skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance
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Comment on 50 years ago, cosmic rays may have caused Apollo astronauts to see lights (2023) in ~space
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
The mechanism behind the flashes described by Apollo astronauts remains a mystery. Perhaps the particles, which are components of cosmic rays, emit radiation as they pass through part of the eye. Or perhaps they trick nerve cells to create the illusion of light. However the flashes happen, they are still an issue for astronauts. In 2006, about 80 percent of NASA and European Space Agency astronauts reported experiencing the flashes. How the phenomenon impacts astronaut health after months or years in deep space is unclear. As NASA plans crewed missions to Mars and the moon, scientists are devising new ways to protect astronauts from radiation (SN: 7/4/20 & 7/18/20, p. 18), such as portable magnetic shields that can deflect cosmic rays.
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50 years ago, cosmic rays may have caused Apollo astronauts to see lights (2023)
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Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance
skybrian (edited )Link ParentWhen you write “growth of the economy as a whole,” do you mean for the entire world? Generally speaking, less economic growth in one country doesn’t imply more economic growth in a different...When you write “growth of the economy as a whole,” do you mean for the entire world? Generally speaking, less economic growth in one country doesn’t imply more economic growth in a different country. It’s more like economic setbacks are sometimes contagious. Example:
A financial crisis started in Thailand in July 1997 and spread across East Asia, wreaking havoc on economies in the region and leading to spillover effects in Latin America and Eastern Europe in 1998.
More spending in the US on imports has helped growth in many other countries that have exporting industries. Cutting back on spending (as threatened by Trump’s tariffs) doesn’t help.
A major exception is that increased carbon emissions are bad worldwide. That really is zero-sum. But that’s not true of most kinds of economic activity.
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Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance
skybrian (edited )Link ParentYes, there are many success stories. I’m saying that economic growth for the poor countries where it hasn’t happened yet (mostly in Africa) is very important.Yes, there are many success stories. I’m saying that economic growth for the poor countries where it hasn’t happened yet (mostly in Africa) is very important.
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Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance
skybrian (edited )Link"Economic growth" is an extremely vague concept. What kind of growth is it? Some kinds of economic growth have to be better than others, and we should make distinctions. There are some kinds of..."Economic growth" is an extremely vague concept. What kind of growth is it? Some kinds of economic growth have to be better than others, and we should make distinctions.
There are some kinds of economic growth that I'm quite dubious of. The gold rush to build datacenters as rapidly as possible, for example. What's the hurry? Seems like it's due to greed and competition.
However, I don't see how anyone could deny that some poor countries are severely lacking in economic growth of nearly all kinds. To say that we don't need any more economic growth seems like the sort of "luxury belief" that would only make sense to rich people in rich countries.
Edit: clarified wording.
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Comment on The consequences of caste in village India in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
The principal concern of the farmer is risk. The crops cannot fail. If they fail, you die. It is much more important to avoid a catastrophic fall in income than to have a higher standard of living most of the time. So, people shade their decisions – they spend less on intermediate inputs, choose crops which are less dependent on rainfall, scatter their fields rather than have them all in one place, and invest in livestock with a low rate of return but which provide something all year round.
They also save, and when that isn’t enough, they importune their relatives. These obligations to provide to your relatives is a form of insurance, of immense quantitative importance and surprising effectiveness.
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But this insurance comes at a cost. It is not the insurance you sign with a company which has clearly defined obligations and benefits, but a latent claim of relatives against anyone who should come into money. It is a tax, and a punitive one.
Some of the idea of the magnitude can be given from a clever experiment conducted by Carranza, Donald, Grosset-Touba, and Kaur (2025), in the Ivory Coast. They offer cashew processors the option of a blocked savings account into which they can deposit a part of their paycheck. These savings accounts do not pay interest. They exist solely to prevent one from being able to access the money for nine months. It is surprising that anyone would take up the offer, and yet many do. Because they are working at a job with pay tied strictly to productivity, through a piece rate system, we can observe how much more people are willing to work when their relatives don’t know how much they’re making.
The effects are tremendous. Earnings rise 9.4%, and attendance rises 6.5%. These gains are observed only when family members don’t know about the accounts. When they do, very few people are inclined to take up the account, ruling out that this is about self-control for the worker. The implied tax rate of the family cannot be directly known without knowing the labor supply elasticity for the workers, but we can put bounds on it through estimates elsewhere. The high end estimates of the labor supply elasticity imply that the workers who took up the account faced a tax rate on the order of 65% of additional earnings, and the lowest tax rate it could plausibly be is around 20% of income.
