This week: the FDA finally approves a modern sunscreen filter, why bigger homebuilders never get meaningfully meaningful economies of scale, and a workable regulatory fixes for frontier AI model mess we find ourselves in after Mythos/Fable release.
1. Our long national sunscreen nightmare is almost over
Victoria Song
Published: 06/19/2026
FDA approves bemotrizinol (BEMT) as first new chemical sunscreen filter in US since 1999
The FDA approved bemotrizinol (BEMT), the first new sunscreen filter in the US since 1999. It blocks UVA and UVB rays without the white cast, greasy feel, or eye sting that have made American sunscreens lag years behind Korean and European formulas.
I’ve been using Beauty of Joseon’s version, one of the Korean sunscreens the article points to, all summer in the Florida sun. It goes on like moisturizer and holds up at the beach.
Filed Under: #theVerge #publicHealth #fda #skinCare #sunscreen
2. Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding?
Brian Potter
Published: 05/28/2026
Low ratio of finished home cost to raw material inputs prevents economies of scale in US homebuilding
Homebuilding never got its Ford moment. Even the largest builders, Lennar and D.R. Horton, don’t show meaningfully lower costs or better margins than tiny regional shops, and the pattern holds inside factory-built manufactured housing too.
The reason comes down to a ratio: a home’s finished cost against its raw materials. Turning lumber and drywall into a house takes relatively little labor and machinery compared to something like a car, so there’s not much room for scale to close the gap.
Filed Under: #analysis #homeBuilding #constructionProductivity #housing #economiesOfScale
3. What Should Be Done
Dean W. Ball
Published: 06/26/2026
Dean W. Ball argues Trump administration’s AI executive order created a de facto involuntary licensing regime for frontier models
Dean Ball, a former White House AI policy advisor now headed to OpenAI, argues Trump’s AI executive order accidentally created a licensing regime nobody understands, not even the administration itself. Every model release request defaults to no because there’s no published safety standard to check against.
His fix: stop regulating individual models and start regulating frontier labs as entities, audited by independent, government-certified verification bodies. It’s one of the few proposals in this space that sounds like it could actually work, though he’s careful to note these are his own views, not OpenAI’s.
Filed Under: #aiGovernance #industrialPolicy #aiRegulation
