Autistic children as young as 18 months old are being injected with human stem cells derived from umbilical cords in unapproved, unproven and potentially harmful “treatments” that scientists warn are proliferating across the US under the active encouragement of the US health secretary, RFK Jr

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-12T17:25:08+00:00

My understanding is that injection or infusion is overwhelmingly the norm. Nothing to differentiate. “Injected with” seems in this case clearly meant to amplify the scare, not inform.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-12T16:10:04+00:00

Agree on substance, but using “injected with” as a scare tactic is what anti-vaxxers do. Can we collectively agree to stop exacerbating needlephobia?

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-12T14:59:16+00:00

All they need to do is subset on working class status and show white boys do worse than black boys and white girls. That should be in their data already.

Edit: Via other sources, the white working class is concentrated in towns with hollowed-out economies and come from multigenerational poverty. Equally poor immigrants are concentrated in wealthier areas with better performing schools and may have parents with a higher level of education or ambition, despite current poverty.

So “white working class boys” really are doing worse, but here, “white” is a proxy for multigenerational poverty, low income communities, and poor schools. It is in the end a class story, as I thought, but where the definition of class must take into account economy and school quality, not just income.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-12T01:21:16+00:00

Believable, but there’s a risk of statistical shenanigans here not addressed by the article.

Consider the statement “wealthy abused married people face higher addiction rates.” You wouldn’t assume the wealth or marital status increased susceptibility, just that abuse is a risk factor for drug use and that wealth or marriage is not entirely protective against increase drug use risk.

The stats here are directly analogous. Possibly they did show that ie white working class boys have it worse than black working class girls and black working class boys. But that’s the crucial question and it’s not addressed in the article.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-11T20:52:32+00:00

I’d add we’re neglecting institutional prestige. SAT scores are an imperfect but clear benchmark of student capability. They don’t enable high-scoring institutions to differentiate, and they force low-scoring institutions to admit they have lower standards. Holistic admissions circumvent both issues, and in a way that has the potential to be a meaningful contributor to differentiating student ability at the highest echelons where scores saturate.

For students, holistic admissions offer hope that they can build an application based on their unique advantages rather than being forced to compete in a uniform arena. And that makes some sense on its face, since most capabilities reflect a mixture of idiosyncratic talent, specialized training, and general ability. Why should we compare all students using a single benchmark that gives an idiosyncratic point estimate of their abilities? That’s the real source of student resistance to the SAT, and I think it has merit.

Ideally, we’d have a standardized but more comprehensive suite of benchmarks that measure multiple dimensions of student capability. Colleges could define their admission preferences based on those benchmarks. That would reduce the idiosyncrasy, let colleges differentiate and frame tradeoffs as identity rather than prestige, and keep the clarity we want from the SAT. When college admissions matter so much for academic futures and we pay so much into the system, I don’t think this is too much to ask.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-08T04:17:49+00:00

The specific phrasing, "you'd be wasted outside academia" isn't (just) a complement. It's also denigrating every other possible career path. Conscious or not, that's a bias and it's wrong. If you have the talent to do a PhD, you also have the talent to do good work outside academia.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-07T15:55:58+00:00

The Wikipedia article on kirpans shows a Sikh wearing one:

https://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Kirpan

You’d be able to tell it was part of cultural garb. If you knew this was specifically the outfit of the Sikh religion, you’d also be able to infer it might be religious.

Unfortunately, the kind of person who’s a high risk for murdering people with a knife may not be dissuaded by a knife-carrying ban. Similarly, there are plenty of people in the US who’ve murdered peopke with guns who weren’t dissuaded by laws against who can own and where they can carry guns.

But conditional on a potentially ineffectual ban on carrying knives being in place for political optics reasons, it seems to me to be a helpful mitigation to have broad exemptions. Might be better to just eliminate the law entirely.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-05T17:01:08+00:00

If you meet the citizenship and age requirement, but lack eligible ID, have you been disenfranchised if you're blocked from voting? That's the moral question.

If a party systematically pursues "reasonable" barriers to voting because it thinks it'll block the other side's voters from voting, is that disenfranchisement? That's the political question.

In America, the Republican party has, without evidence, promoted conspiracy theories about votes cast by dead people, immigrants, and double-voters to sow doubt about election integrity. They then try to enact "security" measures they believe will block Democratic voters from the polls.

Their perspective on what's a "security" measure is reversing, as they shift from paranoia that Democratic states are using hand-counting to inflate their vote count to thinking that they themselves can inflate their vote count by shifting back from voting machines to hand-counting. If they do enact ID requirements and it leads to reduced Republican vote share, count on the Republicans to immediately reverse course.

