The Briefing: Technology | Economy | Policy

I started vibe-coding an app to detect suspected insider trades on Polymarket and actually profit from them — and the results were shocking. Polymarket has seen massive suspicious activity: huge bets placed right before Nicolás Maduro’s capture by U.S. forces (Jan 2026) and Israeli strikes on Iran (2025), netting anonymous traders hundreds of thousands in hours. These aren’t coincidences — they lo...

This video is a companion to the more in depth Article at: https://www.danduncavage.com/blogbasicgridb3/rubio-at-msc2026 Are European NATO allies just freeloaders led by weak, feckless leaders? That’s the narrative the media has pushed hard for years about Trump’s stance on Europe. So how do you explain Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s glowing, almost affectionate speech at the 2026 Munich Securit...

Is the mighty GPU about to be dethroned? In this episode of The Briefing, we dive deep into the future of AI hardware and ask: Are new processor designs like Groq’s LPU and Cerebras’ wafer-scale engines ready to replace NVIDIA’s dominance? We cover: The incredible performance leaps in NVIDIA GPUs: from the GTX 580 to Tesla V100, H100, and Blackwell—how far we’ve come and what’s next How Groq’s LPU...

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated that the DoW makes it very difficult for contractors to provide the systems that are needed. Mazes of requirements, changing directions and a blizzard of documentation all stand in the way. My years at NASA taught me the same thing. The existing regulations make it impossible for the government and industry to work together efficiently. Good people, working har...

Did Elon Musk chicken out on Mars? In early 2025, he called the Moon a “distraction” and insisted SpaceX was going “straight to Mars.” Yet in 2026, he suddenly made the Moon the overriding priority—announcing plans for a self-growing lunar city in under 10 years. So what changed? Was it a retreat… or a smart pivot? In this episode of The Briefing, we break down: Elon’s own words dismissing the Moo...

In 1995, deep in post-Soviet Russia at RSC Energia in Korolev, a 28-year-old NASA engineer (me) faced off against a grizzled senior manager who embodied the old Soviet ways. We were moments from signing a protocol during our quarterly meeting on the $400M NASA-Russia Space Station contract, when he launched into a lecture: why NASA’s demand for detailed design docs on a pure oxygen pump was misgui...

In 1992, Administrator Dan Godlin pushed NASA to be Faster, Better, Cheaper. What stood in the way? Is it even possible?

An insider's experience at NASA in the wake of the Columbia and Challenger disasters, focusing on decision making and response to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. How does culture impact flight safety vs cost and schedule?

What really happened at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos? Aside from all the spin, what sea changes occurred?

Should there be a Moratorium on AI Data Center development? Bernie Sanders thinks so, but why? It turns out that there is a concerted and camoflaged effort by 4 billionaires to convince Americans that AI is dangerous and must be regulated by Washington DC. You can read about this in depth at: https://www.aipanic.news/p/the-ai-existential-risk-industrial https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/dam/c...

What is the hardware that drives the AI we use? In this Brief, we cover the silicon processor chips, memory, networking and power needs.

Why is AI so important? How will AI impact the economy and jobs?