Ultimately to the end of allowing Pittsburgh and the surrounding area to be a place with agglomeration effects, growth, and opportunities enough to allow smart and ambitious young people to remain in the area as opposed to brain draining into the Acela corridor.
It’s sad when a city that could go either way chooses to rust and its most talented young people no longer have the option of staying in their home if they want dynamic careers.
That's true, but I have a thesis for why this might be good for the biotech ecosystem.
A lot of people will dismiss phage therapy on economic grounds, suggesting that you'd need to essentially design a new phage therapy for each individual infection you wanted to treat. But, with the advances we're seeing in microfluidics, diagnostics, gene sequencing, computational biology, laboratory automation, and the theory of precision medicine, that host specificity can turn from a disadvantage to an advantage. We know there are a lot of human-dwelling bacteria we wouldn't want to knock but can't save from a broad-spectrum treatment. With a personalized phage therapy, this isn't as much of a concern, and with the above advances, custom therapeutic design can scale economically.
But here's the most important implication of phage-host specificity for biotech business models. When a biotech company gets approved to roll out custom therapies for each individual patient, that opens the door to solving two important roadblocks to biotech innovation. First, firms could get around the problem where they're subject to regulatory scrutiny based on a naive interpretation of the difference between their manufacturing costs and their sale prices. Second, such a paradigm of treatment could permit biotechs to offer gradations of service and charge based on how finely-tuned your therapy is. This would enable them to much more closely fit the demand curve of patients. They could bring the latest technology to the masses cheaply and relatively quickly, while charging a premium for the cutting edge.
This site is actually doing something interesting through its curation, and I would be pretty impressed if that was how it was pitched to me.
But I have to agree, expecting a bookstore and then getting something totally other is too much of a clash. If you want a bookstore, nothing's going to beat a bookstore. If this site offers something different, it should be sold on its merits.
I remember exactly where I was, about a year ago today, when I realized Deep Thought was an existentialist. B2 Data Structures lab in a building called Fitz. I knew I couldn’t have been the first to realize this, but I couldn’t bear to look it up and see whether or not I’d been preempted.
And it was totally what he meant. The ASCII wildcard-existentialism theory is too consistent with the themes Adams explores through the series to have been an accident.
I fully agree with Musk when he said he regards the Hitchhiker’s Guide as a great work of philosophy, whether or not he was joking. It totally worked for me as I was trying to progress beyond nihilism.
Here’s how this gets broken: The more countries faithfully adhere to the global corporate minimum, the stronger the incentive becomes for a “cheating” country to lower its rate.
The tax haven could even get around an “enforcer” or governing board. For instance, such a country might change what it considers to be “profit” so that you’re paying $2 on $100 of revenue, whereas in the neighboring country you’d be paying $6. Same nominal tax rate, different effective tax rates.
There are even more ways to play this: “Sure, we tax you at the required 20%, but you can then direct how those funds are used to reduce costs you’d otherwise have to pay directly.”
And this happens a ton— see the WTO and “effective” but not nominal tariffs.
Whether or not we see such a harmonized tax rate emerge and even if we could find a way to have some governing body try to “enforce” it, you’ll still see countries lowering their effective tax rates to lure firms or bolster growth. I bet there’s a maximum sustainable effective corporate tax rate, but I have no idea what it is (and for all I know it could be zero or negative).
Happy you found it helpful! The final section (imposters) of this [1] simplified exploration of “green beard altruism” might be of interest to you if you want to explore this further. If you’re interested in thinking about things like this generally, these are Nash equilibrium problems and the field is called game theory.
In answer: if we do discard the assumptions of game theory and we imagine nobody would ever think to “cheat,” it could work. But in reality it wouldn’t be just that some countries have huge advantages in some industries— they would have huge advantages in every industry. People and companies looking to maximize their opportunities would flee to the country with the lowest effective (nominal doesn’t matter) tax rate which could also guarantee their safety.
This is actually part of how the US ended up burying the Soviet Union/eastern Bloc with economic productivity— we kept poaching all their best engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and entrepreneurs.
The point is that effective tax rates can be really subtle.
For instance, you could have a country change what it considers to be “profit” so that you’re paying $2 on $100 of revenue, whereas in the neighboring country you’d be paying $6. Same nominal tax rate, different effective tax rates.
