awesome (but broken) song detection feature for Pixels Read More »

doctors-report-upticks-in-severe-brain-dysfunction-among-kids-with-flu

Doctors report upticks in severe brain dysfunction among kids with flu

CDC, encephalitis, encephalopathy, flu, health, kids, MMWR, neurological / /

Doctors around the US have anecdotally reported an uptick of children critically ill with the flu developing severe, life-threatening neurological complications, which can be marked by seizures, delirium, hallucinations, decreased consciousness, lethargy, personality changes, and abnormalities in brain imaging.

It’s long been known that the seasonal flu can cause such devastating complications in some children, many with no underlying medical conditions. But doctors have begun to suspect that this year’s flu season—the most severe in over 15 years—has taken a yet darker turn for children. On February 14, for instance, health officials in Massachusetts released an advisory for clinicians to be on alert for neurological complications in pediatric flu patients after detecting a “possible increase.”

With the anecdata coming in, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed all the data it has on neurological complications from flu this year and seasons dating back to 2010. Unfortunately, existing surveillance systems for flu do not capture neurological complications in pediatric cases overall—but they do capture such detailed clinical data when a child dies of flu.

An analysis of that data, published today in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, can’t definitively say that this year is out of the norm. For one thing, the flu season is not yet over. But the data so far does suggest it may be one of the more severe seasons in the last 15 years.

Specifically, the CDC received reports of a severe neurological complication called influenza-associated acute necrotizing encephalopathy (ANE). ANE is a severe form of the more general category of influenza-associated encephalopathy or encephalitis (IAE), meaning brain dysfunction or inflammation from the flu.

When a child dies of the flu, clinicians are required to fill out a standardized case report form from the CDC, which collects a large variety of data, including complications. Encephalopathy or encephalitis are included as a checkbox on the form.

Between 2010 and February 8, 2025, 1,840 children died of the flu. Of those, 166 had IAE checked off as a complication. IAE was most prevalent in children aged 2 to 4 but affected children in all age groups under 18. More than half of the cases (54 percent) had no underlying medical conditions, and most (80 percent) were unvaccinated against the flu.

Doctors report upticks in severe brain dysfunction among kids with flu Read More »

11-standouts-from-steam-next-fest’s-thousands-of-free-game-demos

11 standouts from Steam Next Fest’s thousands of free game demos

Demo impressions, Features, Game demos, gaming, steam, steam games / /

Let Ars help you find some needles in Steam’s massive haystack of game trials.

If you head over to the Steam Next Fest charts right now, Valve will offer you a glimpse of the 2,228 games offering free downloadable demos as part of the event through Sunday, March 3. That is way too many games to effectively evaluate in such a short time, even with the massive resources of the Ars Orbiting HQ.

But we haven’t let that stop us from trying. With the assistance of some early access provided by Valve and game publishers, we’ve spent the last few days playing dozens and dozens of the most promising Next Fest demos in an attempt to pull out some interesting-looking needles from Valve’s massive haystack. Below are the results of that search—a varied list of 11 titles we think are worth investing some time (and zero dollars of money) into a demo download.

But this is just a starting point. Please use the comments below to share any other diamonds in the rough you think your fellow Ars readers need to know about.

Afterblast

Developer: Lumino Games

Planned release date: April 2025

Popular steam tags: FPS, Online Co-Op, Action Roguelike, Roguelite

Steam page

Start with the roguelike, room-based shooting action of Returnal. Move it to a first-person perspective and add in the double-jump-and-dash movement system of the new Doom games. Throw in a Halo Infinite-style grappling hook that can be used for traversal or combat. The result would come pretty close to Afterblast, a twitch-action shooter that shines from the jump in this fast-paced demo.

This is the kind of game where halting your movement for even a split second often means being instantly overwhelmed by enemies that swarm from all angles. Rather than being hard to handle, though, the game’s zippy movement makes it feel relatively simple to jump and dash from ledge to ledge, avoiding bullet-hell style projectile patterns as you do.

The grappling hook is by far the most satisfying part of the demo, though. Beyond jumping out of the way of opposing fire, you can also use it to drag yourself over to stunned enemies, exploding them into piles of goo and collectible items. Bouncing from enemy to enemy in this way, with a few well-placed jumps and dashes in between, felt like being a kid bouncing on a trampoline.

The Afterblast demo provides a feel for the game’s randomized item system, which gives access to automated drones, powerful grenades, and other superpowers that should make each run feel unique. We can’t wait to see more.

-Kyle Orland

Castle V Castle

Developer: Nopopo

Planned release date: “Coming soon”

Popular steam tags: Card Battler, Roguelite, Card Game, PvE

Steam page

If you remember cult-classic Flash game Castle Wars, you already know the basics of Castle V Castle. You and your opponent take turns using a handful of cards to either build up your own castle or break down the castle on the other side until one castle has been reduced to rubble. You then improve your deck and do it all again.

Playing effectively means figuring out when to attack, when to defend, and when to use cards to bulk up the various resources needed to play future cards. Strong play requires thinking a few moves ahead, both to avoid being left with a hand of unplayable cards and to counter or reflect potential incoming attacks from your opponent (or deny them the resources they might need).

An extremely clean black and white interface and quick, amusing animations make this a very easy game to pick up and play. But it’s the strategy of taking on short-term risks to get long-term rewards that will keep you coming back for round after round. And while the demo’s extremely punishing daily challenges are good for some continued longevity, we’re hoping the final game will add online multiplayer battles rather than just letting us beat down the AI over and over again.