This finding is extremely well-replicated. Frankly, you can just go out and talk to people and see that this is true, but there are also numerous lab experiments (e.g. Jakiela and Ozier, 2016). Munir Squires (2024) also does a lab experiment, and points out that the effects of the social tax are especially binding on those with the most skill. This misallocation, in his model, lowered productivity by a quarter. People will also borrow at a considerable interest rate money which they already have themselves in savings. Baland, Guirkinger, and Mali (2011) report that in their sample in Cameroon, a fifth of borrowers pay a net interest rate of 25% a year just to hide away their income.
The social obligations which sustain coinsurance make it much harder to migrate. If you move to a far away city, who are you going to marry? India is surprisingly non-urbanized for a country of its level of development. I believe that caste is substantially connected to this.
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The need to maintain kinship networks leads inexorably to dowry, and the pattern of marriage in India. Marriages simply must be arranged in such a world. You cannot chance your children falling in love with someone outside of the caste, and the cultural separation needed to sustain endogamy without force is on the level of the Amish. In any case, once you have restricted your marriage prospects in each village to a cluster of 30 households, you would become hopelessly inbred. It would be too costly – more so in the past – to have people travel tens of miles just to interact with potential suitors, so instead it’s treated as a business decision and negotiated.
Daughters go to live with the groom’s family, and for this a price must be paid. This is not universal, however. Many other places have the sons live with the family of the daughter. The fundamental cause is the form of agriculture, and whether it requires the hoe or the plow. Hoe agriculture, commonly used for root crops, is labor intensive, but does not require anyone to be unusually strong. Women can do this, and in places with hoe agriculture, work in the fields. The plow, on the other hand, requires considerable upper body strength to operate. (It also reduces the need for weeding, which women and children might specialize in).
It is little surprise, then, that the direction of where people go to live, and where the price for marriage flows, varies with agricultural opportunities. Much of Africa pays a bride price, because much agriculture is hoe agriculture. Much of India – including our village of Rampur – is plow based agriculture, and women are not involved with cultivation. This has a long run effect on gender attitudes – Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn (2012) find that places which kept women in the house due to agriculture in the past have worse attitudes towards gender equality today, and that these norms are carried with them when they migrate elsewhere.
The payment of dowry is bound up with informal insurance. The timing of marriages are affected by droughts and other shocks. In India, a drought increases the age at which marriage occurs, while in Africa it decreases the age at which it occurs. In the former, the shock to savings means that the family must wait longer before they can afford it, while in the latter the family is more eager to sell the bride for cash to get by. Dowry thus forces families to maintain a stock of savings above what they would otherwise, and allows other people to make claims against it.
The transaction is not concluded when the dowry is paid on the wedding day. The groom’s family will continue to make claims, prompted by some necessity – sickness, Diwali, the breakdown of a motorbike – and backed up by the threat of violence against the bride. Violence against women is incredibly common in India, with 28% of women across the country reporting having been physically abused in the past year. About 5,700 women a year are killed due to disputes over dowry, with Uttar Pradesh accounting for 2,000 of them. The paradigmatic example is the bride burning, where the woman is covered in kerosene and set alight, with the aim of blaming it on a household accident or suicide. It’s a really ugly part of rural life, yet common. (I’ve received some pushback on this claim. Yes, 28% in the past year is correct. NFHS survey, page 680. The most common form is that 25% of women report being slapped by their husband.)
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They run a second experiment where they surprise people who they’ve hired to assemble paper bags with a request that they perform a task for a bonus. The results are even more astonishing – 43% of workers would refuse to do a task outside their identity for 10 minutes, even for 10 times their daily wage. It’s not a matter of effort expended, as it’s flat across the time increments. Instead, people have a conception of themselves as a person who does x and not y, and will not budge for filthy lucre. This tracks with historical evidence – Alexander Persaud (2023) found that immigrants to Fiji from high castes were willing to pay much more – 2 and a half years of wages – in order to return home.
