But the cartel’s interests may prove just as important to security as government efforts, according to a dozen local and state officials and security experts.

The CJNG has much to gain from the regional economic boost of a successful tournament in Guadalajara — akin to its administrative headquarters — and much to lose from drawing authorities’ attention.

“The city is safe because those guys put all their money here, and they stand to make even more,” said one state official who was not authorised to speak on the record. “They don’t want a war here.”

Huge profits earned elsewhere from drug trafficking and other activities are laundered in Guadalajara, experts said, helping to power a real estate boom. A rash of shiny new skyscrapers has popped up, some of which sit empty. The leafy city also boasts luxurious open-air shopping malls and lively nightlife.

Here is more from Ciara Nugent at the FT.

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Fred Anderson has demonstrated how a futuristic novel written in 1763 can help to shed light on British thinking about the long-term consequences of the peace [from the Seven Years’ War].  The anonymously published The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 presents a scenario far in the future, in the early twentieth century.  The book’s counterhistorical narrative suggests that Britain, by granting far too generous a peace in 1763, unintentionally helped France and Russia become leading nineteenth-century world powers.  In the early twentieth century, the reign of George VI is thus dominated by Britain’s worldwide struggle to reestablish its position as a global power.  The conflict ends with Britain imposing peace in Paris in 1920, after British troops have “liberated” France, with George, the “philosopher king,” hailed as the bringer of freedom.  At the time the book was written in 1763, its primary target was clearly the British negotiators in Paris…

That is from the new and interesting book The World in Flames: A Global History of the Seven Years’ War by Marian Füssel.

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This is a new tranche of ad hoc awards, given out more like prizes, without applications, to writers, creatives, and intellectuals who are not supported by the current system of awards and grants, or who have been failed by such systems.

With advice from Henry Oliver.

I am pleased to announce that our first winner is Helen DeWitt.

Please do contact me if you are interested in supporting this new effort.  Let us debureaucratize the arts!

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• I nominate J Sanilac https://www.jsanilac.com/ ... by Francis Quinn

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2. Books are plunging as a share of political science citations.

3. Gender integration in the military did not hurt male performance.

4. MIE: auctioning off part of the Eiffel Tower (NYT).

5. Agentic AI for economists, slides.  And talk.

6. Seb Krier Substack.

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On Monday, anonymous user “Harshad” asked in a Discord channel if there was “any chance” that he could still win his bet about whether US forces would enter Iran by the end of April. His money was on “no”.

But Polymarket appeared to be resolving the market to “yes”, after the US conducted an operation to rescue a crew member shot down on a mission over Isfahan over the weekend.

…At the moment, when there is a dispute, markets on Polymarket are settled by an anonymous group of people who hold a crypto token called UMA.

It’s an unusual way to decide what has happened. Some longtime users suggest it opens the platform to corruption. Different individuals hold different amounts of UMA, and therefore have different voting power.

It isn’t known who the largest UMA holders are, or what might affect how they vote. It is entirely possible that the people who finally settle a bet on UMA have large amounts of money staked on it.

There was also this bit about Prediction Hunt (I am an advisor) which is focused on cross-market arbitrage opportunities:

“I love to gamble,” said Joseph Francia.

Now in his early 30s, Francia counted cards in casinos while studying economics at Berkeley, and spent weekends in Reno, Nevada, playing blackjack. He’s not a thrill-seeking “Yolo” (you only live once) gambler, he said: he likes to bet when he has an edge on the house.

At university, he and a friend decided to collect data from a number of offshore sportsbooks, and start placing arbitrage bets: playing on the discrepancies in odds given by different betting sites.

“If the odds on the Lakers are really good on one site, and the odds on the Pacers are really good on another site, you could bet on basically both teams on different sportsbooks and make guaranteed profit,” he said.

That project was a student lark in 2017. But in 2025, he remembered it when he was suddenly laid off from his full-time job, just as prediction markets were taking off.

“I’m a spiritual, religious person,” he said. “The more secular people would say, this opportunity is coincidence. But in my head, I was like, this is a sign of something to some extent. Let me lean into this.”

So Francia started Prediction Hunt, a Discord channel and online community where thousands of people gather to trade tips and ideas for how to make money – and bet smart – on Polymarket. The Guardian spent roughly three weeks in this Discord channel.

There are alerts to track “fade” bets, where you try to follow the smart money: profitable wallets were betting “yes” on the Iranian regime falling by 30 April, for example, while unprofitable wallets were betting “no”.

There are alerts to track potential insiders, so you can copy their bets: one of these appears to have an inside line on interest rate decisions by the US Federal Reserve.

Getting these details right will be important but overall I am pleased that the news now regularly reports prediction market data when reporting stories–this is disciplining news from noise, something I predicted long ago in Entrepreneurial Economics.

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An edited transcript is here.

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First, self-driving vehicles make it too easy to read a book or stare at your phone.  Driving yourself fixes your attention on what is unfolding before your eyes, and forces you to keep it there.  You might be bored for an hour, but you will catch periodic gems by always looking at the road before you and to the side.

Second, at least for a while self-driving vehicles will not be allowed to exceed speed limits.  Good luck with that.  A lot of America is marked at 25 mph when you can go 36 mph or maybe even 37 mph in a responsible manner.

