News You Can Use: "Want to track the apocalypse? One theory: Follow the billionaires’ jets"

From the Washington Post, May 9:

An artist made a warning system to notify you if the ultra-rich flee city centers en masse. 

They have endless amounts of money. Sophisticated bunkers. Private jets. Might the oligarchs of the world know — or be warned — in advance of a nuclear apocalypse?

So goes the theory underpinning the newest project from Los Angeles artist and coder Kyle McDonald, who has created what he calls an Apocalypse Early Warning System by tracking private jets around the world. If a large number of jets suddenly flee city centers, transporting their likely affluent passengers to bunkers and isolated resorts, he figures it might be a warning sign for the rest of us.

“I want people to laugh. I hope they see it and they feel the sort of humor of our situation — that we’re locked in a battle between the ultra-wealthy and the working class,” McDonald said. “And remember, there’s still things we can do. We’re not completely downtrodden and lost of all hope.”....

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For a graphic the paper uses a picture of private jets at Le Bourget but I was thinking of the overflow parking at the Swiss Air Force base down the road from Davos:

 

That was at the Guardian in 2019, the year that David Attenbourough came to talk about Global Warming.

New York's Mayor Mamdani And The Curley Effect

Following on the post immediately below, "Fun Fact: "New York City spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns. $81,705 per person in FY2025" a bit of scholarship from the National Bureau of Economic Research:

James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. We present a model of the Curley effect, in which inefficient redistributive policies are sought not by interest groups protecting their rents, but by incumbent politicians trying to shape the electorate through emigration of their opponents or reinforcement of class identities. The model sheds light on ethnic politics in the United States and abroad, as well as on class politics in many countries including Britain. 

NBER download page.

Both the authors have those "@harvard.edu" email addresses.

Enough appeal to authority? I've got more if it is desired. Here's Mom:

A Mother's Love, Letter To Arthur Schopenhauer

‘All your good qualities,’ she wrote on 6 November, ‘become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others … If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.’

—Aeon,  The semi-satisfied life

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Now THAT'S authority. But in Arthur's defense our post goes on to look at his "Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten" with its thirty-eight stratagems for making an argument including:

#30 - Appeal to Authority Rather Than Reason and: 

#38 - Become Personal, Insulting, Rude (the Ultimate Stratagem)

And that, children, is why we study philosophy.

Fun Fact: "New York City spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns. $81,705 per person in FY2025"

From Newsweek March 16:

NYC Spends as Much Per Homeless Person as Median Income

A new report from the New York State Comptroller Office reveals New York City spent roughly as much per homeless person as the city’s median household income last fiscal year.

Newsweek reached out to comptroller's office and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's office for comment on Monday afternoon via email.

Why It Matters

The data reflects a central tension in New York City’s homelessness debate: record‑high spending alongside persistent, visible homelessness. If the city is effectively spending the equivalent of a median income per homeless individual each year, critics say it raises serious questions about efficiency and accountability....

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As noted in March 2020's "Where Are The Bodies Of The Homeless Coronavirus Victims?":

Over the years I've taken a special interest in the plight of the homeless, both as an outlet for charitable impulses and as a socio-political phenomena/area of study. Some of that has ended up on the blog where posts, usually focused on money, have also looked at the lack of it....

****

Here's a shelter in, I thinks it's San Diego, which is typical of newer designs: bunk beds, the mattress mats are washable but I don't know how often that is done, close quarters, colds and flu spread very quickly but apparently not Covid-19 deaths.

A shelter like that, capable of holding 80 to 100 souls should not cost $6.5 to $8 million per year to run. The Newsweek article states:

“Per‑person” homelessness spending typically reflects system‑wide costs, including shelters, medical care, mental health services, security, administration, and emergency services, rather than direct cash or housing support provided to individuals. 

One of the commentariat is quoted as saying:

X user @charliesmirkley, who has over 10,000 followers, wrote on Sunday: “NYC spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns. $81,705 per person in FY2025. And $81,705 is a floor. It excludes supportive housing (~$500M/yr), mental health response teams, and NYPD encampment costs. The city projects ~$97K per person in FY2026." 

We lifted the first part of his comment for our headline. 

Chips: MORE Cerebras IPO Stuff

Following on May 9's "AI Chipmaker Cerebras Is Said to Plan Raising IPO Price Range".

From Techi:

Cerebras is no longer a vague "maybe IPO" story. As of May 6, 2026, the AI-chip company has a live roadshow, a fresh SEC filing, a proposed Nasdaq ticker and a real price range for public investors to evaluate.

The clean headline is this: Cerebras filed an amended S-1 on May 4, 2026 to sell 28 million Class A shares at an expected range of $115 to $125 per share, and the company says it has applied to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker CBRS. At the top of the range, the deal would raise about $3.5 billion before expenses and put Cerebras near a $26.6 billion market value, according to Reuters' May 4 report and TechCrunch's read of the same filing.

That makes Cerebras one of the most important AI infrastructure listings of 2026, but it also makes the due diligence harder. The company has real technology, real customers and real revenue growth. It also has customer concentration, unusual financing tied to OpenAI, export-control exposure and a profit line that looks better on the surface than the operating business underneath.

For TECHi readers already tracking the AI silicon race through AMD vs. Nvidia and the new AMD data-center earnings cycle, Cerebras is the public-market test of a different question: can a wafer-scale AI system become a serious investable platform, or is this IPO being priced like a perfect outcome before the proof is fully in?

The May 2026 IPO terms

Cerebras' May 4 preliminary prospectus says the company is offering 28 million Class A shares and expects the IPO price to land between $115 and $125 per share. The company also plans to grant underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to 4.2 million additional shares, a standard over-allotment structure that could increase the total number of shares sold if demand is strong.

The midpoint matters because it gives investors a cleaner way to size the deal. Cerebras estimates net proceeds of about $3.24 billion at a $120 midpoint after underwriting discounts, commissions and offering expenses, or about $3.73 billion if the underwriters exercise the option in full. The company says it plans to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, including working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditures, with about $230 million earmarked for tax withholding and remittance obligations tied to RSU settlement.

The banking group is large enough to signal a serious institutional book. Cerebras named Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS Investment Bank as lead book-running managers, with Mizuho and TD Cowen as bookrunners and a longer list of co-managers. That does not make the deal low risk, but it does mean this is not a quiet niche listing.

The registration statement is still preliminary. Cerebras' own IPO release says the registration statement has been filed but is not yet effective, and the SEC's investor bulletin on IPOs reminds investors that SEC effectiveness is not an endorsement of the company or the investment merits. Until the offering is declared effective and priced, CBRS is not a normal public stock that retail investors can buy on the open market.

Why this is Cerebras' second attempt

Cerebras first filed to go public in 2024, but the IPO became tied up in national-security scrutiny around Abu Dhabi-based G42. In the original 2024 S-1, Cerebras disclosed that G42 represented $119.1 million of revenue in the first half of 2024, or 87% of total revenue for that period. That concentration made the IPO story about more than chips; it made it about customer dependency, export controls and geopolitical risk.

