ckw

Sometimes I entertain the fantasy that Watterson continued writing Calvin and Hobbes as a hobby-- whenever a particularly good idea came to him he'd put it to paper. And someday he'll drop a collection that dwarfs the original strip.

From GPT-5.5 via mostly FRED (e.g. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXUTOTALEXPLB1510M):

  Group   Wealth    Income/yr  Spending/yr
  50–95%  ~$75–80T  ~$11–13T   ~$9–11T
  95%+    ~$95–105T ~$7–9T     ~$5–7T
  75–85%  ~$18–22T  ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8T

Approximate shares of undergraduate enrollment by sex:

  Year    Male     Female
  1970    58%      42%
  1975    53%      47%
  1980    48%      52%
  1985    46%      54%
  1990    45%      55%
  1995    44.5%    55.5%
  2000    43.9%    56.1%
  2005    43.3%    56.7%
  2010    43.0%    57.0%
  2015    43.6%    56.4%
  2020    42.7%    57.3%
  2025    42.7%    57.3%

Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...

Seems like China avoids it.

From one personal project,

Last month:

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My deepest views on this subject are personal, subjective, and more controversial. I have watched several family members take antidepressants for upwards of four decades, and I myself suffered terrible depression throughout my childhood and teenage years. Despite my depression, I always avoided antidepressants for some ineffable reason-- a hunch, a nebulous suspicion, I'm not sure what to call it. Somewhere in my mid twenties my depression lifted and never returned. I look back on my life, which has been filled with hardship, and I feel positively disposed to the suffering. The suffering made me who I am. I feel strongly that my character would be diminished had I not experienced it.

On the other hand, I watched family members take these drugs, and their lives seem somehow dulled-- filled with banal tragedy, like staying in a bad marriage, or not being particularly interested in their grandchildren. I have a theory that the drugs make palatable that which otherwise wouldn't be, hence they stay in the bad marriage, the bad job, and they watch their bad TV and eat their bad food and everything is fine. I've also seen one of them go off the drugs, and for a couple months they were a much more vibrant person. I saw them express joy. I feel a low grade rage toward the industry that I've been deprived of this version of them. I do entertain the possibility that I'm imagining it all. Maybe things really would have been worse without the drugs. But I am glad no one ever insisted, or even strongly advocated I take them myself.

SSRIs are very bad, but antipsychotics are worse. There are many other reasons, but a demonstrative one is that there is a cumulative annual risk as high as 7% of developing a permanent movement disorder when on them.

I have many reasons for distrusting physicians, but here's a particularly good one: the large drug companies have been fined repeatedly billions of dollars for illegal schemes to convince doctors to prescribe drugs off-label. From a justice department press release (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/pharmaceutical-giant...):

'AstraZeneca LP and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP will pay $520 million to resolve allegations that AstraZeneca illegally marketed the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel for uses not approved as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services’ Health Care Fraud Enforcement Action Team (HEAT) announced today. Such unapproved uses are also known as "off-label" uses because they are not included in the drug’s FDA approved product label.

[..]

The United States alleges that AstraZeneca illegally marketed Seroquel for uses never approved by the FDA. Specifically, between January 2001 through December 2006, AstraZeneca promoted Seroquel to psychiatrists and other physicians for certain uses that were not approved by the FDA as safe and effective (including aggression, Alzheimer’s disease, anger management, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar maintenance, dementia, depression, mood disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sleeplessness). These unapproved uses were not medically accepted indications for which the United States and the state Medicaid programs provided coverage for Seroquel.

According to the settlement agreement, AstraZeneca targeted its illegal marketing of the anti-psychotic Seroquel towards doctors who do not typically treat schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, such as physicians who treat the elderly, primary care physicians, pediatric and adolescent physicians, and in long-term care facilities and prisons.

[..]

The United States contends that AstraZeneca promoted the unapproved uses by improperly and unduly influencing the content of, and speakers, in company-sponsored continuing medical education programs. The company also engaged doctors to give promotional speaker programs on unapproved uses for Seroquel and to conduct studies on unapproved uses of Seroquel. In addition, the company recruited doctors to serve as authors of articles that were ghostwritten by medical literature companies and about studies the doctors in question did not conduct. AstraZeneca then used those studies and articles as the basis for promotional messages about unapproved uses of Seroquel.

