If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

OpenAI credibly threatened to bankrupt a tiny farming township outside Ann Arbor with litigation if the township board didn't approve a massive data center the community didn't want. It worked. www.mlive.com/news/ann-arb...

BOU issues Record Event Report (RER) at Dec 22, 4:31 PM MST ...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE SET AT DENVER CO... via IEMbot Additional Details Here.

The spirit of fisking is alive and well in the halls of Congress. Hallelujah.

Literally the status quo:

When cameras are installed, they issue many violations in the first month, followed by a steep decline in the second month. This suggests that the cameras effectively deter speeding by changing underlying driver behavior rather than relying on sustained revenue extraction.

NYC’s speed cameras are remarkably lenient: violations carry a flat $50 fine with no points (compared to hundreds of dollars and 3-11 points for police-issued tickets). They are also limited to school zones. Even so, we observe large safety benefits. 🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

Framing self-driving car adoption as a public health imperative is a wild choice. On a "dollars per death avoided" basis, it's difficult to think of a more inefficient intervention. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

The passivity. My god.

Look ma, I'm on Odd Lots with @weisenthal.bsky.social and @tracyalloway.bsky.social player.fm/series/serie...

Love a natural experiment.

When you say "the truth" I hear "my belief".

This is more than 2x what the USPS "lost" over the same period, while actually delivering a real service. So much for the "efficiency" of private companies... www.uspsoig.gov/sites/defaul...

This is how you do local news.

Tired: algorithmic media's impact on teens Wired: algorithmic media's impact on boomers www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/u...

This specific legislative fix has been my hobby horse for like a decade.

Oof.

The amazing thing about this particular cycle is that the tech CEOs who had the courage to look at AI five years ago and say, "this shit is nonsense and doesn't belong on our roadmap" are going to end being both completely vindicated and universally unemployed. (And that's bad).

For no reason, was thinking about the time I attended a wildly controversial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia that was entirely uneventful. Looked it up to confirm my memories only to discover that tomorrow is the 18th anniversary. magazine.columbia.edu/article/ahma...

revealed preference is that many US elites prefer crony capitalism and promises of a mechanical god to science and innovation

Well that's one way to go.

i really don’t want a superpower or a cheat code. i just want to do a good job.

As ever, unenforced regulations are a tax on good faith.

People who work in public health hit a new level of despair this week amid high-level CDC firings and resignations. And we learned a key food safety surveillance system is being scaled back. foodfix.co/foodborne-il...

Mate-seeking spiders looking to smash are getting smushed by cars in Southern Colorado. So the state is building tarantula crossings.

One more thought on this. As a food manufacturer, I'm liable if my product causes harm when used as intended. *As I should be *. There's simply nothing about AI that demands we inoculate product makers from liability for things that only they can control.

Do you think we achieve the singularity first or lie about it for tax purposes first?

Apropos of nothing. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenko...

When I was getting my MBA in 2008, there was a lot of discussion about whether one could spot bubbles in the moment. A lot of otherwise smart folks argued that you couldn't. They were -- and remain -- wrong.

Defunct websites are delightful.

Do all AI-generated biz dev emails reference Kevin Harrington, or is my inbox just a special circle of hell?

Incredible shrinking Cone of Uncertainty! Kartina 2005 vs Helene 2024. Dramatic improvement in hurricane forecasting due to expertise of NOAA scientists at NHC & AOML. Since 2005 forecast error on 5-day track has decreased by ~50%! We often take these accurate forecasts for granted but... 1/

The source is John Barron.

Sure.

thiiiiis semantic search is CRAZY useful in how it can unlock the value of the vast majority of data, which is unstructured the fact that LLMs can also summarize and recontextualize that unstructured data is truly a breakthrough this is not by any stretch of the imagination AGI

i'm no big fan of social RCTs, but this seems likely to be broadly true.

Don't do any of this.

ah, the radical dangerous socialism of experimental pilot projects

How do you even diligence a company that's business is helping people lie? techcrunch.com/2025/06/20/c...

Easily the bleakest thing I’ve read this week. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/t...

The problem with public outsourcing of services is that you need a competitive market of suppliers to generate efficiencies. Otherwise you are simply trading a public monopoly for a private one. And for some services, those markets don't really exist because government missions really are different.

"AI is gonna put videographers out of work."

This is marijuana industry erasure.

"I wondered why there wasn't a centralized DOGE software engineering playbook with all of our learnings; overall, I was surprised by the lack of knowledge-sharing within DOGE. It seemed like every engineer started from scratch." This playbook did exist at 18F and USDS. DOGE deleted it and fired us.

We don't talk enough about how for many, many people, morality is downstream of law, not independent of it. We write laws as if morals will fill in the gaps, when in reality policy failings create moral failings in society.

Moralist: "I don't do drugs." Rationalist: "Do you take GLP-1s, drink tea or coffee, or consume alcohol?" Moralist: "..."