All of fuego's Comments + Replies

Fully agree with this -- though I'm not optimistic that hospitals will allow much of it.

This sounds like serious confounding. In all likelihood, prison docs had X doses and triaged, and then repeated.

I will say though -- I do still think Moderna primary was likely better, but I've (since writing) found out that the booster is half the dose of the primary dose -- so I doubt Moderna's increased efficacy translates to the booster.

Adding in post: Omicron both increases short term value of booster and may increase risk of hitting any lifetime cap (its further evidence for more future variants that will warrant boosting)

On somewhat further investigation (really limited here -- lets not lean too much on it) -- the Moderna boosters are half the dose of the Moderna primaries. If you believe, as I do, that the primary reason for increased Moderna efficacy in trials was due to dosing, then the reduced booster dose means that the reason I give above (higher efficacy) is no longer a relevant factor.

I do think @npostavs is right that this study is likely quite confounded. Though I do still believe Moderna primary doses had reasonably better efficacy against OG covid, and in all likelihood against delta and now omicron.

Look at their photos. If you like them, they know their subject (though perhaps not how to teach it). If you don't like them, find a new instructor. Rinse and repeat. Most tutorial people put their photos online to some extent, so this shouldn't be hard -- and unlike many domains (e.g. woodworking) -- looking at the photo on your screen should be enough to judge it pretty well.

If you can't tell if you like them, I suspect that your first step should be to try to develop your "taste". Start by just looking at tons of pictures. I recommend one of the photo-a... (read more)

Honestly I think the celebrations stopped being "valued" by the people who could organize them.

A big celebration involves a lot of planning effort and a fair bit of cash. And it can easily wind up looking like there was substantial corruption in choice of vendors, etc.

On top of that, for cash strapped local govs, the Q "can this money be better spent elsewhere" is real and all consuming.

I think this is right here, though I'd push it forwards a little. 7 days incubation +a few days to detect for some people etc, and you're probably looking at reasonable protection even on t+1 and t+2. I think basically the "dose+ 14 days" is coming down to the fact that it takes us up to 14 days to detect. Otherwise, those two numbers (and pieces of guidance) are suprisingly similar.

The big caveat to all this is that the NEJM figure (based on Pfizer's EUA submission) is focused on OG covid, not covid 2.0.

But the math I did back when I got my shot (based on that figure + an incubation period), was that within 2 days I was at like 70% efficacy.

I think a large factor for people making decisions around covid risk is not just the risk they are posing to themselves, but also the risk they are imposing on others. Insofar as "risk I impose on others" enters my utility function, this is going to change a lot of your conclusions pretty quickly. The reason being that "risk imposed on others" is growing super-linearly in most activities.

E.g. If I go to a restaurant and then meet a friend, I've incurred much more risk to the friend than if I didn't go to the restaurant. If I then meet a third friend separ... (read more)

This (US export ban) is news to me. Can you link to a source for that?

I think korin43 has it right.

Notably, the article you quote cites the US as doing more poorly than the UK, one of the only large countries to outperform the US in both your rankings. I agree that I've seen a number of articles in that vein, but none of them seem to compare the US to countries other than Israel and the UK.

In comparison with the EU however, US vaccine procurement looks incredible. I'll cite a relatively neutral google news search (https://www.google.com/search?q=EU+vaccine+procurement&hl=en&source=lnms&tbm=nws). For future reader... (read more)

I think that Siderea's section 2 is actually very important. While it is possible that the monetary costs of the boots are structured such that buying good boots once is a better use of money than buying cheap ones every year, it is certainly the case that the time-costs of avoiding that big upfront expenditure are huge. The same is true for many of your examples. Being money-poor forces you to work up to your constraints on other dimensions (time, stress, etc) to survive without money -- which in turn prevents you from using slack in those dimensions to... (read more)

I think the reason the second fact gets less attention has to do with the focus rapidly shifting to markets and prices as the mechanism by which the exchange rate is set, rather than 1-on-1 negotiation.

Not to say that the second fact is irrelevant. OPs examples of relevance of fact 1 include things like household chore splits between partners, as well as career choice -- applications where fact 2 is clearly very relevant.

But in econ 101, there is a lot of ground to cover. comparative advantage is a natural jumping off point for supply & demand Qs which are pretty much required content, whereas negotiation, game theory, bilateral decisions are usually treated as somewhat supplementary.

Really well written and thought out.

Indeed, if both Alice and Omega know that Alice's decision-making will tell her to use the 1-boxer strategy, then Alice will know she will gain $1M

and

In both cases, her counterfactual optimization urged her to be a 2-boxer

feel like the crux to me.

If Alice was such a person to listen to the counterfactual optimization, then both Alice and Omega would not know she would 1box. There is a contradiction being buried in there.

Excellent post. I have a small complaint on the Coase section though. Quoting for reference:

Suppose that, in a particular case, the pollution does $100,000 a year worth of damage and can be eliminated at a cost of only $80,000 a year (from here on, all costs are per year). Further assume that the cost of shifting all of the land down wind to a new use unaffected by the pollution—growing timber instead of renting out summer resorts, say—is only $50,000. If we impose an emission fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, the steel mill stops polluting and t

I believe not. The point was that even if a referenda gains a majority of 1% of the population, it is still a successful referenda. Thus 0.51% when turnout is 1% is adequate to change law.

This. I think Mistake theorists would frequently question whether the game is actually zero-sum. This divergence in opinions about the nature of the game feels important to me.

I think the reason not to worry too much about the passive revolution is that as long as there are money-making opportunities from active trading -- people will be incentivized to do it. The end state "everyone is passive -- there is no price signal" is not one we can reach from where we are, and it is not a stable equilibrium. If we ever did cross over into "too few hedge funds", there would such a strong incentive for more, that I don't think it would last long. But perhaps I misunderstand this critique.

Really excellent discussion of the EMH. Love your description of it as some kind of demon-god creature.

I'll jump in on a minor point.

"And yet, and yet…even when criminals have advance access to earnings reports, they still don’t do all that well, which is evidence for the very strongest form of the EMH (the one that no-one, including me, believes can possibly be true)."

This might instead be evidence that there is a lot more insider trading than we think -- making it so that those we know of were competing for gains against other insider traders.

Could certainly go either way. I was trying to emphasize that the productivity loss has an externality associated with it though. I wholeheartedly agree that individuals may be better off -- they are optimizing, but with more information. At most, their predictions about locational preferences have changed but reality hasn't (outside the next couple of years at least). But if that reduces aggregate productivity growth, people alive in 100 years may be suffering -- their utility isn't being accounted for by individual decisions.

A secondary effect, which I f

De-urbanization is something you list several times as being important and beneficial. I don't think I agree.

In the short term at least de-urbanization is diametrically opposed to __climate progress__ -- and that may be true in the medium to long term. See for instance, stats about NYC

In the long term, urban areas have been highly productive historically -- and while it is possible that tele-everything can undermine that effect, I doubt it can fully counter the productivity benefits of cities. Insofar as productivity has been critical for human welf... (read more)