Sauron is communist, is the Palantir a libertarian tool ?

Pether Thiel in a speech, if blockchain is libertarian, can’t we say AI is communist ? He does not say where his Plantyr company stands though

“If we were to tell the two technological stories about scale at this point, one of them is still the sort of crypto revolution which is still going on with Bitcoin and has this sort of this libertarian potential. But I think there is sort of an alternate tech story which is about AI, big data, centralized databases, surveillance, which does not seem libertarian at all. You’re sort of going to have the big eye of Sauron watching you at all times, in all places. And I often think that we live in a world where the ideology always has a certain veil on it. So if we say that crypto is libertarian, why can’t we say that AI is communist, and at least have the sort of alternate account of scale?”

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-computer-age-thiel#transcript

Screenshot 2019-11-20 at 13.16.59

funnels

if you look closely at the fabric of reality you see it made of funnels, all sort of funnels that move along the arrow of time obeying to  the principle of attrition. What lies at one

Used to the funnels of digital marketing, the funnel of medical R&D looks even more demanding, moving at its own glacial pace

”

The overall process from idea to product can therefore take from 9 to 16+ years to complete. Furthermore, historically only one in 20 compounds that start the development process ever become marketed drugs. This is not an enterprise for people with a low tolerance for failure or for those who need immediate gratification.”

 

“In general, the investment needed in discovery to carry out all the work to identify a potential new medicine can range from $25 to $30 million. This is what it takes just to get to Phase 1. Interestingly, these early costs tend to be fairly standard because it generally takes the same number of scientists and similar resources to discover a new drug for rare diseases as it does for drugs to treat the most prevalent conditions. Similarly, Phase 1 testing also tends not to vary among new medicines and so these studies amount to $10–$15 million per compound. At Phase 2, costs vary depending on the information that is needed to justify the major Phase 3 trials. Thus, a Phase 2 program can cost between $60 and $100 million. However, all of the costs to this point are dwarfed by the ultimate Phase 3 program. Before Phase 3, perhaps as many as 500 people have been studied with the new drug. Phase 3, however, involves thousands of patients in many different complex studies and testing for periods that can last for years. The large investment in Phase 3, anywhere from $400 to $800 million, requires full approval at the highest levels of a company.”

John LaMattina “Drug Truths”

Roivant, funded by Softbank. Unbundling and efficiency come to Pharma R&D

“Roivant goes looking for drugs stuck in turnaround—not because of problems with the science, but because of corporate changes-of-plan. “Once we take over those drugs, the same cultural attributes that allowed us to focus on specific drugs rather than general therapeutic categories allow us to focus on the process by which those drugs can be accelerated to the finish line,” Ramaswamy says

Drugome: Roivant has mapped 30,000 potential drugs, 2,000 mechanisms of action, and 10,000 endpoints this way—all from publicly available, mostly free databases.

Hub and peryphery, a thought experiment

by the Richmond Fed, which states optimal to move less productive workers out of high-productivity hubs and give them UBI of 17,000$ rather than investing money into peryphery project in order to reduce growing income gapScreenshot 2019-11-11 at 19.07.36

the authors note how CNR or Cognitive non-routine workers are more productive while clustered together so instead of trying to lure them away from hubs where they would become inevitably less productive is better to lure away non CNR from hubs with a subsidy.

This is an economic thought experiment, in a political void, nonetheless there is a clear insight in how to spend development money in the periphery, do not try to create works, just give money away.

Click to access wp19-16.pdf

ESG – Evironment Social Governance

Acronym to remember

Funds flowing into ESG fundsScreenshot 2019-11-11 at 18.36.59

but WSJ reports that 8 of 10 have investemnts in things like Exxon Mobil, as sustainable as it gets fi you want, as Blackrock does, offer same risk and return that in the broad market.

Money is surely not where the mouth is, as some point the giration might be more violent than expected

Break things to move fast

Move fast, break things – Zuckerberg

an old, beautiful story where breaking things, or breaking the tasks into the smallest pieces helped move fast, or faster

“Boyer’s plan for the synthesis of insulin was almost comically simple. He did not have the gene for human insulin at hand—no one did—but he would build it from scratch using DNA chemistry, nucleotide by nucleotide, triplet upon triplet—ATG, CCC, TCC, and so forth, all the way from the first triplet code to the last. He would make one gene for the A chain, and another gene for the B chain. He would insert both the genes in bacteria and trick them into synthesising the human proteins. He would purify the two protein chains and then stitch them chemically to obtain the U-shaped molecule.”