-Kyle Orland

Dragonkin: The Banished

Developer: Eko Software

Planned release date: March 6, 2025 (Early Access)

Popular steam tags: Action, Hack and Slash, Adventure, RPG, Loot

Steam page

If you’ve grown tired of Diablo IV but are looking for another dark, mouse-based action RPG to scratch the same itch, Dragonkin: The Banished should be right up your alley. Just like in Diablo, the name of the game here is clicking to move and attack swarms of enemies in dark isometric dungeons, throwing in some magical attacks with the number keys on your keyboard as needed.

The Dragonkin demo leads you through a lot of extremely expository and overwrought cutscenes, broken up by short playable vignettes that introduce you to the main character classes: the heavy, the archer, the fire mage, etc. These introductory characters seem extremely overpowered for the early game, cutting through enemy grunts like butter while barely taking a scratch from underpowered opposition attacks. But it gives a good feel for the wide variety of available attacks available, from radiating lightning to a satisfying bull charge.

It’s only after this introduction that you’re thrown into a more standard challenge, clearing out a dungeon with a low-level character that needs all the help they can get. While the moment to moment gameplay will be familiar to Diablo heads, a few small touches like a handy dash-dodge maneuver make it all lean a bit more towards the “action” side of “action RPG.”

If you’re looking for pyrotechnic explosions, cinematic cut scenes, and plenty of things to click on, you could definitely do a lot worse.

-Kyle Orland

Glum

Developer: CinderCat Games

Planned release date: 2025

Popular steam tags: Adventure, Funny, Singleplayer

Steam page

First-person shooters are obviously all about the shooting—it’s right there in the name, after all. But the most satisfying part of these games is often running right up to an enemy and pounding them with a suspiciously powerful close-range melee attack.

Glum takes this satisfying melee bit and makes it the focus of the whole game. Instead of fists or a bludgeoning weapon, though, your main melee weapon in Glum is a steel-toed boot. You’ll see that boot hovering menacingly and incongruously in front of you as you zip around vaguely medieval-themed rooms, charging back with a bent knee for perfectly timed strikes as soon as an enemy gets in your face.

The Glum demo already takes this “first-person booter” concept in some interesting directions, providing plenty of barrels and other heavy objects you can convert into single-use projectile weapons with a kick from the right angle. You can also kick off of walls and other angled surfaces to fly through the air in some surprisingly satisfying and floaty platforming, which is key to finding the many secrets hidden in the demo’s tutorial-esque rooms.

But the most satisfying part is still kicking an enemy directly and watching the ragdoll corpse fly off a wall and back toward your boot, where you can send it flying into other encroaching foes. The light-hearted comedy action is especially welcome in an industry that sometimes seems full of first-person games that are too full of themselves.

-Kyle Orland

Guntouchables

Developer: Game Swing

Planned release date: “To be announced”

Popular steam tags: Action Roguelike, Multiplayer, Post-apocalyptic

Steam page

Seeing and hearing the pre-game logo screen for Ghost Ship Games immediately puts my brain into Deep Rock Galactic mode: headset on, workday stress abandoned, beverage ready. Guntouchables, published by Ghost Ship and developed by Game Swing, could readily fit into that slot. It’s a multiplayer-first overhead shooter in which you and up to three other sausage-y folks with tiny stick legs grab loot, kill baddies, and get the heck out of there. If it’s been a moment since you and your squad have shot some things together, send them a message and link the demo.

A horde of mutants have overrun the world, and you and your fellow redneck preppers are having their moment. You pick a weapon, like the precise but slow hunting rifle or pray-and-spray SMG, and a character, each with their own secondary weapons and skill trees. The game shows you a map with stuff to grab or destroy and the car you need to reach to escape. Then you’re off, moving with WASD keys and aiming in a circle with a mouse. The demo wasn’t ready for controller play yet, but I could see it coming in the future (along with another justification for the trackpads on the Steam Deck).

I cajoled a friend into playing, and we had a great time, both blasting and winning, but also explaining to each other just how dumb that last move was. The game could do more to help you quickly identify and distinguish among your teammates, as they’re currently all green names and health bars. And an optional tutorial mission would go a long way to help explain weapon and item mechanics that we had to test out live. But it’s a demo, and the core experience—shoot, run, grab, swarm coming, panic—already feels plenty strong. There’s a goofy, lightly icky charm to the voice-overs and visuals, and the upgrade paths are pleasantly addictive. It’s a ridiculous game with a ridiculous name, and I recommend it.

-Kevin Purdy

Hyper Empire

Developer: Fair Weather Studios

Planned release date: Q1 2025

Popular steam tags: 4X, Turn-Based Strategy, Auto Battler, Strategy

Steam page

When you play an RPG or strategy game, do you spend hours just staring at the tech tree, trying to figure out the upgrade path that will maximize your power going forward? If so, you’ll probably love Hyper Empire, a super-condensed 4X space simulation where a good 80 percent of the game is spent staring at a menu screen and deciding how best to spend your limited resources.

That’s actually more interesting than it might initially sound. You need to spend money on a fleet of ships to defend your carrier from potential attack, of course. But spending too much on powerful ships means you can’t invest in the outpost stations and tools that will bring in even more resources (and more powerful ships) later in the run. The balance between short-term risk and long-term reward seems well-tuned for those who like to agonize over every potential decision.

When battles inevitably happen, they play out as automated orgies of interstellar explosions that can be a joy to watch, especially once you hit a critical mass of defensive ships. And while random happenings can influence your resources between those battles, none of them have seemed too impactful in the demo so far.

The biggest problem with Hyper Empires right now is that the demo caps out at 30 turns, right when the “just one more turn” resource-building loop is starting to get good. We can’t wait to continue to juggle a bunch of numbers like an intergalactic accountant in the full game.

