The U.S. reports a higher maternal mortality rate than many peer nations like Canada, the United Kingdom, and France.

But the key word there is "reports".

How America classifies maternal mortality varies from peer nations, and this matters🧵 If you go based on the official reports, America's maternal mortality has actually increased since about 1999.

Rising maternal mortality is a disgrace and a tragedy.

But that's if it's really rising. America's rise has more to do with this checkbox on death certificates.

During Bernie's second set of questions in today's Senate confirmation hearing, @DrJBhattacharya came very close to describing the U.K.'s RECOVERY trial and arguing that the U.S. should emulate that sort of pragmatic clinical trial.

Bernie cut him off, but he shouldn't have🧵 The RECOVERY Trial was the in-patient equivalent to the community-level PRINCIPLE Trial.

Both were trials run in the U.K. to figure out what works for keeping people off of serious treatments like ventilators and out of the morgue after they've been infected with COVID-19.

There's a new GLP product that's even more effective than Semaglutide or even Tirzepatide: Retatrutide!

It leads to fast, and massive weight loss by not just suppressing appetite, but also by upregulating metabolism. Side effects aren't the norm, and until you get to the high doses, they're uncommon and largely comparable to placebo.

The Biden administration harassed police and fire departments for asking their recruits to have a bare minimum level of literacy, numeracy, and physical aptitude.

Today, the DOJ has dismissed all of those cases with a clear message:

Competence is legal again. If you would like to understand the test questions that caused the Biden admin to go after these departments for 'disparate impact' reasons, I've written some threads.

Here are questions for U.S. v. Maryland State Police:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1842328223973060680

Today's big news is another DOGE development.

This one centers on modernizing how payments occur so that they're centralized, individually-justified, and accessible to the public.

If this works, there'll be clear, transparent accounting of everything the government pays for🧵 This order starts off big.

The first thing it orders is creating a centralized system for logging payments issued by agencies.

Agencies already record this information, but this adds the need to consistently justify payments and to put all this together in an organized way.

Some trading firms do manage to beat the market.

Part of the secret sauce is heavily using the Freedom of Information Act.

Consider this example. SAC Capital Advisors bought shares of Charles River Labs after FOIAing the FDA, and this allowed them to time the market: What did they ask for?

Seemingly benign information! For $35.50, they got access to just this:

Have you ever noticed that hospitals and insurers aren't exactly transparent about their prices?

No longer!

The President has just signed a new executive order mandating transparent price—not estimate!—reporting within 90 days. That means

- Employers can shop around to save money on health plans

- People can finally figure out if they're priced out of a procedure or provider

- You no longer have to guess whether you're going to pay an arm and a leg for the doctor to save your arms and legs

Compared to men who, on paper, committed similar crimes, women tend to receive shorter criminal sentences. On paper does a lot of work.

We know, for example, that sentencing gaps by race among males largely dissipate when accounting for severity and better measures of criminal priors, so I don't doubt the same might be true for women.

But a pro-female bias seems likely too.

The President just released a new policy that does some big things:

- It makes it easier for friendly nations to invest in the U.S.
- It makes it harder for hostile nations to invest in the U.S.
- It makes it harder for hostile nations to steal American technology

And more🧵 To understand why this Order is so big, you'll need a little bit of background.

First, you'll need to understand what the CFIUS, or the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., does. They review foreign investments that might be of national security interest.

Gould famously claimed that Samuel Morton lied about the sizes of various skulls in his extensive collection the American Golgotha in a way that was biased in favor of Whites.

So some people went and remeasured the skulls in 2011 and they found Gould wrong, Morton was accurate. The degree to which Morton's measurements held up is so extreme that there is just no room for him to have been a biased measurer.

And this is true for all of the ancestry groups he classified the skulls into, indicating that Gould's criticism was totally off-base.

This study is being investigated since it includes results by convicted fraud Stephen Breuning.

Without his huge, fake estimates, the meta-analysis is riddled with publication bias. Correcting for it makes the meta-analytic estimate practically and statistically nonsignificant.

https://twitter.com/xspotsdamark/status/1893451651903549466

It is also just unserious to think that a meta-analysis including obvious rubbish should overturn much better established facts.

