These betting markets create a wild new perverse incentive to power. No need to get gifts from business interests. Just be in the room where it happens and extract piles of cash from betting markets.
These markets claimed to be useful tools for discovering truth. I'm not sure what being able to maybe predict a military strike a bit earlier provides to society, but I do know that creating a system for near-unlimited wealth extraction for those with power is a very bad thing.
On the other hand, these are markets, right? Your ability to make profit is limited by the available liquidity. I wonder, if enough people get burned by insider trading, will liquidity dry up? At the same time, I suppose you don’t need that much volume to make a decent amount of money. And these platforms keep growing…
If you play at a casino, you’re statistically guarantee to lose money, edge cases not withstanding. Do you see casinos closing down because people stop playing?
A sucker is born every minute, and I personally don't think it's great to create more effective channels for funneling money from suckers to corrupt politicians.
They don’t allow unlimited “extraction” of wealth. It is inherently limited by the need for people to take the other side of a trade.
Importantly, people who either thought they had better information (and were sadly wrong) or people who were simply gambling. It’s not like prediction markets are taking money from orphanages.
Well, Iran is majority muslim. If somehow you've concluded that muslims are simply fundamentally violent and incapable of stable governance and that is the reason why the occupation of iraq failed then...
But I personally think that the reasons why you see violent insurgency after a regime change and foreign occupation is a little more universal to humans than specific to islam.
I'm glad someone else remembers. Desert Storm was fast (kind of) because it had a limited objective: Repel an invading army from another nation. It did not lead to an invasion (long term) of Iraq. Comparing any war with the objective of regime change to Desert Storm reveals that the commenter is grossly ignorant of recent history (36 years ago, it's not that far back to be so ignorant).
Desert Storm also wasn't really fast, it led to containment operations lasting a bit over a decade in total, ending only when we decided to invade Iraq with the objective of regime change and nation building. And that one, predictably, turned into a quagmire.
This shouldn't surprise anybody at this point. This is how Trump behaves on a daily basis. He thinks that he can direct the federal government to do literally anything he wants and operates on pure retribution.
So many people wrote think pieces about how Trump couldn't possibly be a fascist because fascism involves state takeover of corporate power. Hm...
Before that we need a vast overhaul of qualified immunity for state officials and expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials. It is incredibly difficult to sue state officials for violating your rights because of how qualified immunity works and Bivens is even weaker when it comes to suing federal officials.
> expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials
I don't expect Congress to do so in the foreseeable future (regardless of how the 2026 midterms go), but I hope more states will adopt "converse 1983" laws [1].
> FISA warrants were even more incredible, with well below 1% rejection rates.
That's potentially much less incredible, and in any case not directly comparable, because its the final, not on-first-submission, rate, and also doesn't count applications withdrawn after a preliminary rejection that allows modificaitons but before a final ruling. It only counts the share of those that get a final ruling where that is an approval.
These markets claimed to be useful tools for discovering truth. I'm not sure what being able to maybe predict a military strike a bit earlier provides to society, but I do know that creating a system for near-unlimited wealth extraction for those with power is a very bad thing.
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