Archive • A Scammer Darkly • Buttondown

Bad Beat - Sports Betting, Endowments, and Round Up

October 4, 2024

Sports Betting Sports betting has been technically legal (though controlled and regulated by the states) since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a...

Blow Off - Methane, Microsoft, Climate Policy, and Eric Adams

September 27, 2024

Methane For years, discussions about curbing emissions have focused on CO2, the ‘carbon’ that we want to tax, capture, and cudgel consumers with. However,...

Nothing Ventured - Texas, Taxis, Homes, and Startups

September 20, 2024

Texas America grants an unusual amount of autonomy to its state governments. Many issues that should be regulated at the federal level - like abortion - have...

In the Zone - Puerto Rico, Honduras, Golden Triangle, and New York City

September 13, 2024

Puerto Rico Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times As US territories go, Puerto Rico is the most populous and accessible to Americans. Despite this, and...

A Heady Brew - Boar's Head, Medicare Advantage, Politics, and Assorted Characters

September 6, 2024

Boar’s Head It is never a good sign when your food company issues a food recall for its packaged products that runs into the hundreds of thousands of pounds....

Unsafe Thoughts - Safety, Slumlords, Antitrust, and Wishful Thinking

August 30, 2024

Safety These actors make more than actual security guards Americans regularly rank ‘reducing crime’ as one of their top concerns in political issue polls....

Poor Stewardship - Steward, Jim Justice, Fake Elon, and Food Prices

August 23, 2024

Steward Steward Health Care went bankrupt in May, the biggest failure of a hospital chain in decades. We’ve talked about how privatization of hospital care...

Search Party - Google, Hotels, Social Media, and Regulations

August 16, 2024

Google Last week, a judge handed down a momentous ruling against Google, declaring what everyone already knew - the company has unfairly maintained its...

If It Leads, It Bleeds - Lead Generation, Crowdstrike, Kars4Kids, and Food Lawsuits

Lead Generation Last week, some of you may have noticed an article in Sherwood about The End of Spam (I did not choose the headline.) This was my first piece...

Slumlord Millionaires - Real Estate, Retail Crime, Teachers, and Trump Media

Note: ASD will be off next week, back the following Real Estate These days, real estate ‘moguls’ do not have the best reputation in American culture. As our...

Free Flow - Catheters, Harvard, School Vouchers, and Rudy Giuliani

Catheters nope, not image searching that Loosely speaking, there are a few ways you could defraud Medicare: You are a giant healthcare company, and you...

Sound and Fury - Sound, PBMs, Mars, and Archegos

Sound Meet me at the Bitcoin Noise Hood In 1909, zoologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt to describe the sensory bubble surrounding all animals,...

Self-Evident Truths - Laws, Rules, Regulations, and Greed

It’s a metaphor Laws It seems fitting that, during the week we’re celebrating the anniversary of America’s independence from colonial rule, we’re deciding...

Off the Record - Cerner, CDK, Facebook, and Detroit Riverfront Conservancy

Cerner Photo of a man who believes he should live forever A common train of thought among tech executives is that software can improve any process. Systems...

Safe and Sound - Crime, Medicare, Synapse, and Bankruptcy

Note: ASD will be off next week, back on the 28th. Crime With a presidential election looming, ‘crime’ will once again plague the American discourse. We are...

It's a Hot One - Climate, AI, Epoch Times, and Trump

Climate There is a saying among climate scientists; rather than describing each record-breaking day or month as the hottest, it is most likely the coldest...

All You Can Eat - Red Lobster, Live Nation, Fintech, and Inflation

Note: Earlier this week, I was invited to guest write the excellent Numlock News. Hello to any new readers who’ve dropped by as a result! Also: Last week’s...

Group Think - Oligarchs, Politicians, and Movies

Oligarchs America’s oligarchs exist largely because our legal and political systems are designed with them in mind. It used to be you had to put your...

Rank Amateurs - SEO, Google, AI, and Taxes

SEO Last week, the folks at HouseFresh, the air purifier site we talked about a couple months ago, issued a fresh Google missive. Despite generating some...

All That Power - Kanye West, Sean Combs, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump

Kanye West Kanye West in a very normal mask, walking normally. Every time a powerful man is exposed as a unrepentantly horrible human being, we often learn...

No Justice, No Peace - Protests, Facebook, Tyson Foods, and Tesla

Protests Columbia University protests via Rolling Stone Across the country, thousands of brave students spent the last week engaging in peaceful protests...

Fit to Print - News, Driving, Regulations, and Trump

News Last week, a listener posed a question during the Distraction podcast that felt pertinent to what we do here at ASD. It was, loosely paraphrased - are...

Daddy's Home - Israel, Migrants, Florida, and TMTG

Israel (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90) We talk a lot around here about AI, and the many harms it has or could someday inflict upon society. Well, it turns out...

