(London perspective), I've intervened from tourists getting scammed before from these guys, and they get violent very quickly. Especially fun because they have their gang all around.
Unlicensed, unmaintained, motorized vehicles on pedestrian paths, a miracle no one has been killed yet.
It's kind of insane, and is a microcosm of the UK's inability to do anything.
- Everyone hates them, from residents, to businesses, to the tourists that get harassed by them.
- There are multiple laws, that if the police wanted to, they could enforce at any time.
- Nothing gets done.
It is an impressive level of apathy from an already toothless government.
Yes, much like how they've regulated delivery drivers. The person listed on the app is definitely the one that delivers, very effective.
I detest the concept that we need yet another "law" before we can actual enforce anything. There are plenty of laws being broken already, we should go and prosecute them before we start making up new ones to ignore.
It's not that easy. He had those little chains strung across the side exits and wouldn't remove them until I paid. I told him they don't let you out of Canada with that kind of cash but he didn't believe me and laid siege to my day while eating a slice of pizza like a taco. The worst thing was that this was my second mishap with non-combustion locomotion that day. ...I still swear that was not the real Secretariat and that Central Park isn't in New Jersey.
Hm. Ok, well, I guess we would have handled that differently.
I had something similar happen in Germany, on the way from the (international) airport to a hotel the driver started some kind of spiel that suddenly his banking machine had broken and he couldn't take card payments. My friend/colleague Jaap who was with me said we'd pay cash and I said no way, and after fiddling for a bit with his phone (mine wasn't a smartphone) gave the driver a different address. When we ended up in front of the police station the driver became a lot more friendly, drove us to the hotel instead and suddenly found that his banking machine had miraculously started working again...
I find that by giving in to such fraud I'm helping to perpetrate it so I've vowed not to let it happen, at the same time there is always a chance that such an interaction would turn violent. After all, they've already decided they want to steal from you. My weighing of this is that they have more to lose than me because I'm a transient and they are not.
If they don't let you out of a vehicle, that's kidnapping and / or extortion and a call to the police should resolve it quickly. In a functioning society, anyway.
Easy to say from the comfort of my terminal, but some urban advice:
Remove the chains and get out; most important is your freedom and safety. They aren't going to risk prison for assault and battery. If they give you trouble, call the police immediately. Take a photo of them and text it to a friend. Don't act intimidated no matter what; it just makes them think they are getting somewhere with you.
Then offer a reasonable fare. If they don't accept, offer to call the police and let law enforcement sort it out. They'll take the fare.
I think your hope touches on what I think the issue partly is: a lack of empathy for any type of user that doesn’t resemble themselves. I think the deeper into tech you go, the more you find it. And Linux devs/fans are very deep into tech.
The commercial force behind SteamOS is largely the financial motivation to deeply care about the user who doesn’t get an apt about the technical details. They’re not there to do computers, they’re there to play a game or watch a movie or whatever. And the Linux community may benefit from the result of that goal, despite likely being salty about not being the audience.
Not just the user, but Valve also has a financial incentive to care about developers too. Especially developers of apps who may never be updated ever again. Developers do not want to waste time trying to fight the desktop Linux software stack.
Yeah. I’ve wondered if the game could be a total hit on some possibly-not-yet-real eink display that can reproduce the intended effect at 60fps without such eye strain.
As a kid I imagined playing Cosmic Osmo on actual magical paper at my desk at school.
Are the little hand animation graphics meant to flicker like they're an epilepsy test? That was so awful I didn't have brain power left to notice the fade scroll.
It is exactly what I'm referring to. I didn't say there aren't still people around. But they're far enough behind CPython that folks like NumPy are dropping support. Unless they get a substantial injection of new people and new energy, they're likely to continue falling behind.
I think this might be a good example of the fundamental misunderstanding of what "security" even is. It is never a binary state. Never was. And I think a lot of people don't really grok that and think that if a security block can be overcome in some manner then the thing is not secure.
Eventually Fort Knox will succumb to the unrelenting arrow of time and some future visitors will simply step over the crumbling wall and into the supposedly "secure" area.
