JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Some times Charlie was in the trees.
User ID: 4009
Why Minneapolis?
Minneapolis, and to some extent the state of Minnesota itself, is essentially a hyper-liberal exclave in otherwise very "red"/MAGA territory. This makes it a natural flash-point.
Bush himself campaigned on a humble foreign policy, and no nation building, to contrast himself from Clinton.
Yes, and then just under 8 months into his first term the chickens of neo-liberalism came home to roost. Turns out history doesn't just end because you declare it so.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember 9/11 as an adult, but Bush II wasn't really offered choice. The public was baying for blood and Clinton's people were still in control of the Senate and much of what we would now refer to as the "Deep State".
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Conceded on Bolton, but Rubio came up through the Tea Party how is he not "America first"?
Re: #1 I do not know how to state my case any more plainly than i did in my reply to @2rafa.
In the conventual stock market you buy shares of Amazon or US Steel that money is (in theory at least) adding to the capital valuation of that company. That capital valuation then helps finance things like new equipment, payroll, etc... You are paying money to own a "share" of that company, it may be only a 0.000000002 percent share of a billion dollar company, but (again in theory at least) 0.000000002 percent of that billion dollars belongs to you and you can cash out at any time.
Meanwhile "investing" in predication markets is something more akin to "investing" in scratchers tickets. The House has your money regardless and all you are left with is the hope that they might share a portion the money they already took off of others with you.
emphasis added.
Re: #2. Meanwhile when you put money into a Prediction Market your money isn't going into the economy (at least not directly) nor is it going into deciding your wagered outcome, it is going to "the house" and what you do (or do not) get paid back is entirely dependent on the house. In this sense a prediction market is not really a "market" in the "market economy" sense of the word so much as a Casino cosplaying as a market.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
every sports governing body has rules against the sort of people who might count as insiders betting on their own sport.
Correct, and eventually the same would have to become true about prediction markets, which according many posters here would defeat the purpose of having prediction markets in the first place.
...same with a bank.
No, not the same as with a bank. The bank you see, is always going to owe you back what you paid in, even if getting what you are owed is a separate question.
Incidentally, this is the exact reason Kalshi pays interest on money they hold for you
All I knew of Kalshi prior to clicking your link was those obnoxious AI-generated commercials they've been spewing all over Monday Night Football wherein the Wright Flyer is portrayed as a WWI style bi-plane.
From the looks of it they're trying to style themselves as a online bank/payment app as a means of trying get around existing gambling regulations. The blog post you linked claims zero transaction fees, but the fee-schedule for 2025 posted on their main website would seem to contradict that claim. If the blog article is honest and they really are both paying interest and not charging fees that just begs the question "Where's the Vig?", What is Kalshi's revenue model? How are they paying for all those prime-time ad-slots? I'm not sure exactly what their game is, but something smells off.
The incentives run both ways, actually.
Incentives running both ways is not a good reason to amplify and encourage them.
Your user-handle, the tone of your post, and the fact that after 18 hours you still haven't replied to anyone in this thread, give me the distinct impression that you aren't really interested in discussion and are just here to vent your spleen.
However on the off chance that my impression is wrong, I have a few questions for you...
- Who exactly do you believe has been humiliated here?
- Do you believe that "isolationism" in the eyes of Trump's supporters literally means "no foreign interventions or entanglements ever" or do you concede that it might mean something closer to "no more spending blood and treasure without getting something to show for it"?
- Do you believe that the Trump Administration's interventions in Venezuela and Iran have been more or less disastrous than the Biden Administration's handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, or the Obama Administration's similar attempts at regime change in Libya and Syria?
I mean, it's not great, but have you seen any top-level "DAE the outgroup are evil hypocrites?" posts from the right getting modded?
I can think of a few long-time users (including at least one former moderator) who ultimately got banned for expressing similar views.
How would a Venezuelan have known about this operation in advance?
Because I'm some rich kleptocrat who lives on the beach and a whole Company's worth of Direct Action Penetrators just passed overhead on their way inland.
a CEO who tried such a thing would still be abandoning his fiduciary duties to his shareholders and still be vulnerable to civil suits and criminal prosecutions
Except that the shareholders would be out millions of dollars. Dollars that the perfidious CEO can now use to hire an army of lawyers and legislators to ensure that the shareholders never see a cent and that he never goes to jail. Also why would you expect the CEO's trades to be "subject to regulatory reporting" if the regulations no longer exist? Wasn't removing them the whole point of this exercise?