-Kyle Orland

Monaco 2

Developer: Pocketwatch Games

Planned release date: 2025

Popular steam tags: Co-op, Heist, Indie, Arcade, Top-Down, Loot

Steam page

It’s been well over a decade since the first Monaco wowed us with its ultra-stylish overhead “heist simulator” gameplay. This long-delayed sequel keeps the same basic find-the-Macguffin-and-escape gameplay, but now with vibrant 3D graphics and more complex, multi-floor building layouts.

As with the first Monaco, this is a stealth game that doesn’t absolutely require stealth. Sure, it’s easier if you sneak by the guards and cameras without raising the alarm, using handy sightlines and quiet movements to avoid detection. But if you’re found, the game quickly transitions into something of a 3D game of Pac-Man, where you have to outrun the guards and use hidden corridors or hidey-holes to outsmart them.

The Monaco 2 demo includes four classes of thieves, each with their own unique way of distracting or avoiding the guards. I especially liked the socialite, who uses a toy poodle to charm nearby guards into ignoring her, and the tech specialist, who can use a drone to interact with doors and items while he hides in relative safety.

The updated 3D viewpoint loses some of the simplistic charm of the original’s overhead perspective. Still, this modernized version of the classic stealth game is incredibly easy to pick up and play, especially with a few friends in co-op mode.

-Kyle Orland

Monster Train 2

Developer: Shiny Shoe

Planned release date: “Coming Soon”

Popular steam tags: Strategy, Card Game, Roguelike, Demons, PvP

Steam page

Monster Train 2 is a lot more Monster Train. Given that the original is in my top five of all-time Steam game hours, I’m happy about that. Just 30 minutes into testing it, I had to tell myself, “No, this really is the last round,” and physically walk away to enforce it. Well, the last round, and then some upgrade shopping. OK, one more and then no more.

Monster Train 2 is, like the original, an amalgam of turn-based tactics and roguelike deckbuilding, with a heaven-versus-hell backstory that is arch, goofy, and entirely skippable. Enemies enter your train on the bottom of three decks and fight their way upward, turn by turn. Your card deck has hellish monsters that you place across three levels of your train and spells that can damage, buff your monsters, and debuff their misguided angels. The music is high-energy melodic metal, the art pops off the screen, and the challenge is largely the same: balancing momentary threats against the need to prepare for future baddies.

Besides new monsters, cards, and clans, the sequel adds some new things, all of which might add up to be a bit too much to manage for some folks. Hero-type creatures can have abilities with cooldowns. New card types include equipment you can put on creatures and abilities you can apply to train floors. You can customize your train and upgrade its core pyre with abilities. This demo had me forgetting monster abilities and feeling overwhelmed with where to focus my upgrades. And yet I had a good time, and I’ll probably learn a new approach to turn actions over time. Hell, after all, devours the indolent.

-Kevin Purdy

Reignbreaker

Developer: Studio Fizbin

Planned release date: March 18, 2025

Popular steam tags: Indie, Hack and Slash, Action Roguelike, Combat

Steam page

The surface similarities between Reignbreaker and Hades are hard to ignore. But Reignbreaker‘s flavor of isometric run-and-gun-and-bash gameplay sets itself apart instantly with an extremely compelling steampunk aesthetic, full of clanging metal sound effects and relentless robotic enemies. That extends to the art direction, with thick outlines making it easy to pick out the color-coded hazards from the dull blues and grays of the metal-and-stone backgrounds.

Reignbreaker also stands out for some extremely chunky-feeling melee attacks and a javelin that can be used for powerful ranged projectiles or slammed down as a temporary turret. Tight controls make it a joy to dash between enemy projectiles as you wait for the opportune moment to go in for the kill. The Reignbreaker demo also shows off a few of the powerful bosses that will require most players to acquire a few permanent power-ups before making it too deep into the game’s randomized corridors.

This is one to keep an eye on as Hades 2 continues to barrel through Early Access toward its eventual final release

-Kyle Orland

Shuffle Tactics

Developer: Club Sandwich

Planned release date: “Coming soon”

Popular steam tags: Singleplayer, Roguelike, Tactical RPG, Isometric

Steam page

Like any good game with the word “Tactics” in its title, Shuffle Tactics is all about positioning. Move your units on a grid to maximize the damage they can inflict on enemies while minimizing the counterattacks that will inevitably come on their next turn. You know the drill.

But Shuffle Tactics adds just a hint of Slay the Spire into the mix, limiting your actions to those drawn from a deck of cards that you can build and modify between battles. As the game goes on, that means you might not be sure what options will be available on your next turn, forcing some quick improvisation if you want to maximize your chances.

I’m already a big fan of the demo’s satisfying sword-throwing mechanic, which lets you toss your melee weapon for a ranged attack and then call it back for more damage when it returns to your hand. I’m also enamored with the game’s evocative pixel-art animations, which make every movement and attack a joy to watch.

My biggest problem is that the demo gets very difficult very quickly; I had quite a few runs fall apart incredibly early when faced with an unavoidable “Elite” matchup that I wasn’t yet powerful enough to conquer. Hopefully. the developer can work out the balancing issues before launch because this mix of tactical strategy and card-based luck is a match made in heaven.

-Kyle Orland

Squirreled Away

Developer: Far Seas

Planned release date: “Coming soon”

Popular steam tags: Exploration, Third Person, Cute, Relaxing

Steam page

“Be the squirrel” is Far Seas’ description of its upcoming game, and while that’s a big promise, Squirreled Away seems on track to deliver. You’re not just a squirrel, mind you, but a tool-crafting, home-building, achievement-unlocking squirrel, owing to the demands of the gaming format. But when moving around, you get to experience the manic, sticky-pawed, and often weightless nature of squirreldom. Why do squirrels run corkscrews around the perimeter of a tree instead of climbing straight up? Maybe because, like me, they’re trying to keep up with their camera view on their right controller stick while moving with the left.

