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We are quite literally witnessing someone taking a massive hit for not discarding their principles.

Evergreen dril: "The wise man bowed his head and said 'there's no difference between good things and bad things you imbecile'"


What's your source for this "massive hit"? All I've seen is a massive PR upside, despite what I said above.

Losing a contract with the Pentagon and potentially all Federal-interacting businesses sounds like a pretty severe monetary hit. One which is hard to recoup by a bunch of $20/month consumer subscriptions.


Smart if you ignore mathematics

...?

No, this is the consequence of having an actual stupid person in the Oval Office and the majority party being half coerced and half committed in cultlike devotion to POTUS.

Obviously the US has economic weapons. It's the largest economy in the world.

If anything this signals that POTUS himself cannot wield those weapons though, and the American public, political, and business apparatuses have little appetite for this use of those weapons.


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Okay: the previous administration elected and elder-abused a clearly mentally handicapped one and lied about it in the press for nearly 4 years.

Happy?

Can we get back to the topic at hand now that I scratched that little itch for ya?


2016?

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Okay, I'll entertain it. How would you distinguish between the brilliant move of using illegal tariffs to disclose limited power and appetite for tariffs, versus someone displaying a 3rd grader level of economic understanding and saying "well of course we should charge people to sell stuff in 'my store' and I am now the manager of 'the store', so I get to set the rate"?

What specific pieces of evidence do you believe makes the former more likely than the latter?

+1 on nukes, though MAD has worked for decades so far. I agree people think this risk is far more remote than it actually is. Especially the risk of a catastrophic accident as nukes proliferate and forces get put on higher readiness.


Why would China immediately retaliate with a Rare Earth threat to tariffs? Why would we threaten Greenland, another rare earth hotbed? We , the general public , similar to the Cuban Missile crisis, are not being told shit.

There is a global cold/hot war where real pieces have moved. NATO is basically at war and we can’t know. There’s millions dying in Ukraine, and it’s basically Eurasia to us (virtualized, reported , broadcasted ).

Warships are being torpedoed. Nuclear subs from either side can’t be tracked, it is always a leveraged threat that one has to negotiate around.

Few are ready to live under 24 hour nuclear watch, but it’s possible that’s what many cities have been under and can never be told. Maybe I should just go ahead and write my great American novel?


> Few are ready to live under 24 hour nuclear watch, but it’s possible that’s what many cities have been under and can never be told.

Effectively every city on the planet is perpetually on 24 hour nuclear watch and has been for decades now. This is completely "known" to anyone who cares to know and has taken the time to understand modern nuclear doctrine.

You should read The Doomsday Machine! It'll help amp up your anxiety ;)


This describes large companies everywhere

I encountered oil wells essentially controlled by post-it notes passed around an office.


Maybe they found the PostIt notes worked better than whatever software they tried.

Many such cases

I distinctly remember reading that the entire bill of materials for building a Boeing 747 was managed in Excel. I have not been able to find that claim since then but it was so amazing to me that I remember it.

It doesn't really make sense as I think about it now, because the 747 design predates Excel by many years so maybe it was BS.


Assume that later models of the 747 were managed in Excel. No trolling: What is wrong with that? You can write insanely powerful software using (1) formulas on the sheet (which are essentially functional programming) and (2) imperative logic in VBA (HTTP calls, database calls, file system, etc.). For years, I used this model and wrote pretty powerful software. Sometimes, I miss it for the encapsulated system. These days, in "biz dev" (internal software), it seems like the Excel model was replaced with an Electron front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) with Java back-end.

> No trolling: What is wrong with that?

Because you can't define a named custom formula by composing the built-ins. So every cell is just the same copy-pasted formula string. When you need to change something, you have to change it everywhere and pray that you didn't miss one usage.

I can't count how many times I found a bug in a spreadsheet because someone (who might be me) missed one or two instances.


Yes, you can define your own named custom formulas in Excel.

I prefer to do it with VBA code because I find it easier to manage, but it's also possible without VBA using just the built-ins in the spreadsheet directly.


