skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    By virtually every metric that matters — employment, crime, fiscal contribution, second-generation mobility — immigration is working dramatically better here than across the Atlantic. Understanding the differences between U.S. immigration and European immigration is indeed a very good idea if you want to design better, smarter U.S. immigration policy — but that’s going to look like “not making Europe’s mistakes” much more than adopting Europe’s solutions.

    [...]

    The most important reason why immigration is more successful in the United States is the simplest: Europe makes it structurally much harder for immigrants to work.

    Rigid employment protection, sector-wide collective bargaining, and high effective minimum wages create insider-outsider dynamics that hit newcomers hardest.

    [...]

    Most European countries ban asylum seekers from working for six to nine months after filing their claims, often longer in practice. The intent is often explained as discouraging people who are entering for economic reasons from making spurious asylum claims. But about 1 million applications for asylum are filed each year despite this discouragement, and most of those people then become dependents of the state — or participate in the illegal economy — at least for the first while.

    What employment bans actually produce is lasting economic scarring: People lose skills, lose contact with employers, and get pushed into informal work or dependency. The negative employment effects persist up to a decade after arrival. And by design, the bans feed the very dynamic of immigrants as a fiscal burden that fuels public backlash.

    The United States, for all its dysfunction, lets most immigrants start working almost immediately. And the results are dramatic. The U.S. is a global outlier: refugee employment rates are comparable to those of economic immigrants from arrival. In Europe, it takes refugees a decade or two to narrow that gap.

    [...]

    In the U.K., asylum seekers banned from working increased property crime; EU workers with labor market access did not. Using Italian legalization as a regression discontinuity, Paolo Pinotti estimated that granting legal work status reduced immigrant crime by roughly 50%.

    The United States also bars asylum seekers from working for 180 days. So why does it still outperform? Because until recently, most humanitarian immigrants to the U.S. were resettled refugees who received work authorization on arrival, not asylum seekers subject to the waiting period.

    When the recent southern border surge changed that, the results looked more European.

    In reaction, New York City spent billions housing people barred from earning a living. This is the closest the U.S. has come to running the European experiment on its own soil, and it produced exactly the outcomes Leonhardt attributed to immigration itself rather than to the policy regime surrounding it.

    [...]

    Sweden is the instructive failure case.

    No country in Europe has invested more in integration services, language classes, and social support. Yet Swedish integration outcomes have been among the worst in the OECD. The lesson is that integration effort does not equal integration design.

    You cannot integrate people into a labor market that will not hire them, and spending generously on language courses while maintaining employment bans and rigid hiring practices is the policy equivalent of teaching someone to swim and then barring them from the pool.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Synthesizing multi-agent harnesses for vulnerability discovery in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the abstract: Apparently, if you have the right harness, you can find security bugs with a Chinese LLM. Source code here. The prompt that their system automatically generated is here.

    From the abstract:

    [...] We evaluate AgentFlow on TerminalBench-2 with Claude Opus 4.6 and on Google Chrome with Kimi K2.5. AgentFlow reaches 84.3% on TerminalBench-2, the highest score in the public leaderboard snapshot we evaluate against, and discovers ten previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in Google Chrome, including two Critical sandbox-escape vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-5280 and CVE-2026-6297).

    Apparently, if you have the right harness, you can find security bugs with a Chinese LLM. Source code here.

    The prompt that their system automatically generated is here.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on China calls for ‘concerted’ efforts to tackle excess solar production in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Perhaps the Chinese government is worried about what happens when the bubble bursts and a lot of investments and loans go bad?

    Perhaps the Chinese government is worried about what happens when the bubble bursts and a lot of investments and loans go bad?

  6. Comment on How US doctors cashed in on the No Surprises Act in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Dr. Rowe has taken full advantage of a new arbitration system, part of a major consumer protection law Congress passed in 2020 with bipartisan majorities. The No Surprises Act was designed to eliminate surprise medical bills, for patients who showed up in the emergency room and were treated by a doctor who didn’t take their insurance.

    It bars those out-of-network doctors from billing patients directly. Instead, they can plead their case to a government-approved arbitrator. If they win, the patient’s insurer has to pay their desired amount.

    By all accounts, the law is successfully protecting patients against bills from doctors they never chose. But it has also generated an expensive unanticipated consequence: Doctors have flooded the arbitration system with millions of claims. Most are winning, often collecting fees hundreds of times higher than what they could negotiate with insurers directly or what they could have earned from patients before the law passed.

    [...]

    Some health plans said they have increased premiums this year to cover the extra costs. The United Service Workers health plan, which covers 20,000 trades workers in the New York area, said it boosted premiums by an extra 1.75 percentage points to offset arbitration awards and fees. The system has also enriched a new class of specialized businesses, which assist doctors in navigating the bureaucratic process.

    [...]

    When the law passed, government officials estimated that about 17,000 cases would go to arbitration a year. Instead, doctors brought 1.2 million such cases in the first half of last year, and won around 88 percent of them.

    [...]

    The arbitrators are doing well too. The fees they earn for deciding cases, which range from $425 to $1,150 per case, have added up. They earned $885 million from 2022 to 2024.

