761–770 of 816 posts
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All corruption is bad. Selective enforcement of the law is worse. It increases corruption by giving a strong incentive to win favors from powerful people.
Do you think this guy's chances of getting away with it would have increased if he solicited favors from powerful people?
What’s the point of prediction markets? They are just ordinary gambling unless you allow insider trading and manipulation, because that’s the only way the market can acquire and represent novel useful information. But if you allow those things, you run into a host of well-documented problems which are the reason why those things are forbidden in other markets. As it stands, prediction markets seem like a tech-aligned…
There was a big push post-9/11 that depended on exactly this.
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Here's a contemporary opinion, from the state attorney general at the time, the highest ranking person in a judicial apparatus that didn't prosecute anyone for participating in it. Looks like the fact that "the Negro" was so rich he didn't "accept the white man as his benefactor" was a pretty big deal... The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man he was thi…
It specifically says "the cause of this riot was not Tulsa", and "It might have happened anywhere". If it "might have happened anywhere", it therefore has nothing to do with the unique high-wealth of this area.
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That comes with the caveat that most revolutions happen against failed states. Those pretty much don't get the chance to be violent.
There's not much reason to replace good functioning governments. There are some examples, although typically they are foreign-backed regime changes masquerading as revolutions.
For most revolutions, the state needs to be unable to maintain control over it's populace. The ones where it can still maintain control is where it gets bloody.
It seems like it would be highly demoralizing to US soldiers that they are prosecuted for betting on the outcomes of the battles they are risking their lives for but those insider trading commanding them aren't.
> would be highly demoralizing Those people should quit. Sour grapes isn’t an excuse for putting others’ lives at risk.
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No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades—unless there's a ceiling that the top m > n have all hit. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible. MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam a…
> No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible. I live in Ontario and we're there. 40% of Waterloo students had above a 95% average in high school. The average GPA to get into UofT med school is 3.94/4.00 GPA. What has happened as a result is students killing themselves and each other. If you fail one test in any course,…
So there is a low ceiling, and if they instead used MCAT or something with a higher ceiling (where, apparently, the number of perfect scores is about 50 per year—in America, presumably lower in Canada due to population size), then studying harder would benefit them. That seems like a much better outlet for competitive urges.
But also, how small is the pool of qualified applicants? If there were something like "they're going to take n people from your school, at which there are 30 plausible candidates", then sabotaging one might conceivably be worthwhile. But if the pool is—well, Google says 3,000 medical students get accepted each year in Canada (and the qualified applicant pool is presumably at least somewhat larger), and sabotaging one person is extremely unlikely to help you personally. (This is one case where it's good that the expected-value "benefits", of sabotaging person X, are widely distributed among thousands of medical candidates, and thus it's a "free-rider problem" where no individual candidate has a strong motivation to do the work.)
Is there some multi-stage thing where they pick 10 people from each high school, or 30 from a town, or something? Or is there major grading on a curve, or a big benefit for being the top person in your classroom of 15? That seems like how you would get real incentives for this backstabbing behavior. Otherwise, I can't see how it's rational (even to a complete sociopath), and would have to chalk it up to individual miscreants and possibly some kind of culture that encourages it in other ways.
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Can you provide a reference? From a Reuters article: > prosecutors said Van Dyke bet more than $33,000 on Polymarket between December 27, 2025, and January 2, 2026, that Maduro would soon be out of office and that U.S. forces would soon enter Venezuela Maduro was taken on January 3. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-soldier-charged-...
Unless someone knows the bets are placed by an insider how does this create any sort of risk?
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Not so much class or caste, but a dual-state where an elite have a normative or lawless state, and specific or arbitrary others suffer a parallel prerogative or punitive state. This is the essence of corrupt authoritarianism. Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellen…
More like three. One class where you can do whatever you can pay for, another with a set of annoying but almost reasonable rules and the last one for whom any actions and their mere existence is illegal, but whose presence is very much relied upon to do things.
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Man, you've been on a streak of these purely vitriolic posts. Maybe take a break from the internet for a bit? These posts read like someone who needs help.