* “On conditional approval for human drugs.” This will almost certainly be too late for me, but it would be a real step forward—as Alex writes: “Dare I say it, but could the FDA be lumbering in the right direction?” I hope so. I’ve been encouraging it to lumber in that direction. Particularly in oncology drugs, not making the process for people with fatal diagnoses to try even long-shot drugs easy is madness. It should be criminal. If I’m going to die anyway, why not try something unusual? The drug I’m on now, petosemtamab, should’ve been approved for recurrent / metastatic squamous cell carcinoma at least ten months ago, if not longer. Give us the right to try! I’m almost certainly going to die of squamous cell carcinoma anyway; might as well find out if any of the drugs coming out of labs work. Drugs to treat fatal diseases are not like drugs to treat some dubious ailments like high cholesterol, or ailments like depression in which it’s hard to say if any of the drugs available really work.

* “Irene Bosch developed a quick, inexpensive COVID-19 test in early 2020. The Harvard-trained scientist already had a factory set up. But she was stymied by an FDA process experts say made no sense.” The FDA is killing more people than it’s helping / “protecting,” a theme you’ll also see in the link above. And the collective response to this is to shrug, and go back to pointless culture wars.

* “The California Forever project is a great idea.” We need new cities. I suspect we’re not going to get a new frontier until we can build O’Neill Habitats, which probably won’t be for a long time.

* “Making every researcher seek grants is a broken model.” True, and an important point for effective accelerationism.

* The Dan Wang 2023 letter. Excellent. Too many sections to quote, but:

The disappointment I feel mostly concerns food. You can find pretty good food in America at fairly high prices, but you will never be able to find mindblowing food at the cost of a few dollars — which is the default in Asia. Americans who have never been to Asia will never appreciate how one never needs to cook, because right outside will be a mom-and-pop shop that is preparing a meal that is one order of magnitude tastier and cheaper than one could make at home.

Maybe one day cooking at home will be as peculiar or rare growing all of one’s food at home. Gains from trade and specialization are real!

I think the U.S. is too heavily invested in parking lots to generate sufficient proximity to restaurants to in turn generate the possibility of mindblowing food at relatively low prices.

* The culture of Boeing, and what happens when engineers aren’t in charge. Facebook/Meta seems to work well in part because it’s kept the MBAs out.

* “A vote for Trump is a vote for chaos.” Obvious, and yet here we are.

* Scientists at Strand Therapeutics Will Test a Cancer-Hunting mRNA Treatment. This is great. Unfortunately for me, their first clinical-trial drug appears to be a tumoral-injection drug, which would work for the tumors in my neck but is probably not ideal for the tumors in my lungs. Their pipeline page lists STX-003 as a systemic interleukin-12 (“IL-12”) therapy that is in preclinical development, and the indication is for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), since sticking needles into the lungs is not ideal. There’s already an IL-2 therapy called SAR444245, being tested as “THOR-707,” but the last wave of IL-2 trials didn’t seem to go well. Biology is hard. This sort of failure is also why I’m leery of many phase 1a trials.

* “Will China squander its moment in the sun?”

* Massive lithium deposits found in the U.S. Whatever you read about lithium shortages is likely BS. The biggest problem in the U.S. is NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act, which, despite its name, often does net harm to the environment—like many putative environmentalists.

* “Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]?” By Dan Luu, and a topic I’ve also wondered about. The information density of text is still so much greater than video, and the production costs so much lower, that I find the shift to video dumb. But I find a lot of common behaviors and choices dumb. Maybe I am the dumb one.

* Funding for “revolutionary” science, outside of the typical foundation and grant-making apparatuses.

* The Housing Famine, and how we should build a lot more housing.

* The need to build a more resilient navy—which is another way of saying: “The need to build more stuff, faster.”

* “How cancer hijacks the nervous system to grow and spread.” One of the high-risk features of my cancer was “perineural invasion”—that is, the cancer had invaded nerves in my tongue.