The Town That Went Crazy for Crypto

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/business/rainbowex-crypto-ponzi-scheme.html

In San Pedro, Argentina, 16,000 people, a fifth of the population, signed up for a cryptocurrency exchange where everyone won. Until they didn’t.[...]

RainbowEx is a version of a scam that has popped up around the world, he said in a recent interview, using a nearly identical software platform each time. He’s found iterations in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America, where examples have surfaced in Alabama and Washington State. At least 200 versions are currently active, Mr. Eldritch said in a phone interview. Each has a different name and many have La China-like characters dispensing crypto instructions. In a now-expired variant in Italy, the La China persona was called Dolly.

War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

https://www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-the-hardest-bug-i-ever#footnote-anchor-1-159719261

All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.

The Scammer’s Manual: How to Launder Money and Get Away With It

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/asia/cambodia-money-laundering-huione.html

Documents and insiders reveal how one of the world’s major money laundering networks operates.

How One Las Vegas ED Saved Hundreds of Lives After the Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. History

https://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-vegas-ed-saved-hundreds-lives-worst-mass-shooting-u-s-history/

The night that Stephen Paddock opened fire on thousands of people at a Las Vegas country music concert, nearby Sunrise Hospital received more than 200 penetrating gunshot wound victims. Dr. Kevin Menes was the attending in charge of the ED that night, and thanks to his experience supporting a local SWAT team, he’d thought ahead about how he might mobilize his department in the event of a mass casualty incident.

Ninety-five theses on AI

https://www.secondbest.ca/p/ninety-five-theses-on-ai

VII. Technological transitions cause regime changes

• Even under best case scenarios, an intelligence explosion is likely to induce state collapse / regime change and other severe collective action problems that will be hard to adapt to in real time.

• Government bureaucracies are themselves highly exposed to disruption by AI, and will need “firmware-level” reforms to adapt and keep-up, i.e. reforms to civil service, procurement, administrative procedure, and agency structure.

• Congress will need to have a degree of legislative productivity not seen since FDR.

• Inhibiting the diffusion of AI in the public sector through additional layers of process and oversight (such as through Biden’s OMB directive) tangibly raises the risk of systemic government failure.

• The rapid diffusion of AI agents with approximately human-level reasoning and planning abilities is likely sufficient to destabilize most existing U.S. institutions.

• The reference class of prior technological transitions (agricultural revolution, printing press, industrialization) all feature regime changes to varying degrees.

• Seemingly minor technological developments can affect large scale social dynamics in equilibrium (see: Social media and the Arab Spring or the Stirrup Thesis).

I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney

I met a woman who had been on a road trip with her husband. She said they had 10-year work visas. While driving near the San Diego border, they mistakenly got into a lane leading to Mexico. They stopped and told the agent they didn’t have their passports on them, expecting to be redirected. Instead, they were detained. They are both pastors.
I met a family of three who had been living in the US for 11 years with work authorizations. They paid taxes and were waiting for their green cards. Every year, the mother had to undergo a background check, but this time, she was told to bring her whole family. When they arrived, they were taken into custody and told their status would now be processed from within the detention center.

Another woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?

One woman had a 10-year visa. When it expired, she moved back to her home country, Venezuela. She admitted she had overstayed by one month before leaving. Later, she returned for a vacation and entered the US without issue. But when she took a domestic flight from Miami to Los Angeles, she was picked up by Ice and detained. She couldn’t be deported because Venezuela wasn’t accepting deportees. She didn’t know when she was getting out.

There was a girl from India who had overstayed her student visa for three days before heading back home. She then came back to the US on a new, valid visa to finish her master’s degree and was handed over to Ice due to the three days she had overstayed on her previous visa.

Dissertation/Thesis Anti-Acknowledgments

https://tacobelllabs.net/@marlies/114126905143977450

Given it’s international women’s day, I’d like to encourage you all, but especially Dutch men to read these ‘anti-acknowledgments’ in a PhD thesis. This is not from somewhere else, it’s from Delft. And it’s not from the 1950s, but from the present. Unfortunately what academic life and culture in The Netherlands is still like. The author is just one of the few who actually spoke up about it, but there are many stories like it.

Her research grant mentioned ‘hesitancy.’ Now her funding is gone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/03/15/vaccine-hesitancy-nih-grant-money-canceled-shingles/

A medical researcher may have erroneously lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money because she was swept up in Trump administration efforts to ban studies of vaccine hesitancy and uptake.

Jed Wagner on Being the Sole Maintainer of the Veterans Appeals System

https://logicmag.io/care/jed-wagner-on-being-the-sole-maintainer-of-the-veterans-appeals-system

The Veterans Appeals Control and Locator System, or VACOLS, starts and ends with Jed Wagner. In the late 1980s, Wagner was hired as a part-time contractor by the Department of Veterans Affairs. He started single-handedly building the system that he was ultimately hired to work on full-time. Now, thirty years later, VACOLS is processing its last appeals, and when the system is sunsetted, he will retire.

Originally, the system’s primary job was to know the locations of the physical files of the 30,000 or so veterans who appealed their benefits decisions. Over time, VACOLS grew and became more complex as Wagner iterated and added modules like courtroom scheduling and video hearings. He would gather requirements directly from judicial review officers, judges, and administrators, deploy a prototype, get feedback, and deploy again—years before Agile became a popular approach to software development.

The Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 created infrastructure and funding for a new appeals system that hopes to resolve appeals in six months as opposed to three to seven years. In a pivot away from the old paradigm where one long-term employee spends their career caring for the system they built themselves, the new appeals system will be overseen by a termed employee and then handed off to the next termed employee after that.

We sat down with Jed at the end of May 2020 to talk what he built, and what’s next.

Was “data journalism” a failure? What went wrong at FiveThirtyEight @ Disney?

https://www.natesilver.net/i/148340021/was-data-journalism-a-failure-what-went-wrong-at-fivethirtyeight-disney

Phil B asks:

I would like to hear more about how Nate’s ambitions for data journalism have evolved since he started 538. What did “conquering the world” mean back then? What changed? Also, with the rise of US sports betting and mainstream sports media coming to terms with that fact, what does Nate think about the prospects for a more data-oriented approach in sports journalism?

Thanks for the question, Phil. This is already a long newsletter, and I was tempted to break this response out into a separate post rather than burying it here. But having multiple threads for SBSQ wound up being confusing last time. I’m going to warn subscribers that I may adapt this response for a standalone post in the future, though — it will go on the Rainy Day List.

The early days of FiveThirtyEight @ Disney, circa 2014-2016 and originally under the auspices of ESPN, was a period I consider unsuccessful despite being presented with a very generous opportunity. I think I made a lot of mistakes and I frequently think about what went wrong. FiveThirtyEight, in my biased opinion, developed into an excellent site by ~2018 (until Disney basically let us stop re-hiring open positions by ~2021, a sign of trouble to come). But those early years were rough, and I was unhappy, so here’s an inventory of Mistakes That Were Made — or really Mistakes That I Made — should any of you find yourself in a similar position