Policy

Hey, remember that weird trade The Financial Times highlighted? The one about oil? Paul Krugman doesn’t like it — nor does he like the weird Venezuela trade or the one about death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I’ve written here about how ill-prepared the CFTC is for insider trading cases. Krugman has a solution: call some of it treason and let the FBI — well, the post-Kash Patel FBI — sort it out.

Bills like California’s Digital Age Assurance Act will require operating systems to confirm their users’ ages, but the developers of the privacy-focused Android fork said in a post on X on Friday that they’re not planning to age-gate their operating system:

Last week, Michael Smith pleaded guilty to creating hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and then using bots to stream the songs “billions” of times. The scheme allowed Smith to earn over $8 million in royalties, according to the DOJ.

The former FBI head and special counsel passed away on Friday at the age of 81. Mueller had been a persistent thorn in the side of President Trump, who quickly took to Truth Social to declare, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” The New York Times has a lengthy obituary recapping his life and storied and, at times, controversial career:

The convicted crypto exec has been heaping praise on the president from behind bars. Most recently, posting on X through intermediaries that “Operation Epic Fury is working,” and backing Donald Trump’s war on Iran. According to CoinDesk:

Everyone was a bit caught off guard when the DOJ settled its antitrust suit against Live Nation. There was speculation that Donald Trump intervened to push for a settlement. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that was indeed the case:

The New York Times sued over the Pentagon’s more stringent policies late last year, and following today’s ruling, the Pentagon has been ordered to restore press passes for seven NYT journalists.

As reported in a big piece by The Washington Post:

A Nevada judge has issued a temporary restraining order, saying the company can’t operate without first getting a gaming license. This is an escalation of a turf war between the states and the CFTC over who regulates prediction markets.

And the headline of the essay in which this happens asks if he should be burned at the stake. Father Paolo Benanti, the Papal AI advisor, doesn’t seem too pleased about Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, which Thiel has brazenly brought to Rome. “La Silicon Valley s’était lancée dans un coup d’État permanent.” I don’t think you need to know French to get the gist of that. one, but linked below is a summary of the essay. Make auto-da-fe great again??

As energy prices soar, Trump’s systematic pivot away from solar and wind in favor of big-beautiful fossil fuels is looking dumber than Brendan Carr. Spain invested heavily in renewables and France went nuclear to reduce its dependence on dinojuice. Both are expected to weather the latest energy crisis better than more oil-dependent neighbors, with Europe as a whole fairing better overall thanks to continued investment in solar panels and wind turbines.

Last year, content moderators who’ve risked consequences like PTSD working for Big Tech companies have started to organize for better treatment in the last several years. Now, Meta has announced a wide rollout of its AI support assistant for Facebook and Instagram, and that it will “reduce our reliance on third-party vendors” employing humans for content enforcement.

I enjoyed this write-up of the Afroman defamation trial, which, by the way, he won. Mike Masnick cuts to the core: the police think they should be able to do whatever they want, including screwing up, without fear of embarrassment.

After initially hitting 4Chan with a paltry £20,000 (about $26,500) penalty for hindering its investigation, Ofcom has now fined the website £520,000 ($690,000) for failing to comply with age assurance obligations. Should non-compliance continue, 4Chan risks facing additional daily fines of up to £800 (about $1,060).

For those of you not familiar, Afroman was raided by the police and then made two music videos (“Will You Help Me Repair My Door“ and ”Lemon Pound Cake”) about it. The officers sued him for using surveillance footage of their raid in the videos. On cross-examination during the trial, Afroman gave a stirring speech on the importance of the First Amendment. He’s also released another video, “Battle Hymn of the Police Whistleblower.”

In this instance of citing cases that don’t exist, two lawyers were instructed to explain how it happened and specifically explain to the court “whether they used generative AI to write the briefs.”

According to the Arizona attorney general, Kalshi is illegally operating a gambling business. It’s the first criminal case against the prediction market, which told Reuters that “States like Arizona want to ​individually regulate a nationwide financial exchange, and are trying every trick in the book to ‌do ⁠it.” The case is part of an ongoing dispute between states and the CFTC about who has jurisdiction over Kalshi and similar companies.

From The Atlantic, on the market for Trump’s personal phone number and who has been calling lately:

The NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Module is the ticket. CEO Jensen Huang:

The nation suffered a total disconnection today, according to its energy ministry. The country’s energy woes have only intensified with the US’ oil blockade and incursion into Venezuela, which had been a major oil supplier for Cuba.

Automotive News ran the numbers based on public filings and found that Toyota was the hardest hit, at $9.1b, while Detroit’s Big Three paid a total $6.5b. It’s unclear how refunds might play out now that the Supreme Court overturned the tariffs as they were originally enacted, but either way that’s a lot of cash stuck in limbo that could have gone to hybrid and EV incentives while Trump’s Iran disaster continues to spike gas prices.