risk
What happens when you analyze college football like the CIA? | Cultivate Labs Blog

What happens when you apply CIA-style analysis normally used to understand China or Russia to your favorite sports team?
The Firms That Power Prediction-Market Trades

Industry insiders explained during the FOS Asset Class event why market making is not the same as the “house” in traditional sports betting.
The Hierarchy of Money
The Dark Year

EMPs, solar storms and the forces that could switch off civilization.
The Store Isn’t Dead—but the Merchant Model Is

Retailers need to stop owning so much inventory risk and start operating more like platforms.
Exclusive: Death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public

Parents want accountability after study went disastrously wrong, Science and Retraction Watch investigation reveals
Despite recent successes, rapid reuse of Starship remains a tough nut to crack - Ars Technica

NASA has not made substantial investments in thermal protection research for decades.
How should we think about Starship?

What started as the Mars Colonial Transporter risks becoming a humble space truck
The Permission Slip | I, Cringely
I have spent forty years watching this industry, and I know a permission slip when I see one.
Black Gold and Grey Markets

Adventures in energy trading
When the Bell Tolls – History of Marine Insurance and Lloyd’s

Lutine Bell, a historic bell that was salvaged from the shipwreck HMS Lutine in 1858, pretty much signifies what marine insurance is all about and the important role that Lloyds of London plays in it. Today the bell hangs in the rostrum of the underwriting room at the Lloyds…
Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything?

We all know they’re casinos. It’s time to look at the data behind the froth.
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…
I’ve found that the benefits of prediction markets fall into five different categories.
We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
Finding X-Risks and S-Risks by Gradient Descent — LessWrong

(This is a fleshed out version of the lightning talk I gave at Megameetup) …
The false positive paradox explains why you misjudge risk

Here’s how a mathematical paradox distorts our view of news, safety and statistics
Welsh police learned this lesson the hard way during the 2017 Union of European Football Associations Champions League final. They deployed cameras throughout Cardiff, where the soccer event was held, and used automated facial-recognition software to analyze the footage. The software scanned the…
Actuarial Warfare: How Seven Insurance Letters Closed the World’s Most Critical Chokepoint and Why Markets Are Mispricing Duration by 300%

Private Reinsurance, IRGC Fragmentation, Interceptor Depletion, and a Dead Nuclear Fatwa Have Produced a Crisis No Military Victory Can Resolve
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
What AI builders can learn from fraud models that run in 300 milliseconds

Mastercard's Decision Intelligence Pro uses recurrent neural networks to analyze 160 billion yearly transactions in under 50 milliseconds, delivering precise fraud risk scores at 70,000 transactions per second during peak periods.
that transaction flows through Mastercard’s orchestration layer, back onto the network, and then on to the issuing bank. Typically, this occurs in less than 300 milliseconds.
they’re not looking for anomalies, per se; they’re looking for transactions that, by design, are similar to consumer behavior
The grab list: how museums decide what to save in a disaster

archived 21 Nov 2025 11:02:52 UTC
Inside the hunt for the most dangerous asteroid ever

As space rock 2024 YR4 became more likely to hit Earth than anything of its size had ever been before, scientists all over the world mobilized to protect the planet.
Why Mean-Variance Fails: Alternative Portfolio Risk Metrics with Python
The Perils of Algorithmic Pricing

Hotels and landlords can mitigate legal risks by choosing decentralized revenue management systems that use public data.
Insuring an uninsurable world – the pricing actuary’s Mission Impossible?
In InsuranceERM, David Walker published, yesterday Insuring an uninsurable world – the pricing actuary’s Mission Impossible? “Actuarially, it is entirely possible – and often documented – that the technical premium reflecting pure risk without political intervention…
11 Books to Help Navigate Risk

Expert strategies for identifying and managing diverse business threats in a complex, global environment.
ARCHIVE: Why Plan B often goes badly — bobsullivan.net

