Christian Baaki

If you double your skill, for example, the number of people producing at your level probably falls by much more than a factor of two. This helps explain Karlsson’s results. As he spent more time optimizing his essays, the pool of competition diminished rapidly, greatly increasing the value to his potential readers. The best strategy for growing his

The child credit is income redistribution that does nothing to change incentives to work or invest.

Congress can manipulate baselines, set fake expiration dates, and ignore their own budget rules—but they can't repeal the laws of economics or math. Deficits will continue to rise—from $1.8 trillion today to a projected $3.6 trillion in a decade. Another $25 trillion in 10-year borrowing will push interest rates higher and bury the budget under

Infrastructure has become nearly impossible to build, in large parts because of endless legal review. See for example the California HSR’s environmental review timeline - the paperwork alone (without any physical construction whatsoever) is scheduled to take twenty years, from 2005 to 2025, just for phase one (they don’t even have a schedule for

Trajan was ambitious of fame; and as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

Your early writing or business will probably suck.

Mine did.

They’ll improve but only if you give yourself permission to suck first.

Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

…the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

The anecdote helped explain the change

The only 2 steps for asymmetric upside:

1. Identify someone else’s bottleneck(s)

2. Solve and provide uncomfortable amounts of free value to them