TechCrunch reported in April 2026 that Cerebras' earlier IPO plan was delayed by a federal review of the Abu Dhabi-based G42 investment and was ultimately withdrawn. The new May 2026 filing does not erase that history, but it changes the center of gravity by putting OpenAI and AWS at the front of the growth story.

The updated prospectus still shows that concentration risk is not gone. Cerebras says G42 accounted for 24% of 2025 revenue and 85% of 2024 revenue, while Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence accounted for 62% of 2025 revenue. It also says OpenAI, G42, MBZUAI and AWS are significant customers or expected future customers whose negative demand changes could harm the business.

That is the first key point for investors: Cerebras has improved the story, but it has not turned into a diversified chip company overnight.

What Cerebras actually sells

Cerebras is not trying to build a slightly cheaper GPU. Its pitch is architectural. The company builds wafer-scale AI systems around the Wafer Scale Engine, a processor that keeps far more compute, memory and bandwidth on one very large piece of silicon instead of distributing work across many smaller chips.

The current flagship is WSE-3. Cerebras says WSE-3 has 4 trillion transistors, 900,000 AI-optimized cores, 44GB of on-chip SRAM and 125 petaflops of peak AI performance, and that the 5nm chip powers the CS-3 AI supercomputer. The same company release says CS-3 systems can be clustered up to 2,048 nodes and train models up to 24 trillion parameters.

That technical pitch matters because the AI market is splitting into workloads. Training frontier models is one market. Low-latency inference is another. Agentic coding, long reasoning, search and enterprise assistants often depend less on one benchmark score and more on how quickly a system can produce useful tokens back to the user. OpenAI makes that point directly in its Cerebras partnership announcement, saying low-latency compute can make AI responses faster and more natural across code, agents and other workloads.

Cerebras is therefore not just selling "anti-Nvidia" sentiment. It is selling a specialized system for customers that need speed, latency and token throughput. That is why the stock, if the IPO prices, should be analyzed beside Nvidia's broader AI platform rather than as a simple one-for-one replacement.

OpenAI is the center of the story

The biggest reason the 2026 IPO looks different from the 2024 attempt is OpenAI. In January, OpenAI said it was partnering with Cerebras to add 750MW of ultra-low-latency AI compute to its platform, with capacity coming online in multiple tranches through 2028. Cerebras' prospectus goes further, describing a multi-year OpenAI deal valued at more than $20 billion and saying the companies agreed to co-design future models for future Cerebras hardware.

That is powerful validation, but it also creates real dependency. The May S-1 says the Master Relationship Agreement with OpenAI represents a substantial portion of projected revenue over the next several years. It also says Cerebras must deliver capacity tranches across specified numbers of data centers and minimum capacity thresholds, and that OpenAI can terminate part or all of the agreement if Cerebras misses certain delivery or service obligations.

The financing around OpenAI is just as important. Cerebras disclosed a $1.0 billion working-capital loan from OpenAI that is tied to accelerating services, technology, manufacturing and buildout under the MRA. The filing also describes an OpenAI warrant covering 33,445,026 shares of Class N common stock at a $0.00001 exercise price, subject to vesting conditions.

That setup gives public investors both upside and risk. If Cerebras delivers, OpenAI could be the anchor customer that turns wafer-scale inference into a large cloud business. If Cerebras misses delivery milestones, the same agreement can become a pressure point.

AWS gives Cerebras a second hyperscaler channel....

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As always our interest is in the disclosures found in the filings rather than in the share flotation. 

As the old-timers used to say: The banks give you too much of the cold ones and not enough of the hot ones to make it pay to play the game.

Speaking of disclosures, there a new amendment to the S1 this morning: 

S-1/A1cerebras-sx1a2.htmS-1/A  

Capital Markets: "Monday Blues: US Negotiating Tactic or Ceasefire may End "

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:

News that the US rejected Iran’s counter-proposal is set the tone for today’s session. The dollar is mostly firmer, though the Canadian dollar and Norwegian krone are slightly firmer. Equities are mostly lower, yields, higher, alongside oil. Appreciating the seeming reluctance of the US to renew “kinetic” operations, the North American market may view the US position as predictable negotiation tactics.

This week, US Treasury Secretary Bessent is in Tokyo. He has indicated that the weak yen is on the agenda. President Trump will be in Beijing later this week. The Trump-Xi meeting is highlight, and we have argued to keep expectations modest. Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister continues to fight for high political future after Labour’s drubbing in last week’s local elections. His speech earlier today does not appear to have done the trick. Sterling and Gilts are lower than before the speech....

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United Arab Emirates Joins Svalbard Treaty

That's quite a ways away:

 

But I suppose that if China can call itself a "near-Arctic nation"* the UAE should be able to head for Svalbard (and the rumored undersea riches the Norwegians have been looking for). 

From The Barents Observer, April 7:

The Emirates joins Svalbard Treaty
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has officially joined the Svalbard Treaty, in a move said to strengthen the country’s role in Arctic science.

The Emirates News Agency (WAM) quoted Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdulla Balalaa as saying that the UAE’s accession to the treaty opens new avenues for scientific and environmental cooperation.

It is “enabling our scientists to contribute directly to global research initiatives at stations such as Ny-Ålesund — one of the northernmost permanent civilian research stations in the world,” Balalaa said.

“We will continue to expand our polar programmes and strengthen international partnerships that enhance climate resilience and serve future generations,” he added.

The Emirates is the 49th signatory to the 1920 Svalbard Treaty. The most recent countries to join prior to the UAE were Turkey in 2024, Serbia in 2022 (Yugoslavia acceded to the treaty in 1925), and North Korea in 2016.

The joining of the Svalbard Treaty comes after UAE's accession to the Antarctic Treaty in December 2024. The country's Foreign Ministry then said: "the UAE’s participation reflects its growing role in global environmental diplomacy and its commitment to multilateral processes that safeguard fragile ecosystems."...

....MUCH MORE
*If interested see:

September 2024 -Meanwhile, In The Arctic: "Svalbard-research becomes more important for China, professor says"

Regarding China in the Great White North:
"China’s Emerging Strategies in the Arctic"
"China’s Polar Strategy: An Emerging Gray Zone?"
"Pentagon warns of risk of Chinese submarines in the Arctic"
"Don't Fear China's Arctic Takeover"
"How To Avoid A Naval Cold War In The High North"
Natural Gas: "Chinese oilmen make big discovery in Russian Arctic waters"
"China opens bids for first nuclear-powered icebreaker"
China seeks a more active role in the Arctic

China defines itself as a near-Arctic state and says it will actively participate with wisdom and strength to future protection and development. Roger that, wisdom and strength, over.

