skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting in ~tech

  2. Comment on Because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against skin cancer in ~health

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I doubt it. He advocates for deregulation in general - this is just one example.

    I doubt it. He advocates for deregulation in general - this is just one example.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against skin cancer in ~health

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Those are good links, providing more depth on this issue. You end on a dismissive note, though. Although the tone is different, it seems like this is all basically in agreement on what happens and...

    Those are good links, providing more depth on this issue.

    You end on a dismissive note, though. Although the tone is different, it seems like this is all basically in agreement on what happens and the results?

    Tabarrok isn't just complaining, he's advocating for a simple-sounding solution to fix the problem. I'm hardly an expert on sunscreens, but it seems pretty plausible, at least if restricted to that domain.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against skin cancer in ~health

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I see sunscreens as an example of US over-regulation and supplements as an example of under-regulation. It seems like it's more difficult for the US to correct these kinds of policy mistakes than...

    I see sunscreens as an example of US over-regulation and supplements as an example of under-regulation.

    It seems like it's more difficult for the US to correct these kinds of policy mistakes than it should be.

    9 votes

  5. Comment on Because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against skin cancer in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... ... A note: the author is a conservative economist who blogs on Marginal Revolution. I've seen a lot of bad takes by him (I like Tyler Cowen better) but I think this article...

    From the article:

    In the European Union, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics, which means greater flexibility in approving active ingredients. In the U.S., sunscreens are regulated as drugs, which means getting new ingredients approved is an expensive and time-consuming process. Because they’re treated as cosmetics, European-made sunscreens can draw on a wider variety of ingredients that protect better and are also less oily, less chalky and last longer. Does the FDA’s lengthier and more demanding approval process mean U.S. sunscreens are safer than their European counterparts? Not at all. In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.

    ...

    The problem is that American sunscreens work better against UVB rays than against the more dangerous UVA rays. That is, they’re better at preventing sunburn than skin cancer. In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection. Precisely because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against UVA rays. Thus, instead of being safer, U.S. sunscreens may be riskier.

    European sunscreens are also more pleasant to apply, and because they work better with makeup they are probably used more often as part of a skin care regimen, which may reduce the prevalence of skin cancer. Once again, the United States’ slower and seemingly more risk-averse approach actually increases risk.

    ...

    In 2013, then-FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg told lawmakers that sorting out the sunscreen issue was “one of the highest priorities.” Yet, it still hasn’t been done. Americans have been without good sunscreen and cough medicine for too long. There is a simple solution to these problems. If a medical drug or device has been approved by another developed country, a country that the World Health Organization recognizes as a stringent regulatory authority, then it ought to be fast-tracked for approval in the U.S.

    The logic of peer approval is simple: If it’s good enough for the Germans, then it’s good enough for us! Americans traveling in Europe do not hesitate to use European sunscreens, rapid tests or cough medicine, because they know the European Medicines Agency is a careful regulator, at least on par with the FDA. But if Americans in Europe don’t hesitate to use European-approved pharmaceuticals, then why are these same pharmaceuticals banned for Americans in America?

    As someone who has studied and often critiqued the FDA for many years, I also know the FDA can be timely and efficient. Europe has sometimes made some better choices, but at times so has the FDA. A peer-approval system would work both ways. Europe would also take into account FDA decisions. Peer-approval is more about spreading the burden of review and speeding up good decisions than it is about castigating the FDA.

    A note: the author is a conservative economist who blogs on Marginal Revolution. I've seen a lot of bad takes by him (I like Tyler Cowen better) but I think this article largely avoids that. Maybe having an editor helps?

    11 votes

  7. Comment on Real estate agents are fleeing the field in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I largely agree, but I don't think it's just sales and marketing. Real estate has a lot of traps for the unwary and local advice from someone with experience is useful. Some markets are especially...

    I largely agree, but I don't think it's just sales and marketing. Real estate has a lot of traps for the unwary and local advice from someone with experience is useful. Some markets are especially complex (like New York City.) The article talks about how having full time, more experienced agents might help.

    14 votes

  8. Comment on Real estate agents are fleeing the field in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: … … … … …

    From the article:

    The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 440,000 full-time real estate agents and brokers in 2023, about 72,000 less than the year before.

    …

    With interest rates remaining relatively high, deals have become so scarce that many Realtors now sell only a few homes a year. A survey of about 2,000 real estate agents conducted by the Consumer Federation of America found that 49 percent of them sold fewer than two homes in 2023. And Realtors will soon face new rules that could result in sweeping changes to how they do business and how they get paid.

