Alex Filo > Recent Status Updates

With the invention of the office copywriter in the 60s, Xerox went from a tiny company -> to the 5th highest market cap in the world! In just 10 years

But some people didn’t like it & called for paper copiers to be banned due to copy write infringement

Reminds me of the anti-AI arguments floating around today.

I think the world’s a better place because we don’t have to copy things by hand, same for Ai!

If Democrats are guilty of adding too many regulations that get in the way of abundance,

Republicans are much too allergic to any kind of govt spending on new technology, and are overly reliant on the free market. The iPhone for instance uses internet, silicon, gps, voice recognition. All of which partly came to be due to govt spending

A mix of both is better than black & white thinking: all govt or all free market

We should do meta-research: investigate which methods of allotting grant funding leads to the best results

Like a scientific experiment, we could test 10 different methods for awarding grants & see which produces the most breakthroughs & best results

As an example DARPA uses a much different strategy than NIH to award grant $, and seems to produce more scientific breakthroughs per $ spent

Science funding in the US goes too much to safe research that gives us small incremental gains in what we already know, and not enough to risky bets & younger scientists

In the 70s & 80s budget hawk congressmen forced NIH to limit grants to research that sounded ridiculous, in order to save tax payor $

But the book gives the example of GLP-1 drugs that got their breakthrough from unrelated research on lizard spit

50% of all startups from the last 20 years that are worth $1 billion+ were started by immigrants. Yet we haven’t increased the H1B (highly skilled worker) visa count in 20 years, and grad school visas have declined 1/3

Let in more educated smart ppl from other countries!!
*important to note this is a separate conversation from the low skilled immigration at the border that prolly lost the Democrats last election

Chapter 3: grow

Environmental statement & DEI protocols in govt projects are well intended, but they slow things down & make them more expensive

Building affordable housing, fix roads, construct bridges is happening wayy to slowly in this country. We need to limit rules & regulation & streamline processes

Also highlights examples where contracting consultants was ineffective. Govt should hire good talent in house

Trying to be better about writing down specific takeaways from nonfiction books like this

- in the 70s, Nixon made many changes like the clean water act which was good bc pollutants like lead in the water supply literally went down 99% and saved 100s of thousands of lives

But the consequence is now its too easy to sue people & block development. Cost of construction in US is 2x or 4x than Germany, France, etc

In the 2024 elections, cities and states run by democrats shifted disproportionately right

But voting is a cheap way to express that you dont like how your state’s being run, moving is a much more expensive one, and hundreds of thousands of ppl living in blue run states have done that too, mostly middle class

Think the book will argue that democrats need to shift strategy, im all ears!

In my chick lit era rn

This book’s fire i’m reading it at the perfect time