New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

Claiming that something is a better way to learn about the world is NOT the same as claiming it is using a specific method, or part of a specific tradition.

I’m open to being convinced, but if you’re claiming mainstream media has no accountability, I think you need to substantiate that.

I realize there are information bubbles on the internet where this is accepted as truth, but unexamined. Nonsense is everywhere on the internet. I’d be curious how you’d substantiate this.

Also -- hedging is generally not done based on material non-public information, but rather to guard against known risks. Joe the farmer sells a bunch of wheat futures when he plants his wheat, not because he thinks the price will go down, but rather because if it does he goes bankrupt and he'd prefer to accept a known rate-of-return now.

If you make a hedging trade while having material knowledge that you withhold from the counterparty… well, that sounds like it could be edging towards fraud. Like taking out life insurance while hiding a medical condition.

But sure, it’s not against the law to do business with a sucker, so there’s degrees here.

But it’s more accurate to say participants can trade on lawfully obtained material nonpublic information absent some independent duty not to use it, which is much narrower than saying insider trading is generally legal.

Not that this excuses some of the absurd stuff that goes on on the online betting platforms...

Not only are you seeing the advertisements for these platforms and their betting apps, you're having a coordinated focus on actively pushing it in a myriad of other ways as well.

And alcohol has always been highly accessible. I have 5 stores within a 5 minute walk of me that I can get it from, and that's not to mention all of the restaurants and bars within that same radius.

Addiction is addiction. Alcohol is one object of that addiction. Sports betting can be another. Porn, food, drugs, etc.

What's to say sports betting addiction won't become as severe as alcohol now that it's becoming more accessible to the public?

The problem with the stock market is when there aren't enough new companies going public to soak up the spigot of all the capital that people want to invest, leading average P/E ratios to increase over time. There is too much money chasing too few earnings. When the underlying fundamentals don't match up, then all that investors are doing is speculating that someone else will be the bigger fool and buy from them at an even more unreasonable price - and that is a gamble.

Modern gambling isn't you talking to a bookie and putting down $100 on your favorite team. That should still be legal. Phone apps which learn your behavior, your favorite teams, the offers you are likely to accept, the time of day that you're most likely to make a bet, etc etc and use that to barrage you with notifications, "free" plays, high paying parlays with horrible odds, should not be.

Society bears the downsides of gambling and gambling addiction, while the casinos gather all of the upside.

Finally... https://www.thalamos.co.uk/resources/gambling-addiction-rela...

> NHS gambling clinics have experienced a rise of 130% in referrals in a year, leading to a large increase in the number of support locations.

Seems like the UK is also experiencing a large increase in problems from modern gambling systems.

Yeah, it's just like being able to take an insurance policy on other people's lives. It's a wonderful idea for all of 15 minutes until people start getting murdered.

> bare minimum of regulation

No amount of regulation will solve the issue when what you can take insurance on is not regulated.

Prediction markets are to insurance the same as crypto is to banking: a speedrun of all the frauds that happened in the past until the perpetrators are sent to jail or regulated so heavily that they are virtually identical to what they were supposed to disrupt.

Not exactly. The law was weird, and that's why it was overturned. It didn't make sports betting illegal federally, instead it prevented states from "authorizing" it, which the petitioners argued was an unconstitutional intrusion into the lawmaking ability of states in that it prevented them from repealing laws against sports betting that they had previously passed.

The full ruling is at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf, and the last paragraph sums it up: "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own".

The SCOTUS ruling didn't legalize sports betting; states chose to do that themselves once they were no longer prevented from doing so. Congress could ban it nationwide today, and probably they should.

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/feature/news-media-tr...

To me, the rules on how large a media conglomerate could get being changed in favor of allowing the conglomerate to grow even larger did some heavy lifting. Journalism publishers no longer have to compete since their all owned by the same limited number of owners.

Now, say that you somehow knew that this coin wasn't a fair coin, and instead was weighted 55% to fall on heads, 45% tails. Then, you would be happy buying these contracts for 50 cents -- given the contract pays out $1 if the coin lands on heads, and you know there's a 55% chance of heads, the expected price for the contract is 55 cents, and you make 5 cents in expectancy.

So, if you had information about the "fair value" of this contract, telling you that the price should be 55 cents, you'd be incentivized to buy the contract at prices below 55 cents. If the contract was trading at any price other than 55 cents, then, from your perspective, the price would be incorrect. And if the price is incorrect, then you'd be able to make money trading: buying for prices below 55 cents and selling at prices above 55 cents. And finally, as a result of your trading, you'd provide one-sided demand to the market, pushing the price closer to the actual correct price.

From this simple mechanism, wherein everyone who has information is incentivized to make money on their information by trading, prices start getting pushed to accurately reflect the aggregate of the information that everyone possesses! So in markets, there is a profit incentive to provide information, and this makes prices more accurate.

Finally, I think a common misconception is that prediction markets are sometimes wrong, as events priced at low probabilities sometimes happen. For example, in the 2024 election, Trump was trading at probabilities below 50%, but he still won! However, this is conflating present information about the future with future results. Given the earlier example about the biased 55% coin -- before we flip the coin, the best thing we can possibly say about the future really just is that there's a 55% chance of heads and 45% chance of tails. If we then flip the coin and it lands on tails, that doesn't mean we were incorrect -- it was just the best statement about the future that we could have possibly made.

Prediction markets -- or really any price system -- aggregate the best available information about the future. If you can confidently state that they are wrong -- that their best available information about the future is inaccurate -- then you should be trading and making money.

Does that clear things up a bit for you? It's a longer response, but I think it might address some of the confusion that you (or anyone else) might have regarding what people actually mean when they say that these prices predict the future.