Flashback, June 2018:

...On the other hand, if you read Xinhua's translation of January's "Full text: China's Arctic Policy" you'll note they call themselves a ‘Near-Arctic state’.
This is to counter people like me using the 'non-polar' or 'non-Arctic' phrasing.

Additionally China is couching their interest in terms of research:

States from outside the Arctic region do not have territorial sovereignty in the Arctic, but they do have rights in respect of scientific research, navigation, overflight, fishing, laying of submarine cables and pipelines in the high seas and other relevant sea areas in the Arctic Ocean, and rights to resource exploration and exploitation in the Area, pursuant to treaties such as UNCLOS and general international law. In addition, Contracting Parties to the Spitsbergen Treaty enjoy the liberty of access and entry to certain areas of the Arctic, the right under conditions of equality and, in accordance with law, to the exercise and practice of scientific research, production and commercial activities such as hunting, fishing, and mining in these areas....

Russia also has serious interest in the archipelago including the old coal mine, the undersea cables and access and egress into the Atlantic:

 

Russian Bastion Defence in relation to Norway and the Bear and GIUK Gaps. 

Source: Mikkola / RAND Europe report 

The Bear Gap is Svalbard - Bear Island - Norway while the GIUK Gap is Greenland - Iceland - Britain.

"Shipping giant MSC opens new trade route to bypass Hormuz disruption"

The first lesson of commodity trading (second lesson of ecology*): Humans are quite adaptable.

From EuroNews, May 11:

As tensions choke the Strait of Hormuz, Mediterranean Shipping Company races to keep global trade moving with new route.

Global container shipping giant, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), has announced a new Europe-Red Sea-Middle East express service, linking key European ports with Saudi Arabia and other regional hubs.

The announcement comes as companies across global supply chains respond to surging demand and mounting disruption across Middle Eastern trade routes as a result of the US-Iran conflict.

MSC said its new service will offer faster, more efficient, multimodal alternatives in an increasingly volatile maritime landscape.

Ships sailing from the Baltic sea and across Europe will be directly connected to Jordan’s Aqaba, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Port and Jeddah via the Suez Canal....

....MUCH MORE 

*The first lesson of ecology is: Everything is connected. 

As we saw in 2022 when MSC surpassed Maersk as the largest container shipping line, different business models require different assets. French standard bearer CNA CGN rounds out the top three. 

Chips: "AI’s Next Phase Plays Into TSMC’s Hands"

From the Wall Street Journal via MSN, May 11: 

Big tech companies are tripping over themselves to get as many chips as possible to secure AI supremacy. So much so that the world’s ability to make what they want is coming under growing strain.

Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Alphabet and Amazon.com collectively plan capital spending of $725 billion this year, much of it on artificial-intelligence chips. That bodes well for the makers of those chips, particularly the largest contract manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

The spotlight for chip investors has largely been elsewhere lately. Markets have recently blessed memory-chip manufacturers whose sales and prices have skyrocketed. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are also celebrating a shift within AI toward using autonomous agents where their central processors are increasingly important.

There is an argument, though, that nobody in the chip world is better positioned to reap the rewards of this new phase than TSMC. And despite all that, its stock doesn’t look expensive.

While the company doesn’t make memory chips, it is the go-to manufacturer for just about everything else—including Nvidia’s market-leading AI chips and Apple’s smartphone chips. It has already seen sales and profits soar over the past few years.

The strength of TSMC’s position is evident in the recent expansion of its gross margins. Those margins get fatter when sales grow faster than expenses, something that happens for TSMC when its factories are running closer to full blast.

High capacity utilization offsets the large fixed costs of maintaining chip factories. With demand soaring, the company’s gross margins climbed to around 66% in the first quarter, from roughly 59% a year before.

TSMC Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang told analysts last month that those margins will actually compress in the latter part of the year—but for good reason. The company is moving to high-volume production of its newest generation of cutting-edge chips, which it calls N2. Costs naturally go up during such ramp-up phases, then come down when production stabilizes....

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"Shall We Play a Game?" (from India with love)

Our second visit to Asterisk this weekend.

 From Asterisk Magazine, April 2026:

Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement.

Jon Peterson is an expert on the history of wargames, and the tabletop role-playing games that they spawned. His books include Playing at the World, on simulated combat from chess to Dungeons & Dragons, The Elusive Shift, on the evolution of role-playing, and Game Wizards, on the legal feuds that shaped the early history of D&D.

One of us (Clara) has spent more time than she’d like to admit at the gaming table. The other (Angela) has never filled out a character sheet in her life. But both of us are fascinated by what happens when we try to reduce the most violent and unpredictable of human actions down to a set of rules. In this interview, the three of us discuss how advances in statistics and cartography made wargaming possible, the journey from 18th century Prussian military officers to Midwestern hobbyists, how RAND played an instrumental role in the birth of D&D, and how little the core debates on game design have changed in the past 200 years. Have fun. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Umpires, topography, and dice

Angela Chen: I wanted to start by talking about the very early history of wargames. In your book Playing at the World, you write that an Indian game called chaturanga was the precursor to and inspiration for chess, which then developed into the first modern wargame. 

Jon Peterson: Right, and through India, chaturanga made it to the Arabic world. And when chess was introduced to Europe through the Iberian Peninsula and the Caliphate, it had a huge impact, first in Spain and then spreading to the remainder of Europe. People viewed the game as a means of studying statecraft, and so they saw it differently from other kinds of parlor games that were circulating at the time. 

Christoph Weickhmann writes about this in his 1664 book The Newly Invented Great Kings’ Game. He believed that games that were based on a board — based on being able to deploy units and manage them, and to engage in a competition that required you to understand different lines of attack— could help you become a better leader. 

But in these early games, you had very prescribed movements, so people questioned how useful it really was as an understanding of military tactics or grand strategy. And so a lot of people started proposing ways that you could improve the game of chess. People said, “let's get rid of all these confusing units and break this down to what the battlefields of Europe look like today. There's infantry, there's cavalry, there's artillery. Let's focus on trying to figure out ways to represent them, still using the basic concepts of chess, where there’s a board, there’s a grid.” 

So Johann Hellwig, who was educated in Brunswick in the late 18th century, was the one who first recommended a game like this for the instruction of the young who needed to learn how to be officers. He recommended playing a game that would be entertaining, but at the same time didactic.

Angela: At this point it’s still on a board. How did it develop from there?

Jon: Well, let’s talk about Georg Venturini first. Venturini really applied a scale to the map, which was not something you would find in Hellwig’s game. His map was still treated like a chessboard, but he was concerned about questions like: What distance is this square supposed to represent? How far does the soldier march in a day? And based on that, how many squares will a soldier march in the day in a realistic game? 

Clara Collier: The wargame variants that exist before Venturini sound a lot like combat in tactical turn-based video games that have squares on a grid. The squares can have different terrain — this one can be swampy, and it makes your unit slower, for example. But there's no sense of how that corresponds to real distances in space. 

Jon:  Quite accurate, yes. Venturini really wanted to create a scale as a tool that bound the setting of the game to its system.

