@SteveRoth prices above cost that discourage purchases are a deadweight loss. that doesn’t mean they are lose-lose: the seller’s rents from high prices can overwhelm their loss from missed sales. that’s the basic logic of monopoly pricing. but the seller’s gains are smaller than potential buyers’ losses. the difference between those two is deadweight.
[New Post] Unfinished https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/10098.html
the welfare cost of drugs not taken due to price is pure deadweight loss, the pharma monopolist enjoys no profit, the potential patient suffers.
if glps are as potentially beneficial as they seem so far to be, the welfare cost of glp pricing must be rather astonishing.
from @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/opinion/trump-law-lawlessness-presidency-congress.html
Text: It matters a great deal then that Trump does not see himself as a steward of a democracy. The country, to him, is little more than a large and lucrative piece of real estate. And his obligations appear to extend only as far as his pecuniary interests. His ideological obsession with whitening the United States can be seen in terms of his fundamentally aesthetic preoccupations. What else is mass deportation than the effort of a lifelong landlord to remove the people he thinks degrade the value of the property?
“the one i’m using now it’s covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame” https://youtu.be/A0k5vpsWb4g
four really transformative technologies of this decade: glp-1s, solar/battery tech, mRNA vaccines, and ai.
we devote much too little attention to three of them.
(thanks @louisevans for the mRNA reminder!)
What’s the counterfactual AI build-out under a Harris administration? Similar scale and speed? Similar stock market / IPO plans? Or something very different?
if you do good things without charging for them, are you just a sucker?
"A Critical History of the Cost-Benefit State: Part 1" by #NathanTankus https://www.crisesnotes.com/a-critical-history-of-the-cost-benefit-state-part-1/?ref=notes-on-the-crises-newsletter
// excellent on the function rather than fantasies of ubiquitized quantitative analysis in government
social media is a reminder that the choice has always been introversion or misanthropy. only with peephole to the stupid human tricks in your pocket 24/7, it’s hard even for introverts to choose sufficient isolation.
one must await the consent of the dead.
@SteveRoth where are you?
@SteveRoth they are by definition. their expected payouts define the rates at which we would discount future cash flows for credit AND duration risk free instruments. it’s just they are the only such instruments, everything else has one or the other risk pushing its discount rate higher.
@SteveRoth Absolutely. Holders of short-duration or floating rate debt don’t experience sizable capital losses when interest rates rise, but absolutely benefit from the increased NPV of future interest payments. Nothing metes out any kind of cosmic justice as rates change. You do or better or based on the duration of the securities you hold.
there must surely be a military-technical solution to constipation.
i am an awesomist, which means i believe in things that are awesome and all the things that awesome people believe.
you, of course, are free to disagree with me.
"immense wealth and control of information in a small number of tech-industry figures whose personal interests do not align with the public interest." #NicholasGrossman https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-plausible-techno-dystopian-future/
// the true alignment problem
If the Democrats take Congress, they should pass amazing, sweeping, exciting bills for Trump to veto. They can nuke the filibuster, just to pass bills that Trump will veto, for which they'll lack a veto-proof majority. 1/
You see a lot of comparisons to Trump's dismal approval now and Truman's in 1946, which lead to a midterm electoral rout. But the resulting do-nothing Congress gave him back the presidency in 1948. 2/
Famous image showing Harry Truman holding up a Chicago Daily Tribune front page with the headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN", published prematurely to describe the election Truman won.
If nothing is done, let that be on Trump, not Congress. /fin