u/holmess2013

Since the appointment of RFK Jr., but really even before that, it seems that health influencers holding that "secret piece of health advice your doctor doesn't want you to know about" has been getting really popular. Including the notion that raw milk is better for you than pasteurized and is just as safe.

For most of you here that survived natural selection, you already know that's total BS. But if you're curious just how dangerous raw milk really is, I pulled some data from an FDA study in 2003 comparing the risk of listeria infection per serving across various food categories.

Health influencers will try to say "but lettuce gets way more people sick every year than raw milk!" and its like yeah dude, everybody is eating it everyday vs. the 1% of people unfortunately drinking raw milk.

Full breakdown here for those who are interested: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/raw-milk-is-making-a-much-not-needed

Since the appointment of RFK Jr., but really even before that, it seems that health influencers holding that "secret piece of health advice your doctor doesn't want you to know about" has been getting really popular. Including the notion that raw milk is better for you than pasteurized and is just as safe.

For most of you here that survived natural selection, you already know that's total BS. But if you're curious just how dangerous raw milk really is, I pulled some data from an FDA study in 2003 comparing the risk of listeria infection per serving across various food categories.

Health influencers will try to say "but lettuce gets way more people sick every year than raw milk!" and its like yeah dude, everybody is eating it everyday vs. the 1% of people unfortunately drinking raw milk.

Full breakdown here for those who are interested: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/raw-milk-is-making-a-much-not-needed

There’s a lot of talk right now about how AI is going to make kids dumber, or conversely, how AI tutors are going to personalize education for everyone. But recent data shows a much weirder, nuanced reality.

The recent Bastani et al. study out of UPenn tested ChatGPT in high school math. Unrestricted AI (GPT Base) dropped final analogue exam performance by 17%. On the other hand, the custom, guarded "GPT Tutor" didn't show any improvements to learning which I found interesting.

So if a safe AI tutor gives zero test gains, why use it at all? Why not just do a full ban in schools?

It comes down to what the subject is:

1. Procedural/Foundational (Math, Grammar, Foreign Language): Execution is the learning. Offloading this removes activity-dependent plasticity and "desirable difficulty." AI shouldn't touch this stage.
2. Applied/Systems (Coding, Data, Applied Math): Spending 3 hours hunting for a missing semicolon isn't learning systems architecture; it's mechanical noise. Once analogue basics are proven, AI lets kids move from "bricklayer" to "architect."
3. Synthesizing/Analytics (History, Humanities): AI shouldn't be a search desk or ghostwriter. It should be a Socratic sparring partner to stress-test a student's already-drafted thesis.

I took a crack at making a full framework for implementing AI safely in schools in this last article: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/how-to-safely-implement-ai-in-schools

I lean far closer to democratic socialists than establishment, status-quo Democrats when it comes to vision and policy goals. But one thing I can't get behind is how they hyper-fixate on process. Like, any positive political change can only come from grassroots movements. If a billionaire touches it, we can't trust it.

Right now, there’s heavy pushback from the DSA and left-leaning commentators against the supply-side "abundance" movement. The critique usually centers on two things:

1. The movement is heavily backed by tech elites and Silicon Valley donors.
2. Fast-tracking development bypasses local community review and empowers private developers.

While the funding criticism is fair, the procedural criticism misses the big picture. The 1970s-era environmental reviews, zoning boards, and hyper-local veto points were originally meant to protect vulnerable communities from harmful infrastructure. But today, those exact same mechanisms have been weaponized by wealthy, suburban NIMBYs to freeze housing and green energy projects we so desperately need.

We can't pretend like top-down change doesn't work. Rich assholes gave us gay marriage, public libraries, and the US Forest Service to name a few.

Grassroots organizing is crucial for setting moral priorities. But for the dry, technical levers—like updating zoning codes, streamlining transmission line permitting, or building public transit—waiting for 100% hyper-local consensus means nothing gets built at all.

If we want cheap housing, clean energy grids, and strong public services, we have to be willing to embrace top-down execution and strip away procedural vetocracy.

Full article here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/the-abundance-movement-is-funded

Would love to hear how folks here balance the need for democratic participation against the urgent need for rapid, material progress.

It seems obvious that pumping zero-fuel solar energy into the grid should drop electricity costs, but I wanted to see exactly how much it impacts the real-time market during peak sunlight.

California and Texas are really the only two states with enough utility-scale solar (USS) to show this clearly. I went with Texas ERCOT data because it's the more surprising, less politicized state to look at for massive renewable adoption right now.

You can clearly see the wholesale price of electricity (blue line) tank as solar generation (yellow line) peaks mid-day.