Then the same principles determine how far artillery can fire. It becomes a question of, “based on how far we think the distance to the square is, how far can our guns fire?” And they calculated this before people actually had rifled barrels, so guns couldn't actually fire very far at all. Throughout the 19th century, as time went on, technological innovation required designers to revisit the principles of wargames and adjust for that. 

Angela: After Venturini, we get the elder Georg von Reisswitz and his son, who together  invented the first modern wargame, the Kriegsspiel. It sounds like there were a few key conceptual leaps between Hellwig’s and Venturini’s games and what the Reisswitzes developed....

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May 8 at Asterisk - "Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything?"

Understanding Chicago

From the Daily Kos, August 26, 2012:

WARD HEELERS

I think the curtain came down on Chicago's innocence just after five on Monday afternoon, November 27, 1905. That was when 38 year old Marshall Field Jr, the eldest son of Marshal Field and heir to $150 millions (about $10 billion today), died at Chicago’s Mercy hospital. He had been admitted five days earlier with a gunshot wound to the abdomen, and now he was dead. And there has never been a good explanation as to just how he had been shot.

The official story was that while in his bedroom that morning Marshall (above) had been cleaning his gun, dropped it and the gun had gone off. The butler and a nurse said they had immediately rushed to his aide. But a reporter for the Daily News tried to replicate the accident with an identical weapon, but it refused to discharge. The papers were afraid of losing advertising from the Marshall Field Department stores, the largest retail chain in America, so the public questions stopped there - for the time being.
*
The Field’s mansions, father’s and son’s, stood next to each other on “Millionaires Row” - Prairie Avenue on Chicago’s south side. The row was home to Pullman, Armour, Sears, and the Fields. In fact 70 of the most powerful families in America lived within a square mile of each other on Chicago's south side, and this was not a place usually visited by public scandal. After the funeral, Marshall’s widow and three children moved in with his father. But it stood no chance of being a happy home. The very next year the elder Field died of pneumonia, and the widow returned to her native England, leaving behind an open wound - caused, many believed, by a section of Chicago called the Levee
*
Less than a half mile from the Field mansions, the Levee District was home to sin and vice of unsurpassed depravity and popularity. It was bordered by 18th street on the north, 23rd street on the south, South Clark on the west and South Wabash Avenue on the east. And at its immoral center was the Everleigh Club.
*
For eight years Ada and Minna Everleigh were “Queens of the Levee”, running one of the most popular brothels in the Chicago. Minna (right) famously greeted each customer with a delightfully wicked, “How’s my boy?”
*
Their thirty girls catered to an upscale clientele, charging $50 just to get in the front door of 2131-2133 South Dearborn. Once inside the plush parlor, extras were extra. It was common knowledge that for years Marshall Field Jr. had been a regular at the Everleigh Club, and the rumor was that Marshall had been shot at the club by one of the girls, or had shot himself because he was being blackmailed by one of the "ladies". Those kinds of things were not unheard of in The Levee.
*
To the south of the Club was Ed Weiss’s bawdy house, "The Capital", and to the north was "The Sapphro", run by his brother Lou Weiss. In fact, jammed into the Levee were dozens of such houses of prostitution; Dago Franks, French Em’s, Old 92, and in direct cutthroat competition with the Everleigh sisters was Madam Vic Shaw’s house at Dearborn and Cullerton. In between the whore houses were opium dens, cocaine factories, gambling joints, peep shows and bars - lots and lots of bars.
*
Ringmasters of this sin circus, the Princes of the Levee, were two men; the big, blustery city alderman, John J. Coughlin, and his diminutive doppelganger, Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna.
*
The gimlet eyed “Hinky Dink” (above) received his nickname because he stood just 5 feet tall. He was normally “…glum and quietly dressed”, and usually chewing on a cigar. He was a teetotaler, and his wife was a temperance worker. He also was an Alderman, as well as owning and operating several bars and gambling houses in the Levee, the most famous of which was The Workingman’s Exchange on Clark Street.
*
Here barflies, bums, tramps and the homeless could find beer for a nickel, a free lunch and, come election day, a job as a “repeater”, for this was where politics and vice crossed paths. Given pre-marked ballots by “Ward Heelers” who walked the district, these "repeaters" spread out to various polling places, where they would trade their pre-marked ballots for blanks. They then returned to "The Exchange" and handed in their blanks for a payment of fifty cents each. While they drank a free beer, their new ballots would be marked and the game would go another round. In twenty years neither "Hinky Dink" nor "Bathhouse" John Coughlin ever lost an election.
*
“Bathhouse” earned his nickname because he worked as an attendant at a bath house, a Levee euphemism for a gambling joint. Coughlin was over sized and overdressed and prone to outbursts of poetry, such as his infamous “She sleeps by the Drainage Canal” and “Why did they build the lovely lake so close to the horrible shore?” His typical “Signs of Spring “concluded, “There are many other signs of spring which come by wireless wire; One of which is Yours Sincerely, who is tuning up his lyre. Just to twang a song to nature 'bout the brooks and fields of green; O, I wonder if I'm understood; I wonder, yes, I ween.”
*
One of Chicago’s mayors asked Hinky Dink if Bathhouse was just crazy or a drug addict. Hinky Dink replied, “To tell you the god’s truth, Mayor, they ain’t found a name for it yet.” These two men had a genius for skimming protection money from the Levee. Their enforcement arm was the Chicago Police, and in addition to their weekly take of up to a thousand dollars per establishment, they sold tickets to the annual First Ward Ball. In the words of one web site, “Every employee of a house of ill-repute or gambling den, every robber, pickpocket, safe-cracker, and streetwalker, and every bartender, bawdy house entertainer, and low groggery proprietor, all were required to buy tickets…”
*
The Ball was held each December, and Ike Bloom, owner of “Freiberg’s Dance Hall”, was responsible for selling the tickets. Ike was half clown and half cold blooded killer, whose club was “the most notorious place in Chicago”, which was quite a charge, considering Chicago....

....MUCH MORE 

"Here's Why Mercedes-Benz's Armored S-Class Guard Still Has a V-12"

Possibly of use for some of our readers. 

From Road & Track, May 6:

Want a non-Maybach S-Class with more than eight cylinders? It might finally be time for you to buy an armored car.

 The Mercedes-Benz S-Class is still a standard-bearer for full-sized luxury, but the V-12 that once sat at the top of the range is no longer available under the hood of either conventional or AMG-branded models. Most buyers who want a V-12 will have to spring for the Maybach S, which preserved the engine in part because American owners love it. A few very special customers will get the same engine another way, though: Mercedes-Benz also builds armored S-Classes, and the latest car in the S-Class Guard line still packs a V-12.

Mercedes-Benz Guard representative Saša Zejnić tells Road & Track that the V-12 was selected because the car is designed for "different use cases," most importantly "guaranteeing the highest protection level and also making the car move from A to B without any kind of [complication.]" 

