My year as a degenerate gambler

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-betting-app-addiction/686061/?gift=otEsSHbRYKNfFYMngVFweLsiO3CHpZFZmczY-kuVbN0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

To humanity’s great thinkers and leaders, gambling was an impediment to an ethical life (Aristotle), an invention of the devil (Saint Augustine), and a tax on the ignorant (Warren Buffett). It fostered selfishness and a something-for-nothing ethos that was poisonous to the soul. George Washington went so far as to warn that “every possible evil” could be tied to gambling: “It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief.”

How Russia’s War Machine Brutalizes and Exploits Its Own Soldiers

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/31/world/europe/russia-military-abuse-soldiers.html

In hundreds of official complaints, inadvertently posted online by the Russian government, soldiers and their loved ones describe a lawless and violent military apparatus that abuses its own troops to maintain its assault in Ukraine.

Norah Jones Is Playing Along with Harry Mack (Podcast Season 2 Episode 27)

https://youtu.be/F4gGroSuYWk?t=3710

Britain Should Have Read the Tweets First

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/starmer-abd-el-fattah/685469/

Starmer—and his Conservative predecessors—were right to call for Abd el-Fattah’s release. What was absurd, however, was to frame his arrival on British soil as an unalloyed blessing. Starmer was thinking like the procedure-obsessed human-rights lawyer he used to be, not the political and moral leader that Britain needs right now.

500 mile email limit

https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible...  I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-)  The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte.  "Come again?"

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.’”

 

NASA, the Space Shuttle Challenger and Decision-making

There’s a renowned fictional case study (originated by Jack Brittain and Sim Sitkin) which is used in business schools to help students understand the risks around poorly informed decision-making. The scenario that students are given is to imagine that they are John Carter, the founder of a car racing team. The team is coming up to a very important race – important because there is big prize money at stake, and doing well in the race could mean that they get great publicity but also that they stand a much better chance of winning a big new sponsorship deal which is sorely needed.

The problem however, is that in 7 out of the last 24 races the engine in the Carter racing car has failed, meaning an early retirement from those races. 

u/Eisgboek on online relationship scams

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/1rcx7lt/i_traveled_7000_km_to_meet_a_webcam_girl_and_it/o734xkb/?share_id=O8TLJx8CgXpbh7ebmqzJA&context=3

I hate to say, but that's actually part of how the scam works. I mentioned in another comment that it happened to a friend of mine and it was the same scenario. Hours on webcam for the first while until he figured it couldn't be a scam because he was talking to the same person every time and there were no signs of it being anything other than a great connection with another person.

But then once he was good and invested, the requests for money started. But not how you would assume they would if it was a scam. They started by being coupled with a refusal... "I don't have enough for both rent and groceries this week so I guess I'll have to go hungry. No no no. Don't send me any money. That's not what I'm asking. I don't need your help". Until they've somehow got you actually pushing to send them money.

And after that you realize that sending them little bits of cash you won't even miss will go so much further for them in Colombia and besides, it's all your idea so it can't possibly be a scam. And they were so grateful for your help that you're officially in a relationship now and don't couples share money anyways?

But then an emergency happens [...]

u/AlexanderHamilton04 explains grammar

https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/1raroa2/was_vs_were/o6lzs84/

We use the 'subjunctive mood' to talk about hypotheticals or things that are counterfactual to reality (impossible situations).

Ex: If she were real, she would have to be 8 feet tall to match the proportions of that doll.

↥ Here we use "were" (the subjunctive form) to talk about a hypothetical
situation, "If she were real..."

---

"She was real" is stating a fact (nothing hypothetical or counterfactual).
"I have accepted that she was real." (present tense, perfect aspect)

"I had accepted that she was real." (past perfect) often used to indicate
that an action was completed.

This was before "that action had been completed":

This was before "I had accepted that she was real."

"I was skeptical of it."
"I was skeptical of it even before I had accepted that she was real."

There is nothing hypothetical or counterfactual here. You could even say:
"I never accepted that she was real."

---

---

If you can replace "accepted she was real" with "accepted the fact that she was real,"

then "was" is the correct choice. 

‘They’re back to making millions’: workers accuse US mill where five died in blast

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/29/didion-milling-wisconsin-explosion-deaths

In December 2020, 52-year-old Randal Rote was killed on the job at Didion Milling after being engulfed in a grain bin. Osha issued proposed fines of $676,808 for 14 violations that the company is also currently contesting. The agency criticized the company for failing to learn from previous incidents.

Just a few months prior, according to Osha, a large grain shelf collapsed and nearly engulfed another Didion Milling employee who was cleaning the inside of a grain bin at the time.

Terri Gernstein, the director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Law School Center for Labor, said: “Clearly those fines weren’t sufficient to get the company to completely overhaul its operations to make sure to really, really prioritize workplace safety.

“Because if they had, another worker wouldn’t have been killed three years later.”

Zacharias H. McClendon d. December 18, 2013

https://www.riemannfamily.com/obituaries/zacharias-mcclendon

Zacharias H. McClendon, age 25, of Gulfport, MS, went to be with the Lord on Wednesday, December 18, 2013, in Oxford, MS.

Zach was born in Gulfport to Percy Eugene and Paula Kaye Lee McClendon. He was a graduate of Gulfport High School where he was registered in many gifted classes. He served twice as first chair in the Honor Orchestra for the state of MS playing upright base and cello. He earned an invitation to go to Governor's School during summer break in high school and eventually accepted an educational scholarship to Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where he earned a degree in Chemistry and Biochemistry. During some of his free time, he substitute taught at Gulfport High School and taught Biology 101 at MGCCC in Perkinston. Zach also trained with American Medical Response to be a paramedic. He furthered his education at MS College where he earned his Master's Degree in Biology, Medical Science. He also had interned under two orthopaedic surgeons locally. He was currently an M.B.A. candidate at the University of Mississippi. Zach was going to make the announcement at Christmas to his family and friends that he had been accepted to the University of MS Medical School in Jackson. He was a talented and smart guy who enjoyed tutoring, cooking, and helping others. His accomplishments in such a short time period are a testimony of his God-given spirit as he journeyed to be a doctor that would help the less fortunate. Zach was truly a gift from God. Prior to his birth, the Lord spoke to his mother which led to the name he was given, which was not the name originally selected for him. His legacy of integrity, hard work, and love for others will live on with his family and friends.

Fear and Anger Grow as Thousands Remain Without Power in the South

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/us/storm-power-outages-tennessee-mississippi-louisiana.html

Hurricanes and tornadoes, particularly in the South, often cause prolonged power outages, and residents are accustomed to going days without electricity. But it is rare to experience a loss of power during a sustained stretch of ice and freezing temperatures, with cold so fierce that it has left hundreds of workers struggling to navigate icy roads as they try to fix the electrical system.

Anger was continuing to boil over toward the leadership of the Nashville Electric Service. The utility has struggled for days not only to restore power across the city and surrounding county, but also to accurately communicate to customers the scope of the repairs and the timeline needed to complete them.