Race to the Bottom - Chatbots, Boeing, Kids, and Sexting

Chatbots If you worked in marketing some time between 2013 and 2020, you were probably exposed to the 'martech' revolution (a portmanteau of Marketing...

Bottled in Bond - Trump, TMTG, Hunterbrook, and Walmart

Trump Photo credit: NBC News One reason it doesn't pay to get optimistic about our justice system ever handing down penalties against Donald J Trump is that...

Won't Shut Up - Speech, MrBeast, Oceans, and Cat Bonds

Speech Like most things American, speech is unevenly distributed - those in power have far greater leeway to say and do what they want, while the less...

Ruling Class - Oligarchs, AI, Boeing, and Justice

Oligarchs Courtesy: CTV News The invasion of Ukraine, and subsequent seizure of assets Russian oligarchs had squirreled away around the globe, helped...

Hasn't Got the Juice - The Economy, Energy, Plagiarism, and Elon

The Economy We have talked about America's obsession with vibes-based economic policy. We had a year of interest rate hikes and talk of sending the country...

Elite Impunity - Politicians, Tech, Media, and Taxes

Politicians tfw your handpicked judges hand you a rare W As expected, this week the Supreme Court decided the state of Colorado couldn't keep Donald Trump...

End of an Era - Sports Illustrated, VICE, Product Reviews, and Instagram

Sports Illustrated Why is it always the Chainsmokers? Last month, most of the staff at Sports Illustrated were notified they would be laid off, due to a...

Bad, Bad Men - Trump, Musk, MBS, and All the Rest

February 23, 2024

Trump Look at my lawyer dawggggg I'm going to be ordered to pay $450 million Earlier this month, Donald Trump was ordered to pay $83 million dollars in a...

A Trilli - AI, Green Energy, Uber, and Reading

February 16, 2024

AI The Prophet of AI Caping for Petrodollars At this point, a significant portion of the tech industry runs on hype cycles - a burst of excitement over a new...

Gridlock - Driving, Vouchers, Migrants, and Politicians

February 9, 2024

Driving The average American spends 2.5 work weeks in traffic. We have talked about cars, and the ways Americans are uniquely dangerous behind the wheel. It...

Chain Gang - Prison Labor, Boeing, 23andMe, and Taking Ls

February 2, 2024

Prison Labor Two things the United States is especially good at are putting its citizens in prison, and putting cheap meat and produce on grocery shelves. It...

Out of Stock - Instacart, Elon Musk, Cruises, and Crabs

January 26, 2024

Instacart For a long time, the business model for any consumer-facing product or service was that you'd sell that product or service for a good price, or...

January 19, 2024

Note: Thanks for everyone's patience as I get acclimated to the new system. This week's newsletter should be coming from the right place, and hopefully land...

January 12, 2024

Thanks to everyone who's made the jump with me. Let's kick the new year off on a new domain, on a new platform that doesn't amplify some of the worst bigots...

December 29, 2023

Note: ASD will be off next week, returning the week after from a new home, explained below. Substack Starting off a newsletter talking about issues within...

December 22, 2023

Note: The nice folks at Business Insider wrote about the FCC closing the lead generator loophole, and quoted your humble newsletterer in the process. Lawyers...

Over the Rainbow

December 15, 2023

Crime Americans are obsessed with crime. They see it everywhere (other than, ironically, where they live) and it gets wielded as a cudgel in many local...

December 8, 2023

AI As if we weren’t swimming in enough breathlessly credulous coverage of AI writ large, industry darling Sam Altman got himself mixed up in a Succession-...

Lead From the Front

December 1, 2023

Lead Generation Only seriously long-time readers of this newsletter will be aware that in a past life I worked in lead generation. My job, for a couple...

November 17, 2023

Note: ASD will be off next week for the holiday, back Dec 1. Elections Those of you fortunate enough to not be on a dozen different candidate spam text lists...

November 10, 2023

Quick note: Welcome to all our new subscribers, many of whom came from Ryan Broderick’s excellent newsletter Garbage Day. Also, as part of a long-overdue...

November 3, 2023

Unions Normally when we talk about unions, it’s bad news. Despite unionization drives in recent years, weak US labor laws and powerful corporations seemed to...

October 27, 2023

Lawsuits When we talk about lawsuits in these pages, it’s often a big company suing a competitor, or an unfortunate citizen - basically, a wealthy plaintiff...

October 20, 2023

Israel For many people, the last weeks have been upsetting and confusing. Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel, Israel’s brutal sanctions and bombing...

October 13, 2023

Google Google turned 25 this year. What began as a janky jumble of bright colors and text in the late nineties has grown into a tech behemoth - it dominates...

Earth Shattering

October 6, 2023

Fracking We talked recently about groundwater, and how parts of the US are rapidly depleting underground aquifers, some of which may never recover. Americans...

September 29, 2023

Bribery Dictionary dot com defines a bribe as ‘money or any other valuable consideration given or promised with a view to corrupting the behavior of a...