COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR SELLS: Nir Eyal is showing software designers how to hook users in four easy steps. Welcome to the new era of habit-forming technology. “Forging new habits has become an obsession among technology companies. In an age when commercial competition is only a click away, the new mandate is to make products and services that generate compulsive behavior: in essence, to get users hooked on a squirt of dopamine to the brain’s reward center to ensure that they’ll come back.”

Back in high school I read Lawrence Sanders’ The Tomorrow File, where they were actually making products worse, but in ways that made them more addictive. And now it’s today.

INSTEAD OF FLYING CARS, I GET THIS: D-Printed Bionic Ants Work as a Terrifying Team: The future of manufacturing is 3D-printed bugs that work toward a common goal.

UM, WELL: Inject this substance in your eyes for night vision. My night vision has always been superb, but in the last couple of years it seems to be regressing toward the mean. So a commercial product that would improve it might be useful. And I’m sure there are military applications. . . .

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 688.

IF YOU WERE TRYING TO DO LASTING DAMAGE TO THE UNITED STATES’ WORLD POSITION, WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY? NBC’s Engel: US allies fear Obama admin leaking information to Iran. “Just how badly has Barack Obama and his administration damaged relations with our allies in the Middle East? NBC’s Richard Engel reports that the Sunni nations in the region have begun to fear that the Obama administration leaks intel to Iran as part of its efforts at rapprochement with the mullahs, which is why the US got blindsided by the Saudi-led coalition’s operations in Yemen. The White House’s ‘incoherence’ in policy, Engel reports, has most of them losing confidence in American leadership.” Welcome to the party, guys. But you can only judge a policy “incompetent” or “incoherent” if you know what that policy is intended to accomplish.

MARCH OF THE AFFLUENT: Why Gentrification Is An Irresistible Force:

Ah, gentrification. What’s not to hate? Except for sit-down restaurants, dog parks, charming pubs, bike lanes … and there goes the neighborhood. Yesterday, we talked about the inherent irony of gentrification: the fact that gentrification is simultaneously driven and abhorred by nice young progressives who just want to live in a walkable neighborhood. We also discussed why so many of the ideas proposed to stop it — from inclusionary zoning to tougher rent control — have so far proven powerless against the March of the Affluent.

Today, we’ll take up the remaining possibilities: scatter-site public housing, and massive, city-wide upzoning, particularly in wealthy areas. And we’ll explore why, even if these things are good ideas, they are probably not going to materialize fast enough to halt gentrification — if they materialize at all. . . .

The political fact is that if you try to plop, say, a 56-unit low-income housing project in the middle of a wealthy neighborhood, the neighbors are going to freak out.

You will say this is terrible NIMBYism. I will say that this is neither here nor there: The neighbors are still going to freak out, and if you want to build affordable housing on their block, you will need a plan to deal with that fact. Housing projects offer affluent people no personal benefit — they are unlikely to find themselves in need of an apartment catering to folks living below the poverty line — but even small ones will change the appearance of their community, and, it is believed, will bring with them some fraction of the problems that afflicted larger projects.

The larger the disparity between the incomes of the people who are going to be housed, and the people who are living near the site, the more community opposition you will face. You can issue clarion calls to residents to do their bit for the public weal, but in general, people are very good at thinking up reasons that a particular project, while splendid in theory of course, should actually be sited somewhere else more appropriate, and of course, much less close to their own home.

On the other hand, if we continue on the present economic policies for another decade, there will be fewer young affluents to support gentrification.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Saudi Arabia says it won’t rule out building nuclear weapons.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Brooklyn Law School Dean Calls For Audit of Multistate Bar Exam. I can’t help but notice that the widespread decanal dissatisfaction with bar examiners has only appeared since schools started having to reach down into applicant pools to fill seats. . . .

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LOOKING FOR NEWS ABOUT THE WAR ON TERROR, AND OUR MIDEAST DEBACLES? Check Fred Pruitt’s Rantburg.

INSTAVISION: Liberal Arts, The Higher Education Bubble, and President Obama’s Attack On Art History Majors.

SO I SEE FEMINIST TYPES PORTRAYING THIS AS SOME SORT OF VICTORY DESPITE HER LOSING: Jury finds no gender discrimination against Ellen Pao in case that captivated Silicon Valley.

But the most likely consequence — which would have been even more likely if she had won — will be for firms to be less willing to hire women in the first place. Doubly so, of course, if they talk about “social justice” a lot.

I WOULD HAVE PICKED AL GORE FOR THAT ROLE, JOWLS AND ALL: “Is California Gov. Jerry Brown becoming the Jerry Falwell of the left?”

WELL, WELL: Sources Say, Erik Prince was hired by crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together a 800-member battalion. “Erik Prince billionaire founder of Blackwater was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by a reputable source. The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show.”

ASHE SCHOW: Looks like the J-School investigation of that Rolling Stone story is going to be quite a doozy.

The original story claimed that a U.Va. freshman, Jackie, was gang-raped by seven members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity during a wild party. The whole thing was allegedly part of a fraternity initiation orchestrated by Jackie’s handsome date for the evening. Bruised and bloodied, Jackie escaped through a side door and called her friends, who encouraged her not to report the crime.

