John Loeber 🎢 (@johnloeber) / X

John Loeber 🎢

9,185 posts

John Loeber 🎢

@johnloeber

San Francisco, CA

Joined July 2010

Pinned
John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
May 8
New Podcast! Natural disasters make the Insurance Commissioner California's most important office after Governor. But insurance is broken in California. Homeowners can't get decent coverage. Why? And how do we fix it? I interviewed Patrick Wolff for answers.
00:00
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Jul 6, 2025
Reading about Javier Milei — paragraphs like this should be internalized by every public policymaker in the west
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Aug 18, 2025
I’m always stunned by this asymmetry: - eating 400 calories is extremely easy, a snickers two-pack. Just a little snack - losing 400 calories requires a serious, sweaty, half hour workout (or longer)
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Aug 6, 2024
I would love an ELO-based restaurant ranking system Yelp reviews aren’t very useful. Everything is 3.5 - 4.5 stars. Tells me nothing. Same for Google Maps. The 0-5 scale just doesn’t get used properly because of social norms toward high ratings. What would work much better is…
836K
John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Nov 14, 2025
When I was in college at UChicago, I dated another student from Appalachia. She once told me she had gotten straight As in high school calculus -- and when she took the AP exam, she got a 1, the worst possible grade. (And she was pretty talented, she later on pretty well at
Kelley K
@KelleyKga
Nov 13, 2025
The fact is that high schools are graduating kids with As and Bs in advanced math courses who haven't mastered foundational skills. The data from the UCSD report makes that clear. 20% took calculus in high school! Their GPA in math classes is ~3.6! This is happening all over the
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Jul 26, 2024
One way to interpret Starbucks’ corporate journey is that starting with the initial value of “coffee”, they have since run gradient descent to determine What The People Really Want, the answer to which appears to be some kind of combination of sugar and ice, large, with a straw
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Oct 28, 2025
Replying to @growing_daniel
Me tweeting from my phone and then from my laptop and then from my phone and then from my laptop for 14 hours
67K
John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Aug 6, 2024
Replying to @johnloeber
Restaurant reviews simply based on whether one restaurant is better than another. Instead of writing a review, it should ask you which of two similar restaurants is better. That’s all you need to construct an ELO ranking scale.
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Sep 27, 2025
This Mississippi thing is so interesting. The TLDR is that the Bush admin was in favor of phonics, and so a bunch of left-ideologues reflexively went to not teach phonics but different/partially discredited language learning styles, some of which turned out to be bunk. Red states
Robert Pondiscio
@rpondiscio
Sep 27, 2025
This may be old news among education professionals, but it still hasn't reached the general public. When I mentioned on a public radio talk show a few weeks ago that Mississippi and other Southern states were leading the way on literacy, the other panelists *literally* LOLed.
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
May 11, 2025
I cancelled my Amazon Prime a few weeks ago. Here’s why: 1) Basically no movie I want to see is free on Amazon Prime Video. I always have to pay. 2) thanks to Amazon inflating the minimum cost on any item, basically no order is <$30 anymore, so I always get free shipping anwyay
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Aug 6, 2024
Replying to @johnloeber
One subtlety that’s nice about this is that it allows the rating to fluctuate every day. Rather than showing a sticky average from 3,000 old reviews, on an ELO scale the rating always changes based on what’s happening recently. Great new chef? It should be reflected immediately.
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Aug 18, 2025
Replying to @krishnanrohit
Correct, but I cannot add another four hours to my day
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John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Jun 25, 2025
I am on the @FedEx website. I am trying to use their "print and go" service to print and mail a document. This is one of FedEx's main offerings, surely used by tens of thousands of people a day. FedEx has a $53B market cap. Using this feature requires me to pick a FedEx office
John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Jun 24, 2025
If you know a lot about software, then you will recognize how poorly most of it is built. But it's not poor by happenstance, it is poor by choice. And the choice of the software publisher is that they don't care about you. This is just so sad.
199K
John Loeber 🎢
@johnloeber
Aug 12, 2025
Replying to @willdepue
This is because Indian airports are so busy that terrorist attacks on the *airports themselves* happened in the past. Hence all the security before you enter proper. It’s disjoint from regular airline security
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