I never hear about Grok being used over Codex or Claude on this site, I don't really hear about new Grok models or updates yet people love using Grok as a way to communicate meaning, are you guys just on Twitter too much?
"grok" in that sense is from a novel, i think Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein. i heard it before i read the novel, i'm sure, but i didn't notice it until afterward.
it means like "full understanding", like complete.
All genuine Beats as far I know come with the H1 chips and pair just like AirPods - even my cheap $60 Beats Flex I use on planes since I don’t have to worry about them falling out - they just fall around my neck
I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?"
But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways.
Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls.
Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)
Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice. A good way to make a little in the off hours.
So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul.
Sounds like a strange thing to have to announce, but sure the guy says you pay and I'll say.
No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0]. People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like a lot of people' he said.
That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of High Card, essentially.
You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the higher value one wins. Repeat.
It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.
My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing with this for decades.
[0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can access it that easily.
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.
While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets.
At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law).
Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player.
The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).
One thing I saw in a study of slot machines is that really addicted slot gamblers eventually become irritated at the jackpot animations, because they break up the "flow" state of pulling the lever or swiping a touch screen continually. They might be the most evil form of gambling we've developed, basically brain jacks for hardcore gambling addicts.
> Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player.
this isn't correct. slot machines are random. my first job out of school was, in part, making sure slot machines were random.
people think the machines are rigged because they don't understand the rules. the machines are fair, it's the pay tables that are rigged.
Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum games, you’re going to lose anyway. While I find most forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
My game of choice is the big state lottery and it’s simply for the fun mental space of the possibility of winning, actually checking your ticket is kind of depressing because the odds are so low. But look at it as paying for the experience of the possibility of a jackpot and realize when you buy one ticket or multiple so just buy one and it becomes a cheap thrill.
I have one friend who likes to gamble. I've tried the old math argument with him and he dismisses it out-of-hand. He says that, yes, he knows it's a negative sum game but sometimes he wins and that makes it worth it. Then he says, "You spend money on a symphony or an art museum or an expensive restaurant, right? Those are guaranteed to leave you a little bit poorer at the end of the night. Same thing as gambling, but with a bigger guarantee."
Hear me out: Whenever people try the "math argument" on a gambler they are basically wrong and are misunderstanding how recreational gamblers actually think, which is not irrational (for the most part) or at least not irrational in the way people think on the surface.
Take the lottery: The classic "math objection" is to explain to the person that the expectation[1] of buying tickets in a lottery is negative so over time they will (on average) lose money.
Most people who gamble know this. The thing is they are not trying to maximise expectation. They are trying to maximise "expected marginal utility"[2]. They know that the dollar they spend on the ticket affects their life far less than the payoff would in the unlikely event they get it. Because the marginal utility of -$1 is basically nothing (it wouldn't change their life much at all to lose a dollar) versus winning say $10mil would completely change the life of most people and therefore the marginal utility of +10mil is much more than 10mil times greater than the marginal utility lost by spending a dollar on the ticket.
It is fundamentally this difference that the gambling companies are arbitraging. And for people who become addicted to gambling it is like any other addiction. The companies are just exploiting people who have a disease and are ruining their lives for profit. There are studies which show that addicted gamblers don't actually get the dopamine hit from winning, they get it from anticipating the win (ie the spin). So actually winning or losing just keeps them wanting to come back for another hit.
[1] Ie the average payoff weighted by probability
[2] Ie the average difference in utility weighted by probability. This could be seen as how much of a difference the payoff would make to their life.
All people who go to casinos are not pathological gamblers.
They have some disposable income, and spend it at the casino for a bit of fun. Sometimes, they come out richer, and they are happy, sometimes, they lose, they come out a bit disappointed, but that's the cost of of entertainment.
Gambling can be entertainment, and as long as it's viewed as consumption it's fine IMO. I enjoy playing craps whenever I'm in a casino, and have great memories with friends playing the ups and downs of the table.
