By default, sunscreen is illegal in schools. The Skin Cancer Foundation is trying to make sunscreens legal in school. Sunscreens are illegal because US classifies sunscreens as over the counter drugs. (This is also why the US is 20+ years behind in legalizing sunscreens widely used in Korea and Europe.) A Virginia mom told me her kid goes without sunscreen because of this rule. Before school, she’ll put it on at 8am. Sunscreen only lasts about 2 hours - there’s no way for her preschooler to reapply it during the day. Virginia bans self-application of sunscreen unless a child is nine years old. For a teacher to apply sunscreen, Virginia requires 1. written permission from parents 2. a written record of application with the amount and type applied, day and time, name of caregiver, any error, and 3. Sunscreen must be in the original container and labeled with the child’s name. Doing this for all 12+ kids in your classroom is a lot. So teachers don't do it. The law requires every kid bring their own sunscreen. A teacher can’t buy a pound of sunscreen to make sure low-income kids also have access. The result of all of these: kids go without sunscreen. This wouldn’t happen if sunscreen was classified as a cosmetic, like it is in Europe. Have any other parents encountered issues like this?

Sweden has tougher environmental rules than America. It also gets more of its energy from renewables than any other EU country. A permitting bill in Congress, BAAJA, would make our system work more like Sweden’s. In Sweden, a lawsuit against a project (like a wind farm) is about its actual harm. In the US, you can sue over whether the government’s thousand-page environmental review left something out. If a judge agrees, the permit is canceled and the agency starts over, even if the project wouldn’t have hurt anything in real life! Federal agencies win about 80% of these cases on appeal. The cases still take over four years. A lot of projects can’t survive that wait. Imagine clean energy groups, environmental groups, and the government all agree on a new wind farm. Today, a rival company or a single neighbor can stall it for years. Under BAAJA, you’d have 150 days to sue, and you’d need to show the project actually harms you. If a judge finds a gap in the review, the agency fixes only that part, within 180 days. The project doesn’t go back to square one. Cases go straight to federal appeals courts, so plaintiffs can’t pick a friendly judge. That’s still short of Sweden, where environmental courts with technical experts judge projects based on their impact. But it’s a big step. The bill also moves us toward Sweden’s model of empowered civil servants. It makes it harder for political appointees to cancel already-approved projects. Trump’s Interior Department halted five already-approved offshore wind farms. BAAJA would make that harder, though that same power could apply to a future Democratic administration wanting to stop an oil permit. Renewables keep getting cheaper. When it’s easier to build energy of any kind, I expect most of what gets built to be renewables, even though the bill helps oil and gas too. It just helps all energy projects. Many House Democrats are waiting to see what environmental groups say. I hope the Sierra Club and NRDC sign on.

“A revolution but marginally It’s easy to just look at the fringe. The loudest voices voices are by far the most cringe But when I look at your overall spending I see so many problems to be ending I love you at the margin. call me just EA I’ll help the world and I’ll do it my way” Banger song. Can someone figure out the chords?

As this post makes clear, a world of abundance doesn’t just mean “more money to buy STUFF” — it means more degrees of freedom for everyone to pursue what means the most to them in their one and precious life.

Hi @Noahpinion! Thanks for the mention! Your translator employment chart appears to show ~160 million translators which is roughly the whole US workforce. BLS counts ~74,000 interpreters and translators. I think your chart y-axis is off. :)

Korea has an interesting rental option. You pay a large (~$90k deposit, 90% of the value of property), then pay a monthly management fee. You get the money back when you leave - unless the owner mismanaged the $$$. The Korean government guarantees housing deposits, and tenants are the ones to do background checks on landlord.

These NYC apartments are standing empty, not because the owners don't want to rent them, but because rent stabilization laws prohibit them from charging enough to earn back the costs of necessary repairs. My latest for @WSJFreeEx

The AI as Normal Technology guys are consistently some of the best and most interesting critics of a lot of arguments in AI safety world. I'm making a point to read everything they put out.

On The Curve: In 1700s England, the people building the first steam engines, modern factories, and discovering new chemistry had dinner together once a month. New ideas need a few people weird enough to take them seriously first. When those people find each other, they make wonders happen. Today, the people shaping AI are spread out across the world. The Curve gathers them for a few days. Not only the builders of AI, but those shaping ideas around AI, preparedness, and putting AI to good uses. So many of my conversations were about doing hard things: post-training a model, fixing a state agency, making a leap in science. I also met allies who want to work on improving society’s structures and institutions, improving forecasts, and lowering risks. When people get together, they support each other’s missions. I can’t wait to learn what came out of the Curve in the coming months and years. Really glad I got to be a tiny part of crafting The Curve. Excited for The Curve DC! Huge congrats and thanks to the entire @GoldenGateInst team!

A rice that prevents childhood blindness has been ready since the mid-2000s. It grows nowhere. Vitamin A deficiency blinds up to 500,000 children a year. Half die within twelve months. To help, scientists added beta-carotene, the pigment that turns carrots orange, to rice. It cooks and tastes the same, though the grain is yellow. They called it Golden Rice and licensed it free to any farmer earning under $10,000. Greenpeace spent twenty years fighting it country by country. Activists destroyed test fields. Lawyers got approvals revoked. A hundred Nobel laureates asked them to stop. They did not stop. I spent weeks calculating what the delay cost. My estimate is 110,000 dead children. Roughly 15 a day, every day, for two decades. The same technology did reach American grocery stores. It makes a pink pineapple that sells for up to $50. The pineapple has a corporation rolling out a new fruit, with the profit margins to take on critics and market the science. Golden Rice had no profit margin to defend itself.