Kalshi is a high-tech prediction market that allows people to "forecast the future" (their term). It is about contracts and information, the company says, making its offerings more like a soybean futures contract than a round of blackjack or a pull on the one-armed bandit.

Still, prediction markets look a lot like betting if you squint, which is why states like New York have tried to regulate them under gambling laws. To head this off, Kalshi has sought federal protection under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Yes, this means regulation for Kalshi, but it also means the CFTC will sue states like Kentucky, Minnesota, Illinois, and Rhode Island, trying to pre-empt their laws in favor of a single national standard that the CFTC controls.

While this battle plays out, government insiders continue to generate insider trading stories after using their work knowledge to place bets "forecast the future" and make huge sums of money. The classic example, of course, was Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a US soldier who participated in planning the capture of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and then made $410,000 from that knowledge on the prediction site Polymarket. Van Dyke was arrested in April.

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Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don't need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But they also tend to be competitive, ambitious, and overscheduled, so AI can look like an easy shortcut that makes more time in their lives for things that can't be done by a chatbot. When the pressure is on, which approach do they choose?

A new scandal at Brown University reveals that huge numbers of these students are likely to cheat.

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A recent survey of Princeton students found that 29.9 percent admitted to cheating with AI on at least one exam or assignment. But the situation at Brown gives us a better sense of what this kind of cheating looks like in one particular class—and just how much it may be substituting for actual learning. And we know all this because the blind economics professor at the center of it all, Roberto Serrano, is not letting it go.

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