    Under the new rules starting in August, real estate databases no longer will include offers of compensation for buyers’ agents. That means those agents can no longer count on a cut of the seller’s windfall. Investment bank Keefe Bruyette & Woods has estimated that as much as 30 percent of the total U.S. commissions revenue might be lost as a result.

    …

    Economists who study the real estate sector have long believed that a “decoupling” of buyer and seller commissions will convince a significant number of Realtors to abandon the field, though estimates vary as to how many.

    …

    Experts see a silver lining in a potential exodus of Realtors: Those who remain might be more experienced and competent. “This will be good for consumers because agents on average will be better at their job and will charge more competitive commissions,” Gilbukh said.

    A “Realtor glut” has persisted since the industry’s pandemic high point, said Brobeck, who also sees a departure of real estate agents as probably a good thing for home buyers.

    …

    Under the rules coming in August, agents will feel more pressure to justify their compensation, Brobeck said, because buyers will be more likely to press for a lower commission. That should also create space for discount brokers serving first-time buyers, he said.

    …

    Contracts under the proposed new rules should bring more clarity to the relationship between buyers and their agents, several analysts said. That could cut down on “ghosting” incidents, in which prospective home buyers will talk to an agent while searching for a home, only to finalize the deal with a different agent, or put their housing search on hold.

    12 votes

  10. Comment on Wisconsin pension fund now includes bitcoin in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    That’s a good list. The next step would be to go through the list and figure out which ones have interesting economic activity. How many customers do they really have, and how much of a benefit is...

    That’s a good list. The next step would be to go through the list and figure out which ones have interesting economic activity. How many customers do they really have, and how much of a benefit is it to them?

    These things require a deep dive that most of us won’t do, boosters and critics alike. (And I don’t want to give anyone homework.)

    There’s also the issue that some needs are very specialized. Once we go below the surface of the goods and services that consumers use directly, there are complex supply chains that we all depend on. Evaluating the worth of supply chain components is often difficult.

    Programmable money seems like one of those. I can see it being convenient and useful for builders of financial infrastructure, in theory, but since I don’t build that kind of thing, I find it hard to judge. My payment needs are pretty simple. Credit cards and Zelle pretty much cover it.

    —-

    Personally, I’m not sure if Las Vegas counts as economic activity that makes the world a better place. My instinct is to assume the opposite. Sure, lots of it is not actually gambling. I assume food, accommodations, and travel don’t count? These things are necessary for any major tourist destination. Hawaii needs them too, even when the beach itself is free.

    The worth of glitzy entertainment is kind of dubious though. The Sphere is pretty neat, but in the end it’s a fancy, eye-catching event venue.

    An argument could be made that, much like with business travel, many kinds of entertainment would be much cheaper to do either remotely or in a distributed way. And indeed we do that. There’s no need to travel to watch a movie or play a video game. For live music, musicians going on tour saves travel costs for everyone else.

    But it’s all incredibly subjective. To avoid dealling with this, economists often assume that buyers know what they’re doing, at least until they change their minds about what to buy.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on How a simple fix could double the size of the US electricity grid in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: …

    From the article:

    Most of America’s lines are wired with a technology that’s been around since the early 1900s — a core steel wire surrounded by strands of aluminum. When those old wires heat up — whether from power passing through them or warm outdoor temperatures — they sag. Too much sag in a transmission line can be dangerous, causing fires or outages. As a result, grid operators have to be careful not to allow too much power through the lines.

    But a couple of decades ago, engineers designed a new type of wire: a core made of carbon fiber, surrounded by trapezoidal pieces of aluminum. Those new, carbon-fiber wires don’t sag as much in the heat. That means that they can take up to double the amount of power as the old lines.

    According to the recent study from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and GridLab, replacing these older, steel wires could allow for up to 80 percent of the new transmission needed on the electricity grid — without building anything new. It could also cost half as much as building an entirely new line and avoid the headaches of trying to get every state, city and even landowner along the route to agree to a new project.

    …

    Duncan Callaway, a professor of energy and resources at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the authors of the recent study, said that many transmission engineers aren’t used to thinking of rewiring as one of their tools. “But it’s a much faster way,” he said.

    Some changes are already underway to encourage this approach. For a long time, utilities had to undergo lengthy environmental reviews if they were rewiring a line longer than 20 miles. Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced that those would no longer be necessary if utilities are simply replacing wires.

    And last month, the Biden administration announced a goal to upgrade 100,000 miles of transmission line over the next five years — which could include rewiring the lines.

    7 votes

  13. Comment on School choice programs have been wildly successful under Ron DeSantis. Now Florida public schools might close. in ~life

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Well, that’s unfortunate. It’s closing a school due to bad policies. The way I see it is that some kids costing significantly more than others to teach is just reality and systems that pay the...

    Well, that’s unfortunate. It’s closing a school due to bad policies.

