I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up controlled news sources. You get people who have an official press card to report on things as you need as part of the reporting manipulation business.
"Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"
As someone who at first embraced the idea of prediction markets and is now ambivalent, sending them underground vastly reduces their harm. First, because discoverability is an issue. Second, there will be much less liquidity. Third, any gains will have to be laundered or hidden, making it even more difficult.
Maybe prediction markets are net positives, or maybe regulating them will make them so, but banning them does resolve most of their negative effects.
I can't believe how many betting ads I see or hear every time I consume US media. It's worse then all the ads about drugs they want you to request from your doctor.
Underground is where it belongs. The less visible it is to the general public, the fewer people will be drawn into it. And it being taken over by organized crime is just another way of saying that law enforcement will be able to make arrests and throw them in prison, which they can't effectively do if it's being run legally.
This is only true if people's want for it exceeds their want to not break the law.
For illegal drugs, people who want them want them a lot, so them being illegal isn't a strong deterrent; although, legalization has still absolutely increased the number of users (i.e. legality was acting as an effective deterrent for some.)
For illegal gambling, sure _some_ people won't be deterred by legality, but most people aren't hardcore gambling addicts; they're just engaging as a form of "harmless fun." They're not looking to go to jail to toss $20 on a sports game.
It was only a few years ago that sports betting was significantly more heavily regulated and limited, and stuff like Polymarket didn't exist (just non-monetary forecasting sites like Metaculus.) Even if there was more demand for "underground gambling" before these changes, the net negative to society was still significantly less.
There were other prediction markets like Intrade which was founded in 1999. I had coworkers who made a significant amount of money doing prediction market arbitrage for the 2012 election.
Intrade confuses me. It was illegal to use Intrade as a US citizen; in fact, some people I personally know who were into that scene had to maintain foreign bank accounts.
What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
Giving it to you straight: GOP SCOTUS court packing via denying Obama’s nomination led to 6-3 supermajority, and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue. Sports gambling startups ate sports right up, then, innovators like YC funded companies that said “that, but for everything” and collided with a shameless pay-to-play administration, not the general “politicians take donations from companies” kind, the “name don jr as your strategic advisor” kind. (Kalshi) Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this) is de facto law of the land.
> and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue.
What did that change? Gambling legislation was a states' issue before. You might have noticed that different states had wildly different gambling regimes.
(...and all federal legislation is a states' rights issue?)
> Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this[,] is [the] de facto law of the land.
You're talking about a law that was invalidated eight years ago, and passed 24 years before that. Which position would have looked insane more of the time?
Fair point that PASPA was the exception, not the rule, and that the anti-commandeering / "states rights" argument isn't some novel theory. It does happen to be deployed often in cases where businesses don't want to be regulated. (and, the elephant in the room, more famously....never mind, let's not go there)
I overstated the court-packing angle, Murphy was 7-2, not a partisan split.
But my actual point is narrower than the constitutional question: in practice, sports betting was confined to Nevada and reservations for decades. Once that dam broke, the path from legal sports betting to VC-funded "that but for everything" prediction markets to the current situation happened really fast, and there's no regulatory apparatus keeping up with it. Whether the dam should have broken is a separate question from whether anyone's minding the flood.
> What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
Polymarket opened a subbranch to handle US customers subject to US law. It's separate from Polymarket proper, which remains illegal for US citizens to use.
This was the case in Italy too until a few decades ago, except for some specific locations with a casino license, and a national kind of sport lottery.
Since sport betting became legal the issues with gambling addiction have skyrocketed but the state is addicted to the trickle of provents from it and can't cut it back.
There was an attempt to limit sport bets advertising, and that was widely sidestepped (you advertise for bet.news instead of bet.com, with the former linking to the latter)
Adam Smith mentions something similar as well. He talks about how the worker's attachment to the work is different when he's working in a super specialised part of a production process rather than making the whole product like an artisan.
But he already explains why it won't work at the beginning. If stuff is cataloged according to a pop paradigm, why would we expect to be able to reassemble it according to a classical one?
Presumably a pop DJ would also mess this up. It's like going to an Indian restaurant and asking what Dim Sum they recommend.
The only reason a human would be able to do this task is that they might be trained in how to find classical music, and they have spent some time learning what is what in that world.
But a Spotify AI is of course going to be trained on the prevailing classification system only.
The whole pitch of AI is that the model is going to be able to make exploit general knowledge outside of the local scope of the problem, just like a human would do. So I would also expect that it would be able to transfer his knowledge of classical music learned in language training, and apply that to the Spotify database.
The classical classification system is equivalent to the classification of cover versions in popular music. Of course, most audio software handles cover versions poorly too, but it's not like it's a completely unknown problem.
I think he means that when you go to watch the symphony orchestra, you are going to watch a bunch of people sitting with their instruments, manually playing them.
There is no way to separate this process from the product of the process.
You're not buying the sound of the music. You can just stream that. As far as that is the product, it has already been automated and scaled so millions of people can hear it at once, whenever they feel like it.
You're buying the sound AND the people sitting in their formal clothes manually moving their strings over a violin, with painstaking accuracy developed through years of manual practice.
You couldn't make a robot do it, for example. You could maybe make a robot play a violin, but that again isn't what the product is.
The product is tied to an expectation of what it is that does not allow for it to be done more effectively.
By contrast manufacturing processes are not tied to this expectation. If I buy a loaf of bread, I don't care whether the wheat was manually harvested or harvested by a huge machine.
The musical performance example is just one example. The general problem of services being resistant to increased productivity, however, is not restricted to this somewhat unique case. That's why I pointed to medical advice and education: when I need a medical consult or personalized tutoring, I don't specifically care if I have to lock down irreplaceable moments of another human being's life in order receive them.
It's misguided to focus on one special case of the cost disease problem where human by definition must provide the services, when most of the time this is not the case.
(For those who have avoided reading AI writing, this is a trope referring to the tendency of some AI sometime to always agree with the user when corrected, I think? Or at least that’s as much as I have worked out, being one of those avoiders.)
Since downdetector has been bought, we can make a new site, where people can bet on what sites will be down. The whole market can be automated fairly easily to check whether a given website is responding.
This should divert a substantial proportion of the world's DDoS capacity.
Mine still runs like the first day I had it. There's basically nothing that is limiting me with the machine as it is, everything is just me being slow to code.
I don't see why I need a new computer at the moment. In the past, I always got to a stage where the machine felt sluggish.
Yeah my M1 is still insanely snappy. Would be nice to have some extra legroom for things like compilation, but I'm far from feeling this device isn't sufficient for me.
My work laptop is M3 and it needs to be because the security crapware makes some things literally 10x slower. Meanwhile my personal M1 is more than adequate for normal work.
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