There's nothing particularly wrong with it, Excel works great. But almost any complex Excel file is riddled with obscure bugs and the nature of the tool makes it impractical to apply some of the most effective quality control techniques. Like you can't easily do code reviews or write an automated test suite.

I suspect the average excel spreadsheet has fewer bugs than the average custom in-house enterprise software

I second this! Excel is a front end everybody knows and everybody can run. I always got laughed at when I say the biggest competitor of small apps (things like gym diary, meal planner etc.) is excel. Now that it even support python…

Investment banks were running complex trading books in Excel well into this century. Insanely powerful software.

Not hypocritical at all if you knew what Palantir actually does


Anthropic doesn't have an issue with their technology "helping kill people," so correct, that would not be hypocritical.

Most gambling "games" are quite a lot harder to acquire and use insider knowledge on though.

People don't play in corrupt markets for very long.


The movie _Casino_ highlights how insider information was and is used to improve the house odds [0].

Information about a players wellbeing and their life goes a long way. Example, they would pay paper boys to talk to coaches to find out non public information. Such as if a player of the team is going through relationship problems.

[0] https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/524-casino


All of which is significantly harder than putting up a gigantic billboard that says "Have insider knowledge on an important event? Place a bet here using crypto!"

Every important event in the world has dozens if not hundreds of people "in the know" before it happens. Not everyone has paper boys, chatty coaches, or the time/energy required to connect all those dots.

The entire flow insider information is reversed from "go out and look for it" to "invite it in anonymously"


Scorsese and De Niro, looking forward to watching.

Was the ", again" left off, or is this going to be the first time you've seen the movie when you do watch it? I know new people are born every day, but Casino is one of those movies that I'd have expected any one old enough to be reading this board to have seen already. This is no judgment on anyone for not seeing it. Just a comment on my skewed view of the world I guess

I didn't see it for the first time until like 2020. Nobody in my family was in to mobster movies and my friends in my 20s never brought it up to watch with me

It's a classic though for sure


Well I just saw Goodfellas the other day... :D yeah this one I missed, lucky 10k!

Sports betting has been around forever, and it has been gamed forever. Gambling is often an addiction and some cheating doesn’t stop people from doing it

To corrupt a Polymarket bet, there needs to be only one person with inside knowledge of a planned event's timing, outcome, duration, etc in order to destroy the other side. The vast majority of Polymarket-bettable events have at least a few dozen if not hundreds or thousands of people with prior knowledge. Polymarket is now a known market where they can (conveniently through crypto) participate. It is basically a billboard saying "do you have interesting inside knowledge? Come here and make some money!"

To corrupt a sport bet, there needs to be an actual manipulation of events perpetrated by a very small, very closely watched and analyzed group of people (athletes or officials).

In my view, it seems immediately obvious that as prediction markets become even more mainstream (and so the billboard effect gets stronger), Polymarket bets will have a significantly higher rate of corruption than sports bets.


We'll see if people stop using it

"People don't play in corrupt markets for very long." ... ahhh, it's not a bug with Polymarket - it's a feature.

Someone has to take the other side of the bet. As these stories become more common and well-known, it'll degrade the market

All I've ever seen is it encouraging people and not discouraging them. The thrill of the easy money, right?

Forget it jake, it's Polymarket.


This stuff is turning me off of prediction markets and I'm actually a huge fan of them conceptually (and have bet on them myself for quite a while).

As the billboard glow inviting insiders to trade gets brighter, the markets get less useful, less fun, less interesting, and obviously less rewarding.


No matter who steps up, Trump's actions make clear they have only two options:

1. Permanent subjugation to western countries, to be unilaterally abused whenever they felt like it, or

2. Race to the nuke as fast and as secretly as possible


> Israel was surrounded by enemies at the time of its creation itself

Uhhhh... euphemism of the century lmao

Can you describe how exactly Israel just came into existence surrounded by enemies?


Aren't Iran's interests in Israel pretty analogous to the US's?

Regional security and holy book brainmush?


That’s my point. The U.S. certainly can’t complain it’s catching strays either. It chooses to involve itself in that conflict.

It's a lot easier to agree Current Guy Bad than it is to agree on who Next Guy should be

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