At least with sports betting it's limited in scope. Polymarket applies the same warping influence to the whole of politics and daily life. That's the biggest problem and difference to me, yes it sucks if teams are throwing or players are altering their play to make or break bets but ultimately the effect/danger of that incentive is limited. And with the more limited and well enumerated pool of potential insiders places like the league can pretty easily monitor for it while on Polymarket it's down to open source monitoring and a little blip on their TOS that's nearly impossible to enforce.
Was I a sucker for believing that Kalshi was going to [e.g.] help farmers hedge against drought years or is the problem just morally bankrupt selection of events?
If they said that and you believed it kinda. There are already markets and insurance schemes to allow farmers to do that though through crop insurance, it's a very old and even government subsidized to keep the prices down in many countries. Farmers in need of that can already insure their crops to make $XXX amount of money to make sure they break even on the crop for the year for example there's no real need to bet on the amount of rain to reach that same goal.
Yep Kalshi is at best only shrinking the scale of things a farmer could bet on instead of getting proper old style crop insurance (either yield or revenue). It's just cloaking a weather slot machine in "we're helping farmers" language. Agri-washing their betting market if you will.
The word "Polymarket" can be replaced by "market" there.
Global market is just the largest gambling venue. Always has been. No amount of "monitoring" and "leagues" will keep people from going Boeing whistleblower way.
