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  • Cholesterol Therapies

    Cholesterol Therapies
    2026/06/16
    This week we talk about LDL, HDL, and cardiovascular issues.We also discuss one-time therapies, statins, and pharmaceutical economics.Recommended Book: Blood by Dr. Jen GunterTranscriptCholesterol is the most common type of what’s called a sterol, which is a type of steroid, but also structurally technically an alcohol. But functionally, and classified by scientists, cholesterol is a lipid, which in this case is similar to a fat in all but how the body uses it. Cholesterol is the type of sterol most commonly found in animals—other types are found in plants and fungi—and its function, and this is where it varies from fats, which are used to store energy, is to basically help hold the cell membrane together, and it also serves as an intracellular messenger.Cholesterol is especially prevalent in the brain and spinal cord of animals, but it’s found throughout their bodily tissues, as well, and again, it’s vital for holding everything together and helping things communicate, in addition to being a precursor for vitamin D, steroid hormones, and bile.You want to have cholesterol, then, as without it you would be dead.Too much cholesterol in the blood, however, can also make you dead, especially when it’s bound to what’s called low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, as that contributes to cardiovascular disease like heart attacks and aneurysms, which can massively impact one’s overall wellness and quality of life, and at extremes lead to the whole system shutting down as a consequence of heart attack, stroke, and the like.A lot of things can contribute to the development of cardiovascular disease, including habits like smoking, genetic predisposition, and the enthusiastic consumption of alcohol and unhealthy foods. But high blood cholesterol, of the LDL variety, is one of the top contributors, as these low-density clusters of lipoprotein can clog the pathways that blood takes throughout our bodies. Other, denser types of lipoproteins, HDLs, can clear it, like a heavier, denser substance pushing through clogs of less-dense materials that are gumming up a pipe, but LDL is at times accumulated as a result of consuming delicious but unhealthy foods, which are hard to avoid, and for some people the only consistently available and affordable foods; and for other people LDL accumulates as a result of their genetic predispositions—two things that are devilishly difficult to change.What I’d like to talk about today is a new type of therapy that may be very good news for people who struggle with the accumulation of LDL, and why this is being seen as very good news more broadly, at the scale of entire nations, as well.—Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is testing a new, experimental drug called VERVE-102 which is a one-time infusion that is currently administered over the course of about four hours, and once completed, it turns off a gene called PCSK9, which is responsible for making a protein that regulates cholesterol levels in humans.As I said, this drug is still being tested, so these are early results. But in a study of 35 people with high cholesterol levels, high levels of LDL or LDL-C, which is short for lipoprotein cholesterol, they found that this infusion, which again, is a one-time treatment, so get it once and then theoretically at least you never have to get anything done ever again, it reduced those LDL and LDL-C levels by as much as 62%, and that reduction was maintained a year and a half after the infusion; that’s how far out they’re retested so far, and the hope is that each retest will continue to show the same.On the strength of those very promising results, a Phase 2 study has been planned by the end of 2026, and the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, previously fast-tracked this existing study, because of the promise and potential this drug already demonstrated in early studies; all of which is considered to be very significant progress and possibility.To understand that significance, though, it’s useful to know some health stats. And I’m going to focus on the US here, as that’s where this drug is being developed, but many wealthy countries have similar stats, at least in terms of cardiovascular disease struggles.As of 2024, which is the last year we had good, cohesive data on this in the US, it was estimated that about 11-12% of the US adult population has high cholesterol levels. This typically doesn’t come with any symptoms, but it can contribute a higher risk for all those cardiovascular diseases, including heart attack and stroke. A further 86 million US adults have borderline or elevated cholesterol levels, which can easily tip higher, but also, even in that existing, elevated state, contribute to negative cardiovascular outcomes.There are treatments for high cholesterol, the most common of category of which are called statins, which reduce the production of LDL by inhibiting an enzyme that produces cholesterol in the body.Unfortunately, these drugs do come ...