Excerpt From: Siddhartha Mukherjee. “The Gene”.

(…) Gilbert “had for many days past, trudging through an airlock, dipping his shoes in formaldehyde on his way into the chamber in which he was obliged to conduct his experiments. Out at Genentech, we were simply synthesizing DNA and throwing it into bacteria, none of which even required compliance with the NIH guidelines.” In the world of post-Asilomar genetics, “being natural” had turned out to be a liability.”

Excerpt From: Siddhartha Mukherjee. “The Gene”.

and BTW sometimes it is an advantage a surname starting with A or B

“He had dug up a dog-eared handbook from the Asilomar meeting, made a list of important players working on gene-cloning techniques, and had started working down the list alphabetically. Berg came before Boyer—but Berg, who had no patience for opportunistic entrepreneurs making cold calls to his lab, turned Swanson down. Swanson swallowed his pride and kept going down the list. B . . . Boyer was next.”

Excerpt From: Siddhartha Mukherjee. “The Gene”.

“On October 26, 1982, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a patent to Genentech to use recombinant DNA to produce a protein such as insulin or somatostatin in a microbial organism. As one observer wrote: “effectively, the patent claimed, as an invention, [all] genetically modified microorganisms.” The Genentech patent would soon become one of the most lucrative, and most hotly disputed, patents in the history of technology.”

Excerpt From: Siddhartha Mukherjee. “The Gene”. Apple Books.

of men and rats

water rats learn in 2 years to eat poisonous cane toads, the great oper air experiment that is Australia

Australian water rats cut cane toads open with ‘surgical precision’ to feast on their hearts

Pellagra ravaged some areas of Europe were corn was staple long after it was imported from the Americas. The Europeans did not import the right method to prepare it which would enrich it of vitamin E and did not develop a remedy for centuries. Maybe water rats would have done better

“despite the long prevalence of a corn-based diet in Central and South America, pellagra did not occur there. In those cultures, ground corn was first boiled in lime water, a procedure which releases the small amount of niacin contained in the corn. In addition, beans traditionally accompanied tortillas made from the boiled cornmeal.” https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/life/entertainment/story/2016/jul/12/clif-cleaveland-pellagrand-history-south/375065/

Golden rice is GM rice enriched with vitamin, its story is worth reading

Block on GM rice ‘has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness’

 

centralised platforms for decentralization

“People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands. It’s part of this amazing expansion of voice through law, culture and technology.” Marc Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg Stands for Voice and Free Expression

Sort of troubles me, worth thinking about, probably laszlo barabasi would have something to say, in a way seems to me a good definition of populism, “people” behind a centralized, strong platform can be louder of individuals roaming the vast prairies of the free internet of the origins, if ever there was one. Of cousre “people” is in brackets since it is not factual but rather ideological definition, Rousseau style.

Screenshot 2019-10-28 at 14.23.08.png

Stamos, former chief security officer at FB and now in academia, says that “he (Zuck)compressed all of the different products into this one blob he called “Facebook”. That is not a useful frame for pretty much any discussion of how to handle speech issues.”

the expression-amplification inverted Stamos pyramid of facebook services:

Screenshot 2019-11-06 at 16.32.14.png

Tax evasion Eu and Italy

reports and charts

VAT Gap https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/vat-gap-full-report-2019_en.pdf

International tax evasion https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/2019-taxation-papers-76.pdf

Tax evasion Europe with corporate tax estimate https://www.socialistsanddemocrats.eu/sites/default/files/2019-01/the_european_tax_gap_en_190123.pdf

Italian report from MEF (ministry finance) http://www.mef.gov.it/documenti-allegati/2018/A6_-_Relazione_evasione_fiscale_e_contributiva.pdf

Screenshot 2019-10-17 at 12.34.24

The US tax regressivity spat

adding a data point for the top 400 make the curve collapse in 2018, it is a graphic trick but also substantial

they have been fighting on it for days, looks like national accounting is complex and prone to interpretation though sometimes you see economists meddling up waters in this politically charge issue