But are Chinese EVs attractive to consumers if they are built in Canada with union wages? At that point people will just keep buying Toyotas/Hondas that are also built in Canada.
I'd expect quite a few consumers would still want them. Canada has cheap electricity and expensive gasoline. For those who don't live in some part of Canada so cold that the efficiency of an EV drops massively due to heating an EV can save quite a bit on energy costs.
Around 65-75% of Canadians live in parts of Canada that have winter temperatures similar to those of Norway's major cities and EVs perform fine in Norway so will probably also be fine in Canada.
The US and Japanese and Korean car companies are putting most of their EV effort, at least in the US and Canada, into the more expensive models. They don't have much that is the EV equivalent of a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic for non-SUVs, or the equivalent of a RAV4 or CR-V for EVs.
Honda for example only has the Prologue, which is built on top of GM's Equinox EV platform and starts at about $15k more than an Equinox EV.
The Chinese EV companies seem more willing to address that segment. Even if they have to pay union wages to build them there will be demand because it will still be cheaper than the EVs that are aimed at a more upscale market the other companies are mostly making.
Or you just setup lower price limits for cars like Europe did with China. So that state support is not affecting the market. Because guess what: producing a car in far far away land and then ship it around the world and pay some 10% tariff is also not that cheap.
He can’t actually do much with votes in Congress he doesn’t have. Take money from programs via executive order? Ok, I guess. Cut checks to voters with that money? Even the Supreme Court would blush at that.
I wonder how many will simply become "Trump Republicans" and follow some other leader when he's gone? Or will some simply pretend to wake up and have realized they had Trump Derangement Syndrome the whole time and are ready to come back to reality?
These people aren't temporarily insane, they have always been this way. The same hatred and stupidity have been prevalent in US dinnertable discussions for decades, but much less in the actual halls of power because we used to have more collective sense to not grant people like that authority over others in general. If the rest of American society regains its agency, the toxic %25 will just go back to corroding the country as they were before. They are secure in knowing they will not be treated in the way they would treat others if given the opportunity.
My guess is politics are so divisive and social media so effective that until something significant breaks/Trump succeeds in complete Putin-esque capture of the government that we will see the president flip parties every 4 years indefinitely. People will continue to vote for whoever the current leader of their "team" is no matter their actual politics or values or even how they were chosen as leader for that matter because the perceived cost of the other side winning is always greater.
As soon as Trump dies there will be an increasing avalanche of "always never-trumpers", until 40 years from now it will be almost impossible to find anyone who admits to having voted for him. I already have anecdotal experiences of having conversations with people (on tape) in early 2017 celebrating/defending their vote of Trump who now claim to have never voted for him and say that anything on video was just a joke or sarcasm.
>It's perhaps to be expected, as these education people are usually non-technical.
I don't think that's totally correct. I think it's because AI has come at everyone, equally, all at once. Educational academics didn't have years to study this because it was released on our kids at the same time.
is not true. It's obvious that certain people and certain fields are technological laggards or technological early adopters.
Other computing and IT technologies also provided a good training ground for this stuff. LLMs have really interesting new properties, but all have familiar properties and decade+ old methods of distribution.
This stuff is difficult, sure. But we have long set a low bar for education management and the results—declining literacy and math in countries which have become stupidly wealthy—speak for themselves.
Who are Uma token holders? I'm assuming some token people can buy? Could someone not corner that market, then make a ton of longshot bets, then dispute them all and win every case as majority Uma token holder?
"After the debate period, Uma token holders vote (this process takes approximately 48 hours) and one of four outcomes happens:"
That is true. UMA tokens are just a coin on the blockchain that can be bought. The resolution is put up for a vote. People can vote by staking their tokens and the losing side(s) lose their tokens. The winning side are rewarded the tokens of losing sides. In theory you can just buy out these votes with enough money/tokens
UMA's security model assumes the cost to corrupt the oracle exceeds the profit from corruption. It is quite interesting because it doesn't consider the Polymarket side at all in the calculation.
Doesn't this whole model break down when the Polymarket market far exceeds UMA's market cap?
Not just in theory, it happens frequently. There's multiple 'markets' that resolved in untruth when it suited UMA whales. Polymarket is a scam site, with a thin veneer of gambling over the top.
Easy up to ~70, interesting between 80-110, very hard around 120-130. I think scores above 200 are pretty sus, there is very little room on the sphere at that point (using the cheat from sibling comment). Anything >400 is definitely made up.
