A Learning a Day

On a warm night last August, a 12-year-old boy named Shawn Dunkley took a family friend’s electric scooter out for a spin near his home in London, Ontario. It was a powerful machine, ordered from the Chinese online retailer Alibaba. Dunkley was barrelling—helmetless, despite his mother’s pleas—along the paths of his family’s suburban neighbourhood, only a two-minute walk from his house. He glanced at the scooter’s speed display: 69 km/h. Suddenly, everything stopped.

Two passersby found him five minutes later, lying unresponsive a few metres from the pathway. His eyes were open, his expression vacant, his hair streaked with blood. A dead raccoon lay nearby. The best anyone can figure is that it darted in front of the scooter. The passersby called 911 and, within minutes, Dunkley was being rushed to London’s Children’s Hospital. He’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, a skull fracture and spinal bleeding.

He was transferred to pediatric critical care in a medically induced coma. A tube helped him breathe, and two catheters snaked out of his fractured skull to monitor his cranial pressure and drain his pooling cerebrospinal fluid. His doctors weren’t sure if he’d live or, if he did, whether he’d walk or talk again. At her son’s bedside, Crystal Dunkley anxiously awaited the 72-hour mark: doctors had told her that if Shawn lived for three days, his long-term odds would shoot up. She hadn’t understood how dangerous e-scooters could be, or how fast they could go. “I thought they were toys,” she says.

Twelve days after Dunkley’s accident, doctors started bringing him out of his coma. First, he gave a thumbs-up. Then, a toe wiggle, which was a tremendous relief—no spinal injury. Then he nodded and shook his head. Finally, his breathing tube came out.

Dunkley’s injury was no anomaly. At Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, e-scooter–related admissions jumped 600 per cent from 2020 to 2024. Pediatric trauma centres have been particularly besieged: SickKids hospital, also in Toronto, treated 46 e-scooter injuries in 2024, up from only one in 2020. At the Montreal Children’s Hospital Trauma Centre, the number of cases multiplied tenfold in only a year, between 2023 and 2024. When I asked one ER physician what could be done to make them safer, he quipped: “Turn them into bikes?”

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Caitlin Walsh Miller’s article on e-scooters and e-bikes in Canada is worth reading. She makes 3 simple points –

(1) The adoption of e-bikes and e-scooters has been much faster than regulation has been able to keep up. Very few understand what is legal and what is not.

(2) These vehicles can go very fast. Coupled with the lack of clear rules, they are especially dangerous.

(3) e-scooters, in particular, can be easy to knock off balance – increasing risk to injury.

While her notes are primarily about city streets, we see this in our suburbs too and it scares me every time I see a group of teenagers zoom on the wrong side of the road alternating between the bike lane and the sidewalk.

I don’t understand how or why parents would want to enable this – especially because it reduces the amount of exercise and outdoors time kids get. It feels like a lose-lose-lose.

It always gets me reflecting about the hidden cost of chasing convenience.

Communications of the ACM had a fascinating post about how NASA built Artemis II’s fault tolerant computer. 3 fascinating excerpts.

(1) Eight modules with several back up scenarios: “Orion utilizes two Vehicle Management Computers, each containing two Flight Control Modules, for a total of four FCMs. But the redundancy goes even deeper: each FCM consists of a self-checking pair of processors.

Effectively, eight CPUs run the flight software in parallel. The engineering philosophy hinges on a “fail-silent” design. The self-checking pairs ensure that if a CPU performs an erroneous calculation due to a radiation event, the error is detected immediately and the system responds.

“We can lose three FCMs in 22 seconds and still ride through safely on the last FCM,” said Uitenbroek. A silenced FCM doesn’t become dead weight, however; the system is designed to reset, re-synchronize its state with the operating modules, and re-join the group mid-flight.

(2) Multiple redundancies with deterministic error-checking: “This architecture ensures that each FCM sees the same inputs, runs the same application code, and produces the same outputs,” said Uitenbroek. Every second, the drift of any individual FCM is measured and its local clock is recalibrated to the network’s ‘true’ time. If an application fails to meet its strict deadline, the module is automatically silenced, reset, and re-synchronized.

The hardware itself is also reinforced. The system employs triple-modular-redundant memory that self-corrects single-bit errors on every read. Even the network interface cards utilize two lanes of traffic that are constantly compared, ensuring that a bit flip in the communication fabric results in a fail-silent event rather than a corrupted command. The network itself is triple redundant with three separate planes, and all network switches employ self-checking strategies.

(3) Dissimilar redundancies: While the four-FCM primary system is robust, NASA must still account for common mode failures—software bugs or catastrophic events that could theoretically impact all primary channels simultaneously.

To mitigate this, Orion carries a completely independent Backup Flight Software (BFS) system. This is a prime example of dissimilar redundancy. It is implemented on different hardware, runs a different operating system, and utilizes independently developed, simplified flight software.

Even in a total power loss scenario—called a “dead bus”—Orion is designed to survive. If power is restored, the spacecraft enters a safe mode, in which the vehicle first stabilizes itself and then points its solar arrays at the Sun to recover power. Then, it orients its tail toward the Sun for thermal stability before attempting to re-establish communication with Earth. During such a failure, the crew can also take manual action to configure life support systems or don space suits.

Of course, it costs a lot to get this sort of redundancy planning in technical architecture. Those costs make sense on a space mission.

But, that said, there’s a lot we can learn on ensuring we’re making space for redundancy planning that is appropriate to our use-cases.

There’s a line from Game of Thrones that has stayed with me over the years. Ned Stark said “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”

A brutal image. But an important lesson nonetheless.

Ned made sure that if he condemned someone to their death, he was the one who carried it out. He didn’t outsource the hard part.

