What the Fed is actually trying to do here—as opposed to the story it’s telling about what’s happening in the economy—is clear, yet extremely difficult: It is trying to destroy demand just enough to reduce excess inflation but not so much that the economy crashes. This a little bit like trying to tranquilize a raging grizzly bear with experimental ... See more

We pay lip service to the idea of hiring the best people in the world — but in reality, we’re only hiring the best people who happen to be close by. Call me crazy, but I think if we’re going to talk about hiring the best talent available, we should actually try to do that. This means letting go of the idea, at least in IT work, that people need to ... See more

Certain features of the modern academic system, like underpaid PhDs, interminably long postdocs, endless grant-writing drudgery, and clueless funders have lowered productivity. The 1930s academic system was indeed 25x more effective at getting researchers to actually do good research.

The weight of all of this evidence is that low doses of radiation do not cause detectable harm. Little to no cancer, or at least far less than predicted by LNT, is found in the subjects receiving low doses, such as workers operating under modern safety standards, or populations in high-background areas.

Under-index on interviews. In many cases they are just a “how good can this person talk shop” and you will just prefer native speakers from tech hubs if you do this. Get them to do real work asap.

Why is nuclear expensive? I‘m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but the answer seems to be that it‘s in design and construction costs for the plants themselves. If you can build a nuclear plant for around $2.50/W, you can sell electricity cheaply, at 3.5–4 c/kWh. But costs in the US are around 2–3x that.

To show how this might work, let’s take multiple sclerosis as an example. It is a devastating condition in need of better therapies. When testing new drugs in animal studies, researchers measure and report a number of different metrics, including the effects of drug candidates on inflammation, on damage to nerve fibres (axon loss), on damage to the... See more

Regarding the robots, UBI is less compelling when framed as a shield against job loss than as a tool to design a more democratic distribution of the gains from automated productivity.