How? Then why would non-insiders bet? The classic prediction market is guessing the weight of an elephant (or some animal) at a circus. The average guess of the crowd will actually get very close. But if someone knows the actual weight, no one would play.
The entire idea of a prediction market is to aggregate insider information. If you don't have insiders, you're not doing predictions, you're just doing gambling.
Granted: that's what almost every Polymarket user is actually doing. But that's a bad thing. The insider whales are the only ones actually using it for its intended purpose.
No, the entire point is gambling. Yes there is insider trading mixed in as well, but the vast majority of events these markets are pushing and people are betting on don't have "insiders" at all. Sports, election winners, Bitcoin/stock/commodity prices, weather forecasts, movie box office receipts. None of this is about insider information, just pure gambling.
The real point of Polymarket is gambling, we agree. I'd extend that argument to every prediction market that is open to all comers in which people can meaningfully gamble. But that's not the original concept of a prediction market. I'm not here to defend Kalshi and Polymarket, both of which I think are pretty evil.
It's not 'predicting' when the outcome/answer is known. From the wiki entry on prediction markets "The main purpose of prediction markets are eliciting aggregating beliefs about an unknown future event."
I think you should probably read more about the background of prediction markets. Robin Hanson is a useful place to start. The whole concept of a prediction market is to convert private information into prices. That only works with "insider" information.
As I said in a parallel comment, Hanson was also thinking about scientific questions, where there are asymmetries in knowledge but people can often invest in research that improves their own knowledge (like by performing an experiment or a scientific expedition or something). So, Hanson believed that prediction markets could incentivize people to invest in scientific research in order to get an edge over other market participants in such questions. That doesn't exactly make them insiders, though.
Interestingly, it doesn't necessarily incentivize them to publish the detailed results of their investigations. They're incentivized to reveal what they expect to happen (based on how they bet), but not necessarily incentivized to reveal why they think so, or how they know. E.g. if you became able to predict the weather more accurately than other models over some timeframe, prediction markets would incentivize you to reveal (some aspects of) your predictions, but not your method for making those predictions.
It's OK, I didn't have it in cache either, I just remembered "people like Robin Hanson have said insider trading on prediction markets is a feature not a bug" and GPT5 tracked it down for me. :)
Apparently there's also something about the duration of a White House press conference where the press secretary may have been deliberately helping some people?
I continue to think prediction markets are potentially extremely useful and valuable, but I feel like there's a huge conceptual muddle about why people would (1) care about an outcome of a market and (2) be willing to bet on the outcome of a market. And perhaps (3) whom else they would be happy or unhappy to have participating in the market with them. I doubt people will be super-content with prediction markets until those issues are a bit clearer for more participants in any given market. (And I don't know exactly how we can make them so.)
I could go either way on prediction markets but I don't think the dilemma here is all that complicated. I think most people interacting with them are just valorizing gambling, and want a Nevada Gaming Commission to step in and make sure that the games are fair. They're not supposed to be fair! They're supposed to predict! It's in the name!
I don't know much, but I can't see why betting on a known outcome is good? Why not just ask the knower? Also, just because Robin Hanson says "it's about aggregating insider information" makes it true. He writes some stuff.....
The idea is that people have all sorts of fragmentary information about future events that they can't directly reveal, due to confidentiality or trade obligations (among other things), and that a prediction market effectively liberates the directional content of that information by converting it into prices.
Robin Hanson can credibly claim to have invented prediction markets as we understand them today.
"that a prediction market effectively liberates the directional content of that information by converting it into prices."
I can see this, and I guess maybe my issue is with the phrasing of "aggregating" insider information. Because you aren't just aggregating insider info, you are also aggregating non-insider information, but no one (but the insider) knows what is right.
Is there different types of prediction markets then? One where there is a true insider and one without? For example, you could take bets on weather it will rain on Saturday. People can make educated guesses, but no one really knows (no insider). On the flip side, Kanye could create a bet on whether he will run for president. He would be the only insider, so again, aggregating insider and non insider information.
> you are also aggregating non-insider information
You're not really aggregating non-insider information, because in these cases, it's not really "information", it's just (at best) rational guessing or (at worst) gambling.
But yes, Kalshi and Polymarket essentially aggregate gambling, rational guesses, and insider information that's likely to be correct. It's a losing game unless you're an insider, and these companies profit off of other people's addictions.