The response is probably that gambling is designed to be as addictive as possible, and while your friend might think they will not get addicted, is it really a good risk to take?
Go to a movie and you are going to be put the ticket prices, it’s a money losing proposition clearly there’s no reason to do so. Obviously, people place value on some experiences so any argument which fails to consider that is flawed.
If you happen to be at a casino, make exactly one bet in your lifetime and there’s a significant chance you’ll end up ahead. On average you’ll be out money but we don’t live out every possibility and average them. It’s just one event and you could easily end up ahead, it’s only as you repeat it with minimal gains and negative returns that things quickly become a near certainty.
With Powerball the odds are low but not astronomical that you buy 1 or 1000 tickets and end up ahead. It’s the most likely outcome by a massive margin but due to non jackpot prizes a long way from zero.
However again the odds of breakeven just reduce the cost of play they aren’t the only thing people get for their money.
If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.
I don’t play the lottery but I’ve never really understood the math against it. It’s a negative expected value, sure, but it also produces a (small) probability of a high return. The math against it seems to hinge on the idea that people should maximize the expected value of their wealth.
But, an alternative goal is to maximize your probability of qualitative changes up, and minimize the probability of qualitative changes down, for your living conditions. If somebody is in a situation where they can spend a qualitatively inconsequential amount of money on lotteries, then playing the lottery is a rational way of maximizing this metric, right?
Of course, it does add the hard-to-quantify risk that they’ll become addicted to gambling and start spending a qualitatively meaningful amount of money gambling!
OTOH if we as a society all started putting a small percentage of our wealth toward the lottery we’re essentially misallocating whatever that percentage was. So it produces a somehow less efficient economy I guess. So maybe there’s a social bias against it.
> if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
If you spend $50 at the arcade you usually develop a little more skill at the game. Depending on the game and player.
$50 at a slot machine develops no skill. At best you’ve broke even or made a little money. At worst, it just feeds an addiction. But there’s no skill here; the odds of any outcome are fixed regardless of what the player does.
Two or more tickets in the same draw have a lower expected value. Yes it is a very small change to your payout while having an extra chance. In some way you're betting against your self with a second bet in the game relative to the jackpot .
He just kinda hustled I think. I don't know him all that well. But from what I do know, he started announcing for his buddies who referred him to other people and so on. Eventually he had a website going and would schedule when he was available for announcing (dude has a family and day job so not all the time). Made a niche in online basketball games and was open to really anything.
If your buddy is somewhat famous, then get on the socials and network with the players in the files already, they all seem really open as it's still a big and unaddressed market. Payouts are gonna be small at first, think beer leagues and largeish friends groups. And from what I can tell the competition for big gigs is tougher as you go up in the field.
Honestly give it a try, seems like a great side hustle.
Edit: be a great idea for AI in the low end, but it's the human touch that really makes it. The guy I know is pretty funny and I assume his wisecracks help him
As mentioned in the other comment, scout out local events - bars that have trivia nights, bowling contests, etc. Find the ones where it's obvious the bartender is also the MC, and offer to do it for them for free/drinks/small fee.
Have business cards ready to go and have them laying out.
Economics sort of works ok when money transfers are used to mediate, y'know, the exchange of goods and services. Nearly everything else turns out to be a pretty obvious moral hazard.
I know roulette is random enough but here is a fun book by some physics whizzes who tried to make money off the game.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.
The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.
It literally has to be compromised to work. If the roulette machinery was perfect, you would be able to predict the outcome with Newtonian physics at the start of the spin. It has to have irregularities and asymmetries to trigger chaotic behaviour – and those same irregularities and asymmetries make the outcome biased!
I don't see how this is more degenerate than betting on roulette at a casino. Prediction markets usually provide more efficient odds than casinos because the house profits from trading volume instead of from the spread, so it's essentially just a way to bet on a game of complete chance with a much better average-loss than you could get on games of pure chance in the past. If people want to bet on coinflips, it seems objectively better that they have access to a way to do that in a way where they only get fleeced for 1% of their bet rather than 5%+ of their bet.
