Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• How the Biggest Crypto Heist in History Went Down: The cryptocurrency exchange Bybit lost $1.5 billion to North Korean hackers last month — and it all traced back to an account on a free digital storage service. (New York Times)
• The Worst 7 Years in Boeing’s History—and the Man Who Won’t Stop Fighting for Answers: Fatal crashes. A door blowout. Grounded planes. Inside the citizen-led, obsessive campaign to hold Boeing accountable and prevent the next disaster. (Wired)
• The hidden dangers of family offices: Private wealth management companies for the super-rich now manage trillions of dollars globally. Critics say they are open to abuse. (Financial Times)
• Are men in a spermpocalypse? One childless man’s journey through the sci-fi start-ups, DIY donor clubs, and group masturbation retreats attempting to save the world from the misunderstood apocolypse inside men’s bodies. (GQ)
• What the Blue State Covid Fighters Got Wrong: Five years after the start of the pandemic, a new book argues that liberal America’s deference to expertise morphed into intolerance for dissenting views. (Bloomberg)
• The spoiled man-children set out to find waste. Here’s what happened. How Silicon Valley boys came to rule politics. (Washington Post) see also The D.C. ‘PayPal Mafia’ Goes Beyond Elon Musk. A Guide to Silicon Valley’s Hostile Takeover. (Barron’s)
• Trump’s Latest Weapon Against Critics: Destroying Their Lawyers. When a president uses executive power to not just blacklist but effectively destroy a major law firm, solely for representing political opponents, it means he’s given up any pretense that he’s not an authoritarian hellbent on destroying anyone who opposes him through any means necessary. (Techdirt)
• Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South: Our country’s constitutional order is withering before us. In the states of the former Confederacy, democracy never fully flourished. (The Bulwark)
• Iran-Contra Paved the Way for Trump to Defy Democratic Norms: A new book argues that Ronald Reagan’s signature scandal foreshadowed today’s sidelining of Congress by the executive branch. (Bloomberg) see also Elon’s Grok Chatbot Calculates Probability That Trump Is a Russian Asset: Elon Musk’s supposedly “anti-woke” chatbot, Grok, keeps spewing outputs that are hilariously opposed to the billionaire’s views — including that newly-minted President Donald Trump is likely a Russian asset. (Futurism)
• How mapping galaxies can teach us what the CMB can’t: The CMB gives us critical information about our cosmic past. But it doesn’t give us everything, and galaxy mapping can fill in a key gap. (Big Think)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University and a Senior Fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. Previously, she was Chief Economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and was named by Politico as one of the 50 people most influencing the policy debate in America, and one of Barron’s top 100 Women in Finance. Her book “The Deficit Myth” became an instant New York Times bestseller.
Why the Maga mindset is different
Source: Financial Times
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