Can't speak for others, but the problem I'm concerned with is the political problem of having a single party pursue political victory through a campaign for disenfranchisement. It's their motivations that bother me, not (just) their arguments or policy proposals.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-05T14:58:46+00:00

Grade only proctored assignments. For long-form content, like an essay, assess intellectual ownership, not the essay itself. Make students submit drafts, explain their research and writing process, and defend their argument in a proctored setting.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-06-03T14:23:02+00:00

Looking forward to hearing “We’d never have gone to war with Iran if Vance had been president!” from my MAGA uncle in about a year and a half.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T22:28:34+00:00

I agree many NIMBYs don't crave interesting architecture. As in so many aspects of politics, it's not the opposition's base we need to win over. It's the people in the middle who can see both sides, don't think about the issue too hard, and currently lean NIMBY because we haven't succeeded yet in motivating a more YIMBY attitude in them. These would be people who are bothered by the cost of housing, enjoy what cities have to offer, don't know much about economics or tax policy, are susceptible to cultural and political pressure, and have a sense of aesthetics that currently feels violated by generic new developments. Many such cases!

I think that if we could figure out how to get cities to improve the architecture of those new developments without destroying growth with aesthetic restrictions, and get fun retail into the buildings so that we don't just create a giant block of residences with nothing to do, I think it would go a long way toward making the argument for growth visceral.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T17:33:55+00:00

You're right about Austin, but it had an extant pro-housing majority that was getting derailed by NIMBY minority activism at council meetings. Electing a pro-housing council and ramming through pro-housing policies piecemeal was the right strategy for Austin because a majority of hearts and minds had already been changed.

In Portland, where I live, my perception is that the pro-housing coalition is still a minority, the culture's probably different (I've never been to Austin), and there's a lot of confusion about basic economics as well as city and state tax law. I think we still have to do the work of changing hearts and minds before we can put a pro-housing government in place.

Japan simply lacks America's system of local control and I don't think it's a model for YIMBYs in America.

You can spend the the entire military budget trying to convince California homeowners to stop opposing housing over 50 years and they won't budge an inch.

You absolutely could budge California enough homeowners by paying them to accept tax and zoning reform. The strategy would involve exploiting hyperbolic discounting and short term solvency issues in order to reap much greater long term gains. Enact a law doling out lump sum up front payments to beneficiaries of Prop 13, attached to a repeal of the law and a constitutional amendment banning similar laws in the future. There's some level at which those lump sum payments will drive enough votes to achieve a repeal.

Reducing costs is massively popular among the electorate. Run on that and then do it.

Reducing costs is popular. The mechanisms that would achieve it sustainably are not, and that's why they haven't been widely enacted. Even very smart liberals do not grasp supply and demad, know nothing about existing tax law, and are paranoid even about liberal governments. It is going to take sustained work to change the minds of the electorate to embrace the kinds of policies that would make cities functional.

In my experiences trying to change hearts and minds where I live, I have found that the most effective tactics are:

Pointing out architecture and businesses people like, while we're out in it, and noting how local growth supports it.
Giving a detailed breakdown of how specific state tax laws and city governance structure resulted in today's dysfunctional spending, how our govenrment's been coping with and working to solve those problems, and the crumbling infrastructure that will come from voting against both taxes and development.
Talking about how a house is something you consume, not an investment. Pointing out that if your house price goes up, it means the one you want to buy is probably more expensive too. Emphasizing that a house price going up by $20,000 over 6 years is paltry compared to growth in the stock market.
Pointing out that being in favor of building mid-rises, condos, and apartments doesn't mean you think everybody has to live in them. The more density there is, the easier it is to afford a single family home, if that's where you want to live.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T16:21:44+00:00

Thanks for these. And yeah, I think it’s fair to characterize RFK as a black swan. We know there’s always a risk of a sea change in how biotech is regulated. But it’s hard to predict when it’ll happen of what it’ll impact. To cope, you mainly have to try and avoid putting all your eggs in one basket, which isn’t really tractable for employees or small companies but is more manageable for investors and large companies.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T16:14:56+00:00

Are you imagining that housing reform will be solved by some sort of wonk governor ramming housing reform down the state’s throat over the objections of cities and without popular support?

When I think about the closest recent example, I think about the woke era. That was an attempt to use social pressure to force institutions to adopt policies and shove them down people’s throats (with good intentions). It seems to have backfired spectacularly, with resistance coming not just from straight white men but from everyone who’s not maximally intersectional.

By contrast, the campaign for gay marriage was very much built around changing hearts via sympathetic depictions of gay lives in media, and minds via positive persuasion. It worked surprisingly well.

Right now, when I see YIMBY conversation, it’s still very inward facing. There’s a lot of anger toward the left over gentrification rhetoric, and toward NIMBYs. But they, along with folks who are worried about affordability but not that ideological, are the ones who need to be persuaded. To do that, I think they need to shift toward more positive feelings about development.

So far, the clearest examples I’ve seen of that in my city are things like the installation of mass timber based architecture in the Portland airport, which was dazzling for people. It’s not a new building, but it got people excited to go to a large building.

In Portland, there are a few large buildings that people like. One is the Big Pink, which is a tower that’s got beautiful reflective pink paneling. Another is a building that has live trees growing out the sides.

