This is the crux. Trump is simultaneously a wholesale departure from political norms, but also merely a culmination of decades of reactionary talk radio preaching "Death to America" but then backing it off just enough for people to go to the polls and vote for "their" candidate.
Trump's second term should be the end of the Republican party. But if Bush II is an indication, the pattern was that while people gradually came around to seeing what a bad idea the Iraq War was and whatnot, they merely cooled off for a few years but then were right back at it getting fooled again a slightly different way. How much of the support for Trump was basically recycled criticism of the Iraq War (ie of the Republican establishment) ? And yet here we are now, with a nice shiny new quagmire (assuming it isn't an outright loss).
fwiw I'm a libertarian so while I actually agree with much of the criticism, it galls me even more how people can start with very individual-liberty-centric criticisms, but then somehow gleefully jump behind supporting authoritarianism when it can be their turn at the trough.
I have regrets when I say something dumb or drive through an intersection on a not-quite-yellow light.
Innocent people, including children, are dead. Republicans have done irreparable harm to this country on every imaginable level: civil liberties, trade, global power, economics. Open and naked corruption is so off the charts it can only be described with comparisons to the post-Soviet era.
What exactly do they have deep regrets about, though? Do they regret voting for someone with his style? Do they regret empowering an obvious corrupt liar? Do they regret supporting someone who focuses on who to blame and hurt, rather than on things that might actually help (albeit in regrettably marginal ways in all three cases)?
Or do they just regret that they were fooled by this guy, specifically? That he's not accomplishing his stated goals, whether or not he is taking his promised actions? If it's this one, then it's only a matter of time before another charlatan does the same thing better.
Usually they regret him not being extreme enough. Being personally harmed to a very high level also works. The keyword is very high level, people are willing to take a lot of pain for someone they think is "jesus".
I don't disagree. The Democrats believed their "permanent Democratic majority" schtick, and enacted a bunch of things that much of the country deeply disagreed with.
But we also need a national reckoning on ICE's excessive use of force, DOGE, using the DOJ to prosecute political opponents, the financial irresponsibility of the "Big Beautiful Bill", the attack on the Capitol, the rest of the attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 elections, the tariffs by executive order, the threats to Canada and Greenland...
So sad to me how combative Apple has been towards open source software over the years. The peak of the jailbreak era was imo peak mobile development too. So much innovation and rapid iteration. Anything seemed possible and anything really was possible if you put your mind to it and built the thing. Pretty much any good idea apple integrated into ios has been shamelessly copied without attribute from that crucible of creativity that is the jailbreak community.
But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.
It sucks because for a while, at least in the second jobs era, they seemed to at least hesitantly support foss. They collaborated with KDE, released darwin as free software, and contributed to GCC and then very heavily to LLVM. MacOS, for a while, used an open source init system (systemstarter for a while, then launchd)
Which governments, though? The US loves these "NOBUS" companies, enforcing Google and Apple's walled garden is part of their agenda.
The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.
The four other eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point given that sharing intelligence with the US almost certainly means sharing it with your enemies.
I doubt that. Most of those governments still rely on US-made software and US-designed hardware, so the NSA's Sword of Damocles is always dangling over their head whether or not their cooperate. The Canadian Sikh murders seem to indicate a level of US-Canada intelligence cooperation that still operates well.
My original statement should have read Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, but the point stands. The US can play hardball behind closed doors and make these nations regret regulation even if it's a good policy.
I'm sure "the government" (almighty, praised be it's name) is very interested in regulating an industry in order to supplicate your extremely niche hobby.
But faith can move mountains. Maybe you have to sacrifice some goats to the government to have your prayers heard?
I don't think you need to win this, you just need to not be near the bottom of the board. But just in case, I spam tokens like it's the Chuck E Cheese roulette game.
i think the best in this case is to be solidly in the middle of the pack. don't want to be near the bottom, don't want to be a tall poppy when the backlash comes
"California’s top foreign refinery supplier of gasoline and blendstocks this decade is Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Jamnagar refinery complex in western India. "
"More than 9 million barrels arrived via this loophole in 2025"
Now, that's a tiny fraction of the 320M barrels of gas used in CA annually, but anything that affects global oil shipments will be felt in California.
