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New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

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121–130 of 227 posts

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#121
post #109

Most of the top level comments support scrapping the deal, most of them on the basis that "sports gambling is a cancer." A cancer for whom? I want to take the opposite position: let people do whatever they want, as long as they bear the consequences of their decisions instead of socializing the risk. You don't like betting or gambling? Great, then don't do it. But forcing your preferences on others is not the way.

What happens when a husband decides to risk the mortgage payment on a sports bet and loses? Now the wife and kids are evicted.

Or maybe he lives alone and is now homeless. But now we have a man living out of his car, or worse, homeless and begging on the corner.

The problem with allowing people to do whatever they want is that risks are often socialized.

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#122
Ken Paxton went after gambling in Texas but stays hands off on Kalshi | https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/03/ken-paxton-kalshi-t...

"Paxton didn’t sign on to attempts to regulate Kalshi after the prediction market platform and its CEO donated to him and his PAC."

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#124
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also an obvious and cynical regulatory dodge. Prediction markets make the bulk of their profit from sports betting.

obviously and definitely true in their current form. But it's maybe worth clarifying that before this last year or two, when Kalshi became an obvious regulatory dodge (including adding sports and really leaning into the gambling demographic), many were interested in prediction markets not just for that purpose: e.g. the rationalist community seems to have had a longstanding interest in the idea, manifold didn't have…

Iowa Electronic Markets still exists. No need to give the commercial prediction markets any leeway.

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#125
post #34

Sports gambling is a cancer, as are prediction markets. None of it should've been legalized and all of it should be banned.

It should have stopped at Vegas. No reservations exception. Vegas only. No online. No OTB. Vegas only.

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#126
A great irony here is that Kalshi and media generally are competitors. When I make important decisions (e.g. understanding politics, where to travel and setup companies), I always value betting markets over hearsay (aka media). The former has real money at stake, whereas the latter often has no skin in the game (as well as a other issues; like herd mentality, sensationalism, incentive to tell people what they want to hear rather than what's true).

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#127
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realise that countries other than the USA exist, right? The UK has had various forms of sports gambling legal for nearly 100 years and society hasn't crumbled and neither did sport.

You've been able to gamble on your mobile device for 100 years in the UK? Modern gambling isn't you talking to a bookie and putting down $100 on your favorite team. That should still be legal. Phone apps which learn your behavior, your favorite teams, the offers you are likely to accept, the time of day that you're most likely to make a bet, etc etc and use that to barrage you with notifications, "free" plays, high p…

Out of curiosity, why should sports betting via a bookie be legal in the US? Currently it is not.

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#128
post #109

Most of the top level comments support scrapping the deal, most of them on the basis that "sports gambling is a cancer." A cancer for whom? I want to take the opposite position: let people do whatever they want, as long as they bear the consequences of their decisions instead of socializing the risk. You don't like betting or gambling? Great, then don't do it. But forcing your preferences on others is not the way.

What happens when a husband decides to risk the mortgage payment on a sports bet and loses? Now the wife and kids are evicted. Or maybe he lives alone and is now homeless. But now we have a man living out of his car, or worse, homeless and begging on the corner. The problem with allowing people to do whatever they want is that risks are often socialized.

[deleted]

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#129
post #30

The only thing I know is that journalism stopped being independent and unbiased a long, long time ago.

Citizen's United was the nail in the coffin for honest journalism, because it sold out to those with the largest wallets. If you truly want truth in journalism support independent journalists financially, and with your attention. Ignore corporate media.

How did Citizen's United affect journalism?

To me, the rules on how large a media conglomerate could get being changed in favor of allowing the conglomerate to grow even larger did some heavy lifting. Journalism publishers no longer have to compete since their all owned by the same limited number of owners.

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

#130
post #59
post #45

Unfortunately, this shows how much facts and reality have been turned into nothing more than a loyalty test by both sides of our political debate. > A partnership between The Times (for The Athletic) and Kalshi would also provide validation that their prediction market data should be taken seriously as an indicator of the future. Facts prove otherwise. They could have objected to the partnership on any number of vali…

> the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets I'm not intimately familiar with prediction markets (I avoid gambling), but can you explain how this is the case? If the market unpredictably incorrect, then shouldn't it be difficult / i…

I think a good toy example here could be a market on a coinflip. Let's say heads pays out $1 and tails pays out $0, and people can buy and sell contracts that resolve this way. Naively, people might think that this is a 50/50 outcome, so if anyone wanted to buy or sell this contract for some reason, they'd likely be able to find someone to trade with them around the price of 50 cents.

Now, say that you somehow knew that this coin wasn't a fair coin, and instead was weighted 55% to fall on heads, 45% tails. Then, you would be happy buying these contracts for 50 cents -- given the contract pays out $1 if the coin lands on heads, and you know there's a 55% chance of heads, the expected price for the contract is 55 cents, and you make 5 cents in expectancy.

So, if you had information about the "fair value" of this contract, telling you that the price should be 55 cents, you'd be incentivized to buy the contract at prices below 55 cents. If the contract was trading at any price other than 55 cents, then, from your perspective, the price would be incorrect. And if the price is incorrect, then you'd be able to make money trading: buying for prices below 55 cents and selling at prices above 55 cents. And finally, as a result of your trading, you'd provide one-sided demand to the market, pushing the price closer to the actual correct price.

From this simple mechanism, wherein everyone who has information is incentivized to make money on their information by trading, prices start getting pushed to accurately reflect the aggregate of the information that everyone possesses! So in markets, there is a profit incentive to provide information, and this makes prices more accurate.

Finally, I think a common misconception is that prediction markets are sometimes wrong, as events priced at low probabilities sometimes happen. For example, in the 2024 election, Trump was trading at probabilities below 50%, but he still won! However, this is conflating present information about the future with future results. Given the earlier example about the biased 55% coin -- before we flip the coin, the best thing we can possibly say about the future really just is that there's a 55% chance of heads and 45% chance of tails. If we then flip the coin and it lands on tails, that doesn't mean we were incorrect -- it was just the best statement about the future that we could have possibly made.

Prediction markets -- or really any price system -- aggregate the best available information about the future. If you can confidently state that they are wrong -- that their best available information about the future is inaccurate -- then you should be trading and making money.

Does that clear things up a bit for you? It's a longer response, but I think it might address some of the confusion that you (or anyone else) might have regarding what people actually mean when they say that these prices predict the future.

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