There were other prediction markets like Intrade which was founded in 1999. I had coworkers who made a significant amount of money doing prediction market arbitrage for the 2012 election.
Intrade confuses me. It was illegal to use Intrade as a US citizen; in fact, some people I personally know who were into that scene had to maintain foreign bank accounts.
What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
Giving it to you straight: GOP SCOTUS court packing via denying Obama’s nomination led to 6-3 supermajority, and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue. Sports gambling startups ate sports right up, then, innovators like YC funded companies that said “that, but for everything” and collided with a shameless pay-to-play administration, not the general “politicians take donations from companies” kind, the “name don jr as your strategic advisor” kind. (Kalshi) Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this) is de facto law of the land.
> and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue.
What did that change? Gambling legislation was a states' issue before. You might have noticed that different states had wildly different gambling regimes.
(...and all federal legislation is a states' rights issue?)
> Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this[,] is [the] de facto law of the land.
You're talking about a law that was invalidated eight years ago, and passed 24 years before that. Which position would have looked insane more of the time?
Fair point that PASPA was the exception, not the rule, and that the anti-commandeering / "states rights" argument isn't some novel theory. It does happen to be deployed often in cases where businesses don't want to be regulated. (and, the elephant in the room, more famously....never mind, let's not go there)
I overstated the court-packing angle, Murphy was 7-2, not a partisan split.
But my actual point is narrower than the constitutional question: in practice, sports betting was confined to Nevada and reservations for decades. Once that dam broke, the path from legal sports betting to VC-funded "that but for everything" prediction markets to the current situation happened really fast, and there's no regulatory apparatus keeping up with it. Whether the dam should have broken is a separate question from whether anyone's minding the flood.
> What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
Polymarket opened a subbranch to handle US customers subject to US law. It's separate from Polymarket proper, which remains illegal for US citizens to use.
If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong, like your contributions were judged on something other than quality, like you were expected to be someone you’re not—I want you to know:
You are not alone.
Your differences matter. Your perspective matters. Your voice matters, even when—and especially when—it doesn’t sound like everyone else’s.
> Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.
How is doing public reading of poetry not cheap?
I have friends who do standup comedy and they just show up at open mic nights and it doesn’t cost them anything. One is good enough that now the venues are paying him a little bit.
AI can help increase productivity, that is get more outputs (goods/services) for the same inputs.
Two hundred years ago, shirts had to be hand-spun, hand-woven, and hand-sewn, so ordinary people could only own one or two. Now because of automation and factories they are so cheap that poor people have many.
Previously 97% of the workforce was engaged in agriculture, and even in the 20th century, famines killed millions. Now with increased productivity we create so much food that obesity is the defining health crisis of our time.
All classes have been able afford better clothing and more food, not just those owning the means of production.
> instead of going further down the same road we're already on
Even in the last 25 years, we've seen large increases in life expectancy, child mortality fell by more than 50%, 1 billion people left extreme poverty, access to knowledge and education expanded, and more.
The meta analysis is inconclusive. I would not use that as evidence to back up the idea that you should avoid any UV exposure. I’d describe this as a complicated situation where reasonable people could disagree.
“””
What did we find?: Our findings are mixed. Exposure to sunlight has been reported both to increase and to decrease your risk of dying. Alongside its harmful effect on skin cancer, sunlight may help prevent other types of cancer. However, there were issues with the amount of data available, as well as the quality of some of the data that was available, so we can’t be certain about the findings. Currently, there is not strong enough evidence to alter sun exposure advice and so people should continue to follow the guidance.
“””
I’m not the original poster but one thing I look at is recommendations from bodies in other countries that have more experience with the issue. During COVID I found countries that had experience with SARS had better guidance than the US.
Similarly Australia has more than 2x higher skin cancer risk. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends even people with dark skin wear sunscreen daily, even if they don’t go outside. Australia doesn’t recommend this noting the tradeoffs of having higher risk of vitamin D deficiency.
I live in NYC and for the majority of my trips the subway gets me there faster than a car would.
Sure you can find plenty of random places it would take longer for me to get to by train, but for places I actually want to get to, the subway is faster.
OK, you live in the one and only city in the entire USA that is dense enough to make the subway a better option.
I live in the DC area which has an excellent Metrorail system, and it is still nowhere near close enough to being able to replace the average trip by car unless you in DC proper.
Now imagine how much worse things would be in Houston.
You're welcome to try to Trail of Tears everybody into your preferred walled cities, but the attempt would go badly for you.
Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.
> Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Nope: One need only wait for the financial collapse that is fast approaching nearly every municipality in the US due to the relative scale of infrastructure buildout + maintenance as compared to its tax base.
The "standard" American city is 100% unambiguously completely financially impossible.
This is obscured by the fact that cities traditionally account for their infrastructure as depreciating assets whose value goes to zero rather than as perpetual liabilities with exponentially increasing maintenance costs, where the expected maintenance burden of a road already far exceeds its "asset value" on day one of its creation (when it's added to the city's balance sheet as "an asset.")
The American sprawl pattern is financially impossible.
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