Top all-time · #12765
Daniel Davies
Personal blog · blog.danieldavies.comeconomicspolitics
Daniel Davies writes Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived, a personal blog at blog.danieldavies.com about economics and politics. Since 2018, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Daniel Davies's D-Squared Digest posts (2004 to 2006) on public acceptance of ideas, the Iraq WMD claims, risk management and nuclear power. Commenters cite them as reference points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-16
What Hacker News says?
I recently read the great line: "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance." http://blog.danieldavies.com/2004/05/d-squared-digest-one-mi...
Comment linking /2004/05/d-squared-digest-one-minute-mba.html
on “Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food”Submitted Economics and Similar, for the Sleep-Deprived (2005) as a story · 20 points
HN discussionYou might find this a good read about knowing the iraq wmd story was a lie in advance. From someone who predicted it, they explain their reasoning. It's rather convincing. http://blog.danieldavies.com/2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_arch...
Comment linking /2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html?m=1
on “Apple Insiders Say Nobody Knows What’s Going on with Bloomberg's Hack Story”Submitted Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRight now? No, now is too late: if you have a technology that will take a decade to prove and another decade to buildout, we'll need to deploy a huge amount of renewables anyway to cover the gap. Fortunately the panels and turbines come off nice neat predictable working production lines. I like referring back to http://blog.danieldavies.com/2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blair... on this: the industry has a real problem…
Comment linking /2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blair-has-lost-it.html
on “Why We Need Innovative Nuclear Power”There are 62.5 billion Tether in circulation. I can’t tel; you who holds it, but they certainly aren’t all “converted into a different type of crypto”. Various market participants hold every single one of those Tethers. Tesla made waves for injecting 1.5 billion into Bitcoin. The Tether injection is 42x that. So the strong probability is that the crypto market has been raised by a flood of fake money and the actual…
Comment linking /2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html
on “Legal expert says Tether and Binance Coin are likely picks for SEC lawsuit”A similar insight from economist Daniel Davies from 2005: >> The optimal frequency of disasters is not zero. This graceful formulation is due to Prof. Richard Portes, who used to say it about emerging market financial crises. However, it’s a fundamental principle of risk management and one of entirely general application. Most dangers can be absolutely eliminated for all practical purposes, but only at unacceptable…
Comment linking /2005/07/?m=1
on “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)”Well, from the 1950s we inherited a thin spread of radioisotopes contaminating the entire atmosphere: https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi... The problem of nuclear waste management is fundamentally one of public trust. People spent much of the 20th century going from "X is ubiquitous and perfectly safe" to "actually X has been poisoning you and the biosphere for decades". Cigarettes, leaded…
Comment linking /2006/05/nukes-and-nukemen-blair-has-lost-it.html
on “The race is on to develop new strategies for storing nuclear waste”One of the sentences I've read that stuck with me for years is "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance", from https://blog.danieldavies.com/2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_arc...
Comment linking /2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html
on “Academics and the grid. Are they studying the right things?”