The V-12 in the Guard produces 603 hp and 612 lb-ft of torque. That may be well under the 791 hp produced by the plug-in hybrid S63 E-Performance, but the armored S gets to a healthy number without the added weight and complexity that comes in a plug-in hybrid. Given that the S-Class Guard roughly weighs more than 9500 pounds, the savings could be enough to keep the car from the dubi0us honor of a fifth digit in Imperial measurements.

Cutting out the battery also cuts out a potential point of failure in case of the sort of emergency that requires an armored limousine in the first place....

....MUCH MORE, including armored alternatives 

As noted in 2014's "Jim Grant is (still) bullish on Russia, gold and private equity": 

He's gone from serious analyst to...I don't know what. Gold's going lower and Russia is Russia, where people with an actual understanding of the place travel in armored Mercedes limos and have a hidey-hole in London. 

Iran Detains Tanker Hauling Iranian Oil

From gCaptain, May 8:

Iran Detains ‘Ocean Koi’ Tanker Apparently Hauling Iranian Oil 

 Iran said it seized a tanker in the Gulf of Oman, which appeared to be a sanctioned vessel carrying the Islamic Republic’s own oil.

“During a special operation, naval commandos of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Army detained the violating oil tanker Ocean Koi,” state television reported, saying the vessel was “attempting to disrupt oil exports and the interests of the Iranian nation.” The tanker appears to be managed by a Chinese company, according to a shipping database.  

The state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said that the tanker was carrying Iranian oil, but that it had sought to “exploit regional conditions,” without elaborating. 

Benchmark oil prices in London showed little reaction to the tanker seizure, trading little changed as of 1 p.m. in London....

....MUCH MORE

Also at gCaptain:

China Confirms Attack on Oil Tanker in Strait of Hormuz Earlier This Week 

AI: "DeepSeek to soon close first external fundraising in US$50b valuation: sources"

Talk about "Socialism with Chinese characteristics".  

From the South China Morning Post, May 8/9:

Backers include AI-focused affiliates under the third phase of the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, sources say 

Chinese artificial intelligence high-flier DeepSeek is expected to close its first external financing round soon, boosting its valuation to up to US$50 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter, as the country’s marquee state-backed investment vehicle joins in bankrolling what is seen as a national technology champion.

The round was being backed by a group of state-linked investors, including AI-focused affiliates under the third phase of the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, known as the “Big Fund III”, the people said, requesting anonymity because the information is private.

Global investment firm Hillhouse was also involved in the funding discussions, the people said. Shenzhen-based video gaming and social media giant Tencent Holdings took part in the round too, they added. The final valuation could still change as talks were ongoing, they said.

DeepSeek, the Big Fund III, and Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Hillhouse spokesman said the firm was not making an investment in DeepSeek.

The latest valuation – five times the initial US$10 billion value local media outlets reported last month when the Hangzhou-based frontier AI lab started the funding round – reflects the interest of some of China’s largest state-backed investors and underscores the company’s growing importance in the intensifying race between the US and China for AI leadership.

Sources told the South China Morning Post earlier that DeepSeek was prioritising state-backed and industrial investors, including local government guidance funds and affiliated platforms, in its first financing round, favouring those that could provide strategic resources such as AI infrastructure over those that could only offer capital....

....MUCH MORE

Also at the SCMP: 

Chinese health authority says no need to worry about latest hantavirus outbreak 

"AI in fraud detection and compliance"

False positives and other challenges plus a bonus look at the Caravaggio we saw in "Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything?". 

From Arpit Gupta's Arpitrage substack, Apr 05:

Finding Needles in Haystacks 

This is the fifth week of my course summaries from teaching AI in Finance at NYU Stern (see lecture slides here; and last week’s summary here). This week focuses on fraud detection and compliance, which are two critical growth areas for AI applications.

The Base Rate Problem

Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps

We start off this week with Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps, which features a young man being cheated at cards through an accomplice looking at the cards signaling to his partner who has a few cards tucked behind their belt. I like this painting because it features all the everlasting elements of fraud: asymmetric information, coordination among bad actors, and the innocent mark. Fraud and financial crimes have since drastically shifted through scale and ease of execution through technology. Consumers report $12.5 billion in fraud to the FTC; global reported payment card fraud is maybe $30 billion a year; and global compliance costs on financial crimes is about $60 billion a year.

The core technical problem in fraud detection is the base rate problem. Despite the absolute magnitude of fraud, it’s quite rare in any given transaction, say less than 0.1%.

This means that the most “accurate” fraud detection algorithm is always going to be the classifier which tags all transactions as legitimate. It’s going to be 99.9%+ accurate! But this would be a terrible algorithm to deploy because failing to tag anything as fraudulent will be an open invitation for more crimes.

This is the fundamental tradeoff at the heart of fraud detection. Tightening the rules to capture more fraud (lowering false negatives, Type II errors) inevitably means flagging more legitimate transactions as fraudulent (raising false positive, Type 1 errors). These errors have complicated costs which vary based on contexts. Customers really dislike false positives, so tagging more fraud may lead to more customer churn. But letting real fraud through can also lead to huge losses, regulatory penalties, and reputational costs.

Beneish and Vorst have a nice paper illustrating this tradeoff using a range of fraud prediction models. Even the best models they consider have false positive rates in excess of 100:1, meaning that they tag 100 legitimate transactions as fraudulent for every one true fraud they capture. These tradeoffs are so bad they estimate it’s generally not cost effective to even adopt the fraud detection models.

From Rules to Representation

The broader history of fraud detection is similar to other areas of AI deployment in finance, particularly risk management which we had discussed in week 3. Prior to the 1990s we typically had manual review, which was expensive and slow to scale. From the 1990s and 2000s we had rule-based systems which were more scalable, but rigid and easy to game. The 2010s brought supervised ML techniques, such as random forests, which brought in labeled data to let the model learn about fraud drivers in more adaptable ways.

The impact of AI here has been to move towards richer representations of transaction data in ways that allow for more sophisticated analysis of fraudulent patterns of behavior. Purda and Skillicorn for instance show how even simple bag of words applied to the management discussions of financial reports can distinguish fraudulent from truthful filings. This shows that deceptive language carries detectable statistical signatures in word patterns which can be carefully mined for detection....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously with Professor Gupta:

"The End of Market Intelligence and the Last Analyst"

And on Caravaggio, we've actually we've seen "The Cardsharps" a few times as well as other visits to the master:

October 2017 - Turns out there’s a bit of Caravaggio in artificial intelligence.

Which backlinks to some earlier posts:

"The Case of the Mafia and the Stolen Caravaggio" 
Finance and Art: "When the Caravaggio No One Thinks Is a Caravaggio Becomes the Basis of an Asset Swap"
Questions America Is Asking: "Is there a €120m Caravaggio in your roof?"
Art: "Caravaggio and the Experts: Science v. Connoisseurs"
Banking: Ducats for Caravaggio, The Genoa Connection and Medici Moolah
UPDATE: "Villa Aurora: Rome property fails to sell for €471m at auction"
Following up on December's "Attention Art Fans: Large Caravaggio For Sale, Asking $552 Million".

