this California wealth tax thing is just incredible. so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time). polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it). there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate. supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right? well as it turns out, they did. a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative. proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave. just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues. but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion. so when you add it all up you get: + $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated) - $69b in present value of lost future income taxes = - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time. and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes. [1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…

Data on 35,000+ adults: the more cannabis you’ve used in life, the bigger your hippocampus and the better your brain works after 40! People who had ever used cannabis tended to have larger brain volume in key areas that are full of natural cannabis-like receptors (especially the hippocampus, amygdala, caudate, and putamen – these areas are important for memory, emotions, learning, and movement). The more cannabis someone had used in their lifetime, the larger these brain areas were and the better they performed on tests of learning, processing speed, and short-term memory. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4137…

Finally, this important question is being put to someone in authority. What is not being acknowledged is that people who had health care withdrawn and were put on respiratory depressant drugs then PREDICTABLY DIED. Those deaths were counted as covid deaths.

Oh this story is delicious. Some choice parts for you:

When Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) planned to change the voltage of embryo cells, someone wrote to his postdoc mentor saying he’d had a mental breakdown. Membrane voltage was thought to be mere housekeeping. Then a graduate student found the embryos covered in black dots. They were eyes. Full episode: youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s

You can be globally compassionate as a person and still feel that your society should have careful borders and that local cultures matter, and should be preserved if they're clearly doing well. These actually aren't in contradiction.

We need politicians who don't want the job. Imagine waking up and like jury duty, bam, you have to put on your big boy/girl/person pants and head off to serve the government, reluctantly. Guarantee we'd get better results.

The DEI-protected false accuser at Whitehead, and the DEI-obsessed hack administrators at Whitehead, MIT, and HHMI need to be held accountable. Personally and individually accountable.

harvard just hosted a longevity conference and the slides were unusual - lilly: 72 weeks of tirzepatide slowed 26 epigenetic clocks (sub-study) - novartis: now has a department for diseases of aging - cder: aging and longevity going into its upcoming regulatory priorities doc - church: pig organs with 69 edits are in FDA-cleared trials - one investor called glp-1s the "first longevity medicine" we'll look back at october 2026 as the month longevity stopped being niche.

If we want to continue progress in science, we must be prepared to acknowledge that the correct description of nature will eventually simply be too complicated for humans to understand. I do not think it is wise to make human understanding a requirement. AI is the way forward.

What?! TIL! sikorskyarchives.com/igor-si…

The case of Professor David Sabatini stands as one of the most egregious examples of woke institutional excess, and its fallout extended far beyond the destruction of a single career. At the Whitehead Institute at MIT, he ran a roughly 40-person lab conducting important work in molecular biology and cell signaling. That research was abruptly terminated, costing numerous students and trainees their ongoing projects and career momentum and resulting in an untold loss of medically significant knowledge - knowledge that had been funded by the public’s taxpayer dollars. All of that was abruptly canceled when a false accusation of sexual impropriety was taken up by MIT's DEI-infected bureaucracy and a director who was on a feminist crusade to purge a leading scientist for what appears to be the crime of being a white male. The court found that the relationship was consensual and the accusations that destroyed his career came only after he ended it and moved on romantically - buyer's remorse, in other words. After five years of litigation, discovery and trial, a Boston jury has just awarded Professor David Sabatini $6 million in his defamation case against Kristin Knouse, finding that she defamed him and interfered with his career. The jury also rejected her counterclaims of coercion, harassment, and a hostile work environment. But all of this is just the first step. Many people who were involved need to be held accountable. The institutions must make this right. MIT, Whitehead, and HHMI still have questions to answer about their own handling. Investigations must look into the director of Whitehead who perpetrated this witch hunt. @NIH and @NSF should now act on the jury’s findings. Restore @DMSabatini's eligibility for federal grants. The institutional investigations that led to his removal and the later debarment effort were based on claims that a jury has now rejected as defamatory. There is no more reason to treat him as radioactive. And last but not least, bless you, @BillAckman. When almost no one in science, academia, or media would touch this case, you acted and supported him, funding his new lab so that his important work on mTOR could continue. Thank you and Dafna at NYU for standing up publicly for due process when it was so costly. I knew many of his students and colleagues who could not speak out in support of him out of fear of retribution and professional ruin. Prof. Sabatini has said that you saved his life. It is not a hyperbolic statement. Also, for every one of him, there are other men whose lives have been ruined this way. For things to change, high costs on the accuser must be imposed. cc @DrJBhattacharya @regardthefrost

The average 22 year old today has a lower testosterone than the average 70 year old had in the 80s This is the biggest crisis we face

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