Favorites: Fee Fiascos, Free Speech, and $150B
September 21, 2025 — Voters say climate matters but pocketbooks matter more—talk cheaper energy if you want the win.
What a fun idea, what a horrible execution, exactly as promised! I do sorta like the title though ChatGPT's is bad, but arguably in a funnier way.
To Noah's point, Nvidia's market cap went up by $150B in response. Seems like a good trade for them!
It's by Scott Alexander, if you want to read the whole thing.
If you're wondering, in the original it's Hitler and Stalin meeting over the corpse of Poland, the cartoonist who made it was on the Nazis’ most wanted list for their planned invasion of Britain.
Hmm, this might be an acceptable dinner time rule, and an excellent exception to the rule. Although, maybe this means you're telling your kids too much about politics. But is that better or worse than listening to Golden on repeat?
![See new posts Conversation Garett Jones @GarettJones "Getting ~one extra high-skilled worker [by winning an H1-B lottery] causes a 23% increase in the probability of a successful IPO within five years (a 1.5 percentage point increase in the baseline probability of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect." -- @ATabarrok at @MargRev](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mNt5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F83ca75f0-5141-4b32-a78d-568b3534ebd2_1170x1080.png "See new posts Conversation Garett Jones @GarettJones \"Getting ~one extra high-skilled worker [by winning an H1-B lottery] causes a 23% increase in the probability of a successful IPO within five years (a 1.5 percentage point increase in the baseline probability of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect.\" -- @ATabarrok at @MargRev")
Bonkers new H-1B fees are going to lead to tech companies simply hiring outside the US, which in turn will mean even more remote meetings (cached). Marc Andreessen was a fool to think (cached) that the Trump admin would do things that are good for tech. The details make things worse (cached), they've just added an opportunity for graft. And it's not just bad for tech, this will make it harder to get doctors as well (cached). The White House issued a clarification (cached) that say it's 100k one-time, but this is at odds with simply reading the text (cached) of the executive order. Finally, if you're wondering what the correct fix is: get rid of the lottery, just rank all applicants by pay (cached) and take the highest paid ones.
Longer Reads
• If there's one takeaway for how to think about American voters' perspective on climate change, it's that a majority agree it's a problem, but they do not believe doing anything is a high priority. If you want to win votes, you need to talk about lowering energy prices. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Kimmel made a joke that can only be interpreted as him misunderstanding the facts around the Kirk shooter, but it's 100% bad for the US government to threaten anyone's broadcast license over that. There's no spinning it, it's a clear first amendment violation (cached), absolutely blatant attack on freedom of speech (cached) (src)(cached). But now that Disney says Kimmel is going to be back on the air, is it our duty to watch him? (src)(cached)
– If you're wondering why Autism rates are up, the answer is actually not environmental, it seems pretty clear that it was caused by a change to the diagnostic criteria in the DSM 4. (src)(cached)
– Harris' book includes many places where she says Biden made mistakes. Maybe she should have brought those up during the campaign! Another wild tidbit: she says she thought her polling in battleground states showed her ahead (cached), one of her pollsters points is quite certain that's not an accurate read of her polling, someone was misleading her. Nate Silver suggests (cached) that this might be some kind of spin from Harris, but also maybe she shouldn't have hired Biden's campaign team, who were clearly dishonest given how they hid Biden's deterioration. (src)(cached)