Squirreled Away‘s demo gives you a taste of its core mechanics, like stashing away items in a cache for winter or building an axe out of a pebble and twig so you can break larger branches into sticks for a fellow squirrel. The look, feel, and sound of the experience are decidedly calm, with single-instrument melodies lilting in and out as you scamper about, gather resources, and unlock quests and areas. You have health and stamina bars, but the game is gentle if you run them out, sending you back to safety or reminding you to eat some food.

It feels like a more kinetic Animal Crossing, with friendly animals and low-stakes challenges. Except that at any time, you could bail on your tasks, scamper upward, and leap from one far-out branch to another, living out the daydreams of anybody who works next to a window overlooking a tree.

– Kevin Purdy

Photo of Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

11 standouts from Steam Next Fest’s thousands of free game demos Read More »

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Framework Laptop 12 is a cheaper, more colorful take on a repairable laptop PC

framework, framework laptop, framework laptop 12, right to repair, Tech / /

Framework has been selling and upgrading the upgrade-and-repair-friendly Framework Laptop 13 for nearly four years now, and in early 2024 it announced a larger, more powerful Framework Laptop 16. At a product event today, the company showed off what it called “an early preview” of its third laptop design, the convertible, budget-focused Framework Laptop 12.

This addition to Framework’s lineup centers on a 12.2-inch, 1920×1200 convertible touchscreen that flips around to the back with a flexible hinge, a la Lenovo’s long-running Yoga design. Framework CEO Nirav Patel said it had originally designed the systems with “students in mind,” and to that end it comes in five colors and uses a two-tone plastic body with an internal metal frame rather than the mostly aluminum exterior Framework has used for the 13 and 16. Framework will also sell the laptop with an optional stylus.

For better or worse, the Framework Laptop 12 appears to be its own separate system, with motherboards, accessories, and a refresh schedule distinct from the 13-inch laptop. While the Laptop 13 already offers first-generation Intel Core Ultra-based and (as of today) AMD Ryzen AI 300-based processors, the first Framework Laptop 12 motherboard is going to use Intel’s 13th-generation Core i3 and i5 processors, originally launched back in late 2022. Despite the age of these chips, Framework claims the laptop will be “unusually powerful for its class.”

Framework Laptop 12 is a cheaper, more colorful take on a repairable laptop PC Read More »

economics-roundup-#5

Economics Roundup #5

Economics / /

While we wait for the verdict on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7, today seems like a good day to catch up on the queue and look at various economics-related things.

  1. The Trump Tax Proposals.

  2. Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains.

  3. Extremely High Marginal Tax Rates.

  4. Trade Barriers By Any Name Are Terrible.

  5. Destroying People’s Access to Credit.

  6. Living Paycheck to Paycheck.

  7. Oh California.

  8. Chinese Venture Capital Death Spiral.

  9. There is Someone Elon Musk Forgot to Ask.

  10. Should Have Gone With the Sports Almanac.

  11. Are You Better Off Than You Were Right Before the Election?.

  12. Are You Better Off Than You Were Before the Price Level Rose?.

  13. Most People Have No Idea How Insurance Works.

  14. Do Not Spend Too Much Attention on Your Investments.

  15. Preferences About Insider Training are Weird.

  16. I Will Not Allocate Scarce Resources Via Price.

  17. Minimum Wages, Employment and the Equilibrium.

  18. The National Debt.

  19. In Brief.

The Grumpy Economist goes over Trump’s tax proposals, taking it as given this is not the big tax reform bill America needs and probably will never get (pre-AGI).

  1. No tax on tips. It’s dumb, but it’s a campaign promise. He notes that as long as people still have to declare their tips, and we don’t allow those with high incomes to pretend to take half their income in tips, not taxing tips directly won’t matter much, so we should relax.

    1. I think this is far too big an assumption of competence, but given this has to get through Congress, we’re probably safe from the madness.

  2. No tax on social security. He explains why the benefits shouldn’t be taxed.

    1. I get that, but this is a big benefits increase, in a way that doesn’t seem necessary, that transfers money from young to elderly, and which puts a lie to every other ‘we are running out of money’ complaint.

  3. No tax on overtime pay. This one is sufficiently stupid that he can’t pretend that it would not be a huge disaster, the incentives are so awful.

  4. Renewing the Trump tax cuts. Yeah, yeah. Probably a good idea.

  5. Adjusting the SALT cap. He’s against this because of the incentive it gives to states to raise their income taxes.

    1. I notice that when SALT was capped no states lowered their income taxes? He’s only going to fiddle at margins anyway.

  6. Closing the carried interest “loophole.” He says this one is unclear. He points out actual capital gains taxes are stupid, so we should be thankful the rate on those is lower (true), and given this is the case the financial wizards would only find a new loophole.

    1. The level of friction required to get loopholes matters, and indeed many out there already do actually pay their taxes, myself included.

    2. Most of this tax break is going to hedge funds and private equity, I don’t see any reason the tax code should be encouraging these forms of business. I’m not against them, but we are likely allocating too much capital and talent here.

    3. A small portion of the tax break goes to venture capitalists, and yes this part is good policy and we should try to preserve that part of it or make up for it some other way.

Norway doubles down on its unrealized capital gains tax strategy, including an exit tax of 38% of net assets including unrealized gains, despite having a gigantic sovereign wealth fund from its oil wealth. Norway has a lot of ruin in it due to the oil and high human capital, but this is painful to see.

