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jeroboam


				

				

				
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joined 2022 October 15 17:30:54 UTC

				

User ID: 1662

jeroboam


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 3 users   joined 2022 October 15 17:30:54 UTC

					

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User ID: 1662

This is much worse. If obese people pay $1000/month to lose weight they are freely making that choice.

Why should I pay $100/month in taxes and insurance for this drug which I don't even take? And why aren't German taxpayers paying for it - just me?

Yes, this makes a lot of sense. I think a ratio of 10-1 is healthy. So, for example, we have 90% normies, 9% contrarians, 0.9% meta-contrarians, 0.09% meta-meta, well you get the picture.

The problem is we have 90% normies, 5% contrarians, and 5% meta-contrarians most of whom are just closeted normies.

But I suppose we can quickly descend into this territory:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/

My biggest beef is with the people who want to police AI "doomerism".

Big Yud is probably wrong about AI. But I think his ideas are valuable, much more so than the army of normies who own $NVDA stock and think AI is neato keen, isn't science fucking awesome?

Contrarians are society's immune system and should be respected as such. Sometimes they attack healthy tissue, but we're so much better off with them then without.

You'll get a better quality discussion if you present the stronger version of an argument. If that's such a dumb argument and missing context, why didn't you add that in your top level post? ಠ_ಠ

Good point. Set aside Bernie's worthless statement about Wegovy costing only $5 to make, which ignores the immense cost of research and regulatory compliance.

Let's say that Americans paid the same price for medication as Germans do. The pharma industry would no longer be profitable and drug development would slow to a crawl. Why must the entire global pharma industry be dependent on a single country with less than 5% of the world's population? How do we make Germans pay their fair share?

This doesn't address my concerns. On a global level, yes, spending on drugs must pay for research and development. But why must the United States specifically pay for more than 100% of the cost of research?

looks at three previous top level posts Two deserved to get pruned, and two top level posts in an hour is a bit dodgy.

So sorry for posting. What was I even thinking?

I would potentially be open to a regulation that companies can't sell drugs to Americans at a higher cost than they sell them to Germans,

I was thinking something similar. Here's what I'd propose. Drug companies can't sell drugs to Americans at a price more than 5x what they sell to Germans. For the same reason, I'd like to propose a 10 strikes and you're out law for career criminals. Pruning the most egregious misconduct can create a lot of value at relatively little cost.

You can't just look at the marginal cost, you have to consider the fixed costs that go into making the first dose. Drug development has a lot of candidate drugs that don't pan out and so they need big hits to pay for failed drugs.

Yes. Bernie Sanders is quite dumb and honeymooned in the USSR. His understanding of economics is at the /r/antiwork tier.

For the past two years there have been and continue to be pretty severe GLP-1 supply shortages in the US,

Cool. Why don't they just cut off all supplies to Europe and sell exclusively to the US at 20x the price.

C: To a large extent, the 'system' is working. US citizens are getting earlier access to these drugs

Where can I sign up to wait in line 12 months like a German and get drugs for 95% off?

$12,000/year is immense. Americans are being uniquely screwed here.

Edit: Apologies for unnecessary antagonism. No hard feelings I really just want more posts on this frickin' forum already!

Conversation has been slow here. I feel like the standards have increased to the point where people are afraid to post (except of course for bad faith posters who don't care).

So, let me try a post that's more of a conversation starter and less of a PhD thesis.

According to Bernie Sanders, it costs about $5 to make a monthly dose of Ozempic, the blockbuster-weight loss drug. Americans pay about $1000/month. Canadians pay $155. Germans pay $59.

The stock of the company which makes the drug, Novo Nordisk, has doubled since the beginning of 2023. (I considered buying in 2022 but didn't because I thought I was already too late 💀) It now has a market cap of nearly $600 billion, making it the most valuable company in Europe.

I assume that if companies were forced to charge the same price in U.S. as they do in Europe, the global pharma industry would become insolvent.

So why is the United States paying for > 100% of global pharma research? And how can we fix the glitch?

Sigh, slow news week.


Dexter and why meta-contrarians suck.

Dexter was a show about a serial-killer that aired on Showtime. It was pretty good, especially the early seasons. The premise, for those of you who don't know, is that Dexter was a "good" serial killer who only killed other killers.

If killers are bad, then Dexter was good because he reduced the number of killers.

You know who would really suck? A meta-Dexter who only killed Dexters.

... and that's how I see meta-contrarians.

"Let a thousand flowers bloom", the contrarians say, considering all sorts of weird and different ideas. "Actually, the rose is already the best flower and you smell bad" says the meta-contrarian, smugly.

Who are these meta-contrarians you ask? They are mustachioed hipsters of the rationalist community. They might dabble in some forbidden thoughts, but they don't take them seriously. Because, after all, the default hypthosis is usually the correct one.

And, yes, the default hypthosis usually is correct. But contrarians serve a valuable purpose, even if they are wrong more often than not! Because not EVERY default hypothesis is correct. And without contrarians we'll never find out which ones are wrong.

