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Notes -
My response to Scott's post “Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds”.
Scott Alexander argues that Marc Andreessen’s ‘crypto PAC’ was a success and validates his thesis that donors should donate more. But the evidence of success is lacking, and it's way premature to say he and other crypto donors succeeded.
In fact, something interesting and unexpected happened instead, which runs counter to scott's thesis and premature victory lap: those who donated the least, nothing, or originally opposed Trump and his supporters, got the most and the biggest embrace by Trump. They got actual taxpayer-funded bailouts and other initiatives, but crypto donors got little to nothing. No taxpayer-funded crypto purchases.
So what to make of this? I would say that this again shows why donors do not donate more. There is no assurance of success. Crypto donors wanted Trump to make crypto a priority, and at best it has been pushed to the backburner compared to AI, chips, quantum and other stuff.
My response to Scott's post is that almonds turned out to be the #2 earning food crop in 2019 and "something only earns as much as almonds" means it earns a heck of a lot. Yes, almonds really do make 4-6 times as much as tobacco. (I said that it's the #1 food crop, but I forgot about corn being used for corn syrup. About 25% of corn is not used for ethanol or animal feed, so if all of that is corn syrup, it's greater than almonds.)
The almonds example is so bad that I find it hard to imagine that Scott didn't choose it on purpose (unless he got fooled by someone else who did the same thing).
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