Crypto News: The tragic mystery of Mexico’s terror ranch

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Today's Agenda

Sheinbaum gets a wake-up call.
Where's the money, basketball?
Student test scores in free fall.
For farms, it's not easy being small.

Missing in Mexico

A lot is happening in the world right now, which makes it hard to keep abreast of things that aren't impacting your immediate orbit. But no matter where you live, no matter what workplace drama is eating away at your inner peace, you should know about the tragedy that unfolded at Rancho Izaguirre.

"The discovery in early March of an apparent training and extermination camp in Jalisco state, just 60 kilometers west of Guadalajara, has traumatized Mexico and brought to life the country's worst torments," writes Juan Pablo Spinetto. "It exposes the deep-seated rot of a system in which local officials collude with criminal gangs that lack an iota of humanity. The facility lies in a quiet rural community in an area where the drug cartels have ruled over life and death for decades."

What's now being called "the Mexican Auschwitz" by some, was likely a place where hundreds, if not thousands of people — many of them teens enticed by fake job offers — were tortured until their very last breath. The images of the now-abandoned site are absolutely gutting. Piles of suitcases and clothes. Slivers of burned bones — skulls, fingers, teeth — and haphazard graves. Rows and rows of shoes with no owners in sight:

Photographer: Jalisco State Prosecutor

"Local authorities say they are committed to locating the disappeared, amounting to about 15,000 people just in Jalisco (and more than 120,000 nationally), but you wouldn't be wrong to second-guess what authorities say," JP writes. "The evil nature of this camp emerged only thanks to the tenacious collectives (known in Spanish as "buscadores") that crisscross Mexico trying to find their missing loved ones."

It's a major test for a progressive leader like President Claudia Sheinbaum. On Monday, she pledged to help the families find the missing — a positive message, but one that must be followed up with action.

"We have been here before in many other dramatic cases, with governments grandstanding and swearing they wouldn't wash their hands, yadda-yadda, only to wait cynically for the political storm to pass, betting on society moving on until the next scandal, oblivious to the barrage of gruesome news. There is also the temptation to think that if a problem isn't talked about much, it doesn't exist — which may explain why disappearances are up even as the number of murders is slowing down," he writes. "Yet the opposite is correct: As painful and shameful as it may be, Mexico needs to confront the barbarism of its drug cartels; otherwise the problem will continue to metastasize and families won't find solace for their missing ones."

March Madness Is For the Girls

In less depressing news, it's almost March Madness, which means it's almost socially acceptable to say, "haha, LOSER," to a bunch of your coworkers for three weeks straight! I, for one, can't wait to see the outfits that South Carolina women's coach Dawn Staley sports this time around. For the uninitiated, she's a style legend, and so is her dog Champ, who now has an official NCAA nameplate for press conferences:

If only the NCAA was as thoughtful about the actual athletes! Despite advertising space for the women's championship selling out months ago, Adam Minter says that women's college basketball players still aren't getting their fair share of fame and fortune from the tournament. "This year, the NCAA will take in 15 times more media rights money from the men's tournament than the women's. It's a significant gap that speaks to a big issue undermining women's hoops. One year after a breakout season, the sport remains undervalued," he writes.

Historically, the NCAA has bundled the rights to the women's tournament with a bunch of other NCAA championships. In 2011, that package was sold to ESPN for $34 million per year. In 2024, when the package was up for renewal, the NCAA once again sold it to ESPN for $115 million per year. "But according to a 2021 study commissioned by the NCAA, the women's basketball rights alone would have been worth $81-$112 million in 2025 had they been sold separately," Adam writes. "Could the NCAA have gotten more for the rights if they were sold separately? It's hard to imagine that the association couldn't have negotiated for more."

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The Laptops Have Got to Stop

March Madness also means that a bunch of high schoolers probably spent the week perfecting their brackets during school hours on their district-appointed laptop. This is obviously not conducive to actual learning! No wonder why Mike Bloomberg — my boss, the guy who ran New York City for over a decade — says we've lost the plot on classroom technology:

When Google released its inexpensive, utilitarian Chromebook in 2011, the company quickly capitalized on schools' new emphasis on computer use. Why should children learn the quadratic equation, a Google executive asked, when they can just Google the answer? Today, the same executive might ask: Why should children learn to write an essay — or even a sentence — when they can ask a chatbot to do it for them?

The answer to both questions is that mastering the three R's is the first step toward the true goal of education: critical thinking and problem-solving.

As someone who built a company by developing a computer at the dawn of the digital age, I never believed that computers in the classroom were the cure to what ails schools. Some of the most powerful educational interactions occur when a caring, well-trained teacher can look into a student's eyes and help them see and understand new ideas. Machines often don't have that power.

Please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing for free. And try not to get distracted by the 285 tabs you have open on Chrome … Mike says it can take up to 20 minutes for a student to refocus after engaging in a nonacademic activity like playing a video game or filling out a March Madness bracket. I can't imagine it's much different for adults!

Telltale Farm Charts

When Europe rolled out new green rules for agriculture in 2023, some farmers were excited by the prospect of becoming heroes. Now was their chance to protect the future food supply from climate change. But on the ground, Mark Whitehouse says "the red tape can be all but impossible to navigate." (Hence all those angry protests we saw last year.) To learn more about how farmers are navigating the EU's bureaucratic corn maze, Mark traveled to the former East German state of Saxony [1] and spoke to various industry players, including small organic farm owner Paul Lucht. "He had to spend dozens of hours submitting detailed electronic maps and documentation — including soil readings irrelevant to his organic operation. Saxony's glitchy portal crashed during regular working hours, forcing him to toil late into the night and on weekends," Mark explains.

Then there's 27-year-old Jonas Wappler, who sounds like he'd make for a great contestant on Love Island, if he weren't so busy rotating crops and milking cows on his 1,800 hectare farm. As the young chief executive of a large crop-and-dairy operation, Mark says he's the exact kind of farmer the EU needs for the green transition to work. And yet Wappler told Mark that he feels the EU is greenwashing: "They're playing politics at farmers' expense." Mark sees some truth in his complaints: "Saxony's subsidy application entails an ever-expanding list of conditions, requiring extensive documentation of everything from crop spraying to the roughage content of animal feed ... All the hassle might be justified if it were saving the planet. It isn't. An EU audit recently found that member states' agro-environmental plans wouldn't come close to achieving its pledges for 2030, such as a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions."

What's the solution? Big farms should be paid more, for one. The rules shouldn't waste time. And they gotta get rid of all that unnecessary paperwork. Inevitably, some agricultural operations will have to die. "Not every farm can occupy a niche like Lucht's, or achieve the size of Wappler's. On the contrary, many in Europe can't survive without old-fashioned public subsidies. How the EU deals with them will have far-reaching consequences for its finances, politics and the green transition." Read the whole thing.

ICYMI

The White House is going after Penn.

X had a new round of equity funding.

64,000 pages of John F. Kennedy.

Kickers

What nine months in space does to your body.

Zombie plants come back from the dead.

Closet space is disappearing.

Help a fish today!

Notes: Please send blobfish and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net.

[1] In case you're planning your next family vacation, Mark tells me that Saxony is awesome: "There's an area known as Saxon Switzerland, with bizarre rock formations and Lord-of-the-Rings hiking trails." Also, he spent a few hours with one farmer in a combine harvester, which he says is "like a mobile, air-conditioned office with an ever-changing view." A field of rye sure beats a cubicle!

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