Re: #1 see my replies to @netstack above and to @2rafa below.
Re: #2 I disagree that this is a strawman. Pretty much every justification for the positive value of prediction markets that I have ever come across can be boiled down to a single supposition; "More information is always better". If you think that's an unfair characterization, please provide an alternative.
Every investment is uncertain. That doesn’t make them all lotteries or MLMs.
Something being uncertain is not what makes it "gambling", and something making money is not what makes it an "investment".
When you invest you are (again in theory at least) acquiring an asset. That asset may appreciate or depreciate in value, but that asset is explicitly yours, and you do not manifest any gains nor losses until you choose to sell. This is notably not how prediction markets work, or even how options work for that matter. Even after ruining the Duke brothers you still have to sell the orange juice.
The point is that prediction markets do not generate wealth so much as they extract it from their participants. That's why I describe the relationship as "parasitical".
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
I find it pretty comprehensible. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug, especially when cut with philosophies like materialism, individualism, and deconstructionism.
Edit: I challenge any of the downboaters to name a better one.
I don't even think that Yudkowsky was the best thinker on LessWrong. Both David Friedman and Scott Alexander (when he was on) surpass him easily IMO.
Heck I can also think of a handful of regular commentors from those days that I thought were at least in his league if not the same ball park.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
But it doesn't have to be.
If you want your prediction market to have a "practical application" (outside lining of the owner's pockets) be it as tool for gathering accurate information, or as a platform for hedging, it absolutely does have to be this way.
That is why I say that it is not only logically incoherent, but economically irresponsible, to treat "prediction market bets" differently from any other form of betting.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
but aren't prediction markets also markets?
The individual incentives becomes to wreck every single company.
Are you familiar with the Bankrupt series of documentaries from Bright Sun Films? There are some firms that seem to have built their entire business model around this.
I feel like the defenders of insider trading and the boosters of prediction markets more generally are ignoring two massive elephants in the room. In fact they are so massive I feel like "elephant" is underselling their massiveness. More like brontosauri in the room.
Brontosaurus #1: Buying "shares" of a prediction, is not an "investment" in the way that buying a "share" of Amazon or Raytheon is. It's more like buying a lottery ticket, or enrolling in a multi-layer-marketing scheme. Yes there is the possibility of a big pay out, but it is a very small one, and the in mean time the owners of the prediction market have your money. Money that you could have spent on other things. It is a fundamentally parasitical relationship.
Brontosaurus #2: Conflict of interest. The assumption that perfect information for all players is always a net good relies on an assumption that none of the players will ever be direct conflict or competition with one another. This assumption is obviously false, so we must ask whether the purported benefit of having a prediction markets is even a benefit. Is making more information available desirable? I can easily think of cases where it would not be.
For instance, if I am a player on the Packers Offense, I do not want the Bears' defensive line to know what play we're going to run before we run it. It's not just the players themselves either, if I'm a coach, or a fan, or just some guy who "bet the over" on the game, I also do not want the Bears to know what play the Packers. If a bet involving two teams in a discreet game with mostly legible rules is already this messy, imagine how messy it can get when you have three teams in a continuous game with far less legible rules? Say instead of Packers vs Bears we have Ford vs Chevy vs Dodge. Even then that's still a relatively trivial example. I don't even want to think about all the weird and perverse incentives that would arise from things like Judges to "betting" on which way they are going to rule in a legal case, or any of other innumerable other chances to defect and/or make-a-buck that people would surely come up with were this to become normalized.
It’s incoherent to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than to financial markets,
This is incorrect. It would be more accurate to say that it is not only incoherent but economically irresponsible to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than we do to sportsbooks or any other form of betting.
In the conventual stock market you buy shares of Amazon or US Steel that money is (in theory at least) adding to the capital valuation of that company. That capital valuation then helps finance things like new equipment, payroll, etc... You are paying money to own a "share" of that company, it may be only a 0.000000002 percent share of a billion dollar company, but (again in theory at least) 0.000000002 percent of that billion dollars belongs to you and you can cash out at any time.
