Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
No bio...
User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
21hr ago
The arguments for permitting insider trading are pretty straightforward from an economics perspective. We want prices to incorporate all available information. Limitations on trading by insiders prevent information from being incorporated into a price as quickly as it could be. So restrictions on insider trading make prices less efficient, less useful, than they could otherwise be.
I think the best counterargument I've heard comes from some of Matt Levine's writings on US equity insider trading. The basic skeleton is that the restrictions on insider trading reflect a duty of confidentiality you have to some entity with respect to that information. If I am an employee of a company and come into possession of some material nonpublic information I have a duty to my employer to keep that information confidential and insider trading restrictions are a reflection of that duty. Trading on that information (or sharing it to others for them to trade on) violates that duty by revealing that information.
What that second argument looks like in the context of prediction markets is less clear. I think in the specific Maduro case whoever did the insider trading probably had a duty of confidentiality with respect to that information. Likely to the United States government. I am not sure how well it generalizes.
Does this sound insane to anyone else? Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already? Just create a market about things you know in advance, using proxies and crypto mixers to hide your identity and money trail if needed. An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone. More specifically, shill accounts would create markets pretending to be an outsider, and the employee and his accomplices would place the correct bets leading up to the deadline. Wash trades by accomplices could be placed to create hype and volume to lure unsuspecting traders.
One thing preventing just anyone from doing this is market liquidity. In order to make a substantial amount of money you need a lot of people to be willing to take the other side of the bet. Also, it seems like people are doing this. At least some of them.
There's also some weirdness in US law, specifically, about prediction markets technically being event contracts which are commodities and subject to different (more lax) insider trading rules than equities.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
What I was trying to get at is that your comment says this context is connected to the phenomena in my comment but it's not clear to me how.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I actually don't think this one is specifically gendered. Both my wife and I have at times struggled with expecting the other to know our preferences and desires without having to explicate them.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I guess it's not clear to me what I'm supposed to do this this purported context. Are the factors identified here supposed to serve as justification? It's ok for men to generate and distribute nonconsensual nude images of women and girls because X and Y? Or an explanatory purpose? Men are doing this because of these factors, no comment on the permissibility? Either way I don't see how this is supposed to work. "Feminists complain about scantily clad women in video games so obviously middle school boys are going to generate nonconsensual pornography of their classmates" Huh?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
So much this.
The number one complaint I hear from women about porn is that it gives men a very confused, one-sided view of sex. You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!
I guess apologies if this is TMI but this was literally me with my wife when we were in high school. The first time I fingered her my only experience was from porn and so naturally that was what I tried to replicate. It was a painful uncomfortable experience for her and she left quite unsatisfied. Fortunately for me my response was to go online and look up some actual useful information about what women like. Talk with her about her preferences. Developing the skills to bring her to orgasm was not that hard! Unfortunately I get the impression a lot of men have the opposite takeaway. "If she doesn't like what the women in porn like, it must be something wrong with her!"
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I guess one limitation is it does have to be your "buddy" (at least, non-relative). The page describing the program has an exception so that you cannot receive subsidized childcare payments for your children during hours when you yourself are providing childcare to a child you are related to that is paid for with subsidies but it is worded kind of confusingly:
Note: In-home providers who are relatives and are paid child care subsidies to care for children receiving WCCC benefits, may not receive those benefits for their children during the hours in which they provide subsidized child care.
On the same page they are specific that a child's "parent" cannot be a subsidized provider but it seems like other family members could be:
Someone other than the child's biological parent, step-parent, adoptive parent, legal guardian, in-loco parentis, or spouse of any of these individuals
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
You can see the base payment rates for Licensed Centers from Washington's Working Connections Child Care here. Depending on exactly where you are (region map) that 40k is very possible. If you took care of 12 infants (<1 year old) for a full day, for 30 days, in King County, the state would pay you ~$41k for that month. The rates are fairly similar for licensed family homes. You can also get an increase above those base rates if your childcare entity is part of the Early Achievers program. Family Home and Center EA rates.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
Someone also quote tweeted that with a quote from Naomi Wolf's book Misconceptions:
When Nico was about 9 months old, I was in the floor with him playing the way you do with a nine-month baby- sorting cubes. We were doing this for what seemed to me to be a really long period of time. Ed came in, saw this scene and said, "Oh you're just entranced." And I said, "Are you out of your mind? I am bored silly." And he was stunned- he had no idea.
I am not myself a parent but I have a lot of experience being around smaller kids at various ages due to having siblings with kids in a wide age range. Playing with younger kids is definitely something I often found boring or tedious, both as a teenager and adult.
