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Colby Cosh: Coming soon to the news — betting on real life

Possible historic landmark whizzing past your window dep’t: early Wednesday morning, CNN announced that it is entering into a branding partnership with Kalshi Inc., one of the two leading companies in the emerging business space of “prediction markets.” Kalshi is an exchange, more or less exactly like a stock exchange or a betting market: it’s a place where you can bet on quantifiable outcomes of a very general variety of future events. It has become a market leader, and apparently worthy of the attention of CNN, by pursuing a strategy of legality and regulatory housebrokenness. It’s chartered in the U.S. and is subject to the American legal rules of commodity exchanges (after suing, with tentative success, to be recognized as such). Read More
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Colby Cosh: The next great Canadian is out there, we just haven’t met them yet

Somewhere across this great land, someone or something great is just getting started. This country is built on game-changing people, ideas and initiatives: Wayne Gretzky redefined a game; oil sands innovations helped us prosper; Frederick Banting transformed millions of lives; Loblaws changed how we live. Today, we launch a new National Post series that celebrates Canadian greatness, in whatever form we find it. Read More
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Colby Cosh: Costco’s tariff lawsuit hints that Americans are tiring of Trump protectionism

On Friday, the Costco Wholesale Corp. filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) seeking an immediate refund of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional tariffs on imports imposed officially in August under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). It’s an interesting political wrinkle in the historic tale of the tariffs. The president’s contrived, random claim of multiple “emergencies” that allow him to rewrite the American tariff schedule according to whim went before the U.S. Supreme Court a month ago. Read More
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Colby Cosh: The AI future is here, but it comes with enormous risk

The market-liberal economist/pundit Noah Smith has written a fun “stranger in a strange land” essay about his unusual fondness for the emerging species of “generative” artificial-intelligence bots. Smith points out that 100 years of science fiction has prepared us all to have convenient, convincingly intelligent, multilingual automaton life assistants; they are an accepted part of the background of almost all imagined futures, with exceptions like Frank Herbert’s Dune universe (wherein even basic mathematical computing is outlawed on religious principle). Read More
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