    [...]

    In arbitration, doctors and insurers each propose a price for the care, along with arguments for why it is appropriate. An arbitrator must pick one of the two numbers, and there is no opportunity to appeal the decision.

    Arbitrators have repeatedly approved doctors’ submissions of extremely high prices for common medical procedures, according to court filings and a New York Times analysis of a large public data set with basic information on each dispute.

    [...]

    Many claims that shouldn’t be eligible for arbitration, such as those for patients covered through the government programs Medicare and Medicaid, move through the system anyway. The claim from the New Jersey anesthesiologist involved a patient on a UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage plan, according to a lawsuit that UnitedHealth has filed protesting the arbitration decision.

    [...]

    Medical specialties like spinal and plastic surgery, for which surprise bills were rare before the law, now frequently have cases in arbitration, according to the public data. Some practices are using the law to obtain high payments for routine medical care, including gynecologists who have won fees 600 times higher than usual rates for placing intrauterine contraceptive devices, or I.U.D.s.

    [...]

    Health policy experts have been surprised to see such lopsided results that favor doctors. Some argue that because the arbitrators are paid per case, they may have an incentive to render decisions that keep doctors coming back.

    Arbitrators may also, like the broader public, prefer doctors to insurers, said Matthew Fiedler, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied the law. “Arbitrators are people, and the typical person likes physicians.”

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Astronomers find the edge of the Milky Way in ~space

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Disk galaxies like the Milky Way form stars “inside-out” — starting from the center and working outwards through the disk. So, as a general rule, the farther out astronomers look, the younger the stars are.

    Now, a team led by Karl Fiteni (then at University of Malta), carried out under the supervision of Joseph Caruana and Victor Debattista, has analyzed more than 100,000 giant stars. By coupling observations with advanced computer simulations, the astronomers show that this inside-out pattern reverses at between 35,000 and 40,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s center. Beyond this distance, the stars are older again.

    [...]

    The analysis involves data from the LAMOST and APOGEE spectroscopic surveys, as well as measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. Fiteni’s team focused on red giant branch stars, whose ages can be estimated with relatively high precision. The results are published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

    The stars beyond this boundary probably weren’t formed in situ. But they didn’t come from infalling satellite galaxies either. Instead, they likely migrated outward over time. “A key point about the stars in the outer disk is that they are on close-to-circular orbits, meaning that they had to have formed in the disk,” says team member Victor Debattista (University of Lancashire, UK).

    [...]

    Similar U-shaped age profiles have been seen in simulated disk galaxies and inferred in observations of other galaxies beyond our own. So the Milky Way is not unusual but merely following a common pattern of disk evolution, with the newly identified boundary marking a transition that may be a generic feature of spiral galaxies.

    It is currently unclear what stymies star formation beyond this boundary. It is possible that the gravity of the Milky Way’s central bar corrals gas at preferred radii. Or it could be due to the bend of the galaxy, which warps towards the edge, disrupting star formation in the outer reaches.

    New and future instruments could help paint a clearer picture. They include the 4MOST spectroscopic instrument at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, which saw first light last October, and the WEAVE spectrograph, attached to the William Herschel Telescope at La Palma in the Canary Islands.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on China calls for ‘concerted’ efforts to tackle excess solar production in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like solar panel prices have always been "artificial" due to various subsidies and tariffs? It's unclear what a "natural" price would be. It's also always been a very difficult industry...

    It seems like solar panel prices have always been "artificial" due to various subsidies and tariffs? It's unclear what a "natural" price would be.

    It's also always been a very difficult industry to make money in. This move will probably make it a little easier for manufacturers everywhere, if it works.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on For $700 a month, sleeping pods make San Francisco more affordable, but at what cost in ~life

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    It doesn't seem like median income and the poverty rate (which is about people at the bottom) have much to do with each other? They're about different people. According to this chart, California...

    It doesn't seem like median income and the poverty rate (which is about people at the bottom) have much to do with each other? They're about different people.

    According to this chart, California median household income reached $100,000 per year in 2024. And that means half the households in the state make more than that.

    Housing prices are high in part because there are a lot of people out there who can pay that much, and they're competing for housing.

  12. Comment on China calls for ‘concerted’ efforts to tackle excess solar production in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    My understanding is that the solar modules themselves are now a relatively small part of the total cost of installation, so moderate price changes might not have that much of an effect, other than...

    My understanding is that the solar modules themselves are now a relatively small part of the total cost of installation, so moderate price changes might not have that much of an effect, other than on the manufacturers' finances.

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Donald Trump officials reclassify medical marijuana as Schedule III drug in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The Justice Department said that it was immediately reclassifying marijuana products that had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as lower-risk drugs and establishing a new registration process for state medical marijuana licenses. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche also said that the administration would hold a new hearing to “fully” reschedule marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act.

    [...]

    Marijuana has long had the same Schedule I classification as heroin, but administration officials have sought to reclassify the drug as Schedule III, similar to some common prescription painkillers. Medical marijuana is now reclassified as Schedule III under the Justice Department’s order, which does not decriminalize marijuana for recreational use.

