The Moderna vaccine was designed in 2 days in January.

Every smart person was recommending Human Challenge Trials to speed up the approval process.

The US didn't do it, obviously.

Here's the part I still don't get: There are 195 countries in the world. Why did *no one* do it?
(This was not a rhetorical question. I'm genuinely confused — please help!)
We had 39,000 volunteers in 166 countries willing to participate in Human Challenge Trials!

1daysooner.org
From July:

“More than 100 top scientists including 15 Nobel laureates have written an open letter calling for volunteers to be exposed to the coronavirus to assist with vaccine development.”

cnn.com/2020/07/16/hea…

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More from @AlecStapp

29 Nov
“running a leafblower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles”

🤯
Apparently @JamesFallows (author of the above passage) has been on a mission to end two-stroke gas-powered leaf blowers.

He’s written more than a dozen pieces for The Atlantic on the topic over the years.

Godspeed!

theatlantic.com/author/james-f…
Read 5 tweets
28 Nov
Why isn’t @elonmusk the hero of the environmental movement?

He built a $550 billion company that sells electric cars & solar panels.
The plan from day one was to use the luxury market to bootstrap the company and reach economies of scale on batteries (and other critical inputs).

Tesla continues to move downmarket and become more of a mass market solution.

You gotta start somewhere!

Read 6 tweets
20 Oct
🚨 The DOJ's antitrust complaint against Google is out!

Thread with some of my initial reactions as I go through it...
Economies of scale are at the heart of this case:

The pro-competitive story: scale economies mean it's efficient (and good for consumers) to have only 1 or 2 large providers.

The anti-competitive story: Google locks up the market to prevent rivals from reaching adequate scale.
Scale matters, but how much?

Data has rapidly diminishing returns (see chart).

Google has about 90% market share.

Microsoft powers search results for the other 10% of the market (Bing, Yahoo & DuckDuckGo).

Microsoft is a $1.6 trillion company — it can afford to compete.
Read 16 tweets
6 Oct
🚨 House Judiciary Committee report on tech and antitrust is out!

Thread with some of my initial reactions as I go through it...
First highly misleading claim:

"a decade into the future, 30% of world GDP may lie with [Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google] and just a handful of others."

Source is a McKinsey report, which says 30% is literally all B2B and B2C commerce globally.

Not "a handful of others"!!
It's so ironic to me that of the 100 acquisitions Facebook has made, the Instagram acquisition is the one most commonly criticized while also being the only one that was extensively investigated & cleared by regulators in the US & abroad at the time.

Lots of hindsight bias here!
Read 22 tweets
1 Oct
The House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing right now on proposals to change the antitrust laws.

Critics of the current laws want to make it easier to break up Big Tech.

Re-sharing my thread about the 10 myths related to tech & antitrust that you need to know.
Myth #1: “Big Tech companies are monopolies”

People use this term loosely (which I get!) to mean that a company is big or dominant, but when it comes to an actual monopolization case, the legal meaning of the word really matters.
According to DOJ guidelines, it’s “a market share in excess of two-thirds.”

The tech companies likely don’t exceed that threshold in any antitrust product market.

- Amazon 38% of ecommerce
- Apple 58% of US smartphone OS
- Google 29% of digital ads
- Facebook 23% of digital ads Image
Read 17 tweets
29 Jul
The CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook will be testifying in front of Congress today.

Critics want to break up the companies.

Here are the 10 myths about Big Tech and antitrust you should be aware of before tuning in.
Myth #1: “Big Tech companies are monopolies”

People use this term loosely (which I get!) to mean that a company is big or dominant, but when it comes to an actual monopolization case, the legal meaning of the word really matters.
According to DOJ guidelines, it’s “a market share in excess of two-thirds.”

The tech companies likely don’t exceed that threshold in any antitrust product market.

- Amazon 38% of ecommerce
- Apple 58% of US smartphone OS
- Google 29% of digital ads
- Facebook 23% of digital ads
Read 17 tweets

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