For sporting events, for example, the alternative to prediction markets 5-10 years ago was to use a website where you bet against the house directly, and they'd usually take around a 15-20% spread, and they'd ban you and keep your account funds if they decided you're winning too much. Now you can bet on the same events on prediction market sites, with around a 1-5% spread, and the house doesn't care how much you win (so there's actually an argument that you're playing a game of skill, compared to the old format where you definitely weren't, since you'd be banned for being too skilled).
Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead? Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of money in. Wait for someone to collect on the obvious profit opportunity for an assassination.
The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when this was dreamed up, the idea was crypto. But now we have prediction markets that encourage insiders to bet. And an administration that chooses to not prosecute corruption: https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Ord...
The result is a market that incentivizes manipulating wars for private gambling profit. With no need for anonymity, because the investigators have been fired. :-(
Or bribery: "I didn't pay anybody to dismiss the case against me. I just innocently hedged my personal risks by betting I'd be convicted. Now, if that judge or clerk just happened to be betting I'd go free, so that my million dollars is coincidentally in their pockets... well, that's just how things work out sometimes in prediction markets."
The one we're seeing more of is, "I just happened to buy a lot of the TRUMP meme coin that Donald Trump just happens to like selling. It's just a coincidence that I'm no longer in legal trouble." You know like the pardon for Changpeng Zhao (Binance CEO). Or the investigation into Justin Sun that got stopped.
See also the list of prominent people and companies that benefitted from executive action after investing in the Trump Presidential Library. You know like Amazon, Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. One wonders what exactly Qatar has gotten for deciding that the library needs a jumbo jet.
As I said, when the investigators have been fired, this kind of stuff can just happen in the open...
(To be fair, this happens on both sides. Granted, Trump has moved the Overton Window on corruption. But there is no guarantee that his successor, even if a Democrat, will want to move it back.)
> Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders.
And like any other gambling (see 1919 Black Sox), they can also incentivize behavior for actors who can influence the outcome of what’s being gambled upon.
Personally, that’s a significant enough negative externality for me to not want to live in a society where “prediction markets” are popular.
I personally think it’s ridiculous that we have allowed these prediction markets to subvert our sports betting laws. And meaningful corruption legislation should exist to prevent government and military personnel from profiting from them.
But if you are going to allow them at all, you want as much expertise as possible in them. Sharks eating minnows is what that looks like.
Makes me wonder if there's a bet you can take on Polymarket that Polymarket will get shut down due to it negatively influencing behavior. The insider trading on that one should get interesting.
2. If it’s only banned in the US, yes it pays out, you just need to get a VPN or go to another country.
Also even it’s banned everywhere, the markets are blockchain contracts so you should be able to access it without the website, which is just the frontend. (this is where my technical expertise breaks down, someone who knows blockchain is a better expert)
Why would we want insiders to profit on a public decision like war? If some general has money on Iran's leader being taken out by March 1, he might not be acting in the best interest of the country.
How is it useful when what we are seeing is insiders place massive bets immediately before the event resolves. Does gaining this information a few hours early provide value to society that offsets the impact of normalizing gambling and attaching incentives to bad outcomes of war, politics, etc.
Can you make massive bets if there's no one to take the other side of the bet? In a prediction market that allowed insiders, if you don't have insider knowledge you shouldn't bet very much because you're probably going to lose to someone who is an insider.
In an iterated game, either people would be happy to lose occasionally small amounts like $5 (with the benefit to society that insider knowledge is revealed), or if they didn't like losing even small amounts they'd learn not to bet if they didn't have real insight.
Well, look at current prediction markets, which are not theoretical and very clearly do allow insiders, with no limitations whatsoever. And people still routinely bet on things that they know insiders can control.
That is not true. That is not how gambling works at all.
That is how theoretical mathematical construction works. Which has nothing to do with how real world people behave in iterated gambling games. And the less you regulate what the gambling company can or can not do, the less the real world version resembles the theoretical construction.
