How far should you persist with a series such as, say, Breaking Bad if you’re not enjoying it at first? Statistics can tell us. CC-licensed photo by Irmin Wehmeier on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Seasonal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Citigroup erroneously credited client account with $81tn in “near miss” • Financial Times
Stephen Gandel and Joshua Franklin:
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Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues.
The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April and has not been previously reported, was missed by both a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was approved to be processed at the start of business the following day.
A third employee detected a problem with the bank’s account balances, catching the payment 90 minutes after it was posted. The payment was reversed several hours later, according to an internal account of the event seen by the Financial Times and two people familiar with the event.
No funds left Citi, which disclosed the “near miss” to the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to another person with knowledge of the matter.
…Citi’s $81tn near miss in April was due to an input error and a backup system with a cumbersome user interface, according to people familiar with the incident. In mid-March, four transactions totalling $280 destined for a customer’s escrow account in Brazil had been blocked by a screen that catches payments that are potential sanction violations.
The payment was quickly cleared, but nonetheless remained stuck in the bank’s system and unable to be completed normally.
Citi’s technology team instructed the payments processing employee to manually input the transactions into a rarely used back-up screen. One quirk of the program was that the amount field came pre-populated with 15 zeros, which the person inputting a transaction needed to delete, something that did not happen.
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The interest on that sort of amount would be colossal – even in 90 minutes. (I make it about $9bn – not million – at 2% across an hour.) Nice to know the amount didn’t leave Citigroup – I’d be amazed if it could rally those funds under any circumstances. But notice how this colossal error arose from a bad user interface: the programmer assumed the user would “know” to remove the zeroes, while the user assumed the programmer wouldn’t let those zeroes remain once input began. Now read on and imagine crucial government systems made with that sort of misunderstanding.
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We are dedicated to the American public and we’re not done yet • 18F Group
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1 March 2025: A letter to the American People:
For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.
However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.
18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.
When former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd took the position of TTS director and met with TTS including 18F on February 3, 2025, he acknowledged that the group is the “gold standard” of civic technologists and that “you guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists.” He repeatedly emphasized the importance of the work, and the value of the talent that the teams bring to government.
Despite that skill and knowledge, at midnight ET on March 1, the entirety of 18F received notice that our positions had been eliminated.
The letter said that 18F “has been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical”.
“This decision was made with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the Administration and GSA,” Shedd said in an email shortly after we were given notice.
This was a surprise to all 18F staff and our agency partners. Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.
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Formed in 2014 under the Obama administration, with slightly fewer than 100 staff. One of its biggest wins was a site that let Americans file their taxes for free, rather than having to do it via a vampire company. Now you’ve got to build that competency up again.
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Elon Musk, and how techno-fascism has come to America • The New Yorker
Kyle Chayka:
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Accelerationism has been popularized in the past decade by the British philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment movement populated by figures including Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for an American monarchy have enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0.
The accelerationist attitude is, as Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at Chapman University who studies accelerationism, put it to me, “This collapse is going to come anyway—let’s rip the Band-Aid.” Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top.
Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”
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Only fools think Elon is incompetent • Noahpinion
Noah Smith:
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Seth Abramson [a social media critic of Musk] could not build SpaceX, or Tesla, or any of the things Musk has built, no matter how much money someone handed him. Neither could I, dear reader, and neither could you. Neither, I think, could Terence Tao, or any of the other highest-IQ supergenius mathematicians on the planet. Any of us could spend a lifetime and burn a trillion dollars and probably not end up with anything remotely resembling Musk’s high-tech industrial behemoths.
Why would we fail? Even with zero institutional constraints in our way, we would fail to identify the best managers and the best engineers. Even when we did find them, we’d often fail to convince them to come work for us — and even if they did, we might not be able to inspire them to work incredibly hard, week in and week out. We’d also often fail to elevate and promote the best workers and give them more authority and responsibilities, or ruthlessly fire the low performers. We’d fail to raise tens of billions of dollars at favorable rates to fund our companies. We’d fail to negotiate government contracts and create buzz for consumer products. And so on.
And there are probably lots of other, less obvious things that Musk does that we would fail to do:
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A key driver of [Musk’s] success is a relentless focus on solving problems fast, often by working directly with the engineers or coders who’ve gotten stuck, Marc Andreessen says…The legendary venture capitalist shared his insights from working closely with Musk on X, xAI, and SpaceX…Unlike many CEOs, Musk is devoted to understanding every aspect of his businesses, the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder and general partner said. He’s “in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work,” and acting as the “lead problem solver in the organization.”
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I’ve been watching Elon succeed at building seemingly impossible companies and driving them to new heights of success for over a decade. And at every turn, there were hecklers on social media calling him an idiot, a fraud, and a huckster, and claiming that his companies were about to collapse and die. Although Elon didn’t deliver on every promise he ever made, again and again he has made his hecklers eat their words.
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It’s important not to underestimate successful people whose motives and intentions you don’t respect; instead, you should try to understand exactly why they’re successful. (A link shared by John Naughton.)
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Crypto prices jump as Trump names tokens included in strategic reserve • Financial Times
Philip Stafford and Eric Platt:
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On Sunday, Trump said that bitcoin and ethereum would be “the heart of the reserve”, adding that it would also include Solana, XRP and Cardano.
“I will make sure the US is the Crypto Capital of the World,” he wrote on his Truth Social account. “We are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
His comments gave prices across the industry a lift after weeks of selling pressure, as cryptocurrencies have been hit by a market shake-out of riskier assets.
Bitcoin rose 10% to $93,883.80 while Ethereum gained 13% to $2,477.46, according to CoinDesk. Solana, the token that represents the blockchain that hosts most memecoins — including Trump’s own coin — climbed 19% to $169.71.