But facts came to light after the article was published that painted a completely different picture. There was no party at Phi Psi the night of the alleged incident. Jackie’s friends said they did encourage her to report the crime and that at the time she claimed she was forced to perform oral sex on five men.

It was also discovered that the man Jackie supposedly had a date with that night, Haven Monahan, did not exist.

Rolling Stone apologized for the errors in its reporting, including the absence of any investigation to find the men Jackie claimed had raped her.

But President Teresa Sullivan has not apologized for running with this story, and for breaching her duty of fairness to the falsely accused students.

Related: UVA Professor Urges Rolling Stone Lawsuit: Says Fraternities Have Strong Legal Grounds. Plus, the possibility of suing Jackie, and bringing her up on an honor charge.

And since we know she lied now, can news reports please start using her full name?

BLOWBACK: Leave Facebook if you don’t want to be spied on, warns EU.

All is proceeding as Glenn Derene foresaw.

ANNALS OF “SMART DIPLOMACY:” Anatomy of a whole-of-government foreign policy failure: The Asian Infrastructure Development Bank is proceeding apace, despite U.S. efforts to stop it.

To recap: the AIIB is one of several new financial institutions that China has tried to midwife over the past year or so that many have viewed as direct competitors to the U.S.-created international financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank (ADB). The United States has articulated two concerns about the AIIB: that it was an organization designed to marginalize the ADB, and that in doing so, China would be applying rules and standards in project lending that would be far less friendly to the environment than the U.S.-led institutions.

Whether these concerns are overstated or not isn’t the point. The point is that in recent weeks the Obama administration’s year-long effort to delegitimize and marginalize the AIIB has failed and failed spectacularly. First Britain announced that it would be a founding member of the AIIB against U.S. wishes, surprising even Chinese officials. And then the other dominoes started to fall in rapid succession. Germany, France, and Itally quickly followed suit.

Now we’re seeing a cascade effect. South Korea announced that it would join. Both Australia and Japan now look set to join. Hell, even the IMF’s Christine Lagarde signaled that she was looking forward to working with the AIIB.

The Obama administration has been reduced to backbiting U.S. allies in the press — which, by the by, is a passive-aggressive habit that it really should stop.

But at least they’re not testosterone-addled brutes, amirite?

YES. ISRAEL HAS NUKES. Does that frighten you? Good.

Israel has nuclear weapons. Unlike the United States, which has had nuclear weapons for more than 70 years and betrayed our trust by releasing documents that confirm this, we’ve never used nuclear weapons to kill anyone. Unlike Iran, which doesn’t have nuclear weapons (yet), Israel has never threatened to blow a nation off the face of the map.

For the past 24 hours, after hearing that the United States, under the leadership of Barack Hussein Obama, deliberately stabbed Israel in the back by releasing documents that confirm what most of the world has known or suspected for decades, I was rendered mute with anger. Every post I thought of making usually included at least one four letter word and often many of them.

And so I waited and thought and then I remembered my mother speaking before the Austrian kids who then decided rather than visit Italy, they would take their senior class trip to Israel.

When the world is a bit condescending, antagonistic and certainly against Israel in so many ways, perhaps the United States unwittingly did us a favor. The word is out. Israel has nuclear weapons.

Does that scare you?

Good.

Yes, that’s the main reason to have them. If I were Israel, I’d build a doomsday machine, but that’s just me.

SO WILL HILLARY BE HELD AS ACCOUNTABLE AS A BASKETBALL COACH?

Deleted emails were part of the findings. The allegations of academic misconduct and impermissible benefits were the focus of the NCAA’s investigation.

According to the termination letter, Tyndall acknowledged on March 16 that he deleted the emails that “could have been relevant to the NCAA’s investigation of Southern Miss and/or compliance with the NCAA rules,” and “at minimum, the deletion of those e-mails created an appearance of significant impropriety.”

“The University believes that it’s highly likely that the Committee on Infractions will find that violated NCAA bylaw 19.1.1 identifies ‘failure to cooperate in an NCAA enforcement investigation,'” the termination letter stated.

Nah. It’s not like she held an important job.

HOW TO READ PRAVDA: “Whenever I see the liberal media jumping to a particular conclusion, my instinct is that the opposite must be true. Whenever I see the liberal media ignoring a story, I figure that story must be very important. Is it possible that the liberal media sometimes might be correct about one of these ‘social justice’ narratives? Hypothetically, I suppose, but you’re seldom going to lose money betting against them.”

IS FEMINISM capitalist propaganda?

SO FROM THIS WE CAN TELL THAT WHATEVER WAS IN THE EMAILS WAS REALLY, TRULY AWFUL: Hillary Clinton wiped her server clean. Because it had to be something that would look worse than this. And this looks terrible.

HOW BIG A FLOP IS OBAMA’S MIDEAST POLICY? So bad that even Vox is running stories like this: These Obama administration quotes about Yemen are almost too cringe-worthy to read.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is completely unable to park a car. “The result is a car that is not parked as much as abandoned.” It’s a pretty good metaphor for government in the age of Obama.