"AI Chipmaker Cerebras Is Said to Plan Raising IPO Price Range"

From Bloomberg, May 8:

Cerebras Systems Inc. is set to increase the price range of its initial public offering as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, as demand for the artificial intelligence chipmaker’s shares continues to build.

The company expects to raise the price range to $125 to $135 per share, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. The IPO has drawn orders for more than 20 times the number of shares available, the people said.

Cerebras is currently seeking to raise $3.5 billion and is marketing 28 million shares for $115 to $125 each, its filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission show.

Deliberations are ongoing, details of the IPO could still change and the price range could increase further, the people said. A representative for Cerebras declined to comment.

The increase comes as Cerebras looks to manage the surging interest in its upcoming listing, which is set to price May 13. Cerebras is telling institutional investors placing IPO orders to specify the number of shares and the maximum price they’re willing to pay, in order to gauge the true level of demand, people familiar with the matter have said.

Read More: Cerebras Requires Limit Orders From IPO Buyers as Demand Grows

Cerebras’ listing would be this year’s biggest US IPO so far, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The banks already received indications of interest from investors for more than $10 billion of shares before formal marketing began early Monday, Bloomberg News reported earlier....

....MORE 

And we'll be back with more on Cerebras on Monday. 

In the meantime, if interested see:

January 15 - Chips As Big As Your Head: Cerebras Does Deal With OpenAI For $10 Billion+ In Computing Power 

That's our usual description of Cerebras. Where Nvidia uses smaller chips with ultrafast connections, Cerebras users the whole silicon wafer and eliminates the need for many of the connections completely.

February 9 - Chips: "Cerebras Raises $1 Billion in Funding at $23 Billion Value"

April 20 -  Chips as Big as Your Head: "Breaking down AI chipmaker Cerebras’ S-1" 

"China Moves Beyond QR Codes to 'Face Economy' as Facial Recognition Expands into Healthcare, Transportation, and Agriculture"

From BigGo Finance, May 7:

China's digital economy is evolving from a QR code-based society into a "Face Economy." Facial recognition technology, capable of identifying one person among 1.4 billion in about three seconds, is spreading across sectors including healthcare, transportation, tourism, and agriculture. The National Healthcare Security Administration is promoting a facial-recognition-based medical insurance payment system. A smart elderly care center in Beijing uses facial recognition to measure health indicators and assist in early Alzheimer's diagnosis. Major train stations in Guangzhou and Wuhan have introduced facial recognition boarding systems, and the technology is also expanding into automotive and agricultural industries. However, concerns over biometric data leaks and excessive tracking of personal information have emerged. China's government last year issued the "Facial Recognition Technology Application Security Management Measures" to regulate the space. 

China's digital economy is rapidly evolving beyond the era of QR code payments into a "Face Economy." Facial recognition infrastructure, which allows individuals to verify their identity, make payments, enter buildings, and settle medical bills simply by looking at a camera without pulling out a smartphone, is spreading across healthcare, transportation, tourism, and agriculture.

According to industry sources on Thursday, facial recognition technology in China can identify a single person among the country's 1.4 billion population in about three seconds. The recognition accuracy exceeds 99%, reaching a level that can distinguish between twins. Deep learning algorithms can compensate in real-time for factors like masks, glasses, and even subtle changes from cosmetic surgery or aging.

The fastest-growing area is healthcare. Starting this year, China's National Healthcare Security Administration is promoting a medical insurance payment system that combines facial recognition, QR codes, mobile payments, and credit payments. The facial payment method allows users to authenticate themselves and settle medical expenses simultaneously simply by scanning their face at a terminal, eliminating the need for a physical medical insurance card or smartphone. The administration views this system as particularly useful for elderly people who are not familiar with smartphone operations.

A smart elderly care center in Beijing uses high-resolution cameras to identify seniors' faces. The system then detects subtle changes in blood flow on the facial surface to measure health indicators such as anemia risk, blood oxygen levels, and sleep quality. This system is used as a preliminary screening tool to identify early signs of Alzheimer's disease and to compare past and present health data.

Facial recognition has also become routine in transportation. Passengers pre-register with their real names and can pay their fares by scanning their faces at the ticket gates. The facial-recognition-based boarding system is spreading, particularly at major train stations in cities like Guangzhou and Wuhan....

....MUCH MORE 

"Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War"

From the London Review of Books, April 24:

In the 1990s,​ high-quality counterfeit $100 bills began to appear around the world. The United States Secret Service, the agency responsible for investigating fraudulent currency, claimed that these ‘supernotes’ were printed in North Korea, though it wasn’t clear how the intaglio printer, cotton-linen paper and colour-shifting ink had ended up there. Even so, numerous clues pointed in that direction. In 1996, Yoshimi Tanaka, a former member of the Japanese Red Army Faction, was arrested in Cambodia for distributing supernotes in Thailand. Twenty-six years earlier, he had helped hijack Japan Airlines Flight 351, diverting it to North Korea, where he and his co-conspirators – including Moriaki Wakabayashi, bassist with the cult psychedelic rock band Les Rallizes Dénudés – defected; several of them lived for decades in a compound outside Pyongyang. In 2005, the leader of the Irish Workers’ Party, Seán Garland, who had long cultivated ties to the Korean Workers’ Party, was arrested for allegedly purchasing supernotes from North Korean nationals (he was never extradited and so never stood trial). Around the same time, smugglers in California were indicted on charges of importing millions of dollars’ worth of these notes, as well as more than a billion counterfeit Marlboro and Newport cigarettes and quantities of phony Viagra. The fake dollars had apparently been purchased from North Korean officials by a Macanese judoka called Jimmy Horng and a Taiwanese national called Wilson Liu, who laundered them in slot machines at Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas.

Weeks after one of the smuggling rings was broken up – its leaders were lured by undercover FBI agents to a fake mafia wedding in New Jersey – the US Treasury tried out a new type of economic warfare against North Korea. It targeted Banco Delta Ásia, a relatively small bank in Macau that was accused of facilitating North Korea’s trade in counterfeit money, cigarettes and narcotics, which the regime was thought to rely on to pay for its ballistic missile and nuclear programmes. By labelling Banco Delta Ásia a money launderer, the US Treasury could prevent American banks from dealing with it. Also, any foreign bank that transacted with it would be cut off from the US financial system, blocking easy access to the US dollar and making it difficult to execute payments across national borders. Most banks in Asia ditched Banco Delta Ásia and the Macau government froze $25 million of North Korean holdings. Kim Jong-Il’s regime duly withdrew from nuclear talks and the following year North Korea tested its first nuclear device. Sanctions did little to prevent this; they may have had the opposite effect. But by exploiting foreign dependence on the dollar, the US government had shown that it too had a powerful new weapon.