So I think it's important to give contrarians a lot MORE grace than people who espouse the default opinion. Meta-contrarians give them LESS grace. And that's why they suck.

They were socializing, talking about the opposite sex cuties, talking about sports and fashion.

I wasn't doing that stuff. I was reading.

Today, I'm probably 99th percentile well-read but I rarely read new books. I can't decide if this is good or bad. I somewhat agree with Hanania's take that books suck:

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-against-most-books

I don't know. For me, reading a bunch of books to get from 99 to 99.9 percentile might not make sense. But if you haven't read seminal works of literature then it probably makes sense to read some more instead of getting more hot takes off the internet.

Of course. But Richard is talking about eating beef instead of chicken because EA taught him that killing fewer total organisms is a terminal goal.

I recently came across this: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/effective-altruism-thinks-youre-hitler

"Based on what EAs have written, I have replaced much of the shrimp and chicken in my diet with beef and pork, which they say gets rid of most of the harm".

Richard's thought is that you might only eat one cow per decade, but you kill thousands of shrimp. Better to kill one animal than thousands.

He clearly hasn't thought this idea through very well, so I'll help him. Why stop at cows? Larger animals exist. Ideally, we'd just hunt blue whales. A single organism could feed could feed my entire family for life. So effective. So altruistic.

Speaking of blue whales, did you know that a blue whale eats almost nothing but tiny shrimp-like creatures called krill? A blue whale eats about 1000 kg of krill every day. Wikipedia wouldn't tell me how much a krill weights, so I asked ChatGPT which told me "about 1 gram". That seems fair.

This means a blue whale eats 1 million individual krill per day, or nearly 30 billion during its lifetime. By switching to a 100% blue whale diet not only would I eat fewer shrimp and chicken, but I'd save billions of shrimp lives, shrimp that would be literally burned alive in the acid of the blue whale's stomach. In the EA community we call this "not being afraid to multiply". Simpler minds like Scott merely give their kidneys to strangers. My diet saves billions.

I'm being catty here, but my point is that when you really double down on EA thought it takes you to some weird places. I think the moth lady deserves to be mocked and hopefully comes away a little chastened. We're humans and we should live with human morality, which includes killing pest animals.

Good point. NYT exists on a sort of patronage model. There are lots of people who have subscriptions who never or rarely read it, but they want to support the cause.

Music could end up being similar. It already is in many ways.

To be fair to Biden, this was actually a good use of reserves as he sold high and then refilled it at a lower price.

That's fake news unfortunately.

The SPR has NOT been refilled. There were some trivial purchases but you can barely seem them on the graph: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcsstus1&f=m

The major sales came to a conclusion after the midterms, but they were still draining the SPR until May of 2023, with prices below $80/barrel.

Yes. Environmental goals come with serious tradeoffs. The path to decarbonization will be difficult and make us poorer. The climate activists understand that and are fine with that. But most voters are not.

There is a propaganda effort to make it seem that there are no tradeoffs, that EV's and solar panels will make use richer and Create Jobs. It's simply not true.

Sadly, I think the artists lose this one.

Businesses like Google with huge moats can be run as private fiefdoms. But businesses that are disrupted end up having to compete on cost. Look what's happened to newspapers.

Most older consumers still get their music from Spotify or the radio. I think incumbents will continue to do well here. Probably AI music will get locked out of the market.

But my understanding is that younger consumers get most of their music from TikTok. When human artists have to compete with AI in an algorithmic feed, they will lose. Human artists can only produce so much. AI can throw infinite spaghetti at the wall to find what sticks. The best earworms will get amplified by the algorithm.

At some point, these earworms will be attached to a real-life human group (like a KPop group today), and the real-life humans will tour, dance, and sing the AI song. Some groups will get really big. People will pay thousands of dollars to watch them live, holding their device aloft to capture the moment for posterity.

There will still be a small market for real human artists. It will be similar to how there are still horse-drawn carriages today, a quaint relic of a simpler time.

And to steelman Biden here, there's an argument that goes something like this:

"I want to help the environment, but I can't do that if I lose the election, therefore I have to hurt the environment temporarily to win the election".

Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument is a fully generalizable superweapon to anything you want. But in this case, it's probably fair enough.

Yes, I agree that his rhetoric and actions don't match up. That's kind of my point.

Keep in mind that Russian oil isn't blocked, nor is the U.S. trying to block it. They are trying to "price cap" Russian oil - allowing Russia to sell it but hopefully make less money. Success has been mixed at best. Oil and gasoline are fungible and globally traded. So even if we don't buy Russian oil directly it keeps prices low.

And how would you explain Biden telling Ukraine to stop bombing refineries?

There are certain actions, like massive subsidies for EV's, can achieve Biden's decarbonization goal while ALSO lowering gas prices. This is fully compatible with my model. I believe that Biden does care somewhat about the environment and foreign relations.

But when the administration must choose, they choose lower gas prices every time.

Biden's environmental and foreign policy goals are entirely subservient to the price of gasoline.

For example, in 2022, when oil was over $100/barrel the Biden administration was chiding U.S. producers for not drilling more. That's when the administration decided to sell about 50% of the strategic petroleum reserve to lower prices before the midterms.

