Tell me what you pay attention to, and I tell you who you are …

This guy would not be so chill about sipping his bubble tea if he knew that plastic containers consistently scored hundreds-fold multiples of plastic chemicals allowed in foods.

  1. JD Vance speaks in Munich. Some reflections:

    • First the good, he is a pretty good speaker. [He still spends a lot of words to say relatively little.]

    • However, it is an example of trying to intervene with European politics, and that is not OK.

  2. AI Personality Extraction from Faces: Labor Market Implications

    • “Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is critical for labor market success, yet the personality component remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel ``Photo Big 5’’ predicts school rank, compensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Using administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes.”

  3. Legacies of the 1965 Immigration Act

  4. The Richest Arabs in 2024: Egypt and Lebanon Still Have the Most Billionaires in the Region Again “Despite shitty economy”

    • “Nassef Sawiris has been dethroned as the richest Arab in the world by none other than Pavel Durov [co-founder of VK and Telegram]. Originally from Russia, Durov, the only tech CEO on the list, obtained Emirati citizenship, ironically earning him the leading spot in the Arab billionaires club. Durov is not the only non-Arab to make it to the list. A group of Indian tycoons residing in the UAE also joined, including Renuka Jagtiani, the first businesswoman to make the list. These foreign entries have pushed Arab billionaires down the rankings. “

  5. Cynthia Heimel Has Lots To Say Even After 20 Years Of Writing (1995 Aug 20)

    • “I was the perfect candidate for becoming an obsessive maniac. A normal baby absorbs oceans of parental love. . . . When a normal baby grows up, she expects to be loved. But if a baby never gets that parental love, she keeps aimlessly searching in all the wrong places.”

    • “Everyone in the world seems to think that they are codependent and that they come from dysfunctional families. They call it codependency, I call it the human condition.”

  6. What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman

    Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.

    Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.

    Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it’s usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.

  7. Ephemeral guff: New poems/half thoughts (Kate Ireland)

    • “As a performer, I don’t ever want to appear self-indulgent. The stage is a place to connect, not harbour validation for a grandiose sense of the depth of my individual experience.” — I wish more performers thought the same!

    • Parallel Play: “Let me play next to you // While we cast out // The demands // of grand plans // And let ourselves succumb to the mercy of our // attention spans”

    • Kate Ireland is on bandcamp.

  8. Havermelk mag in Europa nog steeds geen havermelk heten, en dat hindert de eiwittransitie

    • This article is actually about the, sometimes very nonsensical, rules about naming our food. So ‘butter’ from non-animal fat cannot be called ‘butter’, but rather a ‘spread’, etc. How about peanut butter?

    • it also has this section on language use and the way it shapes our behavior: “Language not only describes how we look at the world, but also determines how we see the world and influences our behavior. There are numerous psycholinguistic studies that show this. Famous are those of the American psychologist John Bargh, who had half of his test subjects make sentences with words such as assertive, rude and interrupt, and others with patience, politeness and respect. After the test, the test subjects had to log out of someone who was busy talking. Two-thirds of the ‘assertive’ group interrupted the research leader. In the ‘polite’ group, this was only sixteen percent.”

  9. Based in SF/Boston/NYC/London/Denver and single man in STEM? Dating apps just got a downgrade.

  10. 2025 Healthcare and Life Sciences Predictions

    • “We predict we’re entering a decade-long shift towards genetic medicine and other novel modalities expanding scope to large, chronic conditions as a mainstay of drug development and personalized medicine.”

  11. Fundraising for Founder-led Biotech

    • “When it comes to dilution, I generally advise founders to target selling between 10% to at most 30% of the company in early rounds (if raising on a SAFE, determined based off the ‘post-money cap’). This range gives you enough capital to make meaningful progress while hopefully maintaining significant ownership and control of your company’s destiny. “

    • “While you’ll often hear stories of biotech companies raising massive amounts at the start, these are typically either from experienced entrepreneurs or represent the “old guard” way of investing where founders give up significant control early on. “

  12. Research I’d like to see — EA Forum — by Alex Cohen

    • “Our assumptions about indirect deaths vary significantly across programs, ranging from ~5 indirect deaths averted for each direct death averted for vitamin A supplementation (VAS), 0.75 for malaria and vaccines, and ~2 for water chlorination. We have not thoroughly assessed whether these magnitudes, or their relative sizes across top charities, are plausible.”

    • This was pretty shocking to me, not only that the estimates warrant much more assesment, but also the initial estimates, where malaria and vaccination is much less potent in secondary death aversion than much simpler interventions, like vitamin supplementation and water chlorination.

  13. PlasticList Report. Lot of pretty concerning findings:

    • “Samples of 22 products, from vendors ranging from Starbucks to Shake Shack to Whole Foods, exceeded the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) intake limits for Bisphenol A. The excess amounts ranged from 450% to 32,571% of EFSA limits for a 70 kg (154 lb) person.”

    • “[A]lmost all of today’s safety limits for the chemicals we tested are based on old NOAELs. For example, the EPA safety limit for DEHP in 2024 is based on a 1953 study.”

    • “Phthalate exposure may also interfere with brain development. A 2014 study from Factor-Litvak et al. studied 328 mother-child pairs and found that phthalate metabolites in maternal urine correlated with Wechsler IQs 6-7 points lower at age 7, across genders.”

    • “If BPS really is a regrettable substitution for BPA, then the levels detected in receipts are very high – 547,785,000% of the EFSA daily limit for BPA and 2,191% of the EPA limit, to be precise. The real BPS limit would probably be different from BPA, but considering that dermal absorption of BPA is higher than dietary absorption, the levels in the receipts would almost certainly far surpass any safety limit.”

    • Also check: Trevor Klee on PlasticList, Shanna Swan on Huberman

    • While the authors concluded that they are not changing their behavior substantially, I am now certainly upset that my bio tomatoes and bio peppers are plastic-packed, and not taking receipts anymore.