I don't think there's anything wrong with him (or any parent) feeling this, nor does it make him a bad parent. I suspect most parents feel this way some of the time. The things that are entertaining for kids are just not that entertaining for adults!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
I guess I don't see how eliminating no fault divorce and making it harder to divorce in general helps this. Bad enough that a woman is in an abusive situation. Now she has to create a paper trail. Hire a lawyer. Convince a judge. And if she can't do that she's compelled to remain. Why is that better? Why would shifting to this arrangement make women more inclined to marry? Less likely to be concerned about their ability to support themselves?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
I don't think I disagree with any of this. For many women who end up in that kind financially trapped situation, could they have made better choices earlier? Likely so. The cases where there are no red flags in advance are quite rare I think. Heck, the reason my parents never married is because my father's gambling problems were a deal breaker for my mother! But I think the question about what to do when one ends up in that situation is still important. Whatever process we have for mate selection is not going to be perfect at avoiding these kinds of problems.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
I do not have a good understanding of Hungary's economy so it's hard for me to assess the scale of their interventions relative to the opportunity cost. The exemption from 15% personal income tax seems like it comes the closest to defraying the drop in wages but it only kicks in after 4 children while my impression of the research is that the wage drop kicks in after the first child.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
Your last paragraph is, I think, part of why the discussion on the left is often framed as wages rather than tax cuts. The two proposals are only really equivalent with some assumptions about what you mean by "tax cut" and the underlying facts. If its implementation is as a reduction in one's tax rate or taxable income then they are only really equivalent if you are earning sufficient wages and paying sufficient tax to benefit. I have in mind something more in the vein of Unemployment Insurance or perhaps the refundable EITC. In the most straightforward case, the woman having the child expects to face some lifetime earning reduction of X. If society thinks her having that child is worth more than that lifetime earnings reduction it ought to pay her some amount Y > X. Or, women themselves presumably capture some of the benefit of having kids so perhaps society should only pay something like 0.5*X. The general point is that we need to set the payment amount such that it is actually competitive with the opportunity cost, or we are not going to get anywhere.
I think a combination of feminism-consumerism-hyperindividualism has convinced both men and women, but, especially women, that not having the means to support yourself (even within the context of a family) makes your morally reprehensible.
I suppose my perception is not that it's perceived as a moral failing per-se. Rather, lots of women have heard horror stories from other women about feeling or being trapped in a bad situation due to a lack of access to money. I'm optimistic that this is not the typical case but I think it's understandable women want some downside protection. I, personally, would be uncomfortable in the woman's position in some stories I've read.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
I suppose it's all a matter of framing. I don't think women are obliged to give society children such that their failure to do so is a "harm" to society in a sensible way. Would it be sensible to say you are doing "harm" to every person you could give money to, but don't?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
The impression I get from the rest of the article is not just the boy avoided school discipline immediately but even after having been charged with a crime for his actions. Maybe that's wrong, the boy goes unidentified and the school claims it also can't provide any information. Surely if there's enough evidence for the police to charge a crime there's enough evidence for a school to act.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
I suppose I imagine it's of a piece with something like false light which operates along similar lines to defamation. The harmed party would obviously be the individual whose photo was edited. Especially if their was an intention to pass off the photo as genuine. I don't think you could reach any edited picture with this doctrine but I think you could likely get non-consensual NSFW edits. In the underage case my understanding is that digital edits of minors can already be considered CSAM so I don't know why this would be different.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
How about a different kind of AI culture war? I speak of course of non-consensual pornography generation. The most outrageous article I read about this recently was probably this AP article: Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was the one expelled. The girl in question is 13 and she started a fight on a school bus with one of the boys later charged with a crime for sharing the images.
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.
When the sheriff’s department looked into the case, they took the opposite actions. They charged two of the boys who’d been accused of sharing explicit images — and not the girl.
It turns out that finding apps that advertise this kind of functionality is not hard. In fact, part of the reason I bring this up is it seems this capability is integrated into one of the largest AIs: Grok. There's been some controversy on X over the last couple days after Grok allegedly generated pornographic images of a couple minor girls. Additionally the bot's "media" tab was disabled, allegedly due to the discovery lots of people were using the bot to make pornographic edits of other people's pictures. Though the media tab is gone I did not find it very hard to get Grok to link me its own posts with these kinds of edits.
There is, I think understandably, a lot of controversy going around about this. It's not that it was previously impossible to make this kind of content but the fidelity and availability was much more limited and certainly required more technical skill. Being something you can do without even leaving your favorite social media app seems like something of a game changer.