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It goes without saying that caste solidarity leads to discrimination. Soumitra Shukla (2026), working with multinationals hiring from elite Indian colleges, shows that despite lower-caste individuals being more likely to be promoted and less likely to leave, they are weeded out by higher caste interviewers before they can be hired. It is striking how people with unambiguous surnames get stricken early on, while people with ambiguous surnames are removed only after the interview stage. Going back to Rampur and villages like it, low caste households have much worse access to water for irrigation if someone from a higher caste owns the water supply – Siwan Anderson (2011) finds that lower caste water buyers would have yields 45% higher if they were in a village where the water supplier was also of the same caste. It is striking that trade could even break down in the water market, because the good to be traded and the contracts needed are so simple. In kinship based societies, though, people have limited trust. Moscona, Nunn, and Robinson (2017) show that in places in Africa with similar customs, they trust the central government and outsiders less.
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The consequences of caste in village India
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Comment on Car break-ins drop in San Francisco as drone use increases in ~transport
skybrian Link ParentI wouldn't say this is a more reliable source, but apparently there are rappers are saying it's the drones too?I wouldn't say this is a more reliable source, but apparently there are rappers are saying it's the drones too?
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Comment on Is AI profitable yet? in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentA new run rate was allegedly reported to investors: $65 billion. I asked ChatGPT to add the point to the chart where I keep track. The area under the curve for the year so far looks like about $23...A new run rate was allegedly reported to investors: $65 billion. I asked ChatGPT to add the point to the chart where I keep track.
The area under the curve for the year so far looks like about $23 billion.
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Comment on Car break-ins drop in San Francisco as drone use increases in ~transport
skybrian LinkAlso: A dark thriller about San Francisco car break-ins is selling out theatersAlso: A dark thriller about San Francisco car break-ins is selling out theaters
The dark and deadly serious film follows a pair of brothers, Juju (Reed Shannon) and Slim (Zach Sowers), as they navigate the criminal underworld of San Francisco. Slim is a promising basketball player with his choice of scholarships, while his brother Juju becomes wrapped up in a crew of thieves who use spark plugs and brute force to smash their way into car windows. The film feels like something of a modern day interpretation of the 2004 drama “Sucker Free City.” The movie was co-directed by Alex Ferrufino alongside San Francisco rapper and Cookies cannabis entrepreneur Gilbert Anthony “Berner” Milam Jr. (Berner also has a co-writing credit alongside David Mansanalez).
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Comment on India's Serum Institute partners with Gates MRI to make experimental tuberculosis vaccine in ~health
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
July 16 (Reuters) - Serum Institute of India said on Thursday it would manufacture an experimental tuberculosis vaccine under an agreement with the Gates Medical Research Institute, in what is likely to be the first new TB shot in more than 100 years if approved.
The novel vaccine candidate, M72/AS01E, has been in development for two decades and is currently in a late-stage clinical trial.
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Serum Institute plans to invest more than $100 million to scale up manufacturing capacity and prepare for future vaccine supply, pending approval, the company said.
Under the agreement, Gates MRI, founded by the Gates Foundation, will transfer the technology and know-how needed to manufacture the vaccine antigen and enable large-scale production, Serum Institute said.
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Tuberculosis is the world's leading cause of death from a single infectious agent and is among the top 10 causes of death, the WHO said in a report last year.
Nearly 11 million people contracted tuberculosis in 2024, while 1.23 million died from the disease, according to the WHO's data.
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"The World Health Organization estimates a vaccine with this efficacy profile could prevent 76 million new TB cases, save 8.5 million lives, and save $41.5 billion for TB-affected households over 25 years," Serum and Gates MRI said.
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India's Serum Institute partners with Gates MRI to make experimental tuberculosis vaccine
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Comment on Car break-ins drop in San Francisco as drone use increases in ~transport
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/rRfZv From the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Car break-ins are as old as cars, but bipping, as a regional media spectacle and viral moment, belongs to the Doom Loop era. Consider the evidence: Reports of auto burglaries peaked in 2017, while Google searches for “bipping” didn’t spike until seven years later. This came after bipping — rumored to be either an onomatopoeia for the sound a hammer makes when it taps on glass or a police acronym for “burglary in progress” — found its way onto T-shirts and into the lyrics of local rappers.
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Car break-ins rose dramatically in the 2010s, with more than 30,000 recorded in 2017, according to San Francisco Police Department data. Since then, annual tallies have been gradually falling, and in the last two years, they’ve decreased by more than 75%. There were fewer than 1,800 reported car burglaries in the first half of 2026 — an average of around 10 per day. That may seem like a lot, but in 2017, the daily average was around 85.
