The original point is to use crowd wisdom. Crowds seem better than single individuals to predict outcomes of certain types of events.
I think this is visible in sports betting markets. Unless all games are rigged, games outcomes are fairly random events, and betting markets are pretty good at assessing the probabilities of a team winning. Same thing happens in finance. Option markets are really good at assessing the probabilities of asset movements.
The thing though is that these markets are only good in predicting recurring events like game results or financial asset movements. They are good _overall_, as in, if you take 100,000 sport games, the bettings odds are going to be overall in line with what actually happens.
Hence some people deduced that crowds with skin in the game were wise in predicting random stuff. And what happened then is that some of them thought this kind of predictive power could apply to any kind of event, and then predictive markets were created, with the idea that crowds could magically come up with odds for anything, and that would be fairly correct. But what works for recurring events don't hold for single events like Maduro's capture or the end of the Iran war. So the odds in these market is only the result of influence and insider information.
The result is that the odds are generally completely off, unless there is insider information. That's kind of what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. The bets there were on loans defaulting. These events are rare enough that it's impossible to assess their probability easily. And so banks relied on rating agencies (influence), to price the odds of these events happening. Rating agencies were wrong on a lot of these bets, meaning all the bets were placed at very very wrong prices, resulting in the crisis we saw.
The weird outcome of it all, is that those prediction markets have become insider information detectors. That's how they caught the guy. Whoever is winning big on these markets is necessarily cheating.
But I guess the main takeaway for me is that society is in such a state that a lot of people actually bet big on these things. Probably a combination of being fed dreams of fortune since childhood and the american dream not delivering. It's all very sad.
I don't know the exact legality of it all, but Polymarket wasn't operating in the US up until recently. Even though they are now, they maintain two separate markets. One that is somewhat regulated in the USA and a blockchain based market outside the US. For most of its existence it has very much been offering things that were illegal in the US even though they are based in NY.
15 years ago, Dacia used to make stripped sedans that sold for as cheap as 7.5k euros. It was a wild success. Now, they've pivoted to making modern cars, still on the cheap side, but the cheapest now is a compact car that sells for 13k.
The only reason is that those modern cars have higher margins and there is no competition for cheap cars. So why make cheap cars to kill the market of higher margins ones?
The free market, if it works at all, should produce companies like wheelfront that caters to that share of the population.
To me it's obvious that acetaminophen and ibuprofen do not target the same kind of problems. I am not a woman, but my wife says acetaminophen does not work on menstrual pain for instance.
I take acetaminophen for fever, and those kind of full-body diffuse ill-feeling.
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Oh yeah, banning people who can't vote yet, genius.
I think next we should ban them from eating butter, and you know, riding mountain bikes. Just protecting them you know.
What about us? Oh us, we're addicted, so... Well, you just can't take that away from us, can you? I mean there would be riots. But the kids, they wouldn't know what they're missing, right?
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This is such a weird law. I doubt this would be constitutional in France. You can't just pass a law that affects some people but not others. It's against the principle of equality.
You're not wrong, but these people are not going away. This is New York magazine, Vulture section, they just talk about what people eat at the interview, that's what the same people like to read.
Ben Lerner is from that world. Very New York, very arty, very socialite. If I remember correctly one of his books sets place in Marfa, the Art center.
Ben Lerner is not what "normal people" read, nor is New York magazine.
I find the books pretty good, but I think I qualify as one of "them".
It had never been opened.
It fell in a pool.
It stayed there about 30 seconds (1m deep).
When I fished it out, screen was off and it never turned back on.
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