> [California] imports about 60% of its crude from overseas--up from 5% in the mid-1980s- about a third of which comes from the
Middle East. About 15% of the state's refined fuels are also imported, much of which depends on Middle East crude.
I've been quite successful trading weather prediction markets.
The prediction markets were never about predicting outcomes. If that's the level you are playing on, you're playing at the lowest possible level, and probably won't win.
The markets are now about properly modelling other peoples' manipulation of prediction. That's how Wall Street works as well. Companies can beat earnings and their stocks crash immediately after. It makes zero sense if you just model companies. It makes full sense if you stochastically model how an ensemble of humans behave under incentives and human-written bots behave under human-written policies.
"Hairdryer sometimes get pointed at the weather sensor" and "Government sometimes fudges jobs/CPI data" are more or less the same thing. Build it into your model. That's the level you need to play on to profit in these markets. It's not that different from how a chess engine works.
I am getting into trading on my own (my main job was in machine learning and I studied math in university). I've also come to a similar conclusion that you pretty much have to model these "manipulations" on top of the statistics/Brownian-motion-driven behavior of any security. I am currently working on a hybrid model for something on Polymarket but it's not yet sophisticated. Do you have any resources that you can point me to that expand on this very idea of adding human behavior to financial modeling?
Without giving away my exact strategies, I'm also an ML engineer and I'll just say that ML is in 90% of cases the wrong tool, whereas simple regressions and scatter plots will unearth loads of statistical anomalies if you know where to look. You want to find anomalous behavior then hone in on how to make them your counterparty.
ML can help you optimize things after that, but locating diamonds in a soup of noise is not really where ML shines.
> "Hairdryer sometimes get pointed at the weather sensor" and "Government sometimes fudges jobs/CPI data" are more or less the same thing. Build it into your model.
Is this comment satire? Bet on things being intentionally and secretly manipulated by people you will never meet? In what direction? This just sounds like a recipe for participating in the most financially dangerous questions.
Says "prediction markets were never about predicting outcomes", writes long winded tripe stating that "prediction markets exactly about predicting outcomes". Thank you Tai Lopez.
I don’t understand why these bets are allowed at all. Can one just make an account there and bet in anything?
The whole “prediction market” charade is increasingly proving to lend itself to abuse. I hope regulations catch up with it soon, otherwise more shenanigans will follow.
The problem is that the genie is out of the bottle, even if you try to regulate it away it pops up in offshore jurisdictions and uses crypto. The ease with which polymarket can be manipulated is infinite because there are so many different random things you can bet on. It's a sign of our times and I don't think there is much that can be done about it by anyone.
This vastly increases the barrier to entry for the normal person though. Is your position that just because laws don't work 100% of the time we shouldn't bother with them?
But wow what a useless way of conversing that is. They asked because it's unclear what you're implying. So could you please clarify if you think regulation would be useful? Or should be done despite being futile? Or shouldn't be done? I can only think of those three answers, is there another?
I think smart policy would be a good start. I just made a comment on the sign of our times. I could have worded my one line reply better. I do think it will be difficult to regulate as I don't see a political appetite to do so. Maybe some countries will get it right.
For the record, I do agree with this perspective at least from an external observer of the US. Many places already regulate these types of gambling much better. What I mostly took issue with is what I read to be a resolute throwing up of the hands of any action being useless.
It is indeed unfortunate that the level of corruption in the current US administration likely precludes any action on it in the current term.
Bans from the AppStores will go a long way to removing this behavior.
Sure a few die hards will always find a way to gamble, that does not mean we should not have regulations for the majority.
> It's a sign of our times and I don't think there is much that can be done about it by anyone.
Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable? If you make it too hard and risky for most people to participate in, you'll limit the negative effects. You could probably quite effectively discourage it by sanctioning any transactions with one of these markets, you've got some opportunity because at some point the cryptocurrency needs to be converted to/from cash.
Of course, you'd have to dedicate some investigative and enforcement resources to the effort.
If to bet on a prediction market you have to both use a VPN and launder your money like you're a drug dealer, and I don't think many people would do it.
> Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable
Mostly no. If you're connected it to a banking account, or other KYC platform, maybe, but the folks capable of doing that are part of the same administration supposedly doing the manipulation, so they would not investigate themselves.
Indeed, they are actually fighting against those trying to regulate it [0]
Indeed, the president's son works for Polymarket, and has invested in it [1]
>> Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable
> Mostly no. If you're connected it to a banking account, or other KYC platform, maybe,
But if you're (say) and American betting on it, the money almost certainly flows through one of those entities. And if you're using bitcoin the ledger is totally public, so you could track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept payment (or vice versa).
> Indeed, they are actually fighting against those trying to regulate it [0]
Choosing to "do something about it" or not is a different question than can something be done at all. I was addressing the latter.
How can I, an ordinary person, track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept payment (or vice versa)." in order to link a real identity to a prediction market identity?
I don't have access to that. The government which has access to that is the very government making money doing this, so would not investigate itself.
If your question was purely technical, the answer is maybe, depending on the exchange flow. e.g. Maybe it was exchanged through Monero along the way or something, then the answer might be closer to "no".
> How can I, an ordinary person, track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept payment (or vice versa)." in order to link a real identity to a prediction market identity?
KYC data is certainly confidential.
> The government which has access to that is the very government making money doing this, so would not investigate itself.
I'm not obsessed with the Trump administration, so let's not make everything about them, OK? There are other governments in the world and there will be other administrations in the US in the future. I would like to talk about prediction markets in general.
Again, if your question was purely technical, the answer is "maybe", depending on the exchange flow. e.g. Maybe it was exchanged through Monero along the way or something, then the answer might be closer to "no".
If your question was asking about a practical, realistic possibility of this being done, then your weird fixation on the trump administration aside, the answer is "no".
We seem to be seeing the repetition of every stock/securities fraud that led to the creation of the SEC. But we're seeing people who refuse to let any reasonable regulation to happen.
As Ukrainian I find bets if some city would be captured - peak degeneracy. People are being sent to die or protecting their homes should not be someone bet.
Anything on the site? Yes. Anything at all? No - Polymarket themselves make the markets (and I think they have some partners that can make markets as well, but point is some random user cannot make a market).
You absolutely can market make on Polymarket. The barrier to entry is actually extremely low; you can do it from an AWS instance in Dublin (the closest non-geo-restricted region to the Polymarket exchange), and don't need the kind of infra that is needed to market-make on US stocks. Retail can absolutely do it on anything crypto-based.
In order to market make, you just need to price probabilities better than everyone else. That's it.
On Wall Street on the other hand it has come down to FPGAs and free space microwave links because fiber optics' index of refraction causes a ~31% reduction in the speed of light. If you don't have millions of dollars you can't get into that game. Over-regulation cas resulted in this space being only accessible to the ultra-rich.
I'll steelman it: previously there was no monetary gain to be made by messing with weather sensors. A market like this creates one, creating an externality on owners of weather sensors, on enforcers and courts to investigate and prosecute novel crimes. Administration of taxes on such markets to compensate all the disparate factions harmed by the externalities exceeds the amount which could be collected, so banning is the only proper solution.
> A market like this creates one, creating an externality on owners of weather sensors, on enforcers and courts to investigate and prosecute
I am only half-joking, but this gave me an idea for how to finally get the local courts+LEO near me to get off their asses and actually do some law enforcement and prosecuting - I just gotta create prediction markets on the crimes occuring in public in my neighborhood.
The article articulated this enough, I thought but I guess not.
