Rob Donnelly
@RobDonnelly47
Causal Inference and Economics at OpenAI. Stanford GSB Economics PhD
The Jones Act makes shipping between American ports unreasonably expensive, especially for islands like Hawaii. We need to get rid of the Jones Act to make it cheaper to buy American.
Why are we still doing the $0.05 bottle deposit fees on cans and bottles? It’s not enough to make it worthwhile to do a separate trip to earn the rebate, but it does encourage homeless people to rummage through my recycling to take out the cans.
I’ve built over 50,000 affordable housing units. When I’m Mayor, I’ll build 500,000 more—including on four of the City’s 12 municipal golf courses. I'll increase pathways to homeownership, and ensure every New Yorker lives in a neighborhood they love.
My NYC mayoral platform: - Eliminate all zoning, FAR, height restrictions - Achieve Nordic costs of subway construction and do Alon's subway plan - Long Manhattan - Regional sea wall defense - Build over Sunnyside Yards - Retrofit the top of the Empire State Building to accept…
🔌OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off. It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down.
This is insane. We definitely need reform of the current injury lawsuits system.
Why are personal injury attorneys the marginal bidder for roadside billboards in so many parts of the US? Is the sector really so large? A priori, I would never have predicted this. Quick investigation: "Costs and compensation paid in the U.S. tort system reached over $529…
Two big names from the de Blasio admin—former Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen and former Planning Chair Carl Weisbrod—just put out an incredible op-ed on the housing betrayal happening at Elizabeth Street Garden. 🧵
We need a papal edict about whether or not Chicago style pizza counts as pizza.
Why are Google Gemini and Google AI Studio separate pages / products? Why is AI Studio free when the other one costs money?
What's the logic for Instacart/Uber/Doordash constantly offering giftcards for 20% off? The discount is large enough to make delivery approx same cost as in store.
Everyone is way overindexing on the $5.5m final training run number from DeepSeek. - GPU capex probably $1BN+ - Running costs are probably $X00M+/year - ~150 top-tier authors on the v3 technical paper, $50m+/year They're not some ragtag outfit, this was a huge operation.
It’s sort of funny that every American tech company is bragging about how much money they’re spending to build their models, and DeepSeek is just like “yeah we got there with $47 and a refurbished Chromebook”
Why have TV shows gotten so ridiculously expensive to produce? I would have thought the cost of CGI / special effects would go down as tech improved, but it seems like they've gone up instead.
Nice article working by through the math of why government regulation of uber prices is mostly counter productive.
Why I’m skeptical of minimum prices for ride-sharing dynomight.net/prices/
We rely on random violent nutcases to deter certain kinds of antisocial behaviour mattbell.us/what-i-learned…
Robinhood Gold is an unreasonably good deal. $50/yr for 3% on all credit card spend, 1% deposit bonus, and 3% bonus on IRA contributions. Easily pays for itself many times over.