For example, one of the cited studies claimed to show IQ scores improving by 3.64 g (55 IQ points) when kids (n = 10) were offered a $5 cash prize.

People across the political aisle engage in conspiracy theorizing at markedly similar rates, just about different things. Q: Does each side do this to the same extent?

A: Probably not! In the case above, to get the appearance of total symmetry, you have to include a lot of different conspiracies that are very Trump-related.

The biggest news today should probably be about one of the Executive Orders from yesterday evening.

Trust me, it's big.

The President just authorized DOGE to start cutting regulations🧵 This order starts off huge.

Remember those recently-created DOGE Team Leads going into every agency? They're going to work with agency heads and the OMB to review all of the regulations across a number of huge categories.

Which categories? Let's see.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1889479172348629194

It's projected to take the City of Boston 20 years to build a single train station.

So here's a thread on how long it took to build other things.

It took six years to build the Transcontinental Railroad from Omaha to Sacramento, including hundreds of stations along the way.

https://twitter.com/OnlyInBOS/status/1890762994860060877

It took 410 days to build the iconic Empire State Building.

The biggest news of the day is not so much that @RobertKennedyJr was confirmed by the Senate, but what he's going to do next.

@realDonaldTrump just issued an Executive Order making it official:

America stands against chronic disease and closed science🧵 The first thing the EO does is outline the problem

It talks about how unhealthy America is, how unacceptable that is, and how we have a duty to change that

We do: Americans should not just be the richest people in the world, they should be the hottest, healthiest, and strongest

The biggest news of the day should once again be about DOGE.

A new Executive Order was passed a few minutes ago.

It empowers DOGE to spearhead the complete reorganization of the federal government🧵 The first part of this Order is simple:

The OMB will put out a plan to make the federal workforce smaller and more efficient, including a stipulation that agencies must remove four existing employees for each new hire, with some exceptions.

Trump is wrong about this. Canada didn't steal the auto industry from the U.S.

The decline of the auto industry in the U.S. was driven in no small part by racism.

Let's talk Detroit🧵

https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1889106492508316123

It seems shocking nowadays, but the best major American city for a young person to be in as late as 1980 was Detroit.

The Motor City was America's richest city, not too long ago. Plenty of you reading this will remember a prosperous, beautiful Detroit.

Antibiotics are one of those things where I'm a hypocrite about policy.

I think I should be able to stock up, but also that most people should still have to go to the doctor for a prescription as-needed.

I want to avoid what happens in the developing world: In the developing world, antibiotics are widely available, with little if any regulations over them. And this makes total sense, because there aren't that many doctors. Poor countries, few doctors per capita, limited access to by-the-book healthcare...

Loads of self-medication!

Thread.

On the left, you can see a map of corruption indexed by the number of mob crimes per 100,000. On the right, you can see corruption indexed by how much people steal from the public purse.

And in the middle, a map of inbreeding.

Clannish people do clannish crimes. Though it's noted in the image, I want to reiterate that the corruption measure on the right is reverse-coded, so higher values indicate lower corruption.

The correlations with consanguinity are 0.65 and -0.52, and they hold up splitting the country in half and in other specs.

The largest price-fixing operation in U.S. history took place when @tevapharm hired a woman to do "price increase implementation."

Through LinkedIn & Facebook, she organized a multi-billion dollar cartel, singlehandedly increasing generic drug prices.

There are lessons here🧵 When the cartel started, the companies in question started filing ANDAs, the FDA's "Abbreviated New Drug Applications" to start selling a generic version of an existing drug.

You can see that the involved parties started filing and getting approvals en masse.

Multifamily rental management companies have recently begun adopting algorithmic pricing tools to adjust their rents.

In recent years, about a quarter of buildings and a third of all units are managed with these tools.

What's the effect?🧵 The answer to this question depends on when you ask it.

Early adopters who picked up the technology in 2007, for instance, saw small decreases in asking rents, as well as small increases in occupancy rates.

Algorithmic pricing was making the market better for customers!