It sounds crazy, but one company successfully 'going green' can actually cause total global carbon emissions to go up.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
The original meaning of birthright citizenship likely doesn't cover tourists' kids, but it definitely covers children of undocumented residents.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Immigration courts expect trauma survivors to have a type of 'perfect memory' that is biologically impossible for them to have.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Raising the minimum wage can actually make companies more efficient and less likely to fire people down the road.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
The big profits from famous stock market strategies are usually just caused by everyone else piling into that same strategy.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Companies could get sued for 'waste' if they let good employees quit, just like if they let a multi-million dollar factory rot.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 26
Whether a government actually controls its defense industry has almost nothing to do with whether they own the companies.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
In high-stakes moments, pro female basketball players tend to choke, while the men actually don't.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
People are just as likely to call a 'bad' gamer an AI bot as they are to think a pro player is a computer.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 26
It turns out that changing how much sugar a country has doesn't actually change its obesity rates at all.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
African women are joining new churches as a clever way to protect their businesses from being targeted by witchcraft rumors.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
You might think your phone password is protected by your right to remain silent, but the courts might not agree.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Making the power grid 'storm-proof' actually makes it a lot worse for the environment.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Regular people are using the options market for safe, low-risk bets instead of just gambling for a huge payday.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Telling people to 'think about their ethics' can actually make dishonest people act even worse.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Using people's text messages to decide their credit scores is just making the gap between the rich and the poor even bigger.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
If you actually weakened insider trading laws, companies would probably end up being more honest and revealing more secrets.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
A private tech company remotely shut down a major oil refinery just to follow foreign rules, totally ignoring the local courts.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Global trade and wars are basically just physical reactions to the fact that the Earth is a ball and not a flat map.
Cosmic Scale ssrn | Mar 26
Policies meant to boost 'tourism' actually did a better job of cleaning up water pollution than actual environmental laws did.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 26
Sustainable shoppers are actually creating more trash by replacing perfectly good stuff with new 'green' versions.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Where a central banker was born and where they went to school can tell you exactly how they’ll vote on interest rates.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
It's mathematically impossible to make AI safety filters that can't be tricked just by changing how you word things.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
People pick 'impossible' career goals so that when they fail, they can blame the goal instead of their own talent.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Right before a job gets fully automated, the human experts in that field actually see a weird, temporary spike in their pay.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Overconfident investors actually think the stock market is scarier than the cautious ones do.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Don't expect AI to kill off high bank fees—there's a math limit to how low those costs can actually go.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Data centers in Canada are moving to provinces with the 'dirtiest' power because the green ones are locking them out.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
How much risk you're willing to take with money might depend on how much it rained where your ancestors lived hundreds of years ago.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 26
Only about 4% to 7% of those big 'green hydrogen' projects people announce actually ever get finished on time.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 26
Creating official markets to trade company data actually makes businesses come up with worse ideas.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Making a credible promise of peace can actually make war more likely by making you look like you're less willing to fight.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Building big concrete walls to stop the sea often backfires, making communities even more likely to lose everything later on.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Public health models should probably treat being good-looking the same way they treat air pollution or a virus.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
If we want to fix the massive shortage of care workers, we need to start explicitly recruiting men for those jobs.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 26
You’ll never fix AI safety by making it 'ethical'—the only way is to legally stop AI from being allowed to make any final calls.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Democracies should have an 'immune system' that automatically gives citizens extra rights if a leader starts acting like a dictator.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 26
Private equity firms were actually lowballing how much their companies were worth until new laws forced them to be honest.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
We should stop treating the Presidency like a political job and start governing it like high-risk nuclear infrastructure.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
People in nursing homes are actually much more likely to die in the weeks right after a scheduled inspection.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Most pollution makes the flu worse, but ground-level ozone might actually protect you from getting infected.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 26
Huge industrial disasters usually happen because both companies and the government made the 'smart' choice to hide bad news.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Whether a woman can get a business loan depends a lot on how 'strict' the social rules are in her country.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Living around nature is only good for your health once your country is actually wealthy enough to support you.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 26
If you raise the price of a fan subscription, the top creators actually end up streaming less often.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Tech giants are spending $660 billion a year on AI—this either leads to a massive economic boom or a total bankruptcy crisis.