Frankly I am unsure where to go with this as a policy matter. Should someone be liable for this? Criminal or civil? Who? Just the generating user? The tool that does the generating? As a general matter I have some intuitions about AI conduct being tortious but difficulty locating who should be liable.
There is a simple and straightforward way, common in our society, to induce people to commit their time to doing X instead of Y: pay them more. If you think the marginal women having another kid is more beneficial to society than whatever else she would be doing with her time then society should be willing to put its money where its mouth is. This circles back to your point about economics, though in a rather different way. Women's work outside the home is, by market standards, much more valuable today than it was 30 years ago. The opportunity cost to women of having children is correspondingly higher. As Vox pointed out back in 2018, women suffer a large and persistent decrease in earnings (that men don't) after having children. Women delay having children due to a desire to secure financial stability for doing so. This leads to them overall having fewer children, due to age-related difficulties with pregnancy. If you want more women to have children, pay them for the imputed loss in lifetime earnings.
I should probably just link Parenting as a public good.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
Next, wanting to enjoy the prosperity of a post WW2 America (that they, the boomers, totally earned on their own and didn't inherit from the Greatest Generation) voted for Social Security, Medicare/caid, and home mortgage subsidy. This created a massive debt burden that they would never pay because their children and grandchildren will.
I'm a little confused by this section. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935, a full decade before the first boomers were born. Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, when the oldest boomers would have been around 19.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6d ago
My impression from what I've read is that women tend to have more intimate platonic friendships than men do and so a lot of these kinds of emotional needs are fulfilled by those relationships. Whereas men tend to get those needs fulfilled from a romantic partner.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6d ago
That Dataset actually only goes up to the 1990ish birth cohort. Check Page 43 of the PDF
Sure. It's asking about whether someone was married by age 45 so it is necessarily limited to people who are age 45 or older (birth year 1980 or earlier).
Any shifts that emerged in the past 10-15 years are probably not reflected here.
And the last 10-15 years are when the most drastic shifts have happened.
I'm curious about the precise claim here. For ~40 years between 1985 and the present the fraction of college educated women married by age 45 looks pretty stable around 71% (+/- a couple percent) while the fraction of non-college educated women married by 45 underwent a steady collapse from around 71% to 52%. Is the claim that in 10-20 years, when the current cohort is 45, these numbers will have reversed? There will have been a climb in the fraction of non-college educated women who are married? A decline in the fraction of college educated women who are married? Did going to college become a net-negative for women's marriage prospects just in the last 10-15 years?
The longer a student is in college — the least likely they are to get married, study says
The less likely they are to be married in the 25-34 age range. If people are unlikely to get married while in college then being in college means delaying marriage, potentially out of this age window.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6d ago
The irony for women is that going to college tends to reduce their appeal as mates (not a given, but they tend to make choices that lead there) while making their expectations for a mate go higher.
How does this square with the fact that there's an almost 20 point marriage gap in favor of college educated women? College educated women are worse mates and have higher expectations, but are much more likely to be married? Most of the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years has been among non-college educated women. Non-college-educated women have seen marriage rates decline from 79% to 52% while college educated women have seen marriage rates decline from 78% to 71%. Empirically, college helps women get married.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6d ago
I think people tend to talk about (1) because they perceive (accurately) that it is where the change has been in the last several decades regarding relationship formation. I'm not aware of any data indicating that "desirable" men are less willing to commit today compared to, say, 20 years ago but there is some data showing women are less interested in getting married over that period. Additionally it's a little unclear to me how large the pool of "desirable but unwilling to commit" men even is. Are there a large fraction of men out there who women want to marry but do not themselves want to marry? That's not clear to me. I can think of some high profile anecdotes but not sure how generalizable that is.
On (1) my pet theory is that women's expectations for marriage and relationships have evolved along with their economic development in ways that men's expectations have not really caught up with. If your pitch, as a man, is that you are going to be an economic provider that is probably much more effective as a pitch in 1982 (when men's average wage was 50% higher than women's average wage) than it is in 2025 (when men's average wage is ~18% higher than women's average wage). Among young people (aged 25-34) that gap is even smaller (35% advantage for men in 1982 vs 5% today). Add to this that it seems women are more comfortable being single than men are and a drop off in relationship formation is not that hard to explain.
I am also under the impression a lot of large corporate gambling companies will just ban you or restrict how much you can gamble if you are too good. They want to bet against people who will lose, and nothing prevents them from ceasing gambling with people who consistently win!
More options
Context Copy link