Mirroring similar epic fail graphs in America: United Kingdom has absurdly high marginal tax rates everywhere, and also does not understand what a ‘phase-out’ is, it seems? This is for couples in London with two children under 3, for the extreme case:

Dan Neidle: The 20,000% spike at £100,000 is absolutely not a joke – someone earning £99,999.99 with two children under three in London will lose an immediate £20k if they earn a penny more. The practical effect is clearer if we plot gross vs net income:

David Algonquin: This must be one of the worst pieces of tax policy design ever. I know people who have dropped down to a 4-day week or, if self-employed, take on less work to avoid this trap.

That’s hard to see, but it means that in this scenario you are better off making 99k than 100k+, unless you can make over ~145k. Normally it’s nowhere near this crazy, but you can be a lot less crazy than this and still rather crazy.

Dan’s entire thread offers more detail, and he also offers this interactive set of charts, and this article version of the thread.

Dan Neidle: It’s perfectly coherent and rational to think high earners should pay 62% tax (and of course also coherent and rational to disagree).

But surely nobody thinks we should have 62% tax on people earning £100k-125k, and 47% on people earning more than £125k?

And it can get worse. If Jane’s still repaying her student loan, that’s another 9% – the student loan system behaves like a crude graduate tax. Jane’s marginal rate reaches 71%.

Europe still has sufficiently strong trade barriers that they are equivalent to a 45% tariff on manufacturing and 110% for services, according to Mario Draghi. That’s without even considering the ‘trade barriers’ that exist within-countries in the form of ‘EU being the EU.’ o3-mini-high estimated that this costs the EU RGDP growth in the range 0.2%-0.5% per year, versus taking those barriers down.

A similar situation exists between Canadian provinces, which continues to blow my mind because not only is it a huge own goal for no reason, it is so profoundly unpopular and everyone wants to get rid of it, and somehow it is still there.

One serious danger with the new administration is a potential cap on credit card interest rates at 10%, with Senators Sanders and Hawley planning to work on this with President Trump. This would severely limit the ability of the poor, or those with poor credit, to access credit cards, and the alternatives to credit cards are all vastly worse.

We also had yet another round of people falsely claiming that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, for various reasons this claim simply will not die despite a majority of Americans having actual cash savings that can pay for 3 months of expenses, even before dipping into credit cards, and the median household having a net worth of $193k. There are horrible crimes of statistics happening around such claims, in both directions, but the central truth is very clear.

Someone help his friend, their family is dying? Or living ‘paycheck to paycheck.’

Damon Chen: My friend told me he and his wife live paycheck to paycheck.

I don’t believe it because they both are high earners in tech, and he even works for Google. But after doing a little bit of math, I found out he didn’t lie.

• Mortgage: $17,000/month for a $3M home

• Property Tax: $3,000/month

• Private School: $3,000/month for 1 kid

• Travel: $2,000/month (assuming $20k/year)

• Utilities: $1,000/month

• Groceries: $2,000/month

• Eating Out: $1,000/month

• 2 cars: $1,000/month

So in total $30k per month, not including other misc costs like house maintenance, paying for Netflix, etc.

W-2 employees usually take home only 50% of their salary, so they have to make $60k per month pretax, which is $720k in annual TC.

What’s the point of living a life like this?

This is almost entirely housing and taxes. They’re paying California taxes, which is an extra 10% or so of gross income in this income range, or about $6k/month at $720k annual, and the property costs $21k including utilities (which seem strangely high for a region without much need for heat or AC, are they doing a ton of EV charging maybe? If so that half of it should be filed under the cars). That’s $27k, everything else costs a combined $9k.

Cutting other spending won’t make that much difference for them. Yes, $20k/year for travel (that can’t be expensed) seems crazy to me, but some people value it. Others are saying groceries and eating out are too high here, again there is room to cut but I do think you can get a lot of value from the premium there. So it really does come down to, how much does a family of three want a $3 million home (with a not fun interest rate)?

I’d also question buying both a $3 million home and a private school. If you’re paying that much, presumably (since he’s working at Google) they’re in Palo Alto, which does kind of justify the home price if you want to go large enough to plan for a big family, but then that area is said to have excellent public schools. It’s a hell of a lot to pay for that shorter commute.

California businesses forced to foot the bill for some of the $20 billion in loans California took from the Federal Government to pay unemployment during the pandemic, after the state defaulted on payment, er, ‘failed to allocate funds.’

Chinese venture capital firms are hounding failed founders, pursuing personal assets and adding them to the national debtor blacklist, which means they can’t do things like start a business, fly, take trains, stay in hotels or leave China. China has no personal bankruptcy law, so there’s no way out. If you want VC money in China, if you can get it at all, it now probably means effectively taking on personal debt.

Presumably this is because the franchise value and forward deal flow of VC firms was cratered so much by government crackdowns that the firms have chosen to hound past founders despite knowing this destroys their future deal flow. All that’s left is to get what they can from their existing obligations, which in China technically gave them the opportunity to do this, and now they’re actually doing it at scale.

One assumes that no sane person would sign such terms now that the equilibrium has shifted. It’s one thing to have confidence in your startup and take a shot knowing the odds are against you. It’s another thing to do that when failure ruins your life.

A Delaware judge again rejected Elon Musk’s stock compensation package, despite the shareholders overwhelmingly ratifying it post-hoc when it was vastly more valuable than it originally appeared. He plans to appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court, and if that fails presumably try again in Texas.

From most perspectives I know, this makes absolutely no sense. It is the ultimate ‘isn’t there someone you forgot to ask’ meme. It’s not even a reduction to what the judge considered reasonable, it’s throwing out the entire package.

Paul Graham: It used to be automatic for startups to incorporate in Delaware. That will stop being the case if activist judges start overruling shareholders.

This evening the CEO of a public company told me that all startups should reincorporate in Nevada. That’s apparently the best alternative, and for startups that are still private it’s trivially easy.

