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How Kalshi Infects the News

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161–170 of 202 posts

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#161
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable. With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, rippin…

Of course there are paths to success, and they are available, but we live in a tiktok world where everyone wants to be a millionaire tomorrow and not in 20 years.

What's being a millionaire in 20 years going to be worth?

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#162

We are reaching a new post-rational or neu-rational stage of our society which i think many HNers and educated people will find deeply uncomfortable The difficult truth is that as we've engeineered our society over the last 50 years into more and more deterministic outcomes, and began to assign morality itself TO determinism. Where in we've reached a point where when we must face that life is probablistic (i.e. gambl…

Wow this is a very weird way to mash a bunch of principles and ideas together to sound smart, but not actually say anything.

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#163
post #67

Over the last 2+ decades gambling has increased massively. By "gambling" I include sports betting, prediction markets, online casinos and crypto (including NFTs). Yes, I'm including crypto under gambling. When ordinary people buy crypto it's mostly because they saw the stratospheric rise of Bitcoin, don't really understand why and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin.. Straight up. That's gambling. But why? Eas…

There's 3 kinds of crypto buyers: The investor, the criminal, and your weird libertarian uncle

Investor = speculator, similar to how silicon valley investors are speculating that these companies can go to the moon and 10x their money in under 5-7 years

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable I think this starts to make an inferred narrative about how failure is inevitable and that its excessive complaining, when there is large amounts of data showing how it is genuinely more difficult. Just your Ukrainian example, it was cheaper to live 25 years ago, the cost of college has gone up ~180%. Since 2001 incomes have gone up 64% while…

Rule of thumb for survival vs sober reality. nradov provides the mindset needed to survive, you provide the wisdom of risks and challenges to be aware of. Today a dreaming Ukrainian is quite likely to instead get ripped away by conscription kidnapping teams and used as cannon fodder on the front, and not even make it to America. The reality changes but the rule of thumb is still good, you do the best with what you ha…

My mindset in the workplace is not about these facts, its more about what I present to people to help their worldview and advocate for a world where we don't just hold qualitative data (those who are doing well are likely to meet others who are doing well, people who vacation on a Yacht do not interact with people who don't take vacations), but also the trend and to advocate for policies that address the growing grotesque inequality and opportunity gap. Its hard to make people empathetic for others who they don't see, which is why I try to draw a line to the homeless population.

Everyone, everywhere, tries to optimize their local situation as best as they can with the skills and knowledge they have available. The further one gets into understanding how mental health works, the more one realizes that mindset is a result of experiences usually more than it is of willpower. People in poverty are exerting willpower to the maximum every single day. People are anxious for a reason, and depressed for a reason - these do not pop up like some contagious airborne virus, they're a result of the setting and society and their place in it.

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#165

It's funny, the only place I see Kalshi mentioned is here on HN for articles about how bad Kalshi is. Same for all the sports betting sites. I'm sure they are all bad, but damned if I never encounter them outside of HN.

It's bad on social media, especially Tik Tok. I don't use it often, but when I do I bet I get 3 Kalshi ads every 10 minutes easy.

I don't use tik tok (it never managed to adjust itself to me, YT shorts figured me out faster). I pay for YT Premium so I don't see ads, and I have ad blockers everywhere else, and I just refuse to use any platform that forces ads on me.

Related - ads are a pox upon society.

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring certain healthcare plans to access HSAs is the only thing that keeps HSAs from primarily being (in terms of amount of tax income lost to the program) a benefit for the upper-middle-class and higher, i.e. a regressive redistribution scheme. Optimal (maximizing your benefit... and also cost in lost tax receipts) use of HSAs requires not touching the money until retirement. You pay medical bills with non-HSA m…

> to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term We could just continue to enforce the 20% penalty indefinitely to get rid of the concept of these accounts turning into retirement accounts. FSAs benefit the upper-middle-class and wealthy more than poor people as well. You'll see quite a bit more savings when your top end tax rate is 35% than 12%. They're also far more likely to be able to plan on setting asid…

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Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#167
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are incredibly market-brained at this point. A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking among people who act completely irrationally with incredible regularity. Perhaps our greatest cultural fiction right now is the "rationality" of markets, and people are looking for…

> A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking It also tends to assume a certain hypothetical ideal of perfect information, where all prices and transactions are public, secret deals don't exist, and ownership/interests are never hidden.

