Economist and policy advisor. Trying to be a better effective altruist. Sri Lankan and Australian. Retweets are not endorsements.
Sri Lanka
Joined September 2013
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Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
What weight loss drug users eat more and less of.
FT also estimates weight loss drugs benefit the fitness and health/beauty industries.
ft.com/content/2f1667a8-ef1b…
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
When I stilled worked on biosecurity, I first learned about Debug, a Google project to reduce mosquito populations.
Results from their Singapore pilot are now out.
They crushed mosquito populations, reducing dengue infections by 70% in the process:
There is no good reason for mosquitoes to exist in wealthy countries today.
New technologies can get rid of the mosquito species that cause diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; and others can prevent them from carrying those diseases.
worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…
So why do mosquitoes still exist?
In a new article for Works in Progress, Maya Rosen explains how state incapacity and risk aversion led to over a decade of delays and billions of unnecessary bites in the United States.
Oxitec, for example, engineered an Aedes aegypti mosquito in such a way that its female offspring would die before adulthood. Through sustained releases, they showed they could reduce local mosquito populations by 80% or more, in field trials.
They sought approval from the USDA in 2010, which then passed it to the FDA, which passed it to the EPA. In 2020, the EPA allowed them to conduct limited field trials in the Florida Keys. Two years ago, their experimental permit expired, and they still need another review before it can be used routinely. Their proposed field trial in California was withdrawn after public opposition.
Another company, MosquitoMate, developed a technique involving Wolbachia, which also suppresses local mosquitoes. They then spent over fifteen years working through the system before finally receiving commercial registration nationwide in 2024.
It seems that, sometimes, the barrier to getting rid of diseases isn’t technology at all. It’s policy and political will.
New products shouldn’t get stuck in regulatory review for so long, especially if the delays are about basic questions like which agency has oversight over the product, rather than testing for safety.
Though some of those uncertainties were being addressed, the broader changes haven’t materialized. After Biden’s 2022 executive order, the agencies planned to update how their coordinated framework was implemented. But Trump rescinded the order last year.
Meanwhile, the EPA unit that reviews new mosquito control products is still a small office backlogged in reviewing a wide range of products.
Mosquitoes are a policy choice. We can get rid of them. Will we choose to?
worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
This is great reporting from @observerlk and a horrifying story.
"Investigators probing alleged fraud in the Aswesuma welfare payments at the Norwood Divisional Secretariat believe the case could be the largest such fraud detected in Sri Lanka to date, with suspected losses approaching Rs.30 million.
"The investigation has also uncovered allegations that State employees obtained Aswesuma payments intended for low-income families by using the details of elderly persons who had died, according to investigators familiar with the inquiry.
"One investigator described the Norwood case to the Sunday Observer as the “most serious and largest” Aswesuma fraud uncovered so far."
sundayobserver.lk/2026/09/20…
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
PARA A CIÊNCIA, ASSIM FOI A EVOLUÇÃO DAS BALEIAS.
A baleia que conhecemos hoje descende de um mamífero terrestre de quatro patas e cascos.
Há cerca de 50 milhões de anos, seus ancestrais começaram a passar mais tempo na água. Fósseis como o Pakicetus e o Ambulocetus mostram essa transição: as patas foram diminuindo, o corpo se adaptou à natação e as narinas migraram para o topo da cabeça.
Uma das transformações evolutivas mais bem documentadas da história.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
GLP-1s are eating the food industry.
After households start GLP-1s, grocery spending falls 5.3%, fast-food spending 8%, and savory snacks 10%.
Among high-income households, grocery spend drops 8.2%.
Big Food has a GLP-1 problem.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
This is a better way to visualize Columbus’ voyages than the traditional way (that shows him traveling through a modern map)..
It looks a lot crazier and more daring when you see it as a trip into the unknown.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
Every college syllabus should include these graphs.
Use AI for homework, you will get it done faster and get a higher grade, and then get crushed on the exam.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65.
We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life".
You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets.
I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long.
My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite.
TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
Watching short-form videos deactivates key brain regions for cognitive control.
Your “stop” button goes offline.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
🇰🇵 We built a fake company. We recruited DPRK IT workers. We recorded everything.
📹 The full story is finally out: hours of footage, IOCs, things we never showed at DEF CON and even a familiar face from Season 1.
Smile, You’re on Camera: Episode 2.
🔥 We “hired” Lazarus APT remote workers — and uncovered their toolkit.
@BirminghamCyber & @north_scan used #ANYRUN Sandbox to capture weeks of Famous Chollima activity inside a fake startup.