Third, many of the best moments in cross-country driving come from the unexpected swerve — “hey, that looks interesting!”  And half of the time it is not.  Will the self-driving vehicle know when you might wish to swerve and pull over?

Fourth, there is something to be said for integrating the rhythms of your body with those of the car.  When you drive yourself, you feel the trip in a way the Waymo does not give you.  I would stress this point is a negative for most car trips, though perhaps not for a cross-country drive.  If you do not enjoy driving through the USA, maybe do not do the cross-country thing at all?  Walking through Paris or Istanbul remains a lovely alternative.

Automation and better AI might eventually solve or address some of those problems.  But the next available round of self-driving vehicles probably will not.

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At Harvard Law School, Jonathan is consistently excellent.

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2. Humans are losing the fight against flying fish (WSJ).

3. In this study expert judges preferred the AI writing.

4. Helium is hard to replace.

5. Does using AI for legal research and work limit later comprehension? (No, it seems)

6. Can the CCP contain LLMs?

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We examine the economic impact of non-consumable visual cues through home staging on high-stakes housing transactions. Using hand-collected listing photos for 15,777 transactions and a machine-learning algorithm to detect furniture, we provide the first large-scale evidence that staged homes sell for roughly 10% more and one week faster than comparable homes without furniture. Our pre-registered online experiment establishes causality and uncovers mechanisms. We find that furniture clarifies spatial use, while decor enhances emotional attachment, jointly driving the higher willingness-to-pay. These findings demonstrate how visual cues impact high-stakes decisions and systematically shape valuations in the largest asset market for households.

That is from Puja Bhattacharya, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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I wonder if the cyber capabilities of Mythos and future models ultimately lower the returns to ‘hacking,’ perhaps below the point where such efforts are worth investing in.

Say you’re a nefarious actor and uncover a critical, zero-day exploit in an important system. How do you extract the most value from that exploit? There are more valuable and less valuable times to deploy it, and usually the best time won’t be “immediately.” You may only get to deploy it once or a small number of times. You have to consider:

1. How long do I expect the vulnerability to persist?
2. What material gain do I get by exploiting it at a given time?
3. How does exploiting it increase my personal risk (by focusing countermeasures in my direction)?

The answer to (1) is now “a much shorter time than before”, while 2 and 3 are mostly unchanged. In the new world, yes, exploits are much easier to find, but the expected value of a given exploit has also shrunk. The odds of an opportune moment falling within the ‘window of usefulness’ of that exploit are much lower. It’s plausible that the new equilibrium becomes “it’s not even worth spending money to find vulnerabilities in most systems, because the chances of being able to do something useful with it before it’s patched is close to zero.”

Much of the fear around cybersecurity vulnerabilities is something like: our adversaries accumulate a pile of highly damaging (to physical infrastructure, military assets, communication systems, …) exploits, which in the event of a conflict they then rapidly deploy to cause damage. Mythos would seem to favor defense here, because the usable lifetime of any exploit is much shorter. Any cyberattack that is timing-dependent now has lower utility.

Yes, there are more mundane cybersecurity concerns like ransomware or data theft, but these aren’t hugely significant in the scheme of things. And I would expect within a few years we’ll have fairly robust tools for automated vulnerability discovery and patching that any large business that cares about these things can deploy.

No doubt this assumes you can trust those in control of the leading-edge models. But even if you’re a bit behind, the situation may not be so bad. There isn’t an infinite supply of exploits, and again, most of them only need to be found ‘fast enough’ in order to mitigate the damage.

From Jacob Gloudemans.

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renaissance rationalization is a process that commodified itself rapidly: despite the europeans discovering most technology during the early modern period it spread everywhere within a few centuries, and the rate of spread has been increasing dramatically

knowledge of the scientific frontier dissipates around the world faster as science has enabled better communication technologies. it’s getting even faster with INTELLIGENCE technologies which actually explain themselves and help you build them

as we approach more powerful intelligence, the ability to train powerful models is self commodifying rather than building a huge and runaway advantage for a handful of recursive self improvers. this is one reason why you should expect almost all of the benefits of superintelligence to be captured by the public

Here is the tweet.  That said, it would be useful to relax constraints on the supply of both energy and land, so that the benefits could diffuse more widely yet.

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2. Observations on ambition, though it is sad he does not grasp the value of Jiro.

3. A brief history of lab notebooks.

4. “Hero rat who sniffed out over 100 land mines is honored with giant statue.”

5. The new LACMA (NYT).  And Hausa erotica, published on WhatsApp (NYT).

6. Henry Oliver on Buddenbrooks.

7. “Play chess with Yoko Ono.“

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I think one important point you missed is that South Africa’s recent (and ancient) history has forced the population to work quite aggressively through racial differences at speeds that other developed nations have not. ‘Racial harmony’ would be a stretch, but I would say that most (all?) South African’s have a ‘racial understanding’. South Africa is also very post-racial in the sense that most understand racial differences to actually be cultural differences – for myself, growing up English in Durban, I felt more of a kinship with educated Indians than with the (white) Afrikaners. It would make absolutely no sense from a strictly Western perspective that the English and the Afrikaners (both ‘white’) couldn’t be more different!

Here is my original post.

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