I would argue that a "market" in whether it will rain on Saturday isn't really a prediction market, or even a market, at all. It's just a bookmaking operation. The core function of any market, in anything, is price discovery.
What's the difference between a "Monday it will rain" market and a NCAAF prop bet on a team's rushing yards? I could argue that DraftKings prop bets are actually more like prediction markets than these "will it rain" bets. People actually do have directional information to contribute to sports propositions!
Tradeable risk is the difference between the ncaaf bet and rain futures. Levine has joked that perhaps there is some tenuous way that sports gambling is poolable risk to owners, players and coaches but there is real and obvious economic utility with rain. Neither get the advantages of prediction markets.
> would argue that a "market" in whether it will rain on Saturday isn't really a prediction market, or even a market, at all. It's just a bookmaking operation
How would you define the difference?
Cat bond premiums absolutely bet on near-term weather odds. I’d argue they’re prediction-esque.
You seem to be arguing that that's the canonical definition of a prediction market, and anything else, including markets merely aggregating non-insider beliefs about future events, should be called something else. Do you have a better proposal?
Sure, but then discussions about these types of markets are bound to become somewhat confusing for purely nominalistic reasons. (Turns out not every hard naming problem is automatically computer science :)
Well, it's confusing because you have markets on questions with very different characteristics in terms of whether they are exogenous or not (and whether they are exogenous from the perspective of particular groups), or just with different degrees of asymmetry regardless of whether there are literal "insiders".
Like, prediction markets have questions ranging from what the weather will be in a certain year, to who will win elections, to what stock prices or exchange rates will be, to whether companies will announce specific products, to whether particular people will start dating, to whether a specific person will say a specific word during a conference (some of the Manifold "prop bets" for Manifest).
These are not the same kinds of questions in terms of whether there are insiders at all or who the insiders are. Maybe we can't expect prediction markets to have the same dynamics in all of these cases.
Depending on what you want out of a prediction market, there's probably a sweet spot in terms of whom you should expect (or want) to be trading in it.
In the most exogenous events, those that are most outside of the control of individuals or groups, I think Robin Hanson hoped (in proposing "idea futures") that people would be incentivized to invest in research in order to gain a statistical edge in the market, but also assumed that there wasn't anyone who was inherently drastically better positioned to get information about the question than anyone else. E.g. "I will spend $X to get a better estimate of this probability (hopefully by otherwise ethical means?), and that will make my expected return from buying $Y worth of prediction contracts greater than $(X+Y)". Indeed not something retail investors or gamblers should probably participate in.
It's also true that in some cases where there are true insiders it can give the insiders a financial incentive to reveal confidential information. From the point of view of trying to get the most accurate possible estimate of the likelihood of future events, that would indeed also be a success, even if the process was "unfair" to non-insiders.
Yeah, I mean, they're a wretched hive of scum and villainy, I preemptively agree. I'm just saying, insider bets don't have the same ethical or legal valence on a prediction market that they do in the financial markets (even there, at least in the US, the principles underlying insider trading law are really poorly understood.)
It's funny to think that the most villainous markets might be some of the humorous prop bets where the person creating the market (or a friend of the person creating the market) literally completely controls the outcome. Like "will I say SOME_WEIRD_WORD on stage at the conference tomorrow?".
Although maybe the villainy would come in more from deceiving people about whether or not an event was under your control, more than merely encouraging people to bet on an event that was clearly and unambiguously under your control.
I agree that is funny and want to take this opportunity to say I think things like Polymarket are bad, a real corruption of the original idea. I'm not sticking up for them!
What uses or structures of prediction markets would you like to see? For things like Polymarket, are you more particularly concerned about the kinds of participants (e.g. people who really are just gambling for entertainment), or about the kinds of questions that are the subjects of contracts?
The original prediction markets were internal things at large companies, which I think are a great idea. I've flirted for a long time with doing a vulnerability prediction market. The good-faith incarnations of prediction markets aren't open to all comers; they're structured so you can't meaningfully gamble on them.
Yeah, sorry for not being clear enough. I just struggle how a good faith market can even exist. I immediately start thinking how participants would be incentivized to cheat by neglecting or even introducing vulnerabilities to win. Maybe I’m just a bit too cynical and/or should do more reading on the topic.
If you don't have insiders, you're not doing predictions, you're just doing gambling.