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    14 分
  • SpaceX IPO

    SpaceX IPO
    2026/06/09
    This week we talk about initial public offerings, Anthropic, and investment flywheels.We also discuss AI, financial entanglements, and backstops.Recommended Book: Superconvergence by Jamie MetzlTranscriptAn initial public offering, or IPO, is what happens when a private company goes public and starts selling shares of itself, occasionally to just institutional investors like banks and sovereign wealth funds, but usually also to retail investors, which means normal people who buy stocks as part of their investment strategy.Often private companies go this route, go public, because it’s one of the primary ways of gleaning new, oftentimes large inflows of money, and that money can then be used for investments in assets for the company, but it also allows employees who have shares in the company as part of their compensation to cash out, to get paid possibly a huge bonus for all their efforts, and it’s often a means by which executives garner huge paydays for themselves, because they can now sell their accumulated shares, or borrow against them, or because they have something in their contract that says they get x amount of bonus money or new shares if they take the company public, or achieve a certain valuation goal—and going public is a good way to do that.This is also one of the primary ways investors in a company, whether that’s a bunch of smaller seed investors or big-name venture capitalists, to get their money back; the 10 or 100x-ing of their investment, getting ten or 100-times the money they put into the company, generally happens through an IPO, because it can balloon the valuation of that company, and it gives them a more conventional and reliable way of getting money back for their shares: they can just sell those shares on the open market.So an IPO allows a private company to make shares of itself available to others, on scale. And the ‘initial’ part of initial public offering points at the early days of the process, during which the baseline price of a share of stock is established.A fairly arcane and complex process has emerged around this, and it’s an entire industry at this point, with some institutions specializing in taking companies public, helping them get as high an initial price on that stock as possible. They also help them leap all sorts of regulatory hurdles set by the Securities and Exchange Commission, if they’re going public on a US exchange, at least, other bodies handle such things in other countries, and these going-public entities, called underwriters, which are usually investment banks, also typically have their own stake in the matter, earning compensation through a fee called a ‘gross spread,’ which is the difference between a discounted rate on the stock and what the stock is sold for on the open market on that first day it’s available.What I’d like to talk about today is a wave of very closely watched unusual, impending IPOs that are coming later this year, and one of them in particular that looks to be even more unusual than the rest.—SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are three of the largest companies in human history; on paper, at least.And that’s an important caveat. Market valuation for private companies is generally determined by how much investors are willing to spend on a percentage ownership of the company. So if you start a lemonade stand and I offer to buy 1/10th of that lemonade stand from you for $100, that implies, using this logic, that your lemonade stand has a valuation of $1000; 10 times that $100 that I offered to pay you.Such valuations are also informed by independent analyses from outside experts and institutions. SpaceX, for instance, pre-IPO, is estimated to be worth somewhere between $780 billion and nearly $2 trillion, depending on who you listen to, based on their assets, their potential future earnings, and any advantages they might have in the markets in which they operate.AI company Anthropic is estimated to be worth something like $965 billion, based on a May 2026 series H funding round, through which it raised $65 billion; based on that funding round, the calculations were done, and just shy of a trillion dollars is what the math says the company is worth, though some outside analyses say it’s worth a bit less than that, while others suggest it’s maybe closer to $1.4 trillion.OpenAI, a direct competitor of Anthropic, is valued at about $100 billion less than Anthropic based on its most recent $122 billion funding round, but again, analyses put the company’s actual value, what people and investors would pay for it on the open market, all over the place.Each of these companies have different variables acting upon them heading into a period in which it’s expected that all three will IPO.OpenAI kicked off the current AI race, for instance, but it’s burning money at an incredible rate, and has yet to make a profit, losing billions per year, and will probably continue to lose billions each year for a while ...