[Climateer here: that's a rather robust pair of opening paragraphs]

Economic blockades are not new. The Peloponnesian War was triggered by one in the fifth century BCE; the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 after closing the Bosphorus. But targeted sanctions as a tool of peacetime foreign policy are a more recent innovation. In the aftermath of the First World War, liberal internationalists such as President Woodrow Wilson promoted them as a ‘peaceful, silent, deadly’ means of bending a rival’s will. Their first major test came with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The failure of the League of Nations’ sanctions to prevent Mussolini’s occupation of Addis Ababa ruined the League’s reputation as an instrument of collective security. In 1941, Japan attempted to break free of a tightening US embargo by attacking Pearl Harbor. During the Cold War, embargoes became Washington’s favoured method of confronting communist countries while avoiding nuclear war; the embargoes implemented against North Korea in 1950 and Cuba in 1960 are still in force. From the 1970s, sanctions were used, frequently with the authorisation of the United Nations, to punish human rights violators and arms traffickers, to compel democratisation and to end apartheid in South Africa. They were generally more successful at impoverishing and weakening their targets than in forcing major changes to their behaviour or bringing about regime change. This was certainly true of the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War of 1990-91, which did little to dislodge Saddam Hussein but caused a humanitarian crisis that sparked a global backlash (the first protests I joined were roadside anti-sanctions rallies in a New England town in the late 1990s). There was a growing sense in Washington that the success rate of sanctions did not justify their cost. In the case of Iraq, as it turned out, Plan B was invasion.

The disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made sanctions again seem a better alternative and their use rose dramatically. They have also grown more powerful, focusing on what Edward Fishman in his new study describes as one of the key ‘chokepoints’ in the world economy: control of the US dollar. Maritime trade has always had to negotiate geographic bottlenecks: the Suez Canal, for example, or the Malacca Strait or the Strait of Hormuz. Controlling these narrow passages, through which large volumes of trade pass, confers significant strategic advantages. Yet by the early 2000s, access to the dollar – used in around 90 per cent of foreign exchange transactions and accounting for roughly 70 per cent of foreign exchange reserves worldwide – seemed to offer even greater leverage.

As Fishman explains, US officials came to this view after 11 September 2001. The US Treasury lost most of its national security functions to the Department of Homeland Security, established late in 2002, but it had unexpectedly been given new powers by the Patriot Act, a law rushed through Congress weeks after 9/11 which dramatically increased the state’s capacities to carry out surveillance and policing, as well as expanding the definition of terrorism. The Act’s anti-laundering measures, originally aimed at terrorists’ bank accounts, were soon applied to unfriendly states as well.

After North Korea, the US’s next target was Iran, which had been under sanctions since the 1979 hostage crisis, though they had done little to curb the growth of the country’s oil industry or its regional ambitions. In 1996, near the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, Congress passed a law threatening the imposition of heavy penalties on foreign companies that did business in Iran, such as European oil producers like France’s Total, soon to be a major investor in the development of the South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf. These ‘secondary sanctions’ meant that third parties transacting legally with Iranian entities now faced being penalised by the US. The sanctions extended the reach of the US state far beyond its legal jurisdiction, and sparked a huge backlash in Europe; the EU prohibited European firms from complying with them. Clinton backed down.

In 2005, under George W. Bush, US efforts to isolate Iran from the world economy were renewed after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative former mayor of Tehran, who alarmed Western observers with his messianic speeches and efforts to accelerate Iranian nuclear enrichment. In 2006, a Treasury lawyer called Stuart Levey, drawing on the personal connections of his boss, Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs), met with the heads of the world’s largest banks to warn them to cut ties with Iran. This again proved very unpopular: ‘You fucking Americans,’ one senior executive at the British bank Standard Chartered apparently responded. ‘Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?’ But ultimately what mattered was the bottom line: for almost everyone, the risk of huge fines or of losing access to US banking services outweighed the benefits of trading with Iran. Nearly every major bank complied.

Despite all this, Iran continued to make huge profits on energy exports. After Barack Obama came to office in 2009, Congress agreed, in a rare bipartisan moment, that the US should enforce secondary sanctions. The mere threat led European companies such as Eni, Shell, Statoil and Total to quit Iran, ceding ground to Chinese rivals which ensured that the oil kept flowing. The fact that the global oil trade has long been invoiced almost exclusively in US dollars meant that no European companies were willing to risk being cut off from the US correspondent banking system, a crucial intermediary in facilitating international dollar transactions. But blocking Iranian oil exports was politically fraught. One likely consequence was soaring oil prices – some predicted they could rise to more than $200 a barrel. And prices were already high: after bottoming out in the wake of the financial crisis, they had been driven up by demand from China and other emerging market economies, and accelerated by the Libyan uprising and civil war early in 2011. Facing a re-election campaign in 2012, Obama opposed any further disruption to global oil supplies, even as members of the Treasury plotted how to blacklist the last Iranian financial institution with access to the US dollar: the central bank. Doing this would make it very difficult for Iranian exporters to be paid, but it also risked pushing energy prices so high that they would spark what one Treasury official called a ‘nuclear winter recession’. Despite opposition from the White House, two senators – Mark Kirk, a Republican, and Robert Menendez, a Democrat (currently serving a federal prison sentence on corruption charges) – demanded sanctions on Iran’s central bank, winning unanimous Senate approval. A few months later, Congress also authorised sanctioning Swift, the Brussels-based financial messaging platform used by nearly every bank in the world to communicate international money transfers, if it didn’t stop all business with Iranian entities. It did so, further imperilling the ability of Iranian banks to make international transactions. By early 2012, Iran had been all but cut off from the dollar.

The effects were immediate. During 2012, the Iranian rial collapsed as oil revenues plummeted by nearly 30 per cent. The prices of staple foodstuffs soared, in some cases doubling in one year. This economic crisis developed just before the presidential elections of June 2013, when Hassan Rouhani, running for the technocratic Moderation and Development Party, was elected on a promise to bargain Iran’s nuclear programme for sanctions relief. Iran’s presidents are not mere figureheads, though their freedom of action is constrained by the supreme leader, and only a limited number of candidates, approved by the Guardian Council, are allowed on the ballot. Even so, the choice of Rouhani was a departure. One of his first acts in office was to tap the well-connected diplomat Mohammad Javad Zarif – who studied for a PhD in international law and policy in the US – to lead talks on sanctions relief....

....MUCH MORE 

From the Author's LRB mini-bio:

Jamie Martin

---

Jamie Martin teaches history at Harvard and is the author of The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire and the Birth of Global Economic Governance. He is writing a book about the economic consequences of the First World War. 