    The way I see it is that some kids costing significantly more than others to teach is just reality and systems that pay the same for everyone are denying reality out of misguided egalitarianism. Something like insurance is needed and government funding can do that. This doesn’t mean that special-needs kids have to be evenly distributed over all schools - why not specialize?

    But the funding system needs to be designed to allow for specialization by paying different amounts, or there’s going to be a strong financial incentive to avoid taking special-needs kids.

    Ironically that’s a “to each according to their needs” policy, but that’s just what insurance is supposed to do. It’s a way of mitigating the inherent unfairness of life circumstances.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on Les atomes in ~humanities.history

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link
    From the blog post: You can read a lot more about the history of molecular theory on Wikipedia. Oddly, this particular book isn’t referenced, but it does talk about how Perrin went on to win the...

    From the blog post:

    […] the molecular theory of matter wasn’t widely accepted until the 1910s. Very famous, very smart scientists, including Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare, thought atoms were merely a convenient fiction for predicting experimental outcomes. Statistical calculations, like those deployed to derive the ideal gas laws from kinetic theory, were akin to approximating integrals with discrete sums. Since bulk media obeyed differential equations, many thought it was more likely that they were continuous substances. That nature was an assemblage of a nearly infinite collection of invisible, discrete billiard balls seemed rightfully outlandish.

    The controversy was effectively put to rest by Jean Baptiste Perrin in his 1913 book Les Atomes. Perrin spent hundreds of pages detailing the experimental evidence for atoms and molecules. The core of his argument was that if you assume molecules exist, you could count them in surprisingly diverse ways.

    You can read a lot more about the history of molecular theory on Wikipedia. Oddly, this particular book isn’t referenced, but it does talk about how Perrin went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1926 for “proving, conclusively, the existence of atoms.”

    A bit more context: Ben Recht is a professor who is blogging his way through the last lectures of Paul Meehl, a psychologist who taught about the philosophy of science. The series starts with this post.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Astronomers find “Big Ring” 1.3 billion light years across in ~space

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    Close to the handle of the Big Dipper, there’s a huge ring on the sky that shouldn’t be there. The circular structure — an apparent overdensity of distant galaxies — has a circumference of 4.1 billion light-years. Standard cosmology models cannot easily explain such humongous structures in the mass distribution of the universe. According to PhD student Alexia Lopez (University of Central Lancashire, UK), the discovery “leads to the ultimate question: do we need a new standard model?”

    Lopez first presented the result at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans in early January. Her research paper, coauthored with Roger Clowes (also at University of Central Lancashire) and Gerard Williger (University of Louisville), has now been posted to the arXiv astronomy preprint server (see preprint here).

    Two years ago, the same team presented the discovery of another ultra-large-scale structure (uLSS): a giant arc, at a similar distance of 9.2 billion light-years, and more or less in the same part of the sky. “Two extraordinary uLSSs in such close configuration raises the possibility that together they form an even more extraordinary cosmological system,” they write.

    Both the Giant Arc and the newly discovered Big Ring show up indirectly, via the absorption lines seen in the spectra of many thousands of distant quasars — active galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. Matter along the line of sight to a quasar absorbs light at specific wavelengths. In particular, the team is looking for the absorption of ionized magnesium atoms (MgII) — both in galaxies and in the gas between them. Due to the expansion of the universe, the wavelength of MgII absorption shifts to the red side of the spectrum (longer wavelengths) when the absorber is farther away – a phenomenon known as redshift.

    8 votes

  18. Comment on School choice programs have been wildly successful under Ron DeSantis. Now Florida public schools might close. in ~life

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don’t really want to get into it, but instead of talking about “them,” it would help to be more specific. Sure, sometimes the same person might want all these things.

    I don’t really want to get into it, but instead of talking about “them,” it would help to be more specific. Sure, sometimes the same person might want all these things.

  19. Comment on Surge in India’s renewables set to keep coal’s share below 50% in total installed capacity in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ...

    From the article:

    India has rocketed to third in the world’s solar power generation rankings, behind only China and the US, according to Ember’s fifth annual Global Electricity Review of 80 countries, released last week. Ranked ninth in 2015, India has now surpassed Japan, which, along with fellow G7 member Germany, has a stubbornly high demand for coal.

    ...

    India, on the other hand, has been unable to shed its dependence on coal. Adverse weather conditions and surging power demand mean the country continues to rely on coal for over 70% of its electricity generation. The situation is unlikely to change this year, with the Central Electricity Authority expecting a shortfall in hydropower, leading to power shortages, especially during the night when solar is offline. As a result, media reports suggest the country may fire up idled coal plants to meet the shortfall.

    1 vote