If the value is insider information, and assuming it's legal, wouldn't it be better if the major newspaper offer a big pile of money to insiders that leak the data? At least there will be some level of ethical checking.
> wouldn't it be better if the major newspaper offer a big pile of money to insiders that leak the data?
so why would a newspaper pay money for information they cannot recover or monetize? Where would this money come from in the first place, because even if they wanted to do this out of altruism, they will simply run out of money after a while.
In the same way that the crypto hucksters were desperate to invent legitimate reasons for NFTs to have trillion-dollar valuations, pathetic gamblers are desperate to invent legitimate reasons for there to exist some non-gambling cover for the existence of predictions markets.
It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders.
Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible is debatable.)
That isn't very convincing, as the stock market itself is largely a prediction market. People buy stock to bet on future success, whether that manifest in the form of stock price increases, splits, and/or dividends. It's merely a much more narrowly-focused prediction market.
For that very reason, insider knowledge, and especially the ability to influence future outcomes, become the subject of heavy regulation. And, the lack of such regulation for congressional members is also why their net worth tends to skyrocket once entering office.
That's fair. Insofar as the purpose of the stock market is to allocate capital to companies the market predicts are most likely to succeed, you could argue that trading stocks based on insider information should be legal (though not insider trading by those with the ability to influence outcomes).
But I think the way our current system solves this is by forcing companies to disclose important insider information to shareholders all at once, rather than by letting insiders profit by leaking the information through their market transactions. (The one possibly being related to the other, because insiders who could legally profit by keeping information secret rather than disclose it would be incentivised to do so.) I don't think a similar restriction is feasible for prediction markets, because often the thing you're trying to predict is not something that can be legally cajoled into giving up its secrets.
I'd argue that the "purpose" of the stock market is matching investors with companies that want liquidity. Allowing insider trading hurts the purpose by driving away non-insider trading participants, and it does not really help in any way.
With prediction markets, the "purpose" is information discovery, and "insider trading" actually helps (=> via information from insiders).
Disclaimer: I'm somewhat playing devils advocate here, I personally think that prediction markets are for now mostly an ineffective zero-sum game (and legalized gambling with all the drawbacks that brings).
It's easier to define safeguards and the definition of inside information for stock markets than for prediction markets though. There is plenty of information that should ban someone from prediction markets that also wouldn't meet the definition of material non-public information.
that's a very shallow analogy as the stock market has significantly stronger guardrails to curtain insider trading including fines and jail time these companies lack. But even if you were to bring prediction markets under the purview of the FTC, it would still not be a functioning regulatory scheme since the scope of prediction markets is just so much larger - you can bet on anything.
Who cares what they call themselves? They're not prediction markets, they are just gambling on events. The "point" of prediction markets is not an accurate prediction in the same sense that the "point" of sports betting isn't that your bet means the team will win.
Betting markets are actually pretty good at predicting the outcomes of sports games. But you're correct that that's not the point of those markets; accurately predicting the outcome of a sports game has no real-world value, people are just placing bets for their personal entertainment.
Accurately predicting the outcome of a war, election, or other nationally important event though can potentially have immense value.
> Accurately predicting the outcome of a war, election, or other nationally important event though can potentially have immense value.
I don't contest that, but again, you haven't explained why "predictions" is the point of prediction markets. People place bets on things they want to be true as much as things they believe to be true. They can market themselves as whatever they like but no one has made a case that this is any different from sports betting.
It’s different because the prediction markets companies don’t make money on spreads. You aren’t betting against the house. Sports betting, every bet you take has a house edge.
Polymarket, for example, makes money on the data. So it must be worth something because people are paying for that predication data. They don’t take a slice of the winnings.
Platforms like polymarket can be used to bet on the outcome of sporting events. Does the fact that you are betting against another bettor change that from sports betting to a prediction market? If I am playing poker am I still gambling even if the house is just another player in the hand?
Yeah I guess that’s fair, but I wouldn’t say that predictions aren’t the point of the market. My point was more that the predictions must be the point, because people are paying polymarket to get that data.