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    19 分
  • Jones Act Waiver

    Jones Act Waiver
    2026/06/02
    This week we talk about the Merchant Marine Act, trade routes, and incentives.We also discuss Wesley Jones, foreign competition, and artificial monopolies.Recommended Book: The Quantum Thief by Hannu RajaniemiTranscriptIn 1920, the then-Senator for the state of Washington, Wesley Jones, who was also the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced the Merchant Marine Act as a method by which the American merchant marine could be sustained and remain competitive in the face of external competition, and in the wake of the destruction of a bunch of ship during WWI.The US Merchant Marine is all the commercial water-going vessels that are US flagged, and the crews of these vessels. During peacetime, these boats and ships conduct trade and other services along the United States’ coasts and throughout its internal waterways, its rivers and lakes. During wartime, these vessels and their crews are tapped to help move troops and weapons and supplies for offensive or defensive military efforts.The theory of this proposed Act, then, was to ensure that the US Merchant Marine would remain well-funded and well-taken-care-of, because lacking some kind of government support, there was a good chance it would either slowly degrade, not having enough business to pay for itself, or—and this has been a persistent concern for similar pseudo-fleets of merchant vessels around the world for the past few hundred years—it would fall into disrepair because it would be outcompeted by vessels and crew coming in from elsewhere that would charge lower prices, creating unsustainable economics for the locals and thus slowly degrading this economic and military asset.When this Act was proposed, in 1920, the preservation of this asset was on the mind of many US politicians, as the world had just emerged from World War I, and in that and previous conflicts, the US Merchant Marine had been pretty vital to ensuring the US eventually came out on the right side of things. It was also fundamental to the rebuilding of the US economy following difficult conflicts, because the moving of cargo from city to city along coastlines, and throughout long expanses of rivers—getting food from place to place, getting building supplies where they need to go—has always been important, especially following periods in which there isn’t a lot of building going on, and when supplies chains are reoriented toward other purposes, like fighting.So in addition to all the language the helps regulate trade within US waters and between US ports, and which says how the crew of such vessels have to be treated, this Act was also meant to provide protected status to US Merchant Marine vessels and crew, giving them a pseudo-monopoly on certain types of trade activities in the US.It was also—and this is important context—meant to give Senator Jones’ state of Washington a de facto monopoly on trade with Alaska. But it was sold to the rest of Congress and the country as a means of bolstering the funds flowing into the US Merchant Marine. Section 27 of this act, often called the Jones Act, requires that all goods transported between US ports be carried by US vessels built in the US, flying the US flag, owned by US citizens and with majority US citizen and permanent US resident crews.What I’d like to talk about today are the other consequences of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, and in particular the Jones Act component of it, and why there’s been renewed opposition to the Jones Act in recent months.—The logic of the Jones Act, at least on the surface, is pretty straightforward.If you’re worried about foreign competition coming in and taking all the shipping jobs, swooping in from areas where crews aren’t paid as much, and where ships can be built cheaper, so they can charge less than US-made and -manned ships, all you have to do is require all the ships and people on the ships are of US-origin, and you’re good to go. Those foreign competitors aren’t allowed to take the jobs, and that sets the standards in a different place, allowing US vessels and their crew and owners to charge whatever they need to charge to sustain themselves.This, in theory at least, should also stimulate the US ship-building industry, as that monopoly means anyone who builds new ships stands a pretty good chance of making their money back. After all, there’s no dramatically cheaper competition out there, so you’ve got relatively little downward price pressure and seemingly plenty of customers, because there’s a lot of US coast, and a lot of internal waterways that have traditionally be used for trading purposes.In practice, though—and this isn’t uncommon with protectionist measures; things that seem like they should work for the intended purpose actually leading to other, less ideal outcomes—the Jones Act is often blamed for increasing prices on pretty much everything, and for increasing prices dramatically in places like Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and ...
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    20 分
  • 2026 DRC Ebola Outbreak

    2026 DRC Ebola Outbreak
    2026/05/26
    This week we talk about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, malaria, and healthcare infrastructure.We also discuss militants, Uganda, and the Bundibugyo virus.Recommended Book: We Should Get Together by Kat VellosTranscriptEbola, which is more formally called Ebola Virus Disease or Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, is caused by an infection by a type of RNA virus called an orthoebolavirus.There are six known species of orthoebolavirus, and four of them have at some point infected and caused illness in humans. Those four are the ebola virus, sometimes called the Zaire ebolavirus, which historically has been the strain responsible for the biggest, most devastating outbreaks of this disease, the Sudan virus, the Taï Forest virus, and the Bundibugyo virus, the latter three each causing a variant of the disease that carries the same name.The other two orthoebolavirus species that we know of, the Reston virus and the Bombali virus, have been known to infect animals, but have not, at this point at least, been known to make the jump to human hosts.Ebola symptoms vary a bit between specific viruses and between hosts and infection conditions, but in general those who are afflicted by ebola begin to experience symptoms between a few days and a few weeks after infection, and they’ll start by experiencing cold and flu-like symptoms, like fever, sore throat, headaches, and general muscle pain. Soon after that, though, they’ll start experiencing diarrhea and rashes, they’ll begin vomiting, and they’ll begin to experience liver and kidney dysfunction, and around that same time, they’ll start to bleed internally and externally.Once infected, a person has between a 25 and 90% chance of dying, depending on the strain of ebola, and if they die, usually due to what’s called hypovolemic shock—a severe and sudden loss of bodily fluids, including blood—they usually die between 6 and 16 days after those first symptoms are reported.What I’d like to talk about today is a new outbreak of ebola centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and why this one stands out from other recent outbreaks in the region.