prakhar@affmantra.com

Smart businesses don’t adapt to crony capitalism

On February 27, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the unprecedented step of designating a U.S. firm—Anthropic—as a supply chain risk. Anthropic’s crime? It refused to violate industry-wide protocols against using AI for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. Hegseth’s designation, which has until now been reserved for foreign firms, bars U.S. military contractors from doing business…

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How conspiracy theories spread before the internet, according to Tracy Letts’s ‘Bug’ on Broadway

Conspiracy theories are literally contagious. Recent research on misinformation and how it goes viral across social networks has revealed remarkable parallels to how diseases spread in populations.  It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Tracy Letts’s Bug was tackling this topic 30 years. The psychological stage drama feels like a cautionary tale for our current…

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X’s Exclusive Threads feature lets creators paywall the end of tweet threads

Today, X announced some updates to its creator subscriptions platform. The leading change gives participating accounts the option to make part of tweet threads only visible to subscribers. This new Creator Subscriptions feature is called Exclusive Threads, an ironic name choice given X’s main text-based social media posting competitor is called Threads. The new tool…

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Your 401(k) could shrink due to climate risks. A lawsuit argues that your employer has a duty to protect it

Climate change comes with serious financial risks, and those risks could affect your retirement account. Is it up to your employer, then, to protect your 401(k) from those concerns? That’s the question posed by a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, filed today in the U.S. District Court Western District of Washington. A former employee of Cushman & Wakefield…

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