Polymarket Manipulation and Other Guessing Games
How Polymarket traders using tools like “insider finder” to identify positions that look based on special intel can be fleeced.
Read more...Author Archives: Yves Smith
“We Are Watching Critical Thinking Disappear in Real Time” Due to AI Addiction: 40% of Kids Can’t Read, Teachers Quitting in Droves
How AI and device overstimulation are producing students with severe deficiencies in reasoning and information processing skills.
Read more...Links 1/17/2026
1 Year Into Trump 2.0, the Social Security Administration Is in Disarray
If you are so unfortunate as to need assistance from the Social Security Administration, good luck with that.
Read more...Book Review: A Portrait of the Arctic World in Flux
Neil Shea’s “Frostlines” captures the terror and beauty of the Arctic, a region often dismissed as “big, cold, white, and far away.”
Read more...The Day of the Dollar: Is It Over?
More on the prospects for the dollar. Even under Trump, it remains the cleanest shirt in the laundry bin.
Read more...The Economist Wrecks Its Limited Credibility in Article on Dark Factories That Ignores That China Already Has a Lot of Them
Time to stop reading The Economist. A story that looks like dark factory denialism completely discredits the magazine.
Read more...Critics Say Trump ‘Joke Healthcare Plan’ Nothing But a ‘Con’ of the American People
Trump’s latest afffordabilty headfake is a sketchy healthcare scheme.
Read more...Trump’s “Fix Affordability” 10% Credit Card Interest Rate Cap: A Gimmick, Not a Solution (and It Won’t Happen Anyhow)
It has gotten through to Trump that the state of the economy, and particularly consumer suffering from persistently high costs, aka the affordability crisis, can’t be solved by his barker’s patter about how great things are. So he’s roused himself to try to find some quick and easy wins so he can present himself as […]
Read more...The Ever-Shrinking Eldercare Workforce
Another health industry train wreck in the making is the rising difficulty of staffing so-called eldercare needs, particularly dementia care.
Read more...Climate Engineering Would Alter the Oceans, Reshaping Marine Life – Our New Study Examines Each Method’s Risks
Sadly, climate engineering, aka geo-engineering, is coming. Is it possible to properly assess risks and choose least-hazardous approaches?
Read more...How Voting Systems Influence Immigration Policy
How America’s liberal immigration regime was a predictable result of how we decide elections.
Read more...Move Fast and Break Everything: Crypto and the Democrats
How the Democrats brought crypto back from the dead after the FTX collapse and how weak oversight harms consumers and produces systemic risk.
Read more...Links 1/14/2026
Venezuelan Oil and the Limits of U.S. Refining Capacity
Most economic analysis of Trump’s planned Venezuela oil heist has focused on production. Time for a wee look at refining.
Read more...