> And no person in a position to start a war would do it to affect a Polymarket bet.
Are you fucking kidding? Based just on current events, that is absolutely not a statement you can make without at least trying to prove it.
If you do try to prove that you will fail as the idea that people would start wars for profit is as old as wars.
Just evaluate the sentence you've just created. How many people exist who have the capability to start wars or influence the start of wars? It's a lot. What else do you know about these people and their motivations?
It isn’t just the people who can start a war. It’s also normal people who can.
Imagine if 10 million people bet on starting a war vs 5 million who say no war. Those net 5 million people are going on social media saying why the war is justified. They’ll vote in war mongers. They’ll support the military. The bet literally influences the result. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here
> If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted dramatically in favor of my death
No, you definitely would not want that. You don't want to live in the world like this. That's the point.
It's fucking horrible and dystopian, people betting on extra-legal invasions of countries, murders, things that could hurt or harm people where they have incentives to do something else that you've just distorted.
Gambling has been illegal, immoral, and proscribed by religions for literally thousands of years, in all sorts of different forms and iterations, for a reason. Because it's incredibly toxic to society.
You can make some arguments that pure games of chance, like casino games, and even maybe sports betting (since sports is a spectacle) aren't that bad. Based on what we've seen recently, I tend to disagree, but at least it's an argument.
But now we're talking about betting on all sorts of political issues, things that are illegal, things where people are acting in an official capacity and shouldn't be given incentives to subvert that. And all these other examples are just bad. There's not really any upside to this at all. It's just bad for society and it shouldn't happen. It's horrible.
If you feel like you're missing a big piece of the puzzle you should take a couple of steps back and think about the consequences of a world where this is common.
I think easy gambling over the internet is terrible, tons of young people are getting stuck in it. People get addicted to it throughout history and ruin their lives, vulnerable people get in trouble with huge losses.
But I don't think we should do anything because religion doesn't like it - that's a foolish thing to use to make your crucial choices or world view. A key reason is pretty much every terrible thing ever was excused as requirement of some religion or forever. Separate from the hurtful things in religious books at times, it's too easy for leaders or authorities to somehow justify actions.
Let's instead use a goal of treating each other respectfully, stop hating and killing each other. Yeah, that's all naive stuff, we aren't there, maybe we'll never be there. Still a good goal, treat each other with kindness. And yeah, I'm an optimistic sort.
Presumably they are writing the same quality software faster, the market having decided what quality it will accept.
Once that trend maxes out it’s entirely plausible that the level of quality demanded will rise quickly. That’s basically what happened in the first dot com era.
I'm not convinced. Honestly it seems like we're in a market of lemons and I don't know how we escape the kind of environment that is ripe for lemons. To get out requires customers to be well informed at the time of purchase. This is always difficult with software as we usually need to try it first and frankly, the average person is woefully tech illiterate.
But these days? We are selling products based on promises, not actual capabilities. I can't think of a more fertile environment for a lemon market than that. No one can be informed and bigger and bigger promises need to be made every year.
While this is absolutely true and I've read this before, I don't think you can make this an open and shut case. Here's my perspective as an old guy.
The first thing that comes to mind when I see this as a counterargument is that I've quite successfully built enormous amounts of completely functional digital products without ever mastering any of the details that I figured I would have to master when I started creating my first programs in the late 80s or early 90s.
When I first started, it was a lot about procedural thinking, like BASIC goto X, looping, if-then statements, and that kind of thing. That seemed like an abstraction compared to just assembly code, which, if you were into video games, was what real video game people were doing. At the time, we weren't that many layers away from the ones and zeros.
It's been a long march since then. What I do now is still sort of shockingly "easy" to me sometimes when I think about that context. I remember being in a band and spending a few weeks trying to build a website that sold CDs via credit card, and trying to unravel how cgi-bin worked using a 300 page book I had bought and all that. Today a problem like that is so trivial as to be a joke.
Reality hasn't gotten any less detailed. I just don't have to deal with it any more.
Of course, the standards have gone up. And that's likely what's gonna happen here. The standards are going to go way up. You used to be able to make a living just launching a website to sell something on the internet that people weren't selling on the internet yet. Around 1999 or so I remember friend of mine built a website to sell stereo stuff. He would just go down to the store in New York, buy it, and mail it to whoever bought it. Made a killing for a while. It was ridiculously easy if you knew how to do it. But most people didn't know how to do it.
Now you can make a living pretty "easily" selling a SaaS service that connects one business process to another, or integrates some workflow. What's going to happen to those companies now is left as an exercise for the reader.
I don't think there's any question that there will still be people building software, making judgment calls, and grappling with all the complexity and detail. But the standards are going to be unrecognizable.
While a little reductive and caricatured, as a Gen-X counterculture type myself I can confirm that there's quite a bit of accuracy in this comment. And a lot more examples in more boring parts of the world than these famous people you are mentioning.
With that said it's not exclusively a Gen-X thing to go from counterculture to establishment while preserving the same root personality driver of narcissism and selfishness. It's obviously recognizable as the trajectory of the Woodstock generation as well.
Yeah, probably unfair to name GenX exclusively - more of a late boomer/early gen-x phenomenon. Perhaps it's just the new mid-life crisis, "corvette in your 40s" is beyond silly these days, but rich, powerful 50-60 year olds thinking they're badass rebels is super common.
Private equity has absolutely been buying up (and building) U.S. residential stock, and this is addressing a real problem. The fact that Trump's doing it doesn't change my opinion at all, but it's absolutely the right thing to do and hopefully will be bipartisan.
It's not the opposite of a problem, it's orthogonal.
In this particular instance, what's happening is that it's crowding out and destroying diversity in the home builder market.
The model is built to rent out, and it's taking capacity out of the build-to-sell market. It's putting regional and smaller homebuilders that have traditionally provided most of the housing out of business because of their greater access to national capital.
We are seeing this everywhere in the economy. If you have access to Wall Street capital, you can put basically everybody outside of business and then set the price. That's exactly what's happening.
It's not confusing at all. There's definitely issues with private equity ownership of single-family homes. Although it is fair to say that the BlackRock meme might not be accurate, they aren't necessarily the key player.
I don't know why they decided to put the "warning!" text box on the actual thing - it would look much cleaner if it just said "ON AIR" . Inane copyright/trademark reasons?
Are you fucking kidding? Based just on current events, that is absolutely not a statement you can make without at least trying to prove it.
If you do try to prove that you will fail as the idea that people would start wars for profit is as old as wars.
Just evaluate the sentence you've just created. How many people exist who have the capability to start wars or influence the start of wars? It's a lot. What else do you know about these people and their motivations?
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