There are two potential lines of argument. One is prediction markets in general, the other is prediction markets as they’re currently implemented.
You’re talking about how they’re implemented and I agree. It’s a total mess.
My comment was on the general (and much older) idea of prediction markets. None of the current crypto bros would like those since they would be much more heavily regulated.
The idea of prediction markets is pretty old. Nobody was able to implement a functional one until recently.
The current prediction markets are all based on crypto so it’s really hard to identify inside traders but prediction markets as a general concept don’t depend on it. Theoretically, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a prediction market that only allowed registered investors.
They’re supposed to work using Mosaic Theory. That’s exactly the same theory that allows anyone else to make stock predictions. You can take a bunch of data that doesn’t meet the insider trading definition, ie acting on material, non-public information. You can take a bunch of public information and if you’re clever enough to aggregate it the right way, you’re allowed to trade on it.
Huh? What claim did I make?
I’d like to see every governor that still respects the constitution to activate their State Defense Force.
Send a crystal clear message that true patriots are ready to defend the constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic.
Faster than you may realize.
Baden-Powell was inspired to start the Boy Scouts when he saw the 12-15 year old boys of the Mafeking Cadet Corp assisting the military during the Second Boer War.
As does Ring, Flock, Samsung, Apple, Google and so on. Some random person with any other hidden camera can easily upload them to creepy servers and do automatic face recognition on them too.
Steve Mann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor) has been doing that for a long time.
They can produce better video than some cameras but not as good as others. 12MP ultrawide is pretty standard on security cameras and they’re already all over the place.
Do you think that the current smart glasses are making surveillance more normalized or do you think that they’re getting more common because we’ve already normalized constant surveillance?
I’d point out that the PATRIOT act passed a quarter century ago with only one “No” and one abstention.
If I understand your response correctly, you’re arguing that the glasses themselves aren’t the issue, it’s the shifts that come with accepting the glasses.
They may ironically have the reverse effect. I guarantee that corporations are already cataloging your facial expressions. Between Ring, Flock, Apple, Google, Netflix, Samsung, etc. there are many pictures of all our faces with rich annotation. Currently most people don’t even think about how thoroughly they’re being watched. These douchy glasses may actually draw attention to the matter.
I dislike Facebook and deleted my account even before they changed to “Meta”. I also value privacy.
But what privacy violations do “smart glasses” provide that weren’t already trivially available? Tiny cameras are insanely cheap. A reasonably handy person could hide several on their person and there are plenty of “spy shops” that sell actual wearable hidden cameras.
The “I love ICE” kid was wearing Meta Ray Bans but the first video I saw of it was from someone else’ camera. I can’t leave the house without getting filmed from multiple angles. The only thing those glasses do is make it really obvious that the wearer is a dumbass.
Talarivo and Crockett both seem like good candidates at first glance.
Neither should be censored.
The other Kevin Robert’s :)
Are you referring to Kevin Robert’s public statement about the left?
I wasn’t going to watch the Grammys but this story made me go look up the clip.
Good joke, excellent delivery. No notes.
There’s simple and there’s oversimplified. The element your missing is “trust”. The reason gamers go to Steam is because we trust their reviews and return policies.
The other storefronts haven’t built that trust. Most gamers have the experience of trying other storefronts, hating them, and going back to Steam.
People don’t trust Gabe because he’s a billionaire, they trust him because he consistently makes decisions that gamers benefit from. No other game store CEO can claim that with a straight face.
That would be how monopolies work. You realize that Steam doesn’t require exclusivity, right? You can get BG3 all over the place. When customers have choice between vendors it’s not a monopoly, even if they tend to make the same choice.
Do you think Larian’s management is also stupid?
Any halfway decent GTM executive would have checked their distribution channel options and chosen the mix that makes them the most money, net of fees.
Why would they pay for a service that harms them?
Are you actually confused about the information asymmetry in video game purchases? Given your weird movie references I assumed you were just trying to change the topic.
I’ll try to use small words. Before you play a game, you don’t know if it’s goo;, just as used car buyers don’t know if the used car is a lemon. Without a buyer protections that drags the price of good games down just as lemons drag down the price of used cars. Akerlof goes into the proof for the car part of this in his paper.
“Lemon laws” mostly solve that problem for cars. Steam mostly solves that problem for video games. That requires trust. You may not trust Steam but millions of people do. They’ve repeatedly made decisions that benefit gamers so gamers flock to them. Thats why they buy so many games from Steam even when they’re available elsewhere. If they broke that trust they’d probably never get it back but, until then, their net effect is to increase revenue for studios by providing a market where people are comfortable enough to spend more money.
So you don’t care that Larian isn’t harmed, you don’t care that the dev’s aren’t harmed, you don’t care that the consumer isn’t harmed.
You just feel bad for Epic?
This train wreck is as painful to watch as a B horror movie.
This numbnut is walking into an obvious trap. They’re baiting major assets of the USN using ratty little fast boats.
Now that they’re in striking range, their defense have to be lucky every single day, multiple times per day. If the Iranians are lucky once, they destroy billions of dollars in hardware, get major bragging rights, and thousands of GI families at home get to look up the lyrics to “Fortunate Son.”