Wrote an article here to explore this and why your power bill keeps going up regardless: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/solar-farms-are-saving-everyone-money

Although solar is being built out at breakneck speeds, 1-to-1 net metering is quietly functioning as a regressive tax on non-solar residents.

For context, utility providers don't actually make a profit off the raw electricity we consume, but rather on the physical infrastructure to deliver it. They typically bundle those two costs together into a flat per-kWh rate.

Under traditional "net metering," excess solar energy is sold back to the grid, allowing the resident to zero out their bill and dodge their share of those infrastructure costs. Those costs are then passed on to non-solar residents—often renters or lower-income folks—which naturally makes people sour on the green transition.

While states like Arkansas are fighting over this, Minnesota came up with a brilliant "Buy-All, Sell-All" model to fix it. I broke down how it works in my latest article here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/why-your-neighbors-solar-panels-might

In this week's post, I looked at what list experiments have told us about the tendency of Americans to hide controversial opinions. The classic 1997 Kuklinski study showed that 23% of white southerners would hide their racial prejudices.

But does that "shy bigot" phenomenon hold up today?

When I compared that original study against a 2020 meta-analysis of data spanning the next 20 years, I found a massive divergence from the original findings. I went in assuming the tendency to be brazenly prejudiced was limited to the fringes, but the aggregate data tells a much more complicated—and surprising—story about the social cost of political speech.

https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/the-shy-bigot-in-the-american-electorate

Hey guys. Was doing some nerding out in the polling literature and stumbled across this fascinating tool, called the list experiment, that psychologists came up with in 1984 to find the true percentage of a group of voters that have offensive or even cruel political opinions.

It seems nowadays it's not standard practice for the major pollsters because it takes too much effort and financial resources for a typical horserace poll, but I feel that it's important now more than ever to leverage it in the age of MAGA politics. Could really help us understand how these guys rose to power when all things point to them being appalling human beings.

Did a recent piece on it here to try and break it down in a digestible way: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/a-political-polling-trick-to-assess

I, like many Americans, was under the impression that polls were garbage. It just seemed like a widely accepted truth amongst my friends and family.

But what I realized recently is we confuse the accuracy of polls for predicting the winner of the presidency with what they’re designed to do: predicting the winner of the popular vote. And it turns out that they’re actually pretty damn accurate at doing that, all the way back to the Reagan era.

Full breakdown and link to the python code here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/were-grading-political-polls-on-the

I was looking into the rural/urban political divide and wanted to visualize the actual geographical realities of living in sparsely populated areas.

I used the NHTSA FARS database (fatal accident reporting) as a proxy for general emergency response times (EMS, police), plotted against US Census population density estimates.

As you might expect, the time it takes for an ambulance (and by extension police) to arrive blows up as population density decreases, which can help explain the conservative lean of rural voters.

I did a much deeper dive on how this geographical isolation ties into the Electoral College and national politics here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/abandoning-the-electoral-college

For a while it's seemed like Blue states, mainly California, are leading the charge in solar energy. I was curious if this was just partisan noise, and fortunately the Energy Information Administration hosts a database containing utility-scale solar output for every state for the last several years.

I did some analytics and I was pretty shocked to see that Texas has nearly caught up with California over the last decade, despite Texas Republicans constantly bashing solar for being unreliable and a needless tax burden.

I also built a custom growth metric to map out which states have the highest momentum in transitioning to a solar grid.

Full article here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/dont-say-climate-change

For a while it's seemed like Blue states, mainly California, are leading the charge in wind and solar energy. I was curious if this was just partisan noise, and fortunately the Energy Information Administration hosts a database containing utility-scale solar output for every state for the last several years.

I did some analytics and I was pretty shocked to see that Texas has nearly caught up with California over the last decade, despite Texas Republicans constantly bashing wind and solar for being unreliable and a needless tax burden.

I also built a custom growth metric to map out which states have the highest momentum in transitioning to a solar grid.

Full article here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/dont-say-climate-change

Super stoked at the speed that solar is being implemented, due to both market and recently political forces (the Iran war launched by one particular orange imbecile).

However, I think it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve hit a wall with silicon tech. We’ve pushed it to the absolute breaking point. On the other hand, perovskites are just getting started, and are developing at breakneck speed to overcome their final development hurdles.

The immediate advantage I can see is that because their absorption coefficient is so much higher than silicon, they can be made super thin, such that they can bend over curved surfaces and flexible plastics. They can also be made into semi-transparent windows for huge buildings. Fascinating stuff. Full breakdown here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/perovskites-are-the-future-of-solar