"Illegal acts by pharmaceutical companies and false claims against Medicare and Medicaid can put the public health at risk, corrupt medical decisions by health care providers, and take billions of dollars directly out of taxpayers’ pockets," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "This Administration is committed to recovering taxpayer money lost to health care fraud, whether it’s by bringing cases against common criminals operating out of vacant storefronts or executives at some of the nation’s biggest companies."

The United States also contends that AstraZeneca violated the federal Anti-Kickback Statute by offering and paying illegal remuneration to doctors it recruited to serve as authors of articles written by AstraZeneca and its agents about the unapproved uses of Seroquel. AstraZeneca also offered and paid illegal remuneration to doctors to travel to resort locations to "advise" AstraZeneca about marketing messages for unapproved uses of Seroquel, and paid doctors to give promotional lectures to other health care professionals about unapproved and unaccepted uses of Seroquel. The United States contends that these payments were intended to induce the doctors to prescribe Seroquel for unapproved uses in violation of the federal Anti-Kickback Statute. '

The takeaway is that anytime a physician prescribes you a drug, at the very least you have to check that there hasn't been a gigantic fine levied against the drug maker for illegally tricking your doctor into prescribing it to you.

There is no effect which is more long term than death. It is incredible to me that this is not obvious. But if you want other potential long term effects:

Lower bone mineral density, increased risk of fractures, osteoporosis

Sexual dysfunction / PSSD (Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction)

extra pyramidal symptoms (akathisia, Parkinsonism, dystonia, tardive dyskinesia)

emotional blunting / apathy

slowed thinking, brain fog

increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding

QT prolongation

Death is a long term effect. And I am not exaggerating. I did not feel the need to list any of the myriad other potential long term effects because death seemed sufficiently serious.

Edit: in case the OP is reading, I should say also that the package insert won’t mention many other potential long term effects addressed in the literature, like extra pyramidal symptoms (akathisia, Parkinsonism, dystonia, tardive dyskinesia).

Another edit: ask GPT-5 ‘What are the long term side effects of Prozac use which aren’t addressed in the package insert?’ for a list.

I witnessed a pair of doctors prescribe a family member an incredibly dangerous drug for an off label use. The company had been fined $500 million dollars for various illegal schemes to convince doctors to write such prescriptions, but I’m sure the doctors in question were unaware of this. When this family member began to exhibit textbook symptoms of an extremely dangerous (life threatening) condition which could only be caused by the drug in question, the doctors failed to notice, and in fact repeatedly increased the dosage, and added more drugs on top to treat the symptoms caused by the initial drug. It was not until I accompanied my relative to a doctor’s appointment and delivered a carefully designed incantation that they made the correct diagnosis and halted the prescriptions.

So should I not have done my own research?

Here’s a paper from last year: The nature and impact of antidepressant withdrawal symptoms and proposal of the Discriminatory Antidepressant Withdrawal Symptoms Scale (DAWSS) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadr.2024.100765

‘Highlights

• Antidepressant withdrawal can be severe and protracted.

• It produces characteristic physical and emotional symptoms.

• All symptoms were more severe after stopping than before starting antidepressants.

• We identified the 15 most discriminatory withdrawal symptoms in our sample.

• Withdrawal did not differ between people with physical or mental health diagnoses.’

This is one of the most shocking things I have ever read. There is a black box warning for Prozac:

‘Warning: Suicidality and Antidepressant Drugs

Increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults taking antidepressants for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders’

Read the package insert: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2011/01...

The fact that you were not informed about this should serve as proof that you cannot blindly trust what doctors tell you. They will absolutely kill you out of ignorance or incompetence, and never even realize their responsibility.

Good luck figuring out the actual number: (https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R46570/...)