Ada, which represents the Cardano blockchain, soared 50% to just over $1 per token. XRP, the coin affiliated to payments group Ripple, rose 31% to reach $2.83.
Traders have cited their frustration that the Trump administration has not moved faster to enact some of the reforms he promised on the campaign trail.
His administration has been quicker to halt enforcement actions against the industry, which the top securities regulator under former president Joe Biden had described as the “Wild West . . . rife with fraud, scams and abuse”.
Coinbase, a crypto exchange, said last month that the SEC had agreed to drop its landmark case against the company, which it had accused of failing to register as a national securities exchange, broker or clearing agency.
Executives at other groups, including crypto exchanges Gemini and OpenSea, have also indicated that securities regulators have dropped investigations into their businesses.
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There’s now no difference between the US and Russia, except that the Americans don’t realise what sort of country they’re living in – one which is being stripmined by a kleptocracy. All the people who needed to be on the inside of this announcement were tipped off. And a small group of others will benefit. Those who missed out will need to pay handsomely to get in to a game that’s already rigged.
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Second US company recalls pet food as bird flu spreads to cats through tainted meat • The Guardian
Melody Schreiber:
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a second company selling raw pet food issued a voluntary recall after cats from two different households in Oregon contracted H5N1 from the tainted meat earlier this month.
Two more cats in different households in Washington state have tested positive for bird flu after eating the same brand of raw pet food nearly two weeks after the recall, officials announced on Wednesday. One cat was euthanized, while the other remains under veterinary care.
Two lots of the raw food, made by Wild Coast Raw, fall under the voluntary recall. It is not clear whether the new cases in Washington are linked to recalled lots or others.
Since 2022 in the US, nearly 100 domestic cats have tested positive for bird flu, which can be fatal, and it may be possible for cats to transmit the virus to humans.
On 6 February, Christine “Kiki” Knopp noticed one of her 11 cats was running a slight fever. Within days, two of her cats had to be euthanized, and a third was in an intensive care unit.
All of the cats that had eaten raw pet food would later test positive for bird flu. Only a male cat kept apart from the others and fed canned food stayed negative.
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Well, that seems like one of those strong pieces of evidence. The idea this illness can be spread by food is concerning. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Scientists match Earth’s ice age cycles with orbital shifts • The Current
University of California at Santa Barbara:
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Beginning around 2.5 million years ago, Earth entered an era marked by successive ice ages and interglacial periods, emerging from the last glaciation around 11,700 years ago. A new analysis suggests the onset of the next ice age could be expected in 10,000 years’ time.
An international team, including researchers from UC Santa Barbara, made their prediction based on a new interpretation of the small changes in Earth’s orbit of the sun, which lead to massive shifts in the planet’s climate over periods of thousands of years. The study tracks the natural cycles of the planet’s climate over a period of a million years. Their findings, published in Science, offer new insights into Earth’s dynamic climate system and represent a step-change in understanding the planet’s glacial cycles.
The team examined a million-year record of climate change, which documents changes in the size of land-based ice sheets across the Northern hemisphere together with the temperature of the deep ocean. They were able to match these changes with small cyclical variations in the shape of Earth’s orbit of the sun, its wobble and the angle on which its axis is tilted.
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You have probably already thought of an objection. They’re right there with you:
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“But such a transition to a glacial state in 10,000 years’ time is very unlikely to happen because human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere have already diverted the climate from its natural course, with longer-term impacts into the future,” added co-author Gregor Knorr from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.
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Ice Age v carbon dioxide atmospheric load: who wins? Only one way to find out.
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How many episodes should you watch before quitting a TV show? A statistical analysis • Stat Significant
Daniel Parris:
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Some TV shows take a while to “get good.” Modern classics like Breaking Bad, The Wire, Community, and Bojack Horseman are notorious for “starting slow” and are often recommended with a disclaimer like “Give it a few episodes; I promise it gets good!”
At the same time, some shows never get good. Recently, I started a spy series called The Agency, which could best be characterized as premium mediocre (at least so far). There are big-name actors (Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere), expensive sets, and glossy camerawork—but after a few installments, I’m trapped in a liminal space between engaged and listless. At the end of each episode, I’m left with the same thought: “Maybe the next one will get good.”
Committing to a mediocre program or continuing with a floundering series elicits a state of (mildly) torturous ambiguity. Should you cut your losses, or is this show some late-blooming classic like Breaking Bad? What is the optimal number of episodes one should watch before cleansing a subpar series from their life? Surely, a universal number must exist! Like 42, but for television.
So today, we’ll explore how long it takes a new show to reach its full potential and how many lackluster episodes you should grant an established series before cutting ties.
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Lots of fun wonkery on this (never watched Bojack Horseman, personally). It doesn’t mention The Sopranos, though.
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Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim cuts ties with Elon Musk’s Starlink after controversial tweet • Thinktank via MSN
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Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has officially severed ties with Elon Musk’s Starlink, opting to invest in his own telecommunications infrastructure rather than relying on Musk’s satellite technology.
Slim’s company, América Móvil, announced a massive $22bn investment over the next three years to enhance its network, signaling a major strategic shift in Latin America’s telecommunications industry. The decision is expected to deliver a financial blow to Starlink, which had anticipated a profitable partnership in the region.
Tensions between the two business moguls reportedly escalated after Musk shared a controversial tweet implying Slim had connections to organized crime. Within minutes of the post, Slim canceled all collaborations with Starlink in Latin America, causing Musk to lose an estimated $7bn.
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Most expensive tweet ever? Perhaps. I don’t think the tweet caused the contract cancellation – rather, that the cancellation of the contract led to the tweet. Confirmation is difficult to find – this doesn’t seem to have been picked up widely, which makes me wonder whether it’s accurate at all. But just in case..
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 