🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 234
May 7th, 2026
Episode 234 — May 7th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/234
Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective
We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.
“The future is unwritten. There are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. Both of them are great fun to write about if you’re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.”
— Bruce Sterling
🗒️❤️🔥 Make fire inspectors sexy again
You know the trope. Sexy firefighters. Big strong people who show up when things have gone horribly wrong and are there to solve the problem. With their specialized tools, training, and willingness to go the extra mile, they save puppies, children, and people’s homes.
While the situation is awful, firefighters are a welcome sight. People are happy when firefighters show up, and rightfully so.
Who isn’t a welcome sight? Fire inspectors. With a broad range of powers, they can prohibit, restrict, or close unsafe buildings if significant risk exists. In fire-prone areas, they can mandate the removal of trees and entire structures deemed threats. Firefighters can save your home. Inspectors can kick you out of it.
Inspectors prevent problems, yet they are often scorned. This pattern often repeats in organizations. Those who solve problems are far more lauded than those who prevent problems. Structurally, when someone solves a problem, there’s a story. When someone prevents a problem, it’s quiet, perhaps invisible. And the more effective the prevention, the less evidence there is that it was necessary in the first place.
This bias compounds. Organizations that celebrate problem solvers and not problem preventers create incentives for people to become problem solvers. And problem solvers want to fix problems, not prevent them. So investment in prevention erodes, causing more problems.
It takes a concerted effort for an organization not to get addicted to fire fighting. Appreciation of prevention must be supported by everything from public praise to performance reviews to leadership guidance. On the flip side, it’s easy to under-appreciate roles focused on prevention such as security, public health, risk management.
So this coming week, take a moment to think how you might help make fire inspectors sexy.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏 Vegetables have become less nutritious due to CO2 pollution
A new Dutch study found that plants like wheat, potatoes, and beans have lost 3.2% of their nutrient content (including “protein, iron, and zinc”) since the late 1980s. Increased carbon dioxide levels are making plants more efficient, which is paradoxically a bad thing: with more CO2 around, plants can grow more tissue while absorbing the same amount of nutrients from the soil, which reduces the density of nutrients in the plant material. Plants are predicted to become bigger and grow faster as we continue to spew carbon into the atmosphere, but “each bite of food will have more sugar and fewer nutrients than before.”
🚏🧯 Western states are using AI cameras to detect wildfires early
California, Arizona, Colorado, and other states across the fire-prone American West are deploying AI-powered cameras that monitor smoke and other signs of wildfires, alerting authorities if they suspect a blaze may be starting. Meteorologists say the tech notifies firefighters a full 45 minutes before 911 calls start coming in; it’s especially useful in rural areas where humans are less likely to be watching. One startup that sells these cameras says it detected 725 wildfires in the US last year.
🚏🪖 An American soldier was arrested after winning $400,000 on a bet on the Maduro raid
A US special forces soldier who was “involved in the planning and execution” of the midnight raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro allegedly placed 13 bets about US operations on the prediction market Polymarket. That included long-shot bets on when US forces would be in Venezuela and if Maduro would be out of power by January 31st, totalling nearly $34,000 in wagers. Prosecutors say he made over $400,000 in profits, which he sent through a “foreign cryptocurrency vault” before he “deposited them in an online brokerage account.” The soldier was arrested and faces multiple criminal charges for “unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain.”
🚏🚷 Roblox cut projected revenue by $900 million after adding age verification
The kid-focused gaming platform Roblox, which is no stranger to criticism over exposing children to adult predators, added mandatory age verification for chat access in January. That, combined with Russia totally banning the site, forced the company to slash projected revenue from about $8.4 billion to $7.5 billion; its stock tumbled 22% last week on the news. (Coincidentally, a recent British report found that children find it easy to bypass ‘video selfie’ age verification systems by using clips of video game characters’ faces or even drawing mustaches on their faces; other kids just use parents’ ID cards.)
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Radiology Isn’t an Example of the Jevons Paradox (Ben White) — A radiologist takes issue with Jensen Huang’s assertion that the Jevons Paradox (wherein using a resource more efficiently ultimately leads to using more of it) means that radiologists’ employment will increase, even though AI can automate much of the job. For one, AI hasn’t helped radiologists much yet, and the recent rise in radiologists’ salaries can be better explained by a simple supply shortage. More fundamentally, the Jevons metaphor applies to natural resources like coal, not humans. Perhaps everyone in AI is drawn to Jevons because it offers a comforting story that, rather than driving massive societal disruption, AI will “set us free to do our best, most magical, most human work.”
Gentrification and Abundance (Michael Wiebe) — Evaluates several housing economics studies to conclude that increased housing supply, even of market-rate homes, causes gentrification (rich people moving in) but, crucially, does not drive displacement of lower-income residents. The alternative, supply constriction, leads to both higher rents and displacement. This article has some fairly technical writing, but it introduces some useful concepts in housing econ (such as Bartik shifters) and shows some clever study designs, like using the installation of tech shuttle stops in San Francisco as “hyperlocal demand shocks” and examining their impact on neighborhood prices.
How Lunar Cycles Guide the Spawning of Sea Creatures (Smithsonian Magazine) — Diverse animals such as sea mussels, corals, polychaete worms, and certain fishes are thought to synchronize their reproductive behavior by the moon, simultaneously spawning within a tight time window of 10–30 minutes using their equivalent of a clock and a calendar: a circadian clock and a circalunar clock based on a Light-dependent CRYptochrome called L-Cry.
TACO is Dead. Long Live EMPANADA (Polycrisis Dispatch) — Argues that the TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) principle doesn’t apply to tariffs, where he’s largely stayed the course despite the havoc it’s wrought. Instead, we’re seeing EMPANADA: Everyone Makes Promises And Never Actually Does Anything. In an effort to reach deals on tariffs, Korea, Japan, and the EU have promised to make billions of dollars of investments in the US, but the timelines are vague, there’s no enforcement mechanism, and it looks unlikely that they’ll ever actually spend the money.
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: the Baumol effect.
A string quartet walks on stage. Four musicians, forty-five minutes of Schubert. How much are they paid? It depends on when they’re playing. Even adjusting for inflation, they’d be paid significantly more in 1965 than in 1865. But why? By sheer economic logic, their productivity is the same.
Economists William Baumol and William Bowen used this example to describe the Baumol effect, or “cost disease.” They observed that labor-intensive services such as healthcare, education, and the performing arts become more expensive over time, even without productivity gains. Why? If enough of the economy experiences productivity gains, the opportunity cost of human time across the whole economy increases. Even sectors that can’t increase productivity still need to pay more to stay competitive as employers.
This formulation is not without its problems. For example, musician productivity does go up over time: performance halls get larger, amplification gets better, recording and broadcasting increase the reach of a single performance. Musicians, like other professions, are part of a much larger series of systems. Still, the concept is directionally useful.
AI may trigger the next stage in this trend. Contrary to current predictions of labor collapse, productivity increases from AI in some sectors could raise wages economy-wide due to the Baumol effect. If so, this could increase government spending, leading to budget crises. Why? Most government spending goes towards services that are subject to the cost disease: law enforcement, education, healthcare, and more. In a world where productivity is increasing, the sectors that can’t scale may inherit a surprisingly large part of the bill.
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