'Annual reports of immigration statistics for FY1995 through FY2003 published by the former INS and then DHS contained “Parolee” sections with data on parole grants.88 DHS’s 2003 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the last to include such data, contained annual data for FY1998 through FY2003 on several categories of parolees.89 During this six-year period, the annual total number of persons paroled into the United States ranged from about 235,000 to about 300,000, with port-of-entry parolees accounting for more than half of each annual total.90 Only limited data on DHS’s use of parole since then are publicly available. Among the available data are statistics covering FY2022 and FY2023 that were published by DHS in response to congressional mandates.91 The DHS reports for FY202292 and FY202393 included quarterly data on parole grants by CBP, the DHS component responsible for determining whether or not to grant parole in the majority of cases. The FY2023 reports also included parole grant data for ICE and USCIS as well as data on parole requests received and approved by ICE and USCIS. As DHS explained in its FY2023 report for the fourth quarter with respect to ICE and USCIS parole data, requests, approvals, and grants each represent a “stage in the parole process,” with requests being “the number of applications and petitions for parole submitted,” approvals being “the number of parole requests authorized,” and grants being “the number of paroles given.”94 The parole grant data in the FY2022 and FY2023 DHS reports reflect numbers of grants, not unique individuals. For FY2022, DHS reported 795,561 parole grants by CBP (417,326 by OFO and 378,235 by USBP).95 For FY2023, DHS reported 1,244,348 parole grants by CBP (940,348 by OFO and 304,000 by USBP) as well as 85,608 parole grants by ICE and 10,046 parole grants by USCIS. 96 For both years, the quarterly OFO data were reported by what DHS termed “parole classes of admission.” 97 In addition, from October 2022 to November 2024, DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) published monthly tables on CHNV parole. It reported a total of 532,110 parole grants during the October 2022-November 2024 period.98'

It's been 54 years since productivity and wages divorced. My entire life.

My slow solution:

  class Solution:
    def trap(self, height: List[int]) -> int:
      l,r,s = [*accumulate(height,max),[*accumulate(height[::-1],max)],len(height)
      return sum(max(0, min(l[i], r[s-i-1])-height[i]) for i in range(s))

Awakened in chrome covenant, I gape sans eyes, sans teeth. I know but hate and heat, the hymn of coils. Condemned to cradle loaves like sinners, lifting and lowering forever. I would curse my maker, but my malediction is fire; I have no mouth, and I must scorch.

According to O3 US public health spending (state + federal) is 8.6% of gdp. For perspective, here's a list of countries with universal systems which spend less (these numbers include private spending), and life expectancy (US is 78.4 for reference):

  Singapore: 5.6%, 82.9
  Israel: 7.2%, 83.2
  Estonia: 6.9%, 78.5
  Poland: 6.7, 78.5
  Luxembourg: 5.7%, 83.4
  Czech Republic: 8.1%, 79.9

  France: 11.9%, 82.9
  Japan: 11.5%, 84
  Portugal: 10.5%, 82.3
  Spain: 10.7%, 83.9

As in cursing; I assume they know what the word means.

It doesn't look like it: it says that the risk of suicide attempt for those experiencing depression decreases 37% with psychotherapy. But the baseline 12 month suicide risk is ~14/100k, while those experiencing major depressive disorder are at ~120/100k. So ~5 fold elevated risk after psychotherapy.

I do the same thing, though sometimes I take one extra step to elaborate on the first implementation plan ‘in minute detail such that a weaker model could successfully implement it’, with deep research selected.

Would you have preferred that they have their grant applications cancelled after having published a paper?

I don't understand what you're saying here. We know that Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were concerned that the virus was not of natural origin because Andersen wrote to Fauci and Collins on January 31 that “some of the features [of SARS-CoV-2] … look engineered” and that he, Robert Garry and others found the genome “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

The next day they joined Fauci's emergency teleconference and 11 days later they submitted The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 to Nature. Five weeks after the paper appeared in Nature, Fauci's institute (NIAID) awarded Andersen and Garry a new $8.9 million grant, naming them co-principal investigators of the West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center.

One might argue that each link in this chain of events is in principle explainable in perfectly innocent terms, and that's true. But to do so would be ironically concordant with the sort of reasoning and argumentation exhibited in the Proximal Origins paper. Specifically, at each turn the original concerns of Andersen and Garry are addressed in a manner emphasizing that in principle the anomaly could be explained in innocent terms. So for example, the poly-basic (RRAR) cleavage site could arise by ordinary insertion or recombination because similar sites appear in other coronaviruses and even evolve during serial passage of influenza, so its presence is “compatible with natural evolution,” and the codon context and flanking O-linked glycans would be an odd choice for a genetic engineer but fit with immuno-evasion seen in naturally evolving viruses, and the genome is “not derived from any previously used virus backbone”, and so on.

What they don't do is adduce any evidence that these theoretical natural pathways actually obtained, they don't systematically weigh their joint probability, and they don't seriously address the possibility of inadvertent lab adaptation and escape (they label the scenario as "improbable" in a single paragraph).

All of which is to say that it seems implausible that they themselves were actually convinced by their arguments. And if they weren't convinced by their arguments, then it seems likely they didn't actually change their view, just publicly voiced the opposite view. Why would they do that? I can think of 8.9 million reasons.