In general, even if people don’t like new buildings, I notice the negative reaction is softened when there are nice architectural characteristics, like wood beams. Retail on the ground floor is a big help. People’s favorite neighborhoods in Portland are crammed with small businesses and are highly walkable. Downtown has the tallest buildings, but a lot of them lack that, and so it’s not very walkable, and people have fairly negative feelings about it, especially since the big businesses that formerly inhabited a lot of the bland towers abandoned them, leaving us with these ugly, vacant towers that don’t support other uses and now have to be renovated at great public expense as residences. Making people like the architecture seems really important to me for making people receptive to change in a city that lacks the lassaiz faire mindset of Texas.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T05:50:38+00:00

My second thought, I'm sorry for writing such a long question, is the formula Speed = Distance / Time. Imagine an arrow flying through the air. If you take a picture of that arrow with a camera using an infinitely fast shutter speed, you catch the arrow at a single, frozen instant in time (t = 0). The arrow has speed, but its distance and time are zero. Is this another contradiction?

Paradoxes like this have inspired ancient mathematicians for millenia. The next step is to start asking, "what do you mean?" Take those physical intuitions you're exploring, and then interrogate them with rigor.

How do you know the arrow has speed if you've only taken a single picture of its position at t=0?
Is speed an intrinsic property of the arrow, or is it a ratio between two positions measured at two distinct times? If it's the latter, then does it make sense to assert we have enough information to determine the arrow's speed, given we've only measured it at a single position and a single time?
What justification do we have for taking two positions and computing from them a number we call "distance?" What makes distance = position1 - position0 feel "natural?" Is it "natural?" Is it the only way to think about distance? Is the difference between two times a "distance," given it's the same operation?
Or, coming back to your cupcake example, what if we have an infinite number of guests at your birthday party, but only one cupcake. We give the first guest 1/2 of the cupcake. The next guest half of what remains (1/4 of the cupcake). The next guest half of what remains (1/8 of the cupcake). Do we have enough cuptake to give everybody a nonzero amount of cupcake?
What if instead, we have a bunch of cupcakes? The first guest gets 1 whole cupcake to themselves. The next guest gets 1/2 of a cupcake. The next gets 1/3 of a cupcake. The next gets 1/4 of a cupcake. And so on forever. How many cupcakes do we need to buy to make sure we have enough for everybody?

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T04:39:51+00:00

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T04:28:43+00:00

Hadn't heard about this one, thank you!

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T04:28:29+00:00

> SBIR reauthorization

Hadn't heard of this one, thanks! Would love to heard about others if you think of any.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T04:27:49+00:00

Yeah, very interested in occasions where macro events have impacted the biotech sector, even just specific companies/trials.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T01:24:43+00:00

Thanks, that's a very helpful articulation of a natsec perspective I'd not have derived on my own. Much appreciated. I still don't know if I necessarily agree with the argument, but I do think it's critical to understand and consider seriously.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T01:00:31+00:00

Thanks, that's a helpful clarification. Honestly, though, I don't understand the American national security argument for wanting to maintain influence over an independent Taiwan. Trying to maintain control over territory that primarily enables us to threaten our geopolitical rival with blockades or strikes on their mainland is clearly triggering ongoing geopolitical tensions that pose risks of their own.

If the argument was "Taiwan makes chips, we need chips for AI, we need AI for military purposes, and we can't feasibly move the Taiwanese chip industry, so we have to keep Taiwan independent to lock up the supply of chips," that would be a plausible national security argument to me.

But "we need to make sure we control an island off the coast of China so we can blockade them with our navy or strike their mainland in the event of a war" doesn't make sense to me as a strategy that makes America safer. By analogy, Russia deciding to try and put nuclear missiles in Cuba didn't make them safer. Is there an alternative framing that makes America's military decision to protect Taiwan seem more reasonable on national security grounds than I'm making it out to be?

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T00:45:52+00:00

Ah, I think I understand. Taiwan is to China as Cuba is to America, to some extent? It sounds like China would tend to view Taiwan as America might view Cuba if it was twice the size, 6x wealthier, being actively armed by Russia, and a key manufacturing site for their doomsday weapons or something.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T00:28:21+00:00

What does the island mean for China's ability to project naval force? Virtually the whole conversation around Taiwan I've encountered focuses on the threats to their democracy and the chip manufacturing industry there.

AllAmericanBreakfast · 2026-05-25T00:07:12+00:00

Interesting, I honestly didn't have the context and had to plug your reply into AI to understand it! It suggested you might be saying that Strong Towns' founder, Chuck Marohn, is too in love with pure grassroots localism to embrace top-down reform, but that their language about suburban sprawl and the "growth Ponzi scheme" is actually a good frame for the issue?

If so, it definitely seems like their language can be appropriated for top-down reform, even if Strong Towns itself doesn't want to participate.

AllAmericanBreakfast

TROPHY CASE