I think about this whenever I see leaders disconnected from the impact of their own decisions. It happens at every level – a country that wages a war the leader won’t fight, a large organization that hands down a mandate it won’t implement, and another where a leader makes a difficult call affecting real people by firing off someone else’s shoulders.

Sometimes, the test of a decision maker isn’t just about the calls they make.

It’s whether they are willing to be on the front line when it lands.

“Don’t burn bridges” is conventional wisdom for professionals. Keep every connection intact, especially on the way out of a place.

I think there’s nuance here.

Some bridges are worth burning. Not every relationship is one worth maintaining. Some are toxic. Some just ran their course. In those cases, it’s okay to let the bridge go – or at least not work very hard to keep it strong.

Burning a bridge deliberately, on rare occasions, is thus fine. However, it is when emotion takes the wheel – when your reactions rather than your choices drive the decision – that it comes back to bite you.

As with most things in life, it is best done with intention.

Much of the challenge with being productive in the long term is consistently carving out time for what’s important but not urgent.

Steven Covey fans will recognize this as “Quadrant Two” – the place where the most meaningful long-term work lives.

It is also the place that consistently gets squeezed out by whatever is loudest that day.

Easy to talk about. So bloody hard to do.

“You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.” | Charlie Munger

Simple and powerful. It resonated.

When an executive asks a seemingly simple question about data in a large organization, here’s what often happens –

• A couple of junior analysts put together a draft.
• Senior folks review it and edit.
• Stakeholders across the business align.
• And eventually, a response gets sent.

The cost to ask the question was low. The cost to answer it was enormous.

The problem isn’t the process. The problem is the executive who hasn’t been in the shoes of everyone else in a long time – and hasn’t stopped to think through the consequences of asking.

When you externalize the cost of a question, it’s easy to keep asking them. And suddenly a whole organization is disrupted and randomized, all because of something that felt casual from the top.

It gets worse with mandates. Policies handed down from executives disconnected from the detail create churn that is difficult to overstate. The more removed you are, the less visible the ripple – and the larger it actually is.

The takeaway for anyone in a senior seat: think about who bears the cost before you ask. The larger the organization, the more that question is worth sitting with.

“Prediction markets” are a fancy term for legalized gambling. Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Another way to internalize that statistic – $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats (source) and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets (source).

So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.

Derek Thompson shared a couple of stories with the premise that we haven’t seen the worst of this – with chilling effect.

1. Baseball

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.

The plan worked. Why wouldn’t it? There are hundreds of pitches thrown in a baseball game, and nobody cares about one bad pitch. The bets were so deviously clever because they offered enormous rewards for bettors and only incidental inconvenience for players and viewers. Before their plan was snuffed out, the fraudsters won $450,000 from pitches that not even the most ardent Cleveland baseball fan would ever remember the next day. Nobody watching America’s pastime could have guessed that they were witnessing a six-figure fraud.

2. Bombs

On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.

A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.

It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.

3. Bombs, again

On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”

A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?

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There’s a lot to digest in the post. This passage is an example.

Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”

And this

Prediction markets can be useful for those who want to know the future, but their utility recruits participants into a relationship with the news cycle that is adversarial, and even misanthropic. A young man betting on a terrorist attack or a famine is not acting as a mere concerned citizen whose participation improves the efficiency of global prediction markets. He’s just a dude, on his phone, alone in a room, choosing to root for death.

If that doesn’t bother you, I don’t know how to make it bother you. Based on economic and market efficiency principles alone, this young man’s behavior is defensible. But there is morality outside of markets.

It is a powerful post. Thanks for sharing, Derek.

Having spent time with talent acquisition leaders and fielded more than a few reference check calls from hiring managers, one thing consistently stands out – the sheer amount of hubris embedded in how organizations think about hiring.

One talent acquisition team at one of the world’s largest employers insisted they only hired “the best of the best of the best.” Leaving aside how that sounds – it’s numerically impossible given how many people they hire and how many churn. There simply aren’t that many “best of the bests.”

I’ve heard of companies with policies excluding candidates from certain universities, certain companies, certain backgrounds. Everyone wants references – many references. And, in these references, hiring managers want to hire only people who’d be in the top 10% of the best people they’ve ever worked with.

It always makes me chuckle – top 10% based on what exactly? Across every role? Every context? Every kind of work? According to whom?

The reality is simpler and more honest than any of this. We hire people we think can do the job. We hire people we think can grow. And most importantly, we hire people we can work well with. When the organization is performing well, we get to have more access to people in the intersection of these three.

Everything else is mostly bullshit.

When you’re part of these kinds of hiring machines, you sometimes have to drink the Kool-Aid. That’s fine. The most useful thing you can do is stay conscious of how much of it you’re internalizing. The same holds true for candidates who have to play the game as well.

But that doesn’t mean these standard processes makes much sense.

If it smells like bullshit, trust your instincts.

We often have a conversation with our kids about the idea that excellence is never an accident.

When we see a kid consistently outperform everyone else on the field, you might often hear notes about how the kid is a “natural athlete.”

When you see someone present with flair and make it look effortless, you might hear comments about how they’re “natural presenters”.

However, when you see Steph Curry sink three pointer after three pointer however, you don’t walk away thinking that’s just natural talent. You know that, behind every one of those shots, were hours and hours of relentless practice.

That’s true in every sphere of life. Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. When you dig deeper into the “natural talent,” there’s always a story.

The one nuance – excellence in young kids is often driven by external pressure. The challenge is helping them build the internal motivation and grit to sustain it over the long run. That’s a harder thing to cultivate than the excellence itself.

But either way, the core truth remains the same – excellence doesn’t happen by accident.