The judge’s explanations are, again by most perspectives I know, absurd.

Judge McCormick: Even if a stockholder vote could have a ratifying effect, it could not do so here. Were the court to condone the practice of allowing defeated parties to create new facts for the purpose of revising judgments, lawsuits would become interminable.

“We can’t allow defeated parties to create new facts”? What the actual ? I mean, do you even hear yourself? This makes no sense.

Similarly, claims that the disclosures on the current round were not good enough? They literally stapled the judge’s previous ruling to the disclosures, and were very very clear what Musk was getting, even though it was now vastly more valuable. Absurd.

I presume Judge McCormick’s actual logic is something else entirely. I presume it is some combination of:

  1. Elon Musk broke the rules, and potentially committed outright fraud, by using a compliant board to give him an absurd pay package. We cannot allow him to use this to create an anchor from which he will then benefit.

  2. I don’t think it’s reasonable to pay this much money, and I have the right to impose that opinion on Tesla.

  3. Seriously, though, fthis guy.

Should startups respond to this by reincorporating in Nevada? I have not done the research on the host of other consequences, but my assumption would be no. This is an extraordinary case that is unlikely to be a meaningful precedent. Most of the time, when someone has the level of chutzpah and obviously unacceptable self-dealing that Musk has, invalidating their absurdly huge pay package is a reasonable decision. I see why people would be concerned, but I see this as a one off.

I also see this as part of the standard warning from the startup and Paul Graham crowd, or the Marc Andreessen crowd, that if anyone ever does something they don’t like, that entity will rue the day, rue the day I tell you, because either the startup ecosystem will be Ruined Forever or everyone involved will pick up their balls and go elsewhere. The sky is always about to be falling. Usually, the sky is fine.

Via Tyler Cowen, Spencer Jakab at WSJ asks: Would a time machine make you a good investor?

I mean, obviously, if you had a full time machine. The sky’s the limit, then. But what if you only had a glimpse to work with and limited options?

In the ‘Crystal Ball Trading Game’ players are given $1 million in play money, and 15 opportunities to see the front page from two days in the future (on the same 15 randomly chosen days) and then trade, with up to 50 times leverage, the S&P 500 and 30-Year Treasuries, evaluated at tomorrow’s close. They report that the median trader, from a mostly savvy pool, had only $687,986 left.

Spencer Jakab: But how does one explain the median loss of 31%? Surely being able to bet heavily on the really obvious, no-brainer newspaper headlines should make up for a few errors? In fact that proved to be many players’ financial undoing, with a not-insignificant number having negative money by the end. The first lesson from the game, then, might be to curb your enthusiasm in such cases.

Any true inhabitant of The River would think very differently about this.

You are being given a one-time unique opportunity. There are no transaction or financing costs, so you definitely have an edge however small, but you only get 15 moves, some with clearer edge than others. The more money you make early, the more you can bet later.

Yes, there are decreasing marginal returns to money, but you’re not in that much danger of hitting them. If you bet at random with the maximum 50x leverage on the S&P for 15 random uncorrelated days, you probably don’t even go broke.

So in that situation, you would correctly want to risk ‘going broke’ within the experiment, bet with giant leverage, and act such that, unless you are outstandingly good at directional predictions, more often than not you lose money.

This contrasts with the story of giving someone 30 minutes of 60/40 coin flips and $25 to bet, with a maximum win of $250. If you can’t win the max almost all the time there, you’re doing something very wrong. Indeed, you should play remarkably conservatively, exactly because you should have no trouble hitting the cap. So instead of betting Kelly’s 20% each time, you should bet substantially less than that.

However, suppose the experiment was very different and you didn’t have a $250 limit. But again, you only have 30 minutes. So you get a 60/40 flip as fast as you can name the sizing and do the flip. Let’s say you can, if you do your sizing quickly, do 4 flips a minute, so you get 120 flips. Kelly only wins you a few thousand dollars on average. If you instead bet half each time, you average a few million. You should definitely be at least that aggressive here given the time limit, at least until you get quite a lot of funds in hand.

Remember Ocean’s 11. The house always wins, unless when you have the edge, you bet big, and then you take the house.

As always, the answer to whether you’re financially better off than a year ago shifts 15 points the moment the election is over. So take people’s answers appropriately seriously.

Did inflation make the median voter poorer? Zachary Mazlish argues that it did, but what he actually argues is more that the median voter got poorer overall. Which is also an important point, and while I quibble below, overall it is a very good post.

Among other things, he cites this data:

This data very clearly says that people’s economic perceptions are being heavily warped by that hell of a drug, partisanship, in both directions. There’s no other way this data makes sense. What are people thinking?

Zachary Mazlish: Well, turns out, if you are so bold as to close FRED for a second and ask people, 81% of people believe that prices increase faster than wages during inflationary times, and 73% of people believe their purchasing power decreases.

But are they right?

…

I myself have been extremely confused about this issue, and after having spent the bulk of my post-election haze trying to decipher things, I can now report in high spirits that I am only somewhat confused.

Inflation did make the median voter poorer during Biden’s term.

  1. In no part of the income distribution did wages grow faster while Biden was President than they did 2012-2020.

    1. This is true in the raw data, and even more stark after compositional adjustment.

    2. In particular, the change in median incomes was well below its 2012-20 run-rate.

  2. But, the change in median wages is not what matters; it is the median change in wages that does. And this metric was even weaker under Biden: lower than any period in the last 30 years other than the Great Recession.

  3. People do not feel wages, they feel total income. And median growth in total income — post taxes and transfers — was not just historically low: it collapsed and was deeply negative from 2021 onwards.

