Hello loyal readers! I posted this a couple of years ago, but in case you've missed it I've been blogging on Substack at this page and not really bothering to cross-post on GrokInFullness. I am still covering a similar beat, the libertarian take on various policies. I have a lot to say on immigration and drug policy, which seems topical given the current administration. I wrote a recent criticism…
People who favor strict immigration policies often complain that immigrants fail to "assimilate." I'm not quite sure what to do with this complaint, because I don't really know what standard they're applying. I guess speaking passable English is one requirement. Obeying laws and informal norms is another. But it seems like most immigrants already do these things. (In case you're unaware,…
"It is the proper role of rhinoceros to provide a basic standard of living for the citizens." "It is the proper role of rhinoceros to ensure that all school children are adequately educated." "It is the proper role of rhinoceros to guarantee a modern standard of medicine for all citizens." It's funny (to me at least) that saying these things doesn't really change the nature of a rhinoceros.…
"What kind of cruel person could deny that free access to the lunar health spa is a basic human right? What kind of penny-pinching miser could resist the notion that access to lab-grown cybernetic organ replacements is a fucking BASIC HUMAN RIGHT?!" -23rd century demagogue
So I've started a Substack here . You can read my inaugural "welcome" post here . If you've enjoyed the content of my blog, you'll probably want to follow my Substack as well. I'll be posting on a lot of the same topics and themes. I'll also be moving over some posts, so if you've been following "Grok In Fullness" for a while, you might see some reruns. I believe there's a feature where I can…
In a recent links roundup post at Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander links to this piece with the following commentary: One of the most common objections to libertarianism, right after “but who would fund the roads?”, is “wouldn’t a private fire department leave your house to burn if you hadn’t paid?” Here is a very long investigation by someone who has investigated the history of private fire…
Andrew Koppelman's book Burning Down the House deserved a little more scrutiny than I gave it previously. I wrote an earlier post reacting to the book, and I stand by it. But I took some time to re-read and annotate so I could deliver a more thoughtful review. When I wrote the earlier post, I was under the misapprehension that Koppelman thought of himself as a libertarian. The whole book (title…
I haven't done one of these in almost three years, but I wanted to do an update. Here is my most recent one with data through 2018, also with links to prior years' analyses. I think not much has changed about the overall narrative, so I'll direct readers to the previous years' posts for those details. The CDC's large mortality file gets posted here , in case anyone wants to download and do their…
Social Security and Medicare make little sense as anti-poverty programs. They pay out based on age, not need. A retiree who earned a respectable income over their lifetime shouldn't need Social Security to provide for their retirement. They had the means to save back enough to cover their retirement years. Such a person could easily have a million or so dollars saved up. The obvious way to means…
In 2020 there were 385,293 deaths that mentioned Covid-19 on the certificate. Of those, 351,530 listed Covid-19 as the underlying cause of death. (In other words, 33,763 deaths, about 9%, listed Covid-19 as incidental but not necessarily the ultimate cause.) I wanted to take a closer look, because this seemed lopsided to me. Quick overview, the CDC's mortality data list an ultimate cause of death,…
If you're a libertarian who wants to read something by a progressive that attempts to convert you to progressivism, you should read Burning Down the House by Andrew Koppelman. Alternatively, if you're a progressive who wants to feel an unearned sense of intellectual and moral superiority to libertarians, you should also read Burning Down the House . The book's subtitle is How Libertarian…
A couple of weeks ago I got a panicked email from a friend of mine. His dad was having trouble breathing, and it was really making him miserable. He'd had issues with this before and knew a treatment that worked for him. The steroid prednisone seemed to always work. He was in a lot of pain, and my friend was getting desperate. Their family doctor wouldn't prescribe prednisone because the dad has a…
I recently read two books that detail the history of mistreatment of homosexuals in the United States. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick is focused on the implications of being a homosexual for one's career in government. Vice Patrol by Anna Lvovsky is more focused on the tactics used by municipal police departments to entrap gay men. Both are worth reading if you…