They're interfering with officially gathered data, used to forecast the weather. And they're not just gambling. They're also gaming the system to make money on it. This goes far beyond 'just gambling'.
>They're interfering with officially gathered data, used to forecast the weather.
If that's illegal they should be prosecuted for that. Luxury goods create incentive for theft, but nobody suggests luxury goods stores should be banned to reduce the amount of theft.
Could you regulate the sale of luxury goods meaningfully without having negative impacts on necessary markets? Can you say the same about prediction markets?
There's a reason we don't have markets to bet on whether someone will be killed, or to create a profit motive for people close to the White House to spill the beans.
There's plenty of legal avenues for the next administration to outright shut these firms down
I recommend thinking about the issue for yourself. It's not hard to see why prediction markets are subject to abuse. Market regulation has little to do with morality or "moral rights". Would I be correct in assuming you're an Ayn Rand fan?
Yep, you can bet on anything. Mike Selig is in charge of regulating it, and he's pretty zealous about suing any state regulators trying to exercise their right to regulate gambling. I think the days of the wild west are clearly numbered, but one guy with a burning passion and a big agenda (and the backing of Don Jr) can get a lot done in the meantime
There are communities larger than you'd expect around just about every topic imaginable. I'm certain there are temperature enthusiast groups, especially given its adjacency to climate stuff. It's probably going to be people mostly betting on something they have better than average knowledge of. I'd be interesting to compare the 'normal' majority temperature predictions from polymarket to local weather station predictions. I'm betting polymarket wins, by a wide margin.
For instance chess wagers on polymarket are super interesting because it's far more informative than a chess engine, even though engines are much stronger than any human. The nuance is that engines don't appreciate human factors like how easy/hard a position is to play. And so an engine might just say 'dead draw', whereas a strong human can say 'nah, white has very good winning chances here' - and the polymarket wagers end up reflecting that. And so there it's mostly strong players making money from people who think turning on their engine and betting based on what it says is something nobody else must have thought of.
It sounds like the other side of the bet was the actual winning bet when compared to Truth. Maybe they have great climate models and actually make a bet that they have an edge on. Maybe they have a gambling problem. Either way, they are the victims here.
People bet on anything and everything, and the less controllable the better, afaict. "I'll bet you $5 that snail will eat the cucumber before the broccoli" - > "fuck yes, make it $20" is 100% a thing I could see happening. Weather is significantly easier to do every day though, unless you know a snail farmer with a twitch stream (if so, hook me up!).
You're wrong. The big prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi) employ in-house market makers and contractors. They provide liquidity for less-active contracts. They generally are not profitable.
Why do you think it’s a nonstarter when so many of these new platforms do commit fraud all the time and get away with it? It’s only a problem if they get caught, and then only if people actually pay attention enough to care
It’s not really a bug - it’s a feature. Casino software is designed from the ground up to keep players engaged for as long as possible, which is where all those retention and engagement mechanics come from. It’s also important to understand that the “house edge” isn’t about luck - it’s pure math built into the algorithms (RTP, volatility, etc.). At the same time, a lot depends on the operator. Different providers offer different levels of flexibility, and the casino owner ultimately decides what kind of conditions to offer players. Here’s a solid breakdown on why platform flexibility matters and how it’s used in practice: https://thetradable.com/press-releases/why-flexibility-and-s...
So? There’s no game with payout odds in your favor.
Lotto (at least where I live) also shows the odds, which are always ridiculously low. Still, people play, because the human brain isn’t built to understand odds. It’s essentially worthless as a metric.
> More than just the d100 he was a pioneer of being very exacting when it came to making polyhedral dice.
Absolutely, but i couldn't fit all of that into the subject line ;) and he's best known for the d100. Many of us remember the articles and ads from the 1980s describing the effort he put into that particular die.
I remember reading his original page - what fun insight into something nobody "really" cared about (casinos care about honest dice but only six-sided).
Now, will it immediately off-gas and embrittle on exposure to vacuum? Different question.