    Some health care advocates have spent years pressing for more access to marijuana as a potential treatment, warning that restrictions on the drug made it too hard to conduct research. The administration’s moves also bring national policy closer to legitimizing state laws that have authorized medical marijuana businesses, after years of stalemates over whether states should be in compliance with federal law.

    [...]

    President Joe Biden’s Justice Department in 2024 formally recommended that marijuana be reclassified as Schedule III, but the move stalled amid legal disputes and a pending Drug Enforcement Administration hearing.

    Drug policy experts said that federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services were required to undertake reviews related to public health and safety, even if the pace of that work agitated Trump.

    9 votes

  15. Comment on EU approves $106 billion loan package to support Ukraine in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union on Thursday approved a 90-billion-euro ($106-billion) loan package to help Ukraine meet its economic and military needs for two years after oil began flowing through a key pipeline to Hungary and Slovakia, ending months of political deadlock.

    The EU also approved a new raft of sanctions against Russia over its war on Ukraine. The measures were prepared early this year and had been set to be announced in February to mark the fourth anniversary of the conflict, but Hungary and Slovakia opposed the move.

    Hungary and Slovakia have been locked in a feud with Ukraine since Russian oil deliveries to the two EU countries were halted in January after a pipeline was damaged. Ukrainian officials blamed the damage on Russian drone attacks. Both countries confirmed Thursday that deliveries have resumed.

    Ukraine desperately needs the loan package to prop up its war-ravaged economy and help keep Russian forces at bay. Hungary angered its EU partners by reneging on a December deal to provide the funds. The loans are expected to be available in coming weeks and months.

    [...]

    Ukraine and most of its European backers oppose imports of Russian oil which have helped to fund Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, now in its fifth year. But unlike the rest of the European Union, Hungary and Slovakia still depend on Russia for their energy needs.

    [...]

    The 27-nation bloc had originally intended to use frozen Russian assets as collateral for the loan. But that option was blocked by Belgium, where the bulk of the frozen assets are held.

    In December, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia agreed not to stop their EU partners from borrowing the money on international markets as long as the three countries did not have to take part in the scheme.

    3 votes

  17. Comment on Ezra Klein interviews Alex Bores on AI and Palantir in ~society

  18. Comment on Ezra Klein interviews Alex Bores on AI and Palantir in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alex-bores.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dVA.3-U9.o89-jqbYXSAo&smid=url-share From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]...

    Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alex-bores.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dVA.3-U9.o89-jqbYXSAo&smid=url-share

    From the article:

    If you are living in New York’s 12th Congressional District, you may have seen these endless attacks on Alex Bores, one of the Democrats running there.

    [...]

    Yikes. Bores did work for Palantir. The rest of that attack is not what you might call true, but what interests me is who is paying for it: the super PAC Leading the Future and its subsidiary Think Big.

    Who funds the super PAC Leading the Future? Well, among their largest donors are the co-founders of OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and — wait for it — Palantir.

    So why is a co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, in this case, funding a super PAC to try to destroy a candidate on the grounds that he once worked for Palantir? The reason is that Leading the Future is a super PAC dedicated to destroying anyone who might regulate the tech industry, in general, or A.I., specifically, in a way these funders don’t like.

    And Bores is a member of the New York State Assembly. He co-wrote and passed the RAISE Act, one of the first pieces of A.I. regulation passed in any major state.

    [...]

    Bores, in general, has been a pretty effective legislator. In just over three years at the New York State Assembly, he has passed 30 bills and has been recognized by the Center for Effective Lawmaking as one of the most effective freshmen legislators.

    But it’s his ideas on regulating A.I. that particularly interest me, in part because I think they make sense and are worth discussing — things like an A.I. dividend — but in part because I just really do not want to live in the world that Leading the Future is trying to create. A world where, if the A.I. industry hoovers in enough money, they can then destroy anyone who might try to regulate them.

    What’s funny about all this is: Alex Bores is not an anti-A.I. kind of guy. I think he gets A.I. pretty well. I think he’s trying to balance its risks and its possibilities.

    [...]

    How do you end up at Palantir?

    [...]

    I was a young believer in — I probably wouldn’t put it in these terms back then — expanding government capacity and making sure government is actually delivering.

    Palantir in 2014, in the Obama administration, was about how we could expand government capacity while protecting privacy and civil liberties. So at the time, it felt like very much the natural fit.

    [...]

    Trump was elected in 2016. That was a weird bit.

    With the aggressive support of Peter Thiel, one of the early investors in Palantir. Would you call Peter Thiel a Palantir co-founder?

    I think so. I think that’s the phrase that is given.

    But Alex Karp was very much fighting for Hillary at the time. And if you look at donations of employees at Palantir, they tell a very skewed story toward the Democrats, as well.

    Lots more of interest.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on What is Mastodon for? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    To answer the question in the title, I occasionally visit Mastodon because sometimes I see threads like this one about tea.

    To answer the question in the title, I occasionally visit Mastodon because sometimes I see threads like this one about tea.