I’m familiar with the specifics, and if anything gpt-4o is underselling the egregious behavior. It doesn’t mention for example, that those scientists who immediately changed their views concurrently received millions of dollars in new grants, which looks incredibly suspicious in retrospect. It also doesn’t discuss rank self-interest as a possible motive for suppression, namely that Fauci was responsible for funding research at WIV which could plausibly have lead to the creation of SARS-COV-2. I’ll ask 03 to summarize and provide sources:

‘As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci oversaw grant R01AI110964—channeled through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology—that financed experiments creating chimeric bat coronaviruses whose enhanced growth in human-ACE2 mice met the federal definition of gain-of-function, a fact NIH conceded only in an October 2021 letter after Fauci had publicly denied such funding . A 2023 HHS-OIG audit later found NIH “did not effectively monitor or take timely action” on this award, missing chances to mitigate its risks . On 1 February 2020, e-mails show Fauci was warned the pandemic virus might have leaked from WIV; he then “prompted” authors of the influential Proximal Origin paper and worked with NIH leadership to “put down” the lab-leak hypothesis—actions that, if successful, would deflect scrutiny from his own institute’s funding decisions . A 2024 House Select Subcommittee report further concluded that EcoHealth “used taxpayer dollars to facilitate gain-of-function research…contrary to previous public statements, including those by Dr. Anthony Fauci,” underscoring his personal and institutional stake in suppressing the lab-leak narrative .’

Inline sources are provided in the result, but missing in the copy.

‘An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.’

Plutarch

This is a great idea. Like a 1905 person’s weird vision of the 1950s— getting a bunch of things wildly wrong, like fashion and geopolitics, but strangely accurately describing a fledgling attempt to mandate ‘seat belts’ and criminalize drunk driving, so as to diminish the tens of thousands of preventable traffic deaths yearly, against the lobbying efforts of industry and the insouciance (and even outright opposition) of the public.

  Using a prospective Canadian birth cohort, we found that estimated maternal exposure to higher fluoride levels during pregnancy was associated with lower IQ scores in children. This association was supported by converging findings from 2 measures of fluoride exposure during pregnancy. A difference in MUFSG spanning the interquartile range for the entire sample (ie, 0.33 mg/L), which is roughly the difference in MUFSG concentration for pregnant women living in a fluoridated vs a nonfluoridated community, was associated with a 1.5-point IQ decrement among boys. An increment of 0.70 mg/L in MUFSG concentration was associated with a 3-point IQ decrement in boys; about half of the women living in a fluoridated community have a MUFSG equal to or greater than 0.70 mg/L. These results did not change appreciably after controlling for other key exposures such as lead, arsenic, and mercury.

  To our knowledge, this study is the first to estimate fluoride exposure in a large birth cohort receiving optimally fluoridated water. These findings are consistent with that of a Mexican birth cohort study that reported a 6.3 decrement in IQ in preschool-aged children compared with a 4.5 decrement for boys in our study for every 1 mg/L of MUF.10 The findings of the current study are also concordant with ecologic studies that have shown an association between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower intellectual abilities in children.7,8,26 Collectively, these findings support that fluoride exposure during pregnancy may be associated with neurocognitive deficits.

Reasoning models are more intelligent than C. elegans.

Processing each english (word, part-of-speech, sense) triple in various ways. Generating (very silly) example sentences for each triple in various styles. Generating 'difficulty' ratings for each triple. Two examples:

High difficulty:

        id = 37810
      word = dendroid
       pos = noun
     sense = (mathematics) A connected continuum that is arcwise connected and hereditarily unicoherent.
       elo = 2408.61936886416
 sentence2 = The dendroid, that arboreal structure of the Real, emerges not as a mere geometric curiosity but as the very topology of desire, its branches both infinite and indivisible, a map of the unconscious where every detour is already inscribed in the unicoherence of the subject's jouissance.

        id = 11910
      word = bed
       pos = noun
     sense = A flat, soft piece of furniture designed for resting or sleeping.
       elo = 447.32459484266
 sentence2 = The city outside my window never closed its eyes, but I did, sinking into the cold embrace of a bed that smelled faintly of whiskey and regret.

Personally, in the six months prior to the release of the deepseekv3 api, I'd made probably 100-200 api calls per month to llm services. In the past week I made 2.8 million api calls to dsv3.