More by this contributor

Kettle of Vultures: A History of Interest 
16 November 2023

A Company of Merchants: The Bank of England 
24 January 2019

Nudged: Nudge Theory 
27 July 2017 

AI Use Case: "Meet Rachel: the AI agent that phoned 3,000 pubs to price a pint"

From Tech,eu, March 20:

After Ireland stopped tracking pint prices 14 years ago, one AI engineer built a voice agent to call thousands of pubs—creating a live dataset of Guinness prices across the country. 

Over Paddy's weekend 2026, a friendly Northern Irish "woman" called Rachel rang more than 3,000 pubs across all 32 counties to find out the price of a pint of Guinness. Over 1,000 gave a price.

 Only a handful seemed to realise Rachel was an AI voice agent. 

A data gap 14 years in the making 
Ireland’s Central Statistics Office stopped tracking pint prices 14 years ago, leaving no comprehensive dataset since.

In response, Matt Cortland created the “Guinndex,” using AI to rapidly collect and analyse pint prices across Ireland, where costs have become increasingly inconsistent.

The result is what he claims is the most complete index of pint prices to date—an effort to bring transparency and potentially help normalise the price of a Guinness.

From pub owner to AI engineer 
Matt Cortland is an American AI engineer based in London who previously lived in Ireland for several years. A former US-Ireland Alliance Scholar (George Mitchell Scholarship), he holds a Master’s degree in Creative Digital Media from TU Dublin (formerly DIT). Earlier in his career, he founded and operated a global pub and entertainment company spanning Ireland, the UK, and the US, including a chain of IoT-enabled “wizard bars” where he created working magic wands. He has since transitioned into AI engineering and private consulting, developing his own AI projects while building AI products and tooling for companies, several of which are based in Dublin.

"I'm a former pub and bar owner, so I know what it's like to be on the other end of customer pricing calls," said Cortland.

"But I also know what it's like to be on the consumer end and paying a kidney for a pint. I apologise to everyone I tortured over Paddy's weekend. Rachel just wanted a wee drink."

Designing a believable pub caller 
Cortland named the AI agent “Rachel” and trained her to be friendly, direct, and—if questioned—transparent. She explains she’s “putting together a wee price comparison list” and confirms she is an AI if asked....

....MUCH MORE 

AI: "Are we just 18 months away from everything changing?"

The teaser snippet from  James Pethokoukis' Faster Please substack, May 7:

The evidence for recursive AI self-improvement is real. So are the bottlenecks 

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

The road to the Singularity is paved with evermore capable code. (Here, I define the Singularity as a period of utterly transformative economic growth so rapid that the intuitions of standard economics begin to crumble.) Artificial intelligence systems are already highly capable coding assistants. Autonomous engineering agents capable of running experiments, debugging models, and optimizing chips—with limited human supervision—are now emerging and delivering real-world results for at least some business.

Next steps: These systems increasingly turn their attention to AI research itself, each generation helping build the next more quickly than the last. The feedback loop of “recursive self improvement” continues: Better AI begets better AI. No single “Eureka!” breakthrough is required—just compounding acceleration until the tempo of progress becomes difficult to calculate or even comprehend for us carbon-based units.

So where are we on this road, exactly? Is the Singularity still science fiction, or something serious people, such as Washington policymakers, now have to reckon with?

April 26 - U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent On A.I.: "'a year, maybe 18 months,' before the new technology defines our lives across the board."

"Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything?"

From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 14:

We all know they’re casinos. It’s time to look at the data behind the froth.

In 2007, Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow, Daniel Kahneman, and other notable scholars published a statement arguing that prediction markets could “substantially improve public and private decision-making.” The theoretical foundations were deep. 

Friedrich Hayek had argued in 1945 that markets aggregate dispersed, local, and tacit knowledge through the price system better than any central planner. In 2000, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson proposed a system he called futarchy, in which markets would be used to evaluate whether policies deliver on promises. Seventeen years later, Philip Tetlock, Barbara Mellers, and Peter Scoblic were championing forecasting tournaments as a way to generate useful policy knowledge for the intelligence community and to depolarize political debates. 

Institutions including Google, Microsoft, the CIA, the wider U.S. intelligence community, and British government intelligence analysts have all experimented with internal prediction markets. Some of these trials were more successful than others, but all were small. And we know, from both theory and practice, that more bettors make markets more accurate. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, likes to call prediction markets “information markets,” and the bettors the “suppliers” of the information. 

For decades, prediction market optimists — and I count myself among them — have argued that once we build better markets and increase the supply of bettors, accuracy will improve, and we’ll all be able to benefit from a new level of societal foresight.

Now, in 2026, public prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi transact billions of dollars in volume each month. The vast majority of these bets are not on questions that might produce useful information. Roughly 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume (dollars exchanging hands between bettors) is from sports betting, making Kalshi effectively a sports gambling website with a small prediction market attached. I find that over 80% of the trading volume on Polymarket is concentrated on sports, cryptocurrency prices, or election betting.¹

Much ink has been spilled on the negatives — such as gambling addiction and insider trading — of the growing popularity of these markets. But what of their promise? Are they producing valuable information and making humanity wiser?

Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, 1594.

Demand, demand, demand 
To understand how useful this supply of forecasts is, and whether the forecasts really are delivering on the vision of the progenitors of prediction markets, we need to think about another factor: demand. 

It is entirely conceivable that prediction markets are only being used by bettors themselves. But if individuals, firms, media, and policymakers want (or need) the predictions we see on these markets, this evidence of demand can be used as a proxy for their usefulness. Vitalik Buterin, creator of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, summarized in Info Finance this dual nature of prediction markets: “If you are a bettor, then you can deposit to Polymarket, and for you it's a betting site. If you are not a bettor, then you can read the charts, and for you it's a news site.” 

I’ve thought hard about how to sell prediction markets to consumers. In 2020, I created Google’s current internal prediction market. Since then, I’ve served as the CTO of Metaculus, a non-market-based crowd-forecasting website, and now run FutureSearch, a startup that provides AI forecasters and researchers. In my work, I’ve found that the benefits of prediction markets fall into five different categories. 

First, markets can provide risk monitoring. I learned about COVID-19 in February 2020 from Metaculus, causing me to cancel a planned trip that would have left me stranded. 

Second, they can help with interpreting news, showing whether, and how much, a current event might affect larger outcomes. For example, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the 2026 Iran war led to an increase (from ~25% to ~35%) in the forecasted chance of a 2026 US recession due to the spike in oil prices.

Third, they can inform planning around policy outcomes, such as whether TikTok will be banned in the US.²

Fourth, they could create accountability for claims made by political or business leaders. For example, in June 2025, when President Trump said he was contemplating a strike on Iran’s nuclear program, many Middle East experts dismissed the prospect, according to an article from the Council on Foreign Relations. Yet, per CFR, prediction markets gave a 58% chance of strikes that week, and we later learned that seven B-2 stealth bombers were then on-route.

Fifth, they could produce novel information, allowing traders to discover or track things others don’t, such as when major AI milestones will be reached.³

Now let’s see whether the billions wagered on markets each month are supplying these five forms of useful information....

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