Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• You’ve Never Seen Super Bowl Betting Like This Before: Prediction markets are turbocharging America’s obsession with sports gambling. (The Atlantic)
• 10 Reasons This Is the Worst Crypto Winter Ever. Bitcoin is now down about 44% since its peak last October. Other cryptocurrencies are down much more. This isn’t in the deepest drawdown the space has ever had, but as far as crypto-winters go, this is the coldest. (Odd Lots)
• Amid immigration crackdown, unauthorized access to license plate data: Hundreds of law enforcement agencies searched Mountain View’s ALPR data without the city knowing about it. (Mountain View Voice) see also Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon: In October, a retiree emailed a DHS attorney to urge mercy for an asylum seeker. Then DHS subpoenaed his Google account and sent investigators to his home. We have become a nation of petty cunts, teabagging each other in performative displays of trollery. Sad! (Think Big Picture)
• The rise of in-car ads (ugh): Automakers now view infotainment screens as huge possible sources of ad revenue Our cars are already trying to sell us stuff. CarPlay is disappearing because automakers want our data. And soon, cars may even eavesdrop on our conversations for ad targeting. Oh, good more car crashes… (Sherwood)
• The Rise of the Slopagandist: Nick Shirley and others like him are reminiscent of yellow journalism of the 19th century, updated and turbocharged by social media algorithms. (The Verge) see also The Trump Administration Is Publishing a Stream of Nazi Propaganda: Government social-media managers have transformed official feeds. (The Atlantic)
• 40 years later, a new look at lessons from the Challenger disaster: Christa McAuliffe’s flight as the “teacher in space” lasted 73 seconds. A reporter who witnessed the tragedy returned to the story and found an engineer still trying to spread its lessons. (Washington Post)
• He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive: A source trapped inside an industrial-scale scamming operation contacted me, determined to expose his captors’ crimes—and then escape. This is his story. (Wired)
• How to tear gas children: After ICE gassed a family-friendly protest in broad daylight, Portland is up in arms. (They seem like nice people…) (The Verge)
• The Fashionable Notion of ‘Free Speech Culture’ Is Justifying State Censorship, Ironically: It’ll convince people that free speech is a sham. (The Unpopulist)
• The Great Ticket Crisis: How Attending Live Events Became a Luxury Sport: It’s not just you: It’s never been harder to buy a reasonably priced ticket to a major concert or sporting event. Taylor Swift tours, World Cup matches, the Super Bowl, you name it… We dug in to the complex systems of the live-events market to explain why buying tickets feels like such a colossal mess right now. (GQ)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Bob Moser, CEO and founder of Prime Group Holdings, a private investor in unique real estate holdings. They created Prime Storage, one of the largest, privately-held self-storage brands in the world, with over 19 million rentable square feet of space and 255 locations across 28 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The firm has acquired over $10 billion in real estate assets.
Less than half of Nasdaq stocks are now trading above their 200-day moving average
Source: @Barchart
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