Wait, people can bet on bombings now? What the hell man.
We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
311–320 of 741 posts
Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> You don’t have any enemies. Nobody cares about you. Nobody is coming to hurt you or your family Do you think the U.S. and Israeli militaries have personal vendettas against each and every civilian we've killed in Iran? Of course we don't. We can barely count them. Just because you aren't personally on your community's adversary's radar doesn't mean they aren't a threat. (To be clear, I don't believe Iran was a thre…
How easy this is to comprehend when Iran is killing protesters.
Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#313Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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If it is your company then this is fine, it is your money afterall, and can do as you see fit. If you are employed or have co-shareholders, you are managing someone elses money. And you are not supposed to act within your morals, but those of the company. It would be kind of hipocritical to act on your own morals using someone elses money - up to the point where it could be illegal misapropriation. And then taking th…
Huh..?
> And then taking the moral highground and being judgemental about people because they worked in gambling is probably something one should reconsider.
Ah I see.
Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#315Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan[1]: “When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near the bomb shelter; we look at it every day’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really that popular over there?’” he added. “That’s very powerful. That’s an undeniable value proposition that did not exist before.…
I think the other side of the argument goes that (a) the bombings would happen anyway, and (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading. (The bombs "only" get marginally cheaper.) Thus the only actual effect is the early warning, which is a good thing in this case. Like if someone managed to figure out a way to make slightly cheaper bombs but with the tradeoff that the cheaper bom…
The people profiting aren't buying the bombs with their own money.
Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#316The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'. I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to…
> I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity This triggers thoughts. I don't like people being taken advantage of. At the same time, I like my personal liberties. It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics. That sucks and you could spin this has the liquor companies taking advantage, but I have tons of…
Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#317An argument not mentioned here and which I didn’t appreciate until I actually took part in these markets myself, is that you need a supply of stupid/uninformed people to take the other side of the informed people’s bets.(In economic terms, no-trade theorems apply.) That suggests to me that the dream of perfect information revelation isn’t going to come true. Instead, the liquid markets will be those with a large supp…
That's not actually the predicted odds by the market because every single bet is also a bet on interest rates.
A contract that literally 100% always would resolve to "true" in 1 year would have a non-zero price for the "false" side because selling that option (and thus taking the "false" side means you get ~$97 today and then pay $100 in a year.
Polymarket's 4% chance of jesus returning by 2026 actually represents a market consensus of basically a 0% chance.
For trump losing office there might be some bets predicated on his losing office being correlated to a higher interest rate outcome, too.
Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#318The problem is that these markets allow to translate political power directly to money. Worse destructive events are rare, need a lot less action (butterfly effect) and leave thus less traces and command high odds. Once committed the ones in power have a vested interest in causing destruction.
Capitalism took care of the exchange between money and power long ago. Prediction markets, as terrible as they are, are peanuts in comparison.
Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Glad i wont ever work for/with you. Not because i worked at any of those “bad bad” companies but because your take is a horrible sign of what to expect. Like, if it was a pm or leadership person i can kinda understand it. They are the ones pushing direction. But what, some call center support guy is sol because his resume has kelshi on it? Not everyone is in a position to have luxury beliefs.
But if you are hiring people that have had that luxury, and yet have chosen immoral paths, what does that say about them and about you?
Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
> can play prediction markets by betting on a swing The outcomes are still capped. In that respect, it's more like a derivative market than the stock market. You can trade in and out of options. But the value in the system is tightly defined and, after fees, a net negative-sum game.
There are no fees on Polymarket. Not sure about others.