Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• If You Get in a Car Crash, the Risk Is Growing Your Insurance Won’t Pay: Denial rates are climbing, and the policy you thought you bought may not be the one that responds. Americans require a policy as a condition of driving, but it often doesn’t provide the backstop car owners expect (Wall Street Journal)
• The Flock Uprising Is Just the Beginning: The public rebellion against Flock’s AI-powered surveillance cameras — sold to local governments as mere “license plate readers” — has turned into a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops. (Salon) see also Flock Cameras Are Going to Get Drivers Killed: Justin Hughes on how often the readers get it wrong, and what happens when police act on a bad hit. (Jalopnik)
• Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same: What 640 London shopping streets, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million films and synthetic AI personas tell us about why everything is flattening into sameness and how to regulate the algorithms behind it. Lauren Leek on house-hunting in The Hague and recognizing every flat she scrolled — the same refinished parquet, the same matte-black taps, in a city she barely knows. (Lauren’s data Substack)
• Homeland Security Paid $464 Million for Airplanes. Then It Parked Them.: The New York Times on the deportation air fleet that never flew — nearly half a billion dollars in aircraft sitting on tarmacs while the agency that bought them figures out what they were for. The agency used a no-bid contract to buy 10 used jets, saying they were urgently needed for deportation flights. But the fleet has largely sat idle for months. (New York Times) see also Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing: Jesse Coburn on a rushed process exempted from normal rules. The Army hired General Dynamics, which brought on a barely-vetted Turkish subcontractor — and after $533 million, not a single usable shell. (ProPublica)
• Nothing Moves the Needle: Not that long ago, the press could root out corruption, topple presidents, and end wars. Now, even the biggest scoops have little impact. Here’s how and why the media lost its mojo. Craig Unger on scandal fatigue — the revelations keep coming and nothing changes, and the numbness itself is the story. (American Kompromat)
• The Censorship Industrial Complex Didn’t Exist Until The People Who Invented It Took It Over: Techdirt on the jawboning inversion — the officials who spent years alleging government censorship are now running the most aggressive speech-pressure operation in memory. (TechDirt)
• A Green Light for Crooks: Casey Michel on the same decision as the biggest blow yet in a long run of dismantled anti-corruption policy. (The Atlantic) see also Treasury Scales Back Scrutiny of U.S. Shell Companies: Alan Rappeport reports the administration will not enforce the reporting requirements of the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act, the law written specifically to crack down on money laundering. The Trump administration will not enforce reporting requirements of the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act, which was intended to crack down on money laundering. (New York Times)
• The Disastrous Diplomacy of Jared Kushner: He pledged not to be involved in a second Trump White House. Kushner broke his pledge and has been involved in nearly every consequential foreign policy negotiation since Trump returned to the White House in early 2025. But he has been pursuing these high-level negotiations as a side hustle, and continuing his role as an investor. It has not been going well. Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby on the track record — and on the pledge, since abandoned, not to be involved in a second Trump White House. (Popular Information)
• Trump Is Blocking Billions of Dollars of Grants That Would Fix the Grid: Jeff St. John on the Department of Energy canceling or stalling funding for thousands of projects meant to shore up a stressed grid — and not only in blue states. (Canary Media)
• It’s Never Been More Annoying and Expensive to be a US Sports Fan: Streaming promised to fix all this, and made it worse — with a guide to the least painful way through. (Businessweek)
Video of the day: How to Spot a Russian Deepfake
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dr. Ankur Crawford, EVP and Portfolio Manager at Alger. She heads the firm’s flagship Alger Capital Appreciation strategies. She was an Engineer at Intel, won the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, and was awarded fellowship Natl Academy of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, and holds several U.S. patents. She was recognized as a “Top Women in Asset Management” in 2020 and serves on the board of The Knowledge House, a Bronx-based charity teaching technology skills to underserved communities.
The greatest legacy of older generations—particularly the Baby Boomer era—is the material, technological, and medical transformation of society.
Source: Bruce Mehlman’s Age of Disruption
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