Meanwhile "investing" in predication markets is something more akin to "investing" in scratchers tickets. The House has your money regardless and all you are left with is the hope that they might share a portion the money they already took off of others with you.
I'm only a few paragraphs in and already getting strong "we wrote the conclusion first" vibes.
The repeated refences to disparate impacts and constant waffling between "children referred to CPS as infants", "children referred to CPS multiple times", and "all children referred" strike me as massive red-flags.
Without diving deeper into the raw data I bet that the actual situation on the ground is something like this; Close to 30% of all kids will be referred at least once in their lives. For most of kids who get referred it happens only once and it ends up going nowhere. However If MeeMaw is callin' cause no-good baby-daddy just got released from prison, or her daughter's off the wagon, and she's worried about the baby. The odds say that MeeMaw has called CPS before, and the probability of this referral going somewhere is much higher.
The conclusion of course is that CPS is racist and should stop trying to protect underclass children
Especially in context of the fact that the agriculturalists were demonstrably more evolutionarily fit.
I don't think it's fair to label the guy "a shitty dad" over one tweet but the this tweet displays exactly the sort of behaviors I had in mind when I described the post-modern liberal ethos as "incompatible with forming healthy relationships and families" in last weeks thread.
Neuroticism, extremely short time-preferences, hyper-feminization, lack of emotional regulation, pre-occupation with one's own validation/gratification. These are not healthy qualities to have in a partner but they are endemic (and often celebrated) within the liberal striver class because they are the qualities celebrated and promoted by the philosophies of "Emancipation", "Self Actualization", "Deconstruction", "Breaking down barriers", and "Following your bliss".
It is trivially true that there are downsides to having kids.
We currently have a new baby in the house which means I have been getting less sleep than I would like and I have been getting less sex than I would like. I also have a lot less time and energy to pursue my own interests than I would like. Additionally, the former baby has noticed that he is getting less attention from mom and dad than he is accustomed to, and has been acting out a bit. We have had to rearrange the house to make space for the new arrival and reinstall a bunch of the "baby-proofing" we had previously removed which annoys me, it annoys the kids, and it annoys the animals. Every living thing in the house is annoyed. The thing is that these sorts of issues have been a fact of parenthood for as long as human beings have been making babies so complaining about them has the same energy as complaining that the sun rises in the east.
My point is that it is ok to feel tired, or bored. It is ok to not always be enjoying everything all of the time. What is not ok is to be a grown-ass man with apparent emotional maturity of a toddler. In that sense I suppose I am echoing @iprayiam3 and @PokerPirate user, irrespective of the kid aspect, if you can't handle 10 minutes of tedium or delayed gratification that's really something you need try and fix about yourself.
To come at the issue from a different angle. Are there downsides to being physically fit? Yes absolutely.
Do you think I like eating leafy greens more than I like doughnuts? Or that I like drinking water more than wine? Do you think I "enjoy" doing cardio. Do you think that there isn't some part of me that would just love to throw back a half-pint of tequila smoke a bowl and do a bunch of shrooms right now?
Eating healthy, working out, and having to behave responsibly are all very clear and significant downsides to staying in shape so why stay in shape?
Because despite all reason and logic to the contrary, good things are good.
It is good to take a kids bunch of kids and dogs to a park and play "kick the ball". It is good to catch your romantic partner looking at you like you're a snack.
Good things justify themselves.
This is one of those spots where fixating on the racial angle is going to blind you to the more substantial points of cultural friction. The area between the south shore of Lake Superior and the west coast of Lake Michigan has always leaned left relative to the wider US. The Farmer-Labor Party, Green Party, Reform Party, and CPUSA all got their start in the region.
As I observed above, it is essentially a hyper-liberal exclave in what would otherwise culturally conservative territory. As a result you get a bunch of people who's model of reality is based around tik-toks of protestors in Portland fucking with cops with impunity, and pamphlets about de-arresting detainees, picking fights with a police force recruited from a population that is much less inclined to tolerate that kind of nonsense than their counterparts in more coastal jurisdictions.
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