👀 How not to let a spy in? See full story and videos: any.run/cybersecurity-blog/l…
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
You'll regret it if you get married, you'll regret it if you don't get married. You'll regret it if you have kids and you'll regret it if you don't. Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago as follows - whatever you choose, you'll regret it, because the problem isn't in your choices, it's in romanticizing your life. A person always finds an untravelled path alluring and mysterious. That's why the issue isn't making the right choice. It's choosing and deciding which regret you'll live with. In life, we must choose our regret.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
I finally have all 1.2 million raw image files from my latest mission to ISS! Here is a sample of one of my favorite Milky Way photos, taken from the Cupola with Nikon Z9, Arri Zeiss 15mm lens, T1.8 with custom sidereal drive that cancelled out star motion relative to our orbit.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
The government has gazetted an amendment to the 2023 Anti-Corruption Act introducing a hefty threefold penalty on property—that is, if a convicted person has acquired or converted property as proceeds of corruption, the court is mandated to impose an additional penalty of not less than three times the value of that property.
Under the principal 2023 Act, the penalty for corruption is rigorous imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years, a fine not exceeding one million rupees, or both. It left the recovery of state losses to general court discretion.
Apart from the new mandatory financial penalty, the Anti-Corruption (Amendment) Bill now also states that if the corruption caused a financial loss to the government, the court shall impose an additional penalty equivalent to the full amount determined as the loss.
The amendment restricts bail for major offences. If a suspect is accused of soliciting, accepting, or offering a bribe of not less than 100,000 rupees or causing a government loss/gaining an advantage of not less than 500,000 rupees (as certified by the Director-General of the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption—CIABOC), bail can only be granted in exceptional circumstances by the High Court rather than a magistrate. #SriLanka #corruption @CIABOC_SriLanka
Read more below.
sundaytimes.lk/260801/news/a…
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
Six Malaiyaga Tamil families were evicted forcibly from a line of houses in Ceylon tea producing St. Leonard’s Estate, Halgranoya, Nuwara Eliya, which was their sole residence for 30 years by Sri Lanka Land Reform Commission that claims to have obtained a court order for eviction
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
This is brilliant and should be studied by central bankers everywhere! Peoples Bank of China was the first to deflate a massive, leveraged housing bubble without a single quarter of economic contraction or loss of growth momentum in the real economy.
A success for the history books.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
GLP1s for weight loss impact lives beyond health. My new paper shows single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise 29pp, employment among nonemployed women rises 27 percentage points after 1.5+ years.
Link to paper below:
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
We invented the washing machine, the dryer, the dishwasher, the microwave, frozen dinners, online grocery, the robot vacuum, and DoorDash. The married household with young kids spends more total hours on chores and childcare today than it did in 1965.
Dads went from under 10 hours a week to 28.7, the 300% everyone is quoting. Moms went from the high 40s to 42.5, a slide of five or six. Stack the two and the household total rises. A full century of labor-saving invention, and the modern family with toddlers logs more unpaid hours at home than the family that did the laundry by hand.
Here is the part that should stop you. Every one of those machines did its job. Core housework genuinely collapsed. Mothers do roughly half the cooking and cleaning they did in the 1960s. The dishwasher worked. The dryer worked. The hours got freed.
Then the culture spent them. The time the appliances saved flowed straight back into the children. This is the same law that governs every efficiency gain modern life has produced. Faster email bought us more email. Automation at home bought us a higher bar for what a parent owes a kid.
Watch what childcare even means now versus then. In 1965 a kid got sent outside until dinner. Supervision was loose, the neighborhood raised half of them, and a parent hovering every waking hour would have looked unwell. Today the job is continuous. Driving to practice, sitting through homework, managing screens, booking the enrichment, never leaving a small child unwatched. The one activity that exploded is the one no machine will ever touch. You cannot DoorDash attention.
So pull back and the chart stops being about fathers. It is a portrait of a species that refuses to bank its own productivity. Every tool we built to do less at home, we spent on doing more for the kids. The washing machine freed the afternoon. We handed the afternoon to the children and quietly renamed the old, looser way neglect.
We automated the housework and poured every saved minute into the one job we decided can never be done well enough.
Modern dads are helping out at home more than ever, @lymanstoneky finds.
Married dads of young children in 1965 did, on average, less than 10 hours a week of child care or help around the house. Dads in 2024 contributed nearly 30 hours a week, an increase of approximately 300%.
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
For those who remember #SriLanka's visa scam controversy in the closing months of the #RanilWickremesinghe administration, this collaborative global research project on the visa outsourcing firm involved - #VFS - deepens the picture in many disturbing ways.
Most European citizens will likely never have heard of VFS Global. But across much of Africa, Asia + the Middle East, the visa giant has become notorious
Our investigation finds VFS has made huge profits by exploiting people with 'weak' passports lighthousereports.com/invest…
Anthony Obeyesekere retweeted
Anthony Bourdain wrote about this. This was his pitch for Parts Unknown. Trust me, read the whole thing.
