>Research shows prediction markets are often more accurate than experts, polls, and pundits. Traders aggregate news, polls, and expert opinions, making informed trades. Their economic incentives ensure market prices adjust to reflect true odds as more knowledgeable participants join.
>If you’re an expert on a certain topic, Polymarket is your opportunity to profit from trading based on your knowledge, while improving the market’s accuracy.
You know what's a great knowledgeable participant? An insider.
I have come to the opinion that every successful tech company is basically just an arbitrage scheme to avoid regulations and extract value based on that advantage.
Airbnb for unlicensed hotels. Uber for unlicensed taxis. Amazon for whitewashing fraudulent products. Bitcoin for unlicensed securities and laundering money.
That's what happens when the majority of people don't actually support the regulations.
If people thought it was wrong to be an unlicensed airbnb or uber, they wouldn't use them. In reality, those regulations are mostly protection rackets and most people don't care about violating them.
I disagree. When you give people strong economic incentives to ignore morality, some people will. Not all, but enough to make a hash of things. In any population there will be some people who will do things they know are wrong just to get ahead.
For Airbnb landlords I'm sure the thought process goes like " I'm just one person so I can't be having enough of an impact to be a problem. And besides, I need the money." But then enough people pile on and in aggregate they ruin the local housing market. But nobody thinks that they themselves are culpable
Your taxi crashes because the driver skipped brake maintenance and his insurance doesn't reimburse you for your hospital costs because commercial transportation isn't covered. Sure would be nice to have some minimum requirements for taxis.
The moral issue is when the executives at Uber know with certainty that their driver compensation and incentives push drivers to neglect required maintenance on their vehicles.
Much in the same way tobacco companies knew for a long time how addictive and harmful smoking was.
And how Facebook knows they let their advertisers scam their users, and the way social media was pushing teen suicides higher. They knew and kept pushing policies which made the problem worse. All so they could collect bigger compensation packages.
Would they risk a taxi ride if they knew that Uber failed to properly background check a driver, who later kidnapped and raped one of his passengers, and Uber's response was to hire private investigators to dig up personal information on the victim in an attempt to discredit her? [1]
Noise, litter, etc, "nuisance" laws are on the books, but mostly depend on people following them voluntarily. The local authorities don't have the time/staff to investigate and resolve them all the time.
You have two parties who want to enter into a contract and a third party unrelated to the contract that doesn’t for whatever reason. Just based on contract law and common sense the unrelated party shouldn’t have standing. Now if there’s externalities to the contract that impact that unrelated party sure, but only insofar as to get those externalities addressed.
This is not the same as a robbery which involves no contract or a willing counterparty to the robbery.
Yeah, IME, if the guests of the rental acted exactly like locals, and the units were not removed from the local housing supply (not sure how that could be), or the local housing supply was in excess to the needs of the population (not sure where that is), it would be fine.
I don’t understand why the local housing supply is privileged in your scenario. And if the local housing supply is a problem it’s one the locals created themselves so…
You believe that the local area has no standing, that's incorrect. Laws and regulations are third parties impeding on the contract all the time. Libertarians may dislike this, but it's one problem with democracy - the majority make decisions you don't like.
This is certainly the most uncharitable way to think about it.
I see a prisoner’s dilemma where people often support regulations even if on an individual basis they would personally violate them, because they prefer living in a the less chaotic society. For example anti-dumping regulations… the expected value for any given individual is +EV, but when everyone is dumping, it’s a big -EV
The perfect example is speed limits: everybody thinks they're good and yet they all seem to classify all other drivers into two categories: slowpokes and maniacs.
Nobody seems to be able to agree on what a responsible set of rules is around the speed of vehicles.
That's because they are slowpokes and maniacs: In a decently flowing road, the majority of distinct cars you see are either moving significantly faster or slower than you (and the more extreme the difference the more likely you are to see them). Of cars that go at a similar speed to you, they approach you / you approach them more slowly so you'll see fewer of them.
no, in the sense that they just follow whatever the rules are and don't care very much, or mildly break them as is convenient and still don't care very much
That's interpreting a failure to fight to preserve ethics as an internal rejection when it could be explained by a lack of fighting spirit, either because the fight seems impossible or the given hill not worth dying on. Another interpretation would be a comfort-oriented, avoidant, and possibly cynical culture facing a power imbalance.
From an economic perspective the majority of those regulations destroy economic value and those companies are unlocking value by finding clever ways around them.
No, they just shift the economic downsides to someone else so they can collect the difference. That's what I mean by arbitrage. Someone always pays the price, and now it's you and I.
That's not always true. Regulations increase the cost of transacting and make ranges of transactions non-viable, just like a tax.
So there is "dead weight loss", where transactions that would have been mutually beneficially and socially productive are eliminated by the regulation, and restored when somebody finds a loophole, restoring the individual and social benefit.
I agree, once they have bypassed regulations, they use that to essentially rent-seek from their monopoly/their unique position where the rent is paid by us public.
Their behaviour is very rent-seeking imo and at moments like these, its best to remind us that even the father of Capitalism, Adam Smith didn't like landlords
Had to search up some quotes from adam smith right now but here's a relevant one (imo) to this discussion:
"[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more." - Adam smith
I can't say this for the companies listed above but atleast within the realm of social media, they also want to bypass regulations and well, we all know how's it going.
On a long term, I do feel like there will be a drop in producitivity, thus destruction of economic value because of lack of enforcement of policies/such companies having reckless attitude about them.
Many of the products listed above actually seem to be very rent-seeking in my opinion (IIRC Someone on HN once said that from their personal experience talking to drivers, uber takes an approximate at the very least 40% cut or more)
(This might be a little off-topic?_ but one thing I think about tech regulations is that Facebook used to see if a young girl/minor girl took a selfie and then if they don't upload it, detect that she was insecure and then try to show them face beauty recommendations.
These girls can be our sisters/daughters fwiw. Facebook profits from