They don’t make money by taking a spread, they make it by providing information.
And people bet on emotion for sure, but “wisdom of crowds” suggests that generally that will balance out to somewhat accurate odds.
> Robin Hanson, the economist who’s commonly known as the godfather of modern prediction markets, thinks that using inside information to place bets like this is actually necessary for these markets to work—making “insider trading” a feature, not a bug.
> “The point of these markets is to get information, so the only reason you should ever be trading on them is if you think you have some information,” said Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University whose academic work inspired the founders of prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi. “People with more information should trade more and get more money because that's how they get paid for the information they contribute.”
How is it at all a prediction if someone has insider knowledge? That's not a prediction that is knowing the facts. If I'm Trump and decide to capture Maduro tomorrow and then I bet on that happening, what did I predict? If someone close to me who knows my plans bets on it, what did they predict? That I will follow through on my word?
Insiders bring information to a market. Intelligent analysis and prediction also does, but obviously insiders have special information they are incentivized to bring to the market. Most people placing these bets are simply gambling, insiders and analysts at least have rational reasons for placing bets and add information to the market.
If I use a drone to look over a fence to count the amount of inputs and outputs of a factory, and only I know this, it is perfectly legal for me to trade on it. Not insider trading! I'm just a really good information-finder and I'm morally just in how clever I am at finding an edge.
If I work at the company and count the inputs and outputs, and trade on it, I am a morally bankrupt scumbag and I have hurt society and all of the traders in the market.
If you work at the company you have almost certainly signed an agreement not to disclose such information; if you do so, you are violating the agreement. But that isn't insider trading.
If you hold a position of fiduciary responsibility within the company (or gain information from someone who does) that's a different matter. But the analogy there would be hacking into the company to read internal records, not just looking over a fence. in both cases, it's a crime.
The reason insider trading is illegal is because it undermines confidence in the markets by establishing a pattern by which insiders with privileged, secret information leverage it to profit off people who cannot access this information.
It also incentivizes insiders to leverage their position within a company to manipulate the business in order to profit. This also undermines integrity of markets.
Your second example, setting aside all your troll bait inflammatory verbiage about moral bankruptcy, is an illustration of this risk. I don't care if it rises to the level of moral bankruptcy, it is harmful to a capitalist society in a serious way.
Your first example is a depiction of someone leveraging information that anyone can gather. It does not undermine the integrity of markets because it is just an investor acting on publicly-accessible information.
Correct, but they can access the information as soon as it is revealed.
Consider the case where a company knows that the drug they are selling is dangerous but keeps it a secret. Insiders know of the dangers and so bet against the company in the market (obviously this is illegal right now). The insiders make a profit in the short term, and investors also in the short term lose out (which they were going to do anyway, the losses come sooner), but in the long term the secret information is revealed to the benefit of everybody.
I don't see how this is responsive to what I wrote. Are you arguing that insider trading is no big deal? If so, what you're actually saying is "insider trading is no big deal because eventually bad information does reach the public."
But I never said insider trading was bad because it caused people to keep information a secret. You're responding to an argument I didn't make.
I don’t see the harm of insider trading. I would make the trades public and mark someone as an insider. The “cat and mouse” game played now leaves for endless suspicion
Yeah there are all those stupid things like "what color of Gatorade will they pour over players at the end of the game" that are ultimately about some arbitrary decision an individual or small group. Probably a whole sports game is fair to bet on because it involves so many sub-events but people gamble on things that make no sense to be gambling on.
The stock market and the sports market are also honeypots .
I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn if you believe that when you bet on the stock market or on the sports market for each and every particular bet involving millions of people the maximum profit is not reaped by a half a dozen of insiders who trade on inside informations and their only problem is not being too obvious about it.
Also even if they get caught the millions of people wagering are still getting fucked because there is not a redo or making people whole when the insider traders get caught (which is a tiny percentage of the time)
Insider knowledge is essential, that's the whole point. Expose the most information possible. The real problem is people who try to influence the perception of outcome after the fact, like in this case. That is exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen, but it's an unavoidable consequence of money being involved.
