We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/we-havent-seen-the-worst-of-what

I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.

As this moral vocabulary scales across culture, it also corrodes culture. In sports, when you have money on a game, you’re not rooting for a team. You’re rooting for a proposition. The social function of fandom—shared identity, inherited loyalty, something larger than yourself—dissolves into individual risk. In politics, I fear the consequences will be worse. Prediction markets can be useful for those who want to know the future, but their utility recruits participants into a relationship with the news cycle that is adversarial, and even misanthropic. A young man betting on a terrorist attack or a famine is not acting as a mere concerned citizen whose participation improves the efficiency of global prediction markets. He’s just a dude, on his phone, alone in a room, choosing to root for death. 

How Do You Find an Illegal Image Without Looking at It?

https://mahmoud-salem.net/the-invisible-shield

This is where the engineering meets the ethics.

Every false positive means an innocent person's content was flagged — a family photo, a medical image, a piece of art. It means unnecessary investigation, potential harm to reputation, and erosion of trust in the system. At scale, even a 0.01% false positive rate means thousands of wrongful flags per day.

Every false negative means a child's abuse was missed. An image that should have been caught slipped through. That child continues to be victimized every time the image is viewed, shared, or traded. The distribution never ends.

There is no threshold that eliminates both. Setting the threshold is a moral decision, not just a technical one.

In practice, the industry errs heavily toward minimizing false negatives — catching every possible match — and then uses human review to resolve false positives. This means the system flags aggressively but confirms carefully. The cost of a false positive is an investigation. The cost of a false negative is a child.

In permanence crisis: An argument for state capacity and civil service reform

https://andrewgreenway.substack.com/p/in-permanence-crisis

A government that is serious about state capacity must do 2 things, urgently and in parallel:

One, fundamentally reboot the character of the ‘permanent’ civil service, beginning with an independent Royal Commission like the Victorian-era Northcote-Trevelyan report that founded the modern bureaucracy.

And two, create new institutions that adopt the working styles, technologies and affordances given to public officials who have shown how the state can do great things in special circumstances. A corollary of creating new institutions is that some existing, legacy organisations must be encouraged to wither and die.

I talked tech with third graders for 90 minutes. Here's what happened.

https://www.thehomescreen.org/p/i-talked-tech-with-third-graders

We need to stop focusing on specific products and platforms and focus on the roots of the problem:

• Algorithmic mediation that invisibly shapes our experiences

• Business models that feed off of “engagement” (aka addiction)

• Data that is extracted, amassed, and weaponized against users—jacking up prices, targeting kids with predatory content, and keeping you scrolling.

TikTok or Instagram or Roblox or whatever… the products are not THE problem. They are the SYMPTOM of the problem(s). If 8-year olds can get it, surely our policymakers can. 

how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/20/a-war-foretold-cia-mi6-putin-ukraine-plans-russia

Putin’s tiny planning circle also played a role, creating a hopelessly cocky plan that had not been subjected to a rigorous critique by intelligence professionals versed in Ukrainian realities. Russian troops entered Ukraine expecting a surgical regime change operation with little resistance, rather than the bitter battles that awaited them. Moscow did not bother with many actions that western military analysts had assumed would accompany the invasion, such as taking out Ukraine’s power and communications networks. The Russian army assumed they would control most of the country in a matter of days, so decided to make the subsequent occupation easier by keeping the infrastructure intact. Instead, the working mobile networks and ready power supply proved crucial for the coordination of Ukraine’s hastily assembled defence forces.

“Half of it is we overestimated Russian military performance and underestimated the Ukrainian military,” said Michael Kofman, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. “But the other half is the Russians didn’t execute the operation remotely how many anticipated it might go, or in a way that made sense.”

u/ElectricStings on validating AI videos

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1rak11v/why_fake_ai_videos_of_uk_urban_decline_are_taking/o6l2typ/

If you're the type of person who believes society is on the decline because [insert scapegoat here] then seeing a video that confirms this is going to feel really damn good regardless of if it's real or not.

On a deeper level, it's avoidance.

Avoiding an uncomfortable truth as it may come into conflict with some deeply held beliefs, beliefs which form a foundation of our personality. If our beliefs are wrong then who are we as a person. That experience is very uncomfortable to us - it feels like an attacks, so we circle around avoiding evidence, confirming our own world view.

And so these videos give a sense of comfort and validation that who we are is not wrong.

Apologizing for outliving my executioners

https://williamsrecord.com/471995/opinions/apologizing-for-outliving-my-executioners/

I have spent time in Iran. I have breathed the same air as the men who aimed Khamenei’s rifles. Members of my own family stood before his firing squads — some, like my grandfather, narrowly survived; others, including my uncles and cousins, did not. That is not a metaphor. That is history. My father’s family fled in 1979, as the regime was taking hold. My mother lived under it until 2000 — and her parents, my grandparents, still do. 

My family did not leave over a “political disagreement.” They fled a graveyard that was still being dug. When you ask us to tone down our sense of relief that Khamenei’s reign is over, you are asking us to apologize for outliving our executioners.  

How long do electric vehicle batteries actually last?

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/02/nx-s1-5706658/electric-vehicle-battery-lifespan

Recurrent, a research firm that pulls in data from over 30,000 EV drivers, describes it as an "S curve." There's a rapid decline at the beginning, a long leveling off, and then a more rapid decline at the end.

"It's very much like breaking in a pair of shoes," says Liz Najman, the director of market insights at Recurrent. The shoes start out stiff, but quickly get a little more give. "And then your shoes just last you," she says, until at some point, "It's all over, it's a rapid decline."

The Gulf next door

https://www.semafor.com/article/03/01/2026/view-the-gulf-next-door

Stephen Walt in Foreign Affairs described Trump’s foreign policy as “predatory hegemony”: “The bottom line is that acting as a predatory hegemon will weaken the networks of power and influence on which the United States has long relied and which created the leverage that Trump is now trying to exploit… Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but a backlash could come with surprising swiftness. To quote Ernest Hemingway’s famous line about the onset of bankruptcy, a consistent policy of predatory hegemony could cause US global influence to decline ‘gradually and then suddenly.’”