Information asymmetry is one of those things that is so obvious that you'd expect it to be fundamental to economics, but it wasn't until the mid-90s that mainstream economics started to take it seriously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also: the healthcare system, and the military. We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing . A ton worse than a proper jobs pr…

The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects. Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation. About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing…

> The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.

Yeah, I wouldn't call all our military spending unproductive waste. I'm not insensitive to arguments even about building stuff we don't need simply in order to keep a particular industry healthy-enough that it's ready to expand in case of an actual, serious war. I think a good deal of it is, though, and the reason it's hard to tamp down is that it's not-so-secretly a jobs program that Republicans are willing to vote to fund (even if we'd get more out of spending the same money to have the same people build parks infrastructure or whatever).

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#169
post #131
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just start a small business, or build wealth through real estate is a take that indicates some severe divorce from the reality of poverty in America. You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to). Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up. This runs c…

If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable. And yet on Saturday at the neighborhood Independence Day party I met a guy who immigrated from Ukraine about 25 years ago with no money, no college education, no family support, and no English language skills. Instead of complaining he just went to work and while not exactly wealthy he's now doing fairly well as an elect…

This is why immigrants are often the most exemplar people of the American Dream today. Most of the people today pushing socialist or communist agendas are not these immigrants, but instead children of very wealthy company owners that only saw a downward trend from their parent's trajectory. It's from that privileged that they found fighting for other people their cause. However it's misguided and they don't even understand this. They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world. And they don't understand that most people just want a meaningful job, not handouts and not free stuff. Meanwhile these people just keep pushing it to college students and the cycle continues. No matter how many times you tell them that it hasn't worked before they always respond with well it hasn't been done "right", and even current attempts in the United States are causing nearly unlimited fraud, they won't listen. The current philosophy of these people is to break the United States so badly that the only trajectory could be up. It's almost like they're seeing their own failures as people and want to replicate it for the country. Stop treating everyone as a victim, stop being a victim and you'll see the world shine.

Steps off soap box.

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring certain healthcare plans to access HSAs is the only thing that keeps HSAs from primarily being (in terms of amount of tax income lost to the program) a benefit for the upper-middle-class and higher, i.e. a regressive redistribution scheme. Optimal (maximizing your benefit... and also cost in lost tax receipts) use of HSAs requires not touching the money until retirement. You pay medical bills with non-HSA m…

Even if you spend the money you put in to an HSA every year, you still saved the marginal income tax on that money, which is a lot better return than most other short-term "safe" ways you might save for unexpected expenses.

Yes, it provides some benefits to fund one's HSA even if one spends all that money in the same year, but the cost of the program (in terms of tax income lost, including the time-cost of it) is far higher for accounts that don't do that, and instead spend none of the money on healthcare.

Like, remove the eligibility restrictions and just about 100% of people with a financial planner would soon have an HSA they intend not to touch until retirement, and those accounts would represent a large proportion of the cost of the program (most of it, in fact, I'd wager). At that point much of the program's cost isn't going toward helping people pay for healthcare, which is the nominal point, but toward helping people who (evidently, as they don't need to dip into their HSA before retirement) don't need help with medical bills have an even-more-advantaged retirement, meaning program efficiency for its stated purpose would suffer significantly, with much of it being diverted to improving the retirements of the already-well-off.

That's why it's gotta be restricted in some way. Not because it isn't beneficial to have even for same-year spending for people using such programs, but because the cost of the program going toward things that are not alleviating healthcare costs would go way up, which is to say, the program's efficiency (at achieving its intended goals) per dollar it costs would drop.

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