>I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting...
>But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight
The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.
It's a matter of market size and the inherent goal of the market; The factors are implicitly at odds.
A small market is not at all efficient - it's unlikely to incorporate available information to attain accuracy.
A large market invites manipulation of the event itself - it's auto-corrupting. If ball players make $1M/year and there are easy opportunities to throw a game and make $30M anonymously, then you can expect that the game you're seeing isn't legit.
Arguably (go watch the show 'Billions') this is a big part of how the stock market works as well - insider information is rampant and overwhelming in profitability, and if you believe POSIWID ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... ) ... you're probably not doing a whole lot of trading as a personal investor based on publicly available information.
Yep, similar thing is happening with college sports.
You went from a situation where the intent was for coaches to develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.
And now it's leaving at the slightest difficulty, constant money dangling to encourage transfers because even if the guy doesn't play for you at least he's not playing for your opponent, followed by a million voices online just telling kids to follow the money. There's no telling how much gambling is playing a part.
It's taken one of the best institutions in our country for developing youth and corrupted it while people go out of their way to not report on the stories of people being hurt by the process.
Well, to be fair, in order to complain about no longer being able to "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.."
we would actually have had to have been delivering on the whole "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.." story.
Unfortunately, for the vast majority of student athletes in money sports, we never really delivered on all of those promises in the past.
These younger generations (GenZ) of student athletes are just wayyy smarter than the older generations of student athletes. Consequently, we can't take advantage the way we did in the past. Even women's volleyball and basketball athletes are choosing to take their money up front, and then transfer because they're pretty sure they won't need the "value" of the "alumni base".
Yep, I realize that a lot of fans of different schools were jaded by the idea. It was happening at Clemson though. Dabo made that his #1 priority as a coach, constantly led the country in graduation rates alongside Stanford while competing at the highest level. They created a program called P.A.W. Journey to really take it to the next level too.
He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level.
Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show.
We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.
Yeah, but even "harmless" bets like the one you describe are too easy to rig. Who is to say that someone who works on Conan's show won't have some influence over the programming and intentionally steer the show so that they win their bet?
We're already seeing athletes try to fulfill specific bets since it's way easier to rig a play than to rig a whole game. The problem with prediction markets is that people who bet on something small and influenceable have an actual chance to change the outcome of that thing in their favor.
if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals
I am curious - how do you even begin to police such a thing like polymarket? Wouldn't it take enormous resources to do it? Is it even worth it at that scale? They let you bet on anything and everything, right?
I had fun betting $5 here and there
Maybe this is the solution - don't let people bet more than $5. That is small enough for everyone to have some fun and not worth it for insider trading, threatening journalists etc?
You mean, turn it into a fun minor hobby-time of sharing popular-opinions that are mostly weighted by how common they are, rather than dangling a huge perverse-incentive in front of an insider so that they reveal (or cause) a strong outcome through greed?
Actually, there's another perverse incentive operating on a higher level, when it comes for the people running things: "How is my prediction-market startup supposed to IPO for a bajillion dollars if we're not first-in-line for having sometimes-corrupt insider data? Nobody's going to pay me that much for a company that's just a spicier form of polling."
I think it is naive to assume that under capitalism, with no guardrails in place, that the people involved with these markets will leave money on the table purely by self restraint/acting in good faith.
If you just want fun, you don't need to be gambling real money.
Sure, it’s fun if the limits are at fun levels. Five dollar bet on who wins an Oscar? Whatever. But you could do that amongst your friends or in the office pool. Scaling gambling on real world events to VC level, or allowing people to bet self-ruining levels on anything online? Should be illegal and ought to be recognized as blatantly immoral. That it isn’t shows just how far the cultural rot has gotten.
Like in Old Dominiom Jihadist incident, after had stabbed a professor in a classroom full of highly-trained cadet students, got himself stabbed 22 times, broke 9 of his ribs, breath withheld, turned his head 180-degrees and broke his neck before committing suicide?
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