—Ebola was first officially reported in medical literature in 1976, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and there have been semi-regular outbreaks in that region, of various sizes ever since, and very likely before that, too.This disease is spread through direct contact with the body fluids of someone who’s infected, and it’s thought that this is probably how the disease made the leap from animals, like primates, to human beings: locals sometimes come into close contact with local primates, either while just coexisting, or while hunting bushmeat, hunting monkeys for food.It’s thought that fruit bats serve as hosts for the virus, long-term, and it then spreads to other animals, and then sometimes to humans, in some cases causing illness along the way in those other species, but not always; bats are not negatively afflicted by it, for instance, but humans very much are.Despite not being an airborne pathogen, so it’s not spread by coughing or talking too close to someone, like a cold or Covid-19, ebola can still be spread person-to-person through bodily fluid contact. That means fluids like saliva and blood and semen and breast milk, and research has shown that even after someone survives and recovers from ebola, the disease can linger in their fluids for months. So if someone catches it, survives, and then breast-feeds their child, or kisses or has sex with their partner, or gets a cut and then someone else comes into contact with their blood, like a health worker, that can lead to the transmission of the disease, despite their having been well and seemingly fully recovered for weeks or months.That lingering contagiousness is a confounding factor with this disease, as it requires that people be very careful, even to an antisocial degree, and even well after it seems like that’s no longer necessary, because they feel good and healthy again.This also means that if someone dies of ebola, contact with their bodies can be incredibly dangerous. And past outbreaks have stemmed from or been further enflamed by locals wanting to perform community funerals and wakes, during which the body is often on display and touched by attendees, and that has led to further spread of the disease—which in many cases is difficult to tie back to that wake, because again, symptoms don’t arrive right away, and ebola symptoms are similar to what locals experience all the time from other afflictions, like colds and malaria.This past week, in Bunia, which is located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, locals stormed a regional hospital in an attempt to recover the body of a beloved local figure who died of ebola. In the process, the hospital’s isolation ward, which was being used to keep ebola victims separate from everyone else, to keep the disease from spreading further, that ward was burned to the ground.There are no vaccines ...
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    15 分
  • Super El Niño

    Super El Niño
    2026/05/19
    This week we talk about oceanic surface temperatures, trade winds, and global climate change.We also discuss the Polar Jet Stream, hurricanes, and climate models.Recommended Book: Kleptopia by Tom BurgisTranscriptUnder normal circumstances, the Pacific Ocean’s average surface temperature, the distribution of heat across its vast expanse, is moderated by trade winds that blow east to west along the equator, which help move warm water from South America over toward Asia.Those winds are called trade winds because, back during the European age of Exploration, they helped ships from Europe head west toward Asia and the Americas. And these winds form in part because of the Earth’s rotation, the Coriolis effect funneling air toward the equator, where it is then more concentrated and thus potent, which is useful if you’re trying to move a ship with sails, but also serves the purpose of moving warm water from one part of the ocean to another part of the ocean.As those warmer surface waters are shifted from the Americas to Asia, water is pulled up to the surface from lower down in the ocean as part of a process called upwelling. This process results in cooler temperatures on the surface, because lower down, oceanic water is colder, and that lower-down water is also more rich in nutrients, which has the knock-on effect of stimulating more biological activity along these cooling surface waters.That’s the normal state of things in the Pacific Ocean.There are sometimes deviations in this norm, however, that result in very different outcomes; these deviations are broadly called the El Niño Southern Oscillation Cycle, and that cycle consists of opposite El Niño and La Niña climate patterns.During La Niña patterns, trade winds are more powerful than usual and they shove a lot more of that warm surface water to Asia than is typical, and that has the net impact of moving more deep-down cold, nutrient-rich, ocean water to the surface.This, in turn, nudges the Polar Jet Stream, which is a channel of fast-moving, westerly winds that lives about 30,000 ft or just over 9000 meters up in the sky, and which crosses both warmer, mid-latitudes and far colder Arctic latitudes, further north. The Polar Jet Stream is responsible for moderating or intensifying weather patterns around the world, and like the trade winds, it’s influenced by the spin of the planet, but it’s also adjusted by surface systems, like the temperature of the Pacific. So the arrival of a La Niña pattern pushes the jet stream further north, and as a result, weather patterns change, and in North America, we tend to see drought in the southwest, heavier rains and flooding and in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, warmer winters in the South, and cooler winters in the North.La Niñas also tend to result in more severe hurricane seasons in the Atlantic basin, while suppressing hurricane activity in the central and eastern Pacific basins.El Niño, in contrast, results from weaker trade winds, which, because these winds don’t pack as much of a punch, means less warm water is being shoved from South America to Asia, and thus the surface temperature of that part of the Pacific is warmer, lacking that upwelling of cold water to replace the warm water that would otherwise be displaced over to Asia.El Niño also adjusts the location of the jet stream, but in the opposite direction, pulling it south of its usual spot. That then causes more heat and dryness across the northern US and Canada, but makes the southern US and Gulf Coast a lot wetter, leading to more flooding.What I’d like to talk about today are predictions about an anticipated upcoming El Niño climate pattern, and why some climate scientists are warning that it could be a doozy.