Non-insiders can't make predictions? I'm not into betting as a hobby but I make minor bets with myself or friends on topics with clear win-loss conditions in areas of politics where I consider myself knowledgeable. I'm pretty good at it since I find it easy to distinguish between results I'd like to see vs what I expect to actually happen.
I don't think you have a real point here, and are just using pejorative language about gambling to suggest one. Your thesis seems to be that only insiders can make valid predictions, which is nonsense.
I'm saying that most people --- and functionally all the people who feel victimized by insiders --- on Polymarket are gambling, not predicting. I feel pretty comfortable with how sound that argument is. I agree that there are users of prediction markets who are neither "insiders" (for whatever definition of that you want to use) nor gamblers, but they're participating with the understanding that they're bidding alongside insiders. And they're a tiny cohort.
If it helps, draw a line between "entertainment" and "enterprise", and use whatever term you like for uses on the "entertainment" side of the line. Either way: it has stark implications for the notion of insider impropriety.
This is just redefinition to belabor your insiders point (which I am not disagreeing with). Non-insiders are gambling, but they are also making predictions, with varying degrees of skill
Some kinds of gambling are truly random (unless they are scams) and no prediction is possible. Other kinds involve some degree of skill and predictive power. For example, people can make predictions on races based on past form, even though the element of chance can't be eliminated. It seems like you're trying to redefine 'prediction' to mean 'anticipated outcome as assessed by the most informed' in order to disqualify the validity of any opinions held by non-insiders.
I get that you want everyone to be aware of how prediction arguments were originally a fun way for experts to drive decision making without writing ever-longer arguments for their position. But you seem to be overlooking the the fact that objections are not so much to insiders disrupting hte prediction market as the impropriety of government officials or their special friends cashing in on military adventurism. Said government officials defend engaging military adventures without consent or even notice to Congress by citing security, yet placing big bets on markets to make a quick profit is highly insecure.
I don't care about insiders cashing on on adventurism. Or, rather, I care about the adventurism, but I do not care even a little bit about the impact of it on gambling platforms like Polymarket. I think I'm on reasonably firm footing when I say that (a) the inventors and popularizers of modern prediction markets and (b) US law doesn't care either.
The irony here is that the one bank-shot argument I'd see in the medium term for "insider trading" enforcement at places like Polymarket is Nevada Gaming Commission-style gambling regulation.
I would say that the popular conception of insider trading as a problem of fairness to other traders on financial markets is misapprehended, but no, it's not at all true that the only rational actors on financial markets are insiders.
> the popular conception of insider trading as a problem of fairness to other traders on financial markets is misapprehended
Well, it's the legal theory underpinning insider trading laws in much (all?) of the EU.
And the US might have a different legal theory underpinning their regulations, but practically, it largely amounts to the same effect, so under POSIWID, it's questionable whether the difference matters much.
> no, it's not at all true that the only rational actors on financial markets are insiders.
Then a non-insider-trading prediction market should be possible and at least somewhat useful too, no? You'd essentially create incentives to do thorough research and analysis of public information and publish the results.
Whether it's practically possible to enforce is a different question.
Non insiders would be if they think the odds are in their favor or that they predict that the market's opinion will shift.
>But if someone knows the actual weight, no one would play.
Now what if someone in the audience knew the weight of an average elephant, giving them an advantage. Would people still bet. I would guess yes, but they wouldn't bet as much as the person who did because they have less information.
While having better information may make it more likely for you to win, it is not surefire. Things can change last minute.
One way to use a market rationally as a non-insider is to bet big against something you want to happen. You've just set a bounty for someone to do it. Presumably for some reason this is even more in your favor outside the betting market.
Isn’t this a classic fool’s money game. The betting markets have a strong incentive to pretend it isn’t an insider’s game.
Honestly, of all the vices, I think I pity gamblers a lot. It’s just so visible and understandable to see the harm. Something like being too into porn or drink, those are less visible harm. Where running out of money is comprehensible to even a child.
They took off from many different places so you'd have to somehow know that ~150 aircraft were taking off. If you happen to just see one spot, you'd likely just assume it was another bombing of a boat or a dock.
Or… someone seeing a bunch of commercial flights over the Caribbean getting cancelled. Could be anyone from airline ops to frustrated travelers stranded in Boston.
I guess... but I still think first thought would be just some more bombing. It's a big step to go from bombing boats, a dock, arresting and extraditing a foreign leader in the middle of the night.
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