ARCHIVE, March 18, 2011 — Engineers used to talk about guarding against the “single point of failure” when designing critical systems like aircraft control systems or nuclear power plants. But rarely does one mistake or event cause a catastrophe. As we’ve seen in Japan, disaster…
ZIRP explains the world

A Margins' theory of everything
Rare things become common at scale
Software doesn't scale through architecture and automation alone. New, more difficult problems appear that didn't exist before, causing new downstream consequences.
The Sure Thing

What successful entrepreneurs have in common.
How the Possibility Grid Can Help You Evaluate Evidence Better

The possibility grid is a universal tool to draw attention to what is absent. It alerts you to think about rates of success rather than stories of successes.
I’m a Former U.S. Treasury Secretary. Here’s How I Make Hard Decisions.

The need for a sound decision-making approach in the face of uncertainty is greater now than ever before.
Research: How Risky Behavior Spreads

How does risky behavior spread? There are two theories: one involving social cues and the other involving trial-and-error. Covid-19 offered a chance to study this phenomenon and found evidence for both. In particular, the authors’ research documents a phenomenon of “risk creep,”…
Cultures Clash at Salomon Smith Barney — Stories.Finance

Richard Bookstaber was Salomon Brothers’ chief risk officer in 1997 when the firm was bought by Travelers and merged with Smith Barney, Travelers’ retail brokerage. He describes the resulting clash of cultures.
Understanding Jane Street - by Byrne Hobart - The Diff
Plus! Pensions; Customer-Facing; Use Cases; Making a Market; Reflexive Energy Politics; Diff Jobs
Five Lessons from History
The most important lessons from history are the takeaways that are so broad they can apply to other fields, other…
The 11 Risks VCs Evaluate by @ttunguz
Though the industry is called venture capital, the goal of a VC isn’t to maximize every risk. Instead, we try to understand all the risks a business might face and weigh those risks with the reward - the exit. Here are the major risks that I typically review when a startup…
Product Management is a lot like Playing Poker

Some lessons from the felt
A 6-Part Tool for Ranking and Assessing Risks

Developed during World War II, CARVER is a tool for assessing and ranking threats and opportunities. It can be both offensive and defensive, meaning it can be used for identifying your competitors’ weaknesses and for internal auditing. CARVER can help risk management…
SEO How-to, Part 11: Mitigating Risk

The risk to organic search performance from altering a website usually comes from changes to content, linking structures, or underlying technology. With careful planning and execution, however, you can mitigate the risk from those changes and increase the likelihood of better…
Inversion and The Power of Avoiding Stupidity

Inversion is a powerful mental model to improve your thinking because it helps you identify and remove obstacles to success. Most of us tend to think one way about a problem: forward. Inversion allows us to flip the problem around and think backward.
Moneyball for engineers: What the semiconductor industry can learn from sports
R&D leaders can boost productivity by using advanced analytics to create stronger, faster engineering teams.
Making Decisions Under Uncertainty

Or, How to Decide with Incomplete Data
Heuristics That Almost Always Work

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“Platform” risk — Remains of the Day
Last night, Twitter curtailed Meerkat's access to its graph . I saw lots of discussion on Twitter (I'd say this was ironic but it's just expected) about why and whether Twitter should just compete on its own merits with its recent acquisition Periscope . Some have termed what…
Risk Discounts and Usage-Based Pricing - OpenView

You’re probably not aware of it, but the price of your product includes a risk discount.
In Russia, Western Planes Are Falling Apart

After months of sanctions that have made critical repair parts difficult to access, aircraft operators are running out of options.
Tracking the Fear Index on Wall Street

Plus, with Revlon’s bankruptcy, Wall Street bankers get ready for a wave of distressed situations.
How to Beat the Odds at Judging Risk

Fast, clear feedback is crucial to gauging probabilities; for lessons, consult weather forecasters and professional gamblers.
Why Does the Stock Market Go Up Over the Long-Term?

Why the stock market has to go down sometimes.
The New Risk Management Playbook: Black Swans and the Rise of Scenario Analysis | Toptal®

Standard risk management can’t cope with black swans. Enter: scenario analysis.