411–420 of 741 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does both! There is no natural law which prevents the formation of a monopoly.
> It does both! No, it does not concentrate wealth. Wealth is not a fixed pie. In a free market, you get wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it. As for monopolies, competition is what prevents them.
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be slightly more specific with those assertions, and point them at the gambling mechanics themselves, although I do agree. The games are not inseparable from those mechanics, and are quite fun on their own. I just got into magic, and am sadly watching my more gambling prone friends fall down that rabit hole. They keep asking me what cards I've bought or whatever and the answer is none, aside from a starter deck.…
One of the only good things I got from MtG is Card Forge ( https://card-forge.github.io/forge/ ), an open-source unofficial rule engine that also contains a desktop and a mobile app. They allow playing a game similar to the old Shandalar from Microprose, in which you wander around a world dueling enemies (playing MtG against them), getting money and resources, and improving your deck until you can beat the big bosses…
It is ugly as sin, but so is MTGO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is to say if it rained or not? Well now they are a target. A NY Times reporter was the target of a pressure and threat campaign to change their reporting over whether a rocket in the middle east was intercepted or not before it hit the ground. Prediction markets are not going to end well full stop IMHO.
That was a Times of Israel reporter Emanuel Fabian [1] but your point stands. Prediction markets create incentives to predict the outcome of an event, which can be done in one of three ways: develop better models to predict the event, affect the event, or affect the reporting on the event. [1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there are laws against insider trading.
Prediction markets advertise insider trading as a feature, and enforcement of financial crimes is a racket anyway. If you know the right people, make the right campaign contributions, laws just don't apply to you.
These prediction markets shouldn't be allowed for situations where humans can control the outcome. They do have their place however - one I find particularly interesting is weather prediction markets, primary because they end up having a net benefit. Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models and are duking it out. Over time these models get better, and the rest of us benefit. I think these markets cou…
With enough cash on the line, humans are very resourceful at manipulating outcomes. Humans already control the weather: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding . We already have an example of humans sabotaging the measurement of weather: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684440 . Two ranchers sabotaged weather monitoring stations in order to fraudulently collect millions in drought insurance. One of the farm…
'Predictions' market is the silliest loophole for gambling. Honestly, more surprised Fanduel, DraftKings and the like who have spent millions on lobbying and buying licenses, are not fighting tooth and nail on this.
Especially when the "prediction" part isn't even part of the product, it is an accidental byproduct. No one pays for access to the predictions. And they aren't predictions, they are more like "outcome-shaping" markets, since the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome, and at a certain point it will just always happen if it is billion…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure my position on 2A but it seems you're making a pretty big leap to connect them. Guns kill others. To me, that's a big difference. Gambling does not, only indirectly, you gamble your money away your family doesn't eat. But if you're going indirect than anything fits. Cars kill more than guns. You could argue the similarity is that some people can be responsible with guns and others can't but you're back t…
> Cars kill more than guns. In most countries, but not in the US.
- Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.
- This wasn't true before about 2015 and the change (increase in non-suicide gun deaths) over the last decade is largely the consequence of 'defund the police' policies.
- 90+% of gun violence happens in about 4 urban zip codes, all of which have some of the strictest gun control laws in the US.
There is a reason you have never heard a criminologist rail about guns (its usually a sociologist). The data points to problems with other policies. Also gathering the data honestly is difficult; people stop reporting types of crimes when the police stop investigating those types of crimes.
PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree. Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college. By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working. Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part be…
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working. This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> Nobody is going to attack the US if your government stopped trying to meddle in other countries affairs How did that work out for Ukraine? The idea that we live in a just world where everyone who has chaos rain down on them deserves it is so simply refuted even by a cursory glance at just modern history.