Is there really that much liquidity in these bets? Polymarket is just a broker right? So people are putting up tens of millions cumulatively on the other side of these random bets?
On prediction markets there are plenty of inefficiencies; e.g. an MM could take both sides of the bet when odds don’t add up to 1, which apparently happens more often than we all think
Is this really true? What is the evidence that Trump succeeded in money laundering, where is the dirty money coming from in these particular bets, and how do you propose the polymarket betting mechanism is able to clean the money?
> how do you propose the polymarket betting mechanism is able to clean the money?
I would assume that dirty money (from dirty wallets) is placed on the "losing side" of the bet. And clean accounts take the "winning side" of the bets.
A2: I don’t know. It would be great if the Department of Justice or Treasury investigated the matter, since the SEC no longer has the capability. However, since the interim Attorney General is a simp who expresses his love for the president repeatedly, that’s unlikely.
A3: Polymarket could make an effort to prevent activity that undermines the integrity of their platform. All betting platforms work to detect the use of the platforms by people like
Baseball players and their families. Most public employees names are public, so it should not be impossible to do the same.
The fact that obvious behavior like this happens reflects poorly on the platform. It’s pretty incredible that bettors are stupid enough to use a platform that actively undermines their wagers.
Thanks. A1 and A2 didn't answer my questions except that I think you're saying that you are not sure if any it is true or not. I was hoping for something substantive beyond the usual conspiracy theorizing.
On A3, money laundering doesn't mean hiding financial activity from the court of public opinion, it means to take an illegal income and put it through processes that obfuscates its origin and makes it difficult for law enforcement to notice or investigate so it can be used in legal markets. "Gambling" doesn't just clean money. Polymarket is electronic and the source and destination of transactions could be subpoenaed. That misconception probably comes from physical casinos where a person would walk in with cash and walk out with a receipt for chips and claim gambling earnings. Doesn't work when you have a paper trail in and out.
It would be stupid to the point of ridiculous to try to launder money this way, even from Trump, lol. Especially on such visible trades! Much more likely it's just making money from insider bets, because that is seemingly not illegal for prediction markets. If you were going to try to use this thing to launder (which seems ridiculous in the first place but maybe it's possible) you would do it with much more mundane bets surely.
> The fact that obvious behavior like this happens reflects poorly on the platform. It’s pretty incredible that bettors are stupid enough to use a platform that actively undermines their wagers.
Gambling is or can be a terrible mental health problem. Stupidity - arguably yes, but also an addiction. Which makes profiting from it pretty awful too really. Although regulations have struggled with how to deal with it because internet and black market gambling is so lucrative and easy to set up too unfortunately.
You can't answer with certainty, because the authorities aren't doing their job. No credible, informed person would conclude that there wasn't that kind of activity hapening.
Trump is fairly stupid and reckless, but the 2nd administration is blatant in it's corruption and illegality. The assumption is in the waning days of the administration, they will pardon those who remained loyal.
The argument you use re: gambling is incredulous and a false assumption. The existence of black market gambling isn't a justification to what is happening now -- the full power the marketing and advertising machine. Personally, I'm okay with gambling personally as a fun thing - I don't get a big rise out of it. But I think that making every iPhone a betting terminal is creating social problems that will cause alot of needless misery.
We reject the moral turpitude argument to justify gambling, but hold the abusive gambler personally and morally accountable for their misfortune.
Well you can answer with certainty that Americans making electronic transactions on an American betting site is not money laundering, by any definition. For more certainty than the original assertion that it is a money laundering play which just doesn't make any sense.
Why victim blame him for removing the phone number? He had a logical reason for doing so, and with Google supporting many forms of authentication it's perfectly reasonable to think that removing one wouldn't jeopardize the other methods.
It’s debatable that it was debunked. There was squirrelly wording about some specific claims. One person was reported to have been offered a package worth a billion dollars, which even if exaggerated was probably not exaggerated by 10x. The numbers line up when you consider that AI startup founders and early employees stand to potentially make well into 9 figures if not higher, and Meta is trying to cut them off at the pass. Obviously these kinds of offers, whatever they really look like, include significant conditions and performance requirements.
I don’t think any of these are “obvious” lies. Maybe meta offered someone a $75M package and it got reported as $100M. So they can say with a straight face that the reporting is “false”, yet they never countered with any details.
You’re ignoring my point about the legitimate reason people might be getting offers in this stratosphere. No one has debunked or refuted the general reporting, at least not that I’ve seen. If you have a source, show it please.
“From Eternity To Here” by Sean Carroll has some nice discussions of it. He can be a bit much at times and could stand to have better editing (the book is 25% too long), but he does have some of the most approachable modern writing on physics out there. Lots of videos on YouTube as well.
Ugh, I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, LLMs can generate some really nice introductory summaries of topics. But, so far at least, they can’t even hold a candle to brilliantly written books and long form articles. Consider the classic book Cosmos. There is more insight into the universe in any few pages of that book than could be gathered by reading even a thousand ChatGPT results.
You and I are talking about totally different things.
I'm talking about general overviews of topics, where a good book form at the level you're looking for often doesn't even exist.
You're talking about a classic book that is recognized as a great work.
Nobody's claiming that what ChatGPT outputs is Cosmos. And most books written by people aren't Cosmos either.
And most of the time when you want a basic factual introduction to a field that is at your level, neither too popular nor too technical, ChatGPT is really good at providing that.
Minor quibble with the linked complaint: the GPL doesn’t require you to post source code, it just requires that you have to provide it when asked, and only to people using your software. (But you’re not allowed to restrict anything they do, like repost it.) Just follow the whole Redhat / CentOS drama for exhibit A in this behavior.
These videos were super fun to make and kept me sane when I found myself with far too much free time and a bunch of world news to avoid. I never did the fifth (and final) walk but it's only about 100 meters long so I hope one day to do it in person (if I ever end up with that much free time again).
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