Alex Ames

Conversely, the correct level of tax & transfer from DINKs to parents is the level that allows parents to enjoy a standard of living (vacations, house, etc.) equal to DINKs

We are social creatures, and we compare ourselves to those who are actually around us, not some statistical median. The reference class of the $150k -> $75k household is their friends and neighbors: are they foregoing vacations and downsizing their homes to be able to afford kids?

It’s the *opportunity cost* of kids. The more you could make in wage income, the more it costs to stay home and raise kids. This is compounded by factors like housing: DINKs need less space than families but have more money and can bid up the price of housing in high-demand areas

It’s also one thing to be charismatic in one-on-one interactions (something most politicians are actually good at!) and another entirely to still be widely entertaining when talking to a mass audience (without being devoid of substance or alienating some constituency by misspeaking or generalizing)

It’s also not particularly actionable advice for most candidates! Always-on charisma is rare enough, but it’s a heaven-sent gift to be able to keep the charisma flowing even when communicating about the inner workings of government.

I'm in the middle of a realtor-free off-market purchase and let me tell you, it is delightful to pay a lawyer $850 to do paperwork instead of 10-20x that for a realtor

Had an incident in grad school where a check valve at the bottom of another lab’s 500 gallon water tank failed and leaked through the high bay floor into our experiment’s very expensive lasers in the basement. Had to fly a technician in from Lithuania to fix them.

We were the pit.

Linux is great for headless servers and SW dev work, but everyone I know who uses it as their primary desktop environment has horror stories about audio/graphics drivers that could be fixed only after hours of mucking around in a terminal

In a laboratories-of-democracy sense, I think that sort of experiment would be really valuable. I’m glad that Sam Brownback fucked up Kansas and showed everyone else that you shouldn’t do that. Lots of people think that they could fix everything if only they controlled the economy - let’s try that!

Does “public goods” mean goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, or just goods that you think the government should provide to the public? The latter definition seems politically circular. Aren’t asset managers still needed when the public owns the assets, or are we doing direct democracy?

I have a deep and abiding love for carbon taxation, but voters seem to really hate it no matter how you package it. Canada had a beautiful carbon tax & rebate system and Mark Carney just rolled it back to get elected! I think it’ll take a fiscal crisis to concretize it as a revenue source

We test medical interventions on small groups before broad roll-out because novel things don’t always work. MA, CA, HI, NY, etc should be able to show that you can decarbonize without driving up consumer prices and provoking voter revolt that drags us backwards into O&G hell. Are they currently? No.

For the bulk of American voters, economic democracy means voting for cheap gas and low utility bills. We can’t get all the way to where we need to go on the price mechanism alone, but a laser focus on decreasing the consumer cost of the energy transition will make the rest of the work so much easier

What does climate-first economic democracy mean? What smaller country has successfully implemented it to show that it’s possible in the U.S. context? Can those policies be passed through a bare Senate majority, and can they bear enough fruit before the next election cycle?

Very fun to think about how this is the youngest the population distribution will be for the rest of our lives. We’re only getting grayer from here

I'm trying to buy a house and folks, it's bad out there. The monthly price of an average-house, average-rate mortgage where I live has gone from $1500 to $3600 in the past 3.5 years.

The scientists are upset that management is splitting focus and that parking is harder to come by, but the work really needs to be done, and Savannah River production is but a distant glimmer. Management is just happy to have dollars rolling in - the question was answered at a town hall with a shrug

“We” being Los Alamos HED experimentalists in our personal capacities, not any sort of institutional statement!

I think there’s some fear of loss of relevance. They’re turf-guarding pretty aggressively on next-gen HED after losing a number of designers and experimentalists to fusion startups. Our perspective is “if you build it, we will come”, and we don’t care if that’s Livermore or a ex-DOE-staffed startup

I use LLNL for most of my HPC needs (they really are better at managing clusters!), so I see their internal news bulletins, and it’s… remarkable… how fast they seem to have hopped on Golden Dome. Teller’s ghost lives on in their institutional culture

There’s such beauty in the cross-lab ecumenical tradition of hating on Livermore

Let ‘em focus on lasers and HPC, and leave the rest of it to the rest of us

CFL limit is a real bastard, isn’t it? I spent about 16000 cpu-hours simulating half a nanosecond of an ICF problem in 1D and still didn’t get to convergence

I think something like a right of refusal/bidding process would be a fair way to allow companies to retain IP if they’re willing to pay the higher licensing fee associated with a higher valuation

What? I think you’re reading things that aren’t present in my words.

If Company A is a patent troll and Company B is productive, this is a good outcome. If Company A values the patent at what it’s worth, now they have its worth in dollars instead of in an illiquid patent they’re paying fees on.

If this transfer causes you more than $x harm, then the patent was actually worth more than $x, right?

What’s the mechanism of harm here? You have a patent that’s worth $x, and a company pays you $x for it. You now have money instead of a patent. The company now owns the patent and pays the licensing fee instead of you.

A Harberger Tax on Patents Self-assessing innovation taxes for fun and profit

Intellectual property ownership does not always foster innovation (see: patent trolls). If the ongoing cost of the government-provided monopoly was tied to the value of the idea, patent trolls would go extinct. Harberger taxation! arpitrage.substack.com/p/a-harberge...

Unemployment may increase, but I don't see interest rates dropping significantly given the current levels of publicly-held debt and the great gray wave coming for our old-age safety nets. Workers vote against higher taxes and the elderly vote against reduced benefits, so we'll inflate the debt away

"Make it easier to build things" shouldn't necessitate private funding or ownership. It should mean a given public dollar can build more than it otherwise would. "Who should own things" is separate from the question of "can we build things".