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Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

timesofisrael.com

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Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#831

Post by scoofy »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #734
scoofy wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire discussion is ridiculous. We shouldn't be conflating the serious economic and philosophical work of someone like Adam Smith with the rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley. It's absurd.

> rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley Crowley had a penchant for drama and provocation (which, hilariously, still seems effective today!), but writing off his work as "rantings" is really ignoring the scholarly work he did on Western esotericism (and he also did make a lot of progress bringing greater awareness of non-Western traditions as well), which has always been an important part of Western culture (even…

I’m only dismissing it in relation to the field of economics. I would trivially dismiss Sufism in the same context.

This discussion is ridiculous. We’re literally talking about the occult here.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#832

Post by gopher_space »

natechols wrote: post #527
throw4847285 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit, I bought Stand on Zanzibar based on a recommendation from my Dad, but I only got a few pages in before getting distracted by something else. I should give Brunner another shot.

"The Shockwave Runner" has aged vastly better than "Stand on Zanzibar", which I found unreadable. The first book predicts an early-21st century society full of smartphone users, ubiquitous privacy violations, and governments run by criminal gangs; the other is like if Paul Ehrlich wrote a sci-fi novel. I don't think "The Shockwave Runner" is as well written as any of the other cyberpunk classics, but as a guess at wh…

Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Rider all feel like variations on a theme. If you start with Shockwave and absolutely love it then you are in luck because there's more where that came from. But all of his books are worth reading imho.

> as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic.

Yeah, I should really revisit Future Shock. That book might have been a little ahead of its time.

> Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.

100% agree, and I think it's almost a bigger flaw here. I'm not saying "it gets better in the second season" but I wouldn't be surprised if some people bounce off the future slang.

Interestingly enough, Brunner might be one of the only white authors I've read who describes his characters by skin tone.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#833

Post by obirunda »

waffletower wrote: post #552

[flagged]

The problem is that you are identifying a symptom of an ongoing societal moral decline with an economic system. Spend some time on Dostoevsky or Kant. When morality is solely based on our current nationalism/hedonism hybrid in the West you end up at these extreme morally dubious exploits whether in a free or autocratic society. I don't claim to know what can help society become more ethical. What do you propose will improve society's ethical foundations? It's often the case that staunch critics of a system or another don't usually have much to offer in terms of ethics, they pontificate in favor or counter a given system without exploring whether society's ethics dwell on shaky foundations, they spend a lot of time talking about the technicalities, the merits of this or that implementations when in reality all societies whose ethical foundations crater, do not recover their ethics through policy reform alone.

There are so many examples of this disconnect. Prohibition did not make for a society that wanted less alcohol, or felt that consuming alcohol was unethical, it actually had the counter effect, opening the door for a considerable larger problem of crime supported production. The war on drugs was/has been no different.

To see this as the top comment here, where you picked Adam Smith as your straw man, could have been Karl Marx or any other thinker, and say it boils down to this or that simple mistake.. Are you serious? There are much deeper issues driving this thirst for Gambling we have embraced of late amongst other dubious things that have been normalized. But pick whatever economic system you want, install it anywhere and the existing ethical issues you currently have will still be there.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#834

Post by bluegatty »

waffletower wrote: post #552

[flagged]

"ubiquity of Adam Smith's libertine, some would even label satanic ("Do what you wilt"),

Ok this has nothing to do with Adam Smith ... what are you talking about?

Agree with him or not, Adam Smith was a Christian Ethicist more than he was an Economist, and never even remotely hinted at any of those things.

Smith was literally one of those 'Nothing will work unless people with power act responsibly' kind of thinkers. He was way more on the 'prude' than 'libertine' side.

Also - you're not likely using the term 'libertine' in the sense that you mean, look that one up as well.

Finally, even if you mean 'selfish libertarian' - this is also probably not that.

These are just horrible people, probably with gambling addictions, that would be doing all sorts of other horrible things otherwise.

There's no 'isms' here.

They're just villains, same as it ever was.

They are all over the place, far more common than we'd imagine.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#835

Post by [deleted] »

gusgus01 wrote: post #777
margalabargala wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know what your point is. The best I can come up with is: "The whole point of sports (in my opinion) is X good thing therefore betting on sports is more acceptable" Making bets on good things doesn't make the betting better. Just because Polymarket would allow you to bet money that the infant homicide rate goes down next year, doesn't mean it's a good thing to allow betting on.

His point is pretty simple. Sports don't inherently involve life or death, the whole point is that it's a competition that "respects each other's humanity", eg not a competition to the death. The same can't be said for war (bombings), which Polymarket allows betting on. Seems like a fundamental difference to me.

[deleted]

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#837

Post by [deleted] »

Zambyte wrote: post #603
crazygringo wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the risks I don't have the slightest idea what point you're trying to make with this. Journalists make lots of people unhappy with their reporting, if you're referring to risks to journalists? Indeed that's part of the job of being a truth teller. > nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future I don't think you understand. If you think you can do a better job of predicting the future th…

Making people unhappy doesn't cause them to declare bankruptcy and become homeless. People may lose their reputation by reporting falsehoods in the paper (though probably not). People might read incorrect information in the newspaper. People may directly lose access to food and shelter due to gambling. The risks are no where close to equivalent. > I don't think you understand. [...] I don't think you understand. Let'…

[deleted]

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#838

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

gzread wrote: post #465
TheDong wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats? Polymarket accounts are more-or-less just a crypto address. Whatsapp accounts are somewhat easier to link to a real identity, but still not hard to at least obscure a bit. The arm of the law struggles to reach across borders, and on the internet, it's quite plausible all those involved are in different jurisdictions.

Polymarket runs on Polygon, which, like most blockchains, has public history. If the user wasn't very careful about how they got their money into the system, it traces back to a public cryptocurrency exchange with KYC records.

Ok but if you're using it to kill people you're probably going to be pretty careful about how you got your money into the system.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#839

Post by basilikum »

margalabargala wrote: post #624

As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting. The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem. The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of surface area. My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or…

> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...

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