The police attribute bipping’s heyday to a lack of enforcement technology and a district attorney unwilling to prosecute perpetrators. Burglars knew they could smash windows, grab electronics and other valuables, quickly sell them to black-market dealers, and likely never get caught. Less than 1% of car burglaries over the last decade led to a conviction. But Dreamllife Rizzy is right: Those days are over.
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The SFPD increased patrols in bipping hot spots like Fisherman’s Wharf starting in 2023. Cops also started using bait cars and building cases against major bipping gangs. In 2024, the department deployed its network of Flock cameras, and voters increasingly more concerned about public safety than privacy approved Proposition E, which allowed the SFPD to use drones and other types of surveillance technology.
“We are able to swiftly identify crews moving throughout the city, follow them, and make arrests when it is safe and feasible,” SFPD spokesman Evan Sernoffsky said. “Word is spreading among the criminal element that we will catch them and arrest them.”
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Not everyone is so enthusiastic about the new surveillance tech, of course. The Standard reported last year that local police were sharing their license-plate reader data with other agencies, which could violate state law. Sernoffsky said the SFPD does not use Flock cameras for immigration enforcement or share its data with state or federal agencies. Elsewhere, cops are using Flock cameras for increasingly dubious arrests (opens in new tab).
And in San Francisco, auto glass shops are suffering as fewer people need their windows replaced.
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Car break-ins drop in San Francisco as drone use increases
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Comment on Head of Norway's sovereign wealth fund warns that soaring AI-driven stock valuations could trigger a sharp correction in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentDiversifying is standard financial advice. When one stock goes up a lot, some of it should be sold to rebalance. Under current conditions, though, there's a question is what counts as balance....Diversifying is standard financial advice. When one stock goes up a lot, some of it should be sold to rebalance.
Under current conditions, though, there's a question is what counts as balance. Standard forms of indexing are putting a fair bit of money into tech stocks. So do you want to underweight tech according to the usual metrics, in pursuit of balance according to some other metric?
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Comment on Ukraine attacks Russia with hundreds of drones - one of Kyiv’s largest aerial assaults of the conflict in ~society
skybrian Link ParentYeah, I shouldn’t have written “everywhere,” but I’m thinking of the bollards built around some buildings to prevent car bombs from getting too close after 9/11. What would the equivalent...Yeah, I shouldn’t have written “everywhere,” but I’m thinking of the bollards built around some buildings to prevent car bombs from getting too close after 9/11. What would the equivalent anti-drone defense be?
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Comment on Ukraine attacks Russia with hundreds of drones - one of Kyiv’s largest aerial assaults of the conflict in ~society
skybrian LinkI’m not upset about Russia getting attacked, but this sort of thing isn’t going to only happen in Russia, Ukraine, and the Persian Gulf. (And the US drone attacks happening since the Obama...I’m not upset about Russia getting attacked, but this sort of thing isn’t going to only happen in Russia, Ukraine, and the Persian Gulf. (And the US drone attacks happening since the Obama administration.) This is what warfare is going to look like. If there’s another 911 then it’s likely to be using drones.
I wonder how long before we’re putting in anti-drone defenses everywhere?
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Comment on Patterns and problems in multiagent systems in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentIt seems likely that the AI labs will get cooperation working to keep LLMs from attacking each other. I mean, unless they want to build a shark or something. Maybe there’s a niche for that too? It...It seems likely that the AI labs will get cooperation working to keep LLMs from attacking each other.
I mean, unless they want to build a shark or something. Maybe there’s a niche for that too? It reminds me of core war.
We are living in the future and some parts of the world are turning into a science fiction story. The Internet, especially.
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Comment on Any significant changes to Tildes are extremely unlikely in ~tildes.official
skybrian Link ParentI will sometimes try to do this and it often goes badly. If I share a somewhat similar experience as a way of showing that I can relate, it’s usually misunderstood. Probably bad communication on...I will sometimes try to do this and it often goes badly. If I share a somewhat similar experience as a way of showing that I can relate, it’s usually misunderstood. Probably bad communication on my part, but I’ll just say that it’s a skilled practice and not necessarily something that people can just do.
"intrinsic inevitable" is doing a lot of work there. You can rule out a lot of failures by saying they weren't intrinsic or inevitable, but they're still failures, at least until the country finally succeeds.
Meanwhile, the track record for growth due to export-led global trade is pretty good. It's certainly not "pure" capitalism since it's often due to intentional government policy. (China is an example!) But it's embedded in a trade-based global framework.