    1. Much of this decline is due to timing of pandemic stimulus and even less the “fault of Biden” than other things.

  1. So on #1, the obvious response is, that wasn’t the question. That does not tell you whether people were made poorer, it tells you they became overall less richer. But that’s fine, this was only the setup.

  2. Why is this what matters? It’s a bizarre metric. Why should we care what the median change was, instead of some form of mean change, or change in the mean or median wage? Unless the claim is that voter perception is shaped primarily by their own change in income. That could be a political story but it isn’t a story about economic reality.

  3. So we’re saying that what is happening here is that voters are evaluating income post taxes and transfers, purely for themselves, and then blaming the result on inflation? Perhaps they are indeed doing that, and you can’t do that. I mean, obviously you can, but it’s not a map that matches the territory, again unless the territory you care about is perception.

The attempt to justify #2 is… not great:

To see why the median change in wages is the relevant object for thinking about the election, imagine a world where you had 3 different people: person A with an income of $4, person B with an income of $5, and person C with an income of $10. If four years later person A is now only making $1, person B is making $6, and person C is also making $6, the median income has increased!

But if there were an election, the median worker — who is also the median voter2 — did not have a good last four years, financially speaking. Hence why the median change in income is the object of interest.

In this world, mean income went from $6.66 to $4.33. Of course everyone thinks things got a lot worse. The median income happened to go up, but wages overall are dramatically down. It’s a perverse example, where median income happens to be horribly misleading.

Contrast that with this world (all numbers in real terms):

  1. Time period 1: A makes $1, B makes $6, C makes $10.

  2. Time period 2: A makes $10, B makes $5, C makes $9.

The median change in income is negative, two out of three people saw their wages decline. Do you think this means the economy got worse?

Here’s another graph.

That does look like poor (although still net slightly positive) performance for Biden.

In my opinion, weekly earnings are more relevant than hourly earnings for understanding voter psychology, and likewise, annual earnings are more relevant than weekly earnings: it is annual earnings that determines the overall state of your finances.

This seems to me like a well researched story about voter psychology, that is then being portrayed as inflation making people actually poorer, when we can’t even attribute the voter psychological reaction to the inflation, without knowing the counterfactual.

And indeed, the third point makes clear a lot of what this was about:

Point 3: Post all taxes and transfers, the median household’s real income collapsed while Biden was in office — due to the timing of the Pandemic stimulus.

Yes, exactly. The story is that the big subsidies happened under Trump, and then got taken away, and voters blamed Biden for the difference, plus things overall were unimpressive especially relative to the previous boom decade once we pulled out of the Great Financial Crisis. And indeed, the author notes explicitly this is not the fault of either Biden or inflation.

This thread is a clean summary.

If you put this all together, saying ‘inflation’ gave the voters a way to blame Biden for the decline in their real purchasing power that came in large part from the end of the stimulus, in addition to its other effects. You also see the partisan splits in perception of the economy, as you always do. In a world where a majority of voters dislike each party, and Biden was unpopular, it’s easy for people to use any excuse to think the economic times are bad.

Could Biden have done anything about all this? To some extent absolutely. There were any number of pro-growth policies he left on the table, and ways he actively got in the way of growth, and he overspent. But he was also, as many have noted, dealt a rather terrible hand on this, with the timing of the stimulus and resulting inflation. The fact that we outperformed almost all other countries economically during this period? Irrelevant to the median voter, who wouldn’t notice or care.

People think insurance should be some sort of magic thing, and complain when insurance companies price their products based on their costs plus a profit margin, and attempt to actually model the risks involved. Yes, insurance companies will act like scum to weasel out of paying if they can, but that’s a distinct issue.

The most pure version of this was an old Chris Rock routine where he says that they should call insurance ‘in case shit.’ And then he says, ‘if shit don’t happen, shouldn’t I get my money back?’ And the audience cheers. Except, well, yeah.

And no, this isn’t a weird Chris Rock thing. It’s common.

Spooky Werewolf Media: To be fair it’s not just that people don’t understand rudimentary aspects but that these things are propagandized and confused and marketed to hell and back by legions of bullshit artists.

Jeremy Kauffman: The degree to which society functions despite massive swathes not understanding even rudimentary aspects is a huge testament to capitalism.

(Nothing I write is ever investment advice, etc etc)

I write this note every so often, I think it’s important.

Duderichy: People vastly underestimate the alpha you have in your career!

If you’re in tech, you should be focusing on locking in a $500,000+ staff job instead of getting an extra $20,000 per year off your investments.

You can make a lot off your investments, but it’s hard to turn a lot of extra time into a lot of extra alpha, especially when your net worth is not large compared to your earning potential.

You do want to put in enough time to do something ‘reasonable’ but the answer (assuming you’re not planning for AGI) is plausibly things like ‘just find the right place to live, have an emergency savings account and then buy index funds, maybe buy index funds in industries that look promising and throw in some individual stocks and then forget about it.’

Beyond that, if your shower thoughts are focused on your investments, that will usually be a mistake until your investments are large compared to your income and career potential. Even when the amount of money at stake look large, that doesn’t mean the difference in alpha available from more attention is very high.

This study of insider trading regulatory preferences is bizarre. It says outsiders prefer insider trading be allowed because it increases liquidity and price efficiency, but that seems wrong?

Insider trading increases liquidity from insiders that you don’t want to trade against. It decreases liquidity you do want from everyone else, who are subject to adverse selection.

In my experience, markets vulnerable to insider trading see their liquidity shrink dramatically – a clean example is if there is important unknown injury information in a sporting event, it all but kills the action until the information gets out, and markets for potentially fixed leagues are super thin.

Or: Who do you think is paying the insider traders their profits?