Cosmic Scale ssrn | Mar 26
The chlorine we use to clean water can accidentally turn normal chemicals into new ones that are 10 million times more toxic.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 26
Instead of charging money, we could give things out more fairly just by making the 'right' to use them expire really fast.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 26
Government pay surveys are totally missing the real wage gap in tech because they ignore the stock options people get.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
Prison inmates actually managed to hack the Argentine President’s house just by tricking a soldier with a digital scam.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 26
All that 'green' activism from shareholders hasn't actually lowered global carbon emissions at all.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
That huge 'explosion' in corporate profits everyone is talking about might just be a math error caused by new technology.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
In cultures where 'saving face' is a big deal, companies are way more likely to lie about their environmental record while actually doing a terrible job.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 26
AI researchers moving to big companies are now making about $1.5 million a year more than their friends who stayed in colleges.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 26
The world’s legal system isn't falling apart—it’s being hijacked by dictators who use 'human rights' as a weapon.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
The way Chinese characters are built like a web might actually be a better way to understand how AI 'thinks' than English is.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
We’re trying to save sharks by banning fancy soup, but the real problem is the massive global appetite for cheap shark meat.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Trying to put strict safety rules on AI might actually stop it from ever being truly helpful, because real intelligence needs the freedom to be itself.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Religious groups don't just have more kids because of their faith—they do it because they build 'friend networks' that make raising kids a lot cheaper.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
The reason we can’t find many skeletons from the smallpox outbreaks in the Americas is because so many people died so fast that there was no one left to bury them.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 25
If you want people to support fixing inequality, they’d rather see fair starting wages than high taxes on the rich.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
That legal rule that lets states ignore federal monopoly laws is actually a huge win for local democracy, not just a loophole for corruption.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Going digital and getting 'smart' with data doesn't actually help local governments collect any more tax money.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
China's Two-Child Policy accidentally tanked women's wages because they became desperate for specific 'mom-friendly' jobs.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Weirdly enough, giving solar power to developing countries can actually cause their total carbon emissions to skyrocket.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
If a mutual fund manager is married to a big-shot executive, they make way more money—but only when they're trading in their spouse’s industry.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
The career you ended up with a decade later basically depended on whether your local Federal Reserve bank was aggressive or lazy back in 1930.
Cosmic Scale ssrn | Mar 25
Private equity firms found a sneaky loophole that lets them 'own' law firms, even though that’s supposed to be illegal.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
New laws to regulate AI copyright are basically impossible to enforce because today’s tech literally can't provide the proof the law requires.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
A lot of global smuggling isn't done by gangs—it’s actually set up and protected by governments to hit their own political goals.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Taxes can totally change how a company behaves even if those taxes are never actually passed into law.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
The best way to stop an AI apocalypse might be to copy a 1,000-year-old tribal government system from a tiny Pacific island.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
Trade wars aren't just about politics—they're a physical necessity because our digital world is growing way faster than our actual roads and ports.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
The more efficient we make financial markets, the more likely they are to crash when interest rates stay low.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
When the budget is in a tailspin, some argue the law should make it way harder for patients to sue hospitals for mistakes.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Pouring money into high-tech innovation is currently the biggest reason coastal areas are becoming so environmentally fragile.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
If you want a nuclear plant to be safe, it matters less how many people live nearby and more what kind of people they are.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
Technically, the US Army's funding is unconstitutional if it lasts over two years—a rule meant to stop us from having a permanent standing army in the first place.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Under 'fair' rules, most rich countries have already blown through their carbon allowance and should technically be at negative emissions right now.
Cosmic Scale ssrn | Mar 25
The systems meant to watch doctors are basically designed to ignore patients getting hurt unless there’s a paperwork error or a financial crime.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Some 'clean' cities only keep their good reputation by dumping all their illegal stuff and 'vice' into neighboring towns across the border.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
That 2% inflation target isn't some magic economic number—it’s basically a bribe to keep governments from printing too much cash.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
The idea that 'tradition' doesn't count in American law was basically made up on the spot just so the government could seize Native American land.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Believe it or not, getting rid of draws in sports with penalty shootouts actually makes the games more likely to end in a tie.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
Neurotic people don't actually care more about being safe—they just have a really hard time making up their minds.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 25
The 'entrepreneurial spirit' is so tough it can survive even if starting a business has been strictly illegal for 40 years.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 25
Connecting two countries' apps like Venmo or Cash App boosts trade by 4%—that’s about half the impact of a massive free trade deal.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
People trust 'digital twins' of CEOs way less than the real thing, even if the AI looks and sounds exactly like them.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
In some big markets, investors actually value 'green' companies less because they see environmental spending as just another bill to pay.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Those 'compostable' coffee pods that never actually break down in the dirt will disappear 300% faster if you turn them into biogas first.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
If your taxes are automatically taken out of your paycheck, you're actually less motivated to pay them than someone who is self-employed and could cheat.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
The 'job ladder' is basically broken: you're 50% less likely to get a better-paying offer from a different company than workers were in the 80s.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
To actually beat a recession, governments should probably make it harder for companies to get those subsidies that prevent layoffs.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
If you want to know when the next big animal disease outbreak is coming, look at the price of meat, not the weather or biology.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
The whole point of 'cloud kitchens' is mixing and matching food from different brands, but it makes your delivery about 48% more likely to be late.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
If you try to make multiple AI agents work together as a team, the whole system actually fails twice as fast as just using one.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
Over 80% of contract disputes in the US are decided by local judges who don't actually know much about legal doctrine.
Paradigm Challenge ssrn | Mar 25
When a wife gets a job, her happiness goes way up—but unlike when a husband gets a job, it doesn't give her spouse any boost at all.
Practical Magic ssrn | Mar 25
The reason people often exclude autistic folks might be a 'brain hack' to save calories by not dealing with complex social situations.
Nature Is Weird ssrn | Mar 25