Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Surveillance Tech Company Is Pitching An Unholy ALPR/Stingray Hybrid To Law Enforcement: Here’s something no one but cops and the tech firms that love cops wanted: an Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) that can scoop up pretty much any information being broadcasted by cars and the devices carried by the people inside them. As if ALPRs weren’t already controversial enough, here comes a tech company offering that makes most ALPRs (including those sold by Flock!) look absolutely innocuous. License-plate readers meet fake cell towers in one tidy package. The surveillance-creep beat keeps finding new lows. (TechDirt)
• How Some Private-Equity Managers Collect Big Fees on Paper Gains: Fee structures are among the pitfalls of investing in semiliquid funds (Wall Street Journal) see also Private Credit Is Making Bets on Consumer Debt at a Precarious Time: Billions are flowing from firms like Blue Owl and KKR into Buy Now, Pay Later companies. It’s an untested model and skeptics are worried about what happens in a downturn. The private-credit boom wades into buy-now-pay-later just as households strain. A flashing-yellow-light story worth your attention. (Bloomberg)
• How a Master of Deception Conned Investors Out of $50 Million—in His Own Words: Paul Regan recorded himself ripping off clients to teach others how to do it, too. A fraudster narrates his own scheme. First-person grift is uncomfortably compelling — and instructive. Those tapes reveal the inner workings of a fraud. (Wall Street Journal)
• What Big Food Did to Ice Cream: The slow degradation of the supermarket pint, explained with real food science. Enshittification comes for dessert. The “encrapification” of the American pint — a chemist’s plain-language dissection. (Medium)
• Forget Baseball: Gambling Is America’s Real National Pastime. “It is one of the defects of our national character… that no sooner do we get hold of a good thing of this sort, than we proceed to make it hurtful by excess.” A book-bite argument that betting, not baseball, is the true American sport now. Fits the week’s wildfire-and-insider-betting theme uncomfortably well. (Next Big Idea Club)
• A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family: Buttigieg writes personally about a family ordeal: Many times over the years, I have been denounced, yelled at, protested, threatened, and heckled. I’ve been through political attacks in office, death threats in public life, and rocket attacks in war. But this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began. Even in today’s climate, there should be one fundamental principle everyone respects: whatever you think about someone in politics, you leave their kids alone. (Pete Buttigieg)
• How BP Execs Influenced a Climate Study That Shaped a Generation of Global Policy: ProPublica traces how an oil major’s hand quietly steered the influential ‘wedges’ framework. A story about who gets to write the science. (ProPublica)
• Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.: A Kazakhstan minerals deal with a familiar conflict-of-interest aroma. The family-business presidency, chapter umpteen. An agreement between the U.S. and Kazakhstan has given a group of American investors with ties to the president and the commerce secretary access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten. (New York Times) see also A Trumpworld Events Company Is Raking In Millions in Federal Contracts: The Trump administration has awarded Event Strategies several contracts—including one that could be worth up to $100 million—with little competition, according to federal filings. The team behind the January 6 rally now cashes government checks. Wired follows the money from the Ellipse to the federal ledger. (Wired)
• Alarming New Trend Dominating Youth Sports: Repeating 8th Grade. Families Pay Thousands for It.: Parents paying to hold kids back for an athletic edge. A depressing arms race dressed up as opportunity. A surge of for-profit ‘reclass’ academies are raising equity and oversight concerns across N.J. scholastic sports. (NJ.com)
• EU Politicians Investigated Pegasus Spyware. Then It Ended Up on One of Their Phones: “It is a direct attack on the rule of law,” says one European Parliament member of the new findings from Citizen Lab. The watchdogs become the targets. A chilling reminder that commercial spyware doesn’t respect who’s supposed to be holding it accountable. (Wired)
Video of the day: Are Humans Badly Designed For Modern Life?
Be sure to check out our Master’s in Business next week with Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins. He is a leading investor in enterprise-software and AI. He was an early investor in Slack, Figma, Rippling, Glean, Netskope, and Box. Hamid co-founded Social Capital with Chamath Palihapitiyal. In 2017, joined Kleiner Perkins
Do Competitive Seats Matter?
Source: Bruce Mehlman’s Age of Disruption
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