Insider trading might increase price efficiency, or it might not. Insiders have the incentive to fix prices, but others have far less incentive to do so. If I see Nvidia trading at 400 and my analysis says it should be 360 or 440, how do I know this isn’t because of insiders, and given that how do I dare trade? Or as they say in sports trading when the odds look weird: “Somebody knows something.” Maybe.

Whereas the insiders, this says, are against insider trading. Which I could see if it was due to it killing liquidity and ability to raise capital, but then that feeds back into the previous claim.

Apollo Bagels is fighting an attempt by the landlord to evict them over long lines. Whatever could a Bagel store do when the demand got so large that people were forming very long lines, that might solve this problem in a net positive fashion? Nope, I can’t think of anything.

Raising minimum wages 10% increases the injury rate for ‘fully exposed’ industries by 11% in a working paper, with an elasticity of 1.4. On its own that’s perhaps not a big deal but it is indicative of what else is happening.

Amazon fulfillment centers increase local employment and wages.

Alex Tabarrok asserts an evolving new consensus on the minimum wage, that effects are heterogeneous and take place on more margins than employment. I don’t know about the claim of an emerging consensus, but the claims themselves seem obviously true. In particular, those hurt by minimum wage laws are typically the worst off among us, with others largely unaffected, as economics 101 would suggest.

Whenever I see warnings about the national debt, like this one by Arnold Kling, they usually employ calculations like this one, where Kling quotes Cowen pointing the Rauh.

Joseph Rauh: if I use CBO projections to calculate the interest-to-revenue ratio, it reaches 22.9% by 2034.

The important warning that Kling is the latest to reiterate is that the bond market is currently in the good but unstable equilibrium of everyone expecting the government to pay its debts in valuable dollars, at least on a rolling basis. That means interest rates are reasonable. If we shift to the bad equilibrium, where investors do not assume this and demand higher prices, then we won’t be able to pay our debts without some form of large default, we will be vastly poorer, and there is no easy way back.

When we take on more debt, we raise both the danger that this happens, and the damage it would cause if it did happen. The good reason not to take on more debt is this tail risk.

There are remarkable similarities to things like AI existential risk – we know that going down this road will at some point start introducing steadily increasing risk of catastrophe, but until then we likely enjoy good times. There’s huge value in taking on a non-trivially risky amount of debt.

As we enjoy those good times, we don’t know what level of debt is how risky, with some even saying we can take on essentially unlimited debt and it’s fine, and every time we take on more debt people update that it’s safe to take on yet more debt – either you respond before the crisis, or you respond too late. As Kling puts it, ‘pretending there is no problem means that a sudden crisis is likely.’

How much debt is unsustainable? What is the actual current or anticipated debt burden? Tracking interest as a percentage of revenue is asking the wrong question.

There are essentially two questions that seem like they should matter here.

  1. Can the good equilibrium be sustained? If we retain the ability to borrow at the risk-free rate of interest, or something not too far above it, can we keep the debt-to-GDP ratio from rising?

  2. What will the bond market think is the bond market’s future answer to #1?

Japan, among other examples, shows us that we have a poor model of #2, as does the continued willingness to keep buying the debt of Argentina cycle after cycle. The coyote absolutely can sometimes run across thin air for longer than you think. That’s not the kind of thing I am in a position to model well, so I tend to focus more on #1.

According to Google, America pays about 3.35% on its monthly interest-bearing debt, and an average of 3.28% overall. Nominal GDP growth is higher than that, at 4.96%, similar to its historical average of 6.17% from 1948 to 2024. At current prices, the actual effective amount we pay in interest on the debt is less than zero – we could have debt of 100% of GDP, then have a primary deficit of 1.5% of GDP, and end the year with a better debt-to-GDP ratio than when we started.

That tells me that the answer here is more about demand for market priced safe government debt than it is about market price, similarly to the situation in Japan. My expectation is that the limiting factor here is that the ‘giant pool of money’ chasing safe assets is only so large. For now, demand exceeds supply by a lot, so we’re fine, and if someone dumps their supply that’s not an issue. If we try to borrow too much at once, we would exhaust demand, and have to adjust price in order to drum up more demand, not because of risk but because demand curves slope upward. So that’s what I would want to study, to find out where we should worry about potential breaking points.

Another way to measure this is GDP share of interest payments, but as always keep in mind that this is nominal:

Paying 5% of GDP in interest definitely sounds like a lot. It makes sense that everyone was actively concerned with the deficit and debt back then. But again, I’d be asking more about the steady-state cost of debt. What would it cost to make payments sufficient to prevent the debt from growing as a share of GDP, if the primary budget was in balance?

Which again brings us back to the question of multiple equilibria. The debt is fine, except for the risk that suddenly it very much isn’t. How far dare we go?

New SBF interview from prison, somehow with less candor than before.

Strong recommendation for SBF: How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto’s Very Bad Good Guy, if you are in finance or crypto. Patrick McKenzie has a thread on it.

Jim Babcock explains how many memecoins and ‘market caps’ work, and how very often there is vastly less there than meets the eye. I find the whole thing deeply stupid, and if you propose I get involved with one I will absolutely block you.

Arguments and data in favor of the Peter Principle, that employees get promoted to their level of incompetence. To me this is one of those principles that is obviously true, the question is magnitude. The idea that ‘oh firms know about that, they’d successfully control for it so it wouldn’t happen at all’ is Obvious Nonsense.

Yay economies of scale. Much of what we consume has almost zero marginal product, and its marginal prices are usually falling rapidly to zero. An excellent reason to want more people around.

Our tax code continues to punish married couples when both parents work, or alternatively it relatively rewards ‘traditional’ one income households. Given we do not seem to culturally agree with this on reflection, we should fix it.

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