There are even more ways to play this: “Sure, we tax you at the required 20%, but you can then direct how those funds are used to reduce costs you’d otherwise have to pay directly.”
And this happens a ton— see the WTO and “effective” but not nominal tariffs.
Whether or not we see such a harmonized tax rate emerge and even if we could find a way to have some governing body “enforce” it, you’d still see countries lowering their effective tax rates to lure firms or bolster growth. I bet there’s a maximum sustainable effective corporate tax rate, but I have no idea what it is (and for all I know it could be zero or negative).
Careful, there are a lot of people who wish IQ tests didn’t have anything useful to say about intelligence. Implying that IQ tests can be useful tools and that their results might bear some relation to intelligence usually brings them out of the woodwork.
People have definitely gotten smarter. Here’s a small case which might help illustrate how this happens in general: We know infection with hookworms and other soil-transmitted helminths will do nasty things to the intelligence of the patient, especially for children. Since humanity got rich enough to build sewer systems and shoes and anti-parasitic drug companies, soil transmitted helminths have become a lot less of a problem (and the same goes for their cognitive effects).
This just sounds like a really clever mechanism for solving the cold-start problem for the protocol. You generate a bit of initial demand to pull in some initial supply, which in turn generates its own demand, which pulls in more profit-chasing supply (of storage), which drives down the real price of storage, which is part of the value prop to the non-speculative demand, which is how the crypto asset might maintain its value long-term. Boom, now you’ve got a functional network, a valuable token, and a more efficient market for a raw material of the internet economy.
At the beginning of the pandemic the world health organization was saying that there was no evidence of human to human transmission, when there was. The surgeon general of the United States was saying that masks don’t work. Right now a lot of the establishment dismisses the possibility of a lab leak out of hand. If contradicting any of these narratives were illegal, we’d be in a worse country and I’d be trying to find the America of the 2020s, just as the Soviet mathematicians and scientists and entrepreneurs and engineers did before me. And that last point is why we shouldn’t ban free speech beyond that which poses a clear and present danger: because the damage to the country of losing people who value free speech in particular and freedom in general is much greater, over the long term, than the danger that comes from dealing with an informationally enfranchised public.
Here’s the thing to understand: the “economists” you’re watching on TV are not representative of the field, and TV economics is hardly a better source of information on economics than Facebook is on immunology. Confusing the cargo-cult for the real thing is the actual mistake here.
I think it’s easy to claim all the economists at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UChicago have no clue what they’re doing, and you could design a market better than Vickrey himself by throwing darts at a wall.
But the reality is that while they do disagree about a great deal, this disagreement isn’t different from the disagreement you see on the cutting edge of cancer biology or physics.
And sure, you’ll be able to find “Marxist Economists” for every Nobel Prize winner with a PhD in mathematics, but if you stick with the respectable academics (and especially with those focusing on microeconomics and game theory) they tend to agree about much more than you’d expect.
Watching a tech company break free of legacy media and seize control of its narrative and position in the culture is awe-inspiring. Stripe is all the more impressive because their business wasn’t media-adjacent like Netflix’s.
I’m seeing a company that nails things so consistently and effortlessly that I am convinced that in a decade it’ll be Amazon but for finance. Potential competitors will be terrified of Stripe the same way they are of Amazon. They just execute too well to be comfortable around.
I get it, and I actually agree that the culture you describe isn't a good look.
What I'm going for is more the idea that if you consider the best alternative I can think of to the "holistic" approach, you get selecting applicants purely based on entrance exam scores. In such a world you'd be punishing a kid who plays with Arduino out of interest. Any energy devoted towards something other than test prep is energy wasted.
In the American system, as I'm coming to see it, the kid who plays with Arduino is punished less. The test won't take you all the way anyways, and you even get a little "refund" on attention sunk into some types of activity which qualify as extracurricular.
I used to think that the “holistic” criteria elite US colleges use to select students was a failure of meritocracy. My view was that the non-objective metrics were excuses for colleges to let in students who wouldn’t grind but wanted prestige and had rich parents.
But if you tie a person’s social status to performance on a single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be doing if they didn’t have to solely dedicate themselves to prep. So maybe we’re doing okay as-is.
It’s sad when a city that could go either way chooses to rust and its most talented young people no longer have the option of staying in their home if they want dynamic careers.