On the other hand, it's unclear if Keystone would lower U.S. pump prices at all. It was mostly designed to connect Canadian production with U.S. Gulf Coast ports.

Just recently he froze export permits for natural gas

This is a great example that demonstrates my model. Freezing exports lowers U.S. natural gas prices, prioritizing cheap energy for U.S. voters at the cost of foreign relations with allies. U.S. natural gas is the cheapest it has ever been.

Note that none of this makes Biden "pro oil and gas". He doesn't want energy producers making money. He just wants cheap gas before the election, whether it comes from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, or the Permian.

Use my model and U.S. foreign policy makes a lot more sense.

But this isn’t happening. Every year the caloric surplus generated by humanity is greater. The temperature increasing by 2 degrees in one century won’t change that. In fact higher temperatures and more co2 will likely lead to even greater agricultural production. It certainly hasn’t hurt so far. While some regions will suffer it will be made up for (and then some) by gains in other regions.

Despite this, I think climate change is an important problem. To me, the environment matters for its own sake, independent of humans.

I believe climate change will ultimately be solved in the 21st century by carbon removal technology that will cost less than 0.1% of global GDP per year.

There's a model of Biden foreign policy that's very simple and predictive. I will present it in full.

"The foreign policy of the Biden administration is whatever will make the price of gasoline go down before the election."

It's super effective!

For example, what is Biden's policy towards Venezuela, a brutal dictatorship which is responsible for a large chunk of the U.S. border crisis, and which has threatened to seize the territory of neighboring Guyana? Why, ease the sanctions, of course.

What about Biden's position on Iran, a country which funds terror throughout the world, supports the Houthis in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and is rapidly progressing on its goal to build nuclear weapons? Why, ease the sanctions, of course.

But surely Russia, the Greatest Threat to Democracy Since Hitler, will feel the wrath of U.S. sanctions. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting them in Ukraine. We help send hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men into the meat grinder to die. Because it's worth it. With stakes this high, there's no way that Biden would let his lust for cheap gasoline affect the conflict. Right, Anakin, right?

Today, Biden has urged Ukraine to stop its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure. It was causing gasoline futures to increase.

That's it boys. We've found the red line that Ukraine musn't cross. Biden is not very bright, and he's certainly lost a step. But an old dog still knows some tricks and he knows one. If you want to get re-elected you need cheap gas. As usual, the U.S. will support pretty much any tinpot dictator as long as they have oil. Sometimes, it really is that stupid.

In 1970, the Bhola Cyclone killed at least 300,000 people in Bangladesh. Fortunately, weather-related disasters are getting much less deadly, not more. There's very little reason to think this won't continue.

That said, as global incomes increase, refugee flows will continue to worsen regardless of the weather. Once people escape extreme poverty, they gain the means to emigrate.

Additionally, many people who follow climate change also are concerned about decreased energy return on investment causing at least a partial collapse of industrialized society.

This is a concern. In terms of EROI, renewables suck. My guess is that a lot of the solar being installed in California right now is actually negative EROI. Once you max out on solar, more solar just creates an unusable surplus.

But will this cause governments to collapse? I really doubt it. California can afford to be stupid about energy because they are so incredibly rich. It's true that renewables will make us poorer and more miserable. But governments can and do pivot when things get out of hand. In 2022, Germany started mining lignite again rather than shut down their economy.

I know this is not your stated belief, but how would climate change lead to the collapse of society in the lifetime of anyone currently living?

Are there any people who believe in climate change so strongly they are willing to move to a rural area?

I know there are many people who say they believe climate change is a serious threat and yet buy expensive oceanfront property.

One of the reasons I tend conservative is the different views towards exit rights.

For most conservatives, the reaction to liberals who want to go start a communist paradise elsewhere is "Good. Go do it!". This is a sincere wish. The presence of communism elsewhere is the surest bulwark against it happening here. The idea of communism so alluring that we need constant reminders about its failures, which are guaranteed.

But liberals have more of a "yous can't leave" attitude. The grand experiment can only work if everyone is forced to join. If the ants go somewhere else, the grasshoppers won't have any food to eat. Thus, states like California are considering exit taxes to trap the high-performing people in the state. And obviously the Soviets had to keep people inside with barbed wire and guns.

You're overselling it.

In many industries, competition is fierce to the point where no one is making any money.

For example, during the shale boom that started around 2010, U.S. oil producers plowed all of their profits back into expansion. U.S. oil production rose from 5 million barrels per day then to over 13 million today. But overproduction caused oil prices to collapse and many producers went bankrupt. Even the best-run firms have substantially underperformed the market. Today oil trades well below what it did in 2010, despite the prices of everything else going up a lot.

As a result you can buy the stocks of most oil and gas producers for a PE of less than 10 (compared to a PE of 50 for Costco). Even though they are profitable today, people expect that they will repeat the same mistakes a second time.

Some corporations stick it to the consumer and make big profits. Some don't care about money and just like to drill, baby, drill.

I am sure that there are lots of other industries like this too.