—Climate scientists with the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the NOAA, released new model forecasts in mid-May, and one of those models indicated that an El Niño pattern could form in the Pacific as soon as June.The NOAA puts together and releases new models on a regular basis, as the variables influencing these massively complex patterns are always changing, and the trend over the past three months has been increasing certainty about the formation of this El Niño pattern, but also an increasing likelihood that this potential El Niño would be very strong, perhaps historically so.There have been a total of 27 El Niños since 1950, when we started officially tracking such things, and we get one every three or four years, on average. The last one occurred from the summer of 2023 into spring of 2024.The current models show that we could see another one of these systems as soon as next month, then, and there’s currently a nearly 60% chance that this particular El Niño would become strong—and that’s an official designation, by the way, a strong El Niño being one that sees an ocean surface temperature increase of between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius—and a one-in-three chance that it could ...
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    14 分
  • 2026 UK Local Elections

    2026 UK Local Elections
    2026/05/12
    This week we talk about Keir Starmer, Labour, and the Reform UK party.We also discuss Tories, the Lib Dems, and two-party systems.Recommended Book: Peak by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert PoolTranscriptFor more than 100 years, the British political system has been dominated by two parties: Labour and the Conservative Party, often called the Tories.In practice, that means these two parties, which are center-left and center-right in their leanings, respectively, have tended to shape the direction of British politics and the Overton Window of thinkable proposals—things that might actually happen because they get the requisite support from politicians and the public.These two parties have usually had to work with other, smaller parties in order to get anything done, because the UK has a parliamentary system that often leaves the party with the most representatives lacking enough support to run a functioning government, solo. As a consequence, the Liberal Democrats, which is a fairly centrist party, the Green Party, which focuses on environmentalism and more left-wing concerns, Plaid Cymru (plied KUM-ree), which is the Welsh nationalist party, and the Scottish National Party, which is exactly what it sounds like, have long influenced Labour and the Tories, aligning their votes with whomever gives them a seat at the table. This has given some influence to smaller groups that might otherwise lack representation, though that influence has typically been moderate to meager, at best—the folks in Labour and the Conservative party have run things in the UK, and that’s been the case for generations.Things started to shake up a bit in the 20-teens, however, when anti-immigration and EU-skepticism in Britain led to the creation of the far-right Brexit Party, which was co-founded by politician Nigel Farage, who was the leader of the UK Independence Party in the early 2000s and 20-teens, and who was previously a Tory, and Catherine Blaiklock, a politician and hotelier who stepped down from her position as party leader the year after the Brexit Party was founded after anti-Islamic and racist comments she’d previously made online were rediscovered.The Brexit Party existed, almost exclusively, to push for a no-agreement exit from the European Union by the UK, which was considered to be a fairly fringe ideology back then, but which gained a lot of steam as other populists began to add their support to the general concept.Both the government and the existing political structure of the UK was then caught flat-footed, by all indications very surprised by the eventual success of that push, and the UK left the EU on January 31, 2020, after a whole lot of skepticism that it would ever happen, even after a vote in favor of Brexit took place. This represented a serious come to Jesus moment for British politicians, but also British society, and there’s been quite a lot of self-reflection and naval gazing in the years since, as the Brexit pullout from the EU has caused quite a lot of economic and diplomatic damage, while also shining a spotlight on numerous simmering issues that were previously overlooked or unaddressed, including the bubbling resentment and at times outright xenophobia felt by a significant portion of the British electorate, and persistent economic issues faced by folks at the middle and lower rungs of society.What I’d like to talk about today is the recent 2026 UK Local Elections, and what they seem to tell us about how things are going in British politics, and what they portend for the current Labour-run administration.—On May 7, 2026, the UK held local elections for 5,066 councillors, 136 local authorities, and six directly elected mayors. Some of these elections were postponed in 2025 to allow for government restructuring, but most of these positions were last up for election in 2022.This election was generally seen as an unofficial referendum on the governing Labour Party, and in particular the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who has been in office for just under two years, and who stepped into the role of PM after the role was held by the Conservative Tories for 14 years; five different Prime Ministers taking the reins during that period, including David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.All that changing in leadership is indicative of the chaos the UK government was experiencing at the time, the May 2010 general election leading to a period of significant austerity—the government cutting tons of social programs in order to reduce spending—which then fed into more support for Brexit when some members of the party positioned the economic issues people were facing as the consequence of EU-related immigration, and shortly thereafter, the world succumbed to the Covid-19 pandemic.There was a lot of truly significant political change from about 2010 onward, then, and a lot for the general population to be upset about. The Conservatives held onto power despite it ...
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    14 分
  • Child Mortality

    Child Mortality
    2026/05/05
    This week we talk about industrialization, antibiotics, and child mortality rates.We also discuss corruption, instability, and progress.Recommended Book: Empire of Silence by Christopher RuocchioTranscriptDemographic transition is a social sciences theory that posits, based on all sorts of modern historical data, that societies tend to change, demographically, as they transition from a largely agrarian, low-industrial society, to that of a less-agrarian, high-industrial society.Most modern, post-hunter-gatherer societies have started out plowing the vast majority of their labor into bare subsistence, human beings spending their days, throughout their whole lives, working the land in order to produce enough food to live. All sorts of social and economic systems arose around this base-level fact, including those that tied laborers to the land, allowing for the rise of a leadership or ruling class, regional militaries, and other sorts of specialists. But until relatively recent history, the majority of people in a given society labored to produce raw essentials, and that was just the shape of things.This began to change with the dawn of the industrial revolution, and in some areas a bit before that, as precursor technologies allowed societies to produce more food and other essentials with less manual labor and using fewer foundational resources, like land. These technologies, as they became more widely distributed, more effective and efficient, and cheaper to deploy and operate, allowed more people to do more sorts of things, leading to a ballooning of industry and commerce in industrializing regions, and that allowed said regions to invest in other things, including medical knowledge, education, and so on.Life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk in these industrializing areas, and all sorts of new abuses and issues, including long hours at factories and problems related to pollution, arose and became common. But because these sorts of societies required professionals with new types of knowledge and know-how, and because they were able to sustain an increasing number of specialities beyond working the land to generate food and other bare necessities, keeping people alive, longer, and ensuring more people had the specialized knowledge required to do all those things, became more of a priority, and one that could actually be addressed because of the concomitant ability to feed and clothe and house and address more of the needs of more people.There were gobs of other spiraling forces in the mix, of course, including religion, politics, and so on, but that general tendency to shift away from raw subsistence into more complex and diverse economic systems was a driving factor behind a lot of what happened from around 1800 until, well, now.What I’d like to talk about today is a specific data point, or collection of data points, that arguably, more than any other such data points, show the benefits of the industrialized, modern society we’re living in, today, despite all the accompanying downsides.—So most societies, at this point, have undergone significant changes as a result of our widespread application of technologies that allow human beings to get more done with the same amount of effort.We’re able to generate more value, of all kinds, than our ancestors, and though it’s possible to criticize the change in priorities and focus on all the negative knock-on effects of these changes—and there are many such negative knock-on effects, like large-scale military conflicts and rampant pollution and climate change—it would be difficult to argue that there haven’t been some fairly significant upsides for humanity, as well.One key upside is related to that demographic transition I mentioned. As societies shift and it becomes better for everyone if more people know how to do more things, and it thus becomes a priority for more people to live long enough to use the knowledge and know-how they acquire, it has increasingly made more sense for governments to invest in our overall longevity and survivability.We can’t just say, I’d like everyone to live longer, and then snap our fingers and make that happen. But we can, and have, invested in technologies and systems that make longer lives more likely, and from 1800 onward that’s generally been the trend, with a huge upswing arriving in the mid-20th century, when a bunch of new tools and technologies, including things like modern antiseptics and early antibiotics, first arrived on the scene, dramatically reducing the mortality rate associated with all kinds of medical procedures.Arguably the most significant social gain during this period, though, has been the bogglingly large reduction in child mortality rates.Child mortality refers to the death of children under the age of five, and this figure is, today, usually expressed as the likelihood of a child under five dying, per 1000 children in an area. So you might say in India, the child death rate is 92 in 1000,...
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    15 分
  • Iran War Costs

    Iran War Costs
    2026/04/28
    This week we talk about the Strait of Hormuz, oil, and Russia.We also discuss Patriot missiles, expensive weapons, and peer rivals.Recommended Book: Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le CunffTranscriptDuring 2025 and early 2026, about 20 million barrels of crude oil and other petroleum products was shipped through the Strait of Hormuz every day. That’s about a quarter of the world’s total seaborne oil, and essentially all of that oil, and gas, and those other energy products that pass through this strait are from Middle Eastern suppliers like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Iran.Beginning at the tail-end of February 2026, however, the Iranian military has shut down the Strait by threatening to take out or capture any vessels that attempt to pass through it. This has had the practical effect of initially reducing tanker traffic through the Strait by about 70%, but in recent weeks traffic has dropped to nearly zero. As of April 2026, about 2,000 ships are stranded in the area as a result of this closure.As a result of this shutdown, though, other energy product suppliers have seen demand for their oil and gas and the like increase, and that’s led to higher prices for these products.Russia, for instance, which doesn’t rely on the Strait to get its oil and gas out to its customers, has seen its oil tax revenue double in April, and the price of one grade of oil that it sells increased by 73% from February, alone.That’s a big windfall for Russia, which has had trouble selling its oil and gas at a significant profit, due in part to heavy sanctions that have resulted from its invasion of Ukraine. It’s continued to sell to countries like China and India, but those customers have been able to pay lower prices due to the lessened demand for what Russia is selling.This increased demand has thus goosed profits for Russia at a moment in which it could really use those sorts of profits—its economy is not doing terribly well, again because of its invasion of Ukraine, which has also not been going terribly well—so while inflation caused by this gas price-spike has been near-universally not great for much of the world, because energy cost increases tend to increase the price of just about everything, Russia’s government, at least, has been pretty happy with the shutdown of the Strait, and would probably love to see it continue.Another moderate benefactor of this shutdown has been the United States government. The US is the number one exporter of liquified natural gas, and one of the top exporters of oil and petroleum products. US export numbers are poised to hit new records with the closure of the Strait, too, because, just like with Russia, fewer products of this kind available on the global market means those who have such products to sell can charge higher prices for them.There’s a good chance this disruption, even if it ended today, for good, will have permanently rewired at least some of the global petroleum industry, as companies and countries that have been left in the lurch have adjusted their risks analyses and determined that it makes more sense to buy from different suppliers, to sell to different customers, or, in some cases, to use fewer of these products and invest more enthusiastically in renewables, like solar and wind—so while the US and Russia and a few other players are somewhat pleased with how things are going, oil and gas price-wise at least, long term this could actually harm them, the most, as more of their customers decide to stop paying irregular prices for what they’re selling and to opt for less turbulent solar and wind power, instead.What I’d like to talk about today is another knock-on effect of the war in Iran that could have significant international, possibly even military implications.—Since Trump first stepped into office, winning the US presidency back in 2016, allies have openly wondered whether the US could be relied upon as a military ally, should push come to shove.Trump has repeated said that he thinks NATO is a rip-off for the US, as the US has long provided the vast majority of funding and weapons for the alliance, and he’s pushed European NATO members to step up their own investment, lest he decide to just led Russia or whomever else attack them; he’s openly speculated that he might do exactly that.As a result of the US’s pivot away from happily playing the role of world police and invasion deterrent, European governments have been hastily putting together contingency plans that don’t include the US: if Russia turns its attention away from Ukraine and starts attacking the Baltics or Poland, they want to be ready, and they don’t want to have to rely on the unreliable Trump administration for their survival.Other governments that have long assumed they would be protected, at least in part, by the overwhelming force of the US military, have also been rethinking things, based on Trump’s stated, if not always practiced, ...
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