Suppose you have an opportunity to purchase a box containing a million dollars. It's not actually cash, but a series of IOUs that are only redeemable by you. Because the box is only valuable to you, the current owner has no other buyers. He's willing to sell for, say, $50k. A very confused onlooker observes this situation and says, "But, you don't have $50k. You can't afford to purchase this box!"…
I've recently subscribed to the Oura ring and 23andMe . The goal is to learn a little bit more about myself. I would describe the results as mostly, "Confirming stuff I already knew and getting almost no actionable information." The Oura ring tracks a few vital signs, such as heart rate, respiratory rate, pulse ox, and body temperature. It also tracks movement, so it can tell if you're moving…
I recently read two books about the internal workings of the Trump administration from people I respect. Casey Mulligan's You're Hired and Scott Atlas's A Plague Upon Our House are both very good. They offer a different lens through which to view an administration that's usually portrayed as oafish and arbitrary. I'm no fan of Mr. Trump. He generally had a terrible policy agenda and the way he…
On June 7th, the Soho forum hosted a debate between Jeff Singer and Adriane Fugh-Berman on the opioid epidemic. The resolution was “America's overdose crisis is the result of doctors over‐treating patients with opioids.” Adriane argued for the affirmative, Jeff took the negative. (I refer to Jeff by his first name because I have had several friendly conversations with him, and I refer to Adriane…
I don't necessarily feel the need to weigh in on the news topics of the day. There is a class of Twitter dwellers who apparently need to have an opinion about every topic. Sometimes they loudly spout the conventional wisdom while saying "expert" or "consensus" every second or third word. Some of them are contrarians for the sake of being contrarians. Some are hipster meta-contrarians, crafting…
There is a type of person who becomes apoplectic if you try to compare covid to the flu. I noticed this from the very beginning of the pandemic and I thought it was completely nuts. To be fair, there were some commentators making inappropriate speculation, saying that covid would be like a "bad flu season." Obviously it turned out to be much worse than that, but it was intrinsically reasonable to…
There have been some recent attempts to resuscitate and rejuvenate the dead ideas of socialism. Despite its having been thoroughly refuted by the experience of the 20th century, advocates are always appealing to some slight variation on the basic concept that's "never been tried." You can read some of my recent posts as pushing back against these attempts to redeem a fundamentally misguided idea.…
Almost two years ago, I wrote this post describing a pre-print paper on the origins of the opioid crisis. It was an interesting attempt, but I think it was fundamentally confused. For example, it supposedly finds that differences between states in opioid overdoses are driven (in part) by law differences. (So called "triplicate states" required doctors to fill out forms in triplicate when…
With Covid-19 hitting the world in mid-2020, I was having a lot of thoughts about how to measure public health crises. Covid deaths were numerous enough to show up in the all-cause mortality figures. This basically ruled out the possibility that Covid was far less severe or far less common than the official statistics implied. Cause of death misattributions could conceivably overstate deaths in…
I'm growing tired of arguments and pronouncements that don the mantle of science but then proceed to make the most embarrassingly false claims. I often see it said that there is "no evidence" or "zero evidence" for some claim. This can't be literally true. Anything that can potentially shift your priors is evidence, even if it doesn't shift them by much. If I tell you I saw a leprechaun, that's…
There was an interesting study out of Israel comparing natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity for SARS-Cov-2. Generally it finds that natural immunity is more robust than vaccination, though the vaccine does still seem to yield some benefit to people with natural immunity. And it's not a small effect, we're talking seven-fold or thirteen-fold, depending on how you do the analysis. Note the…
I want to make a point about the topic everyone's worried about, but I don't want to unnecessarily freak anyone out. As in, if you've already gotten it and have suffered no lingering effects, you should probably not worry. But if you haven't gotten it yet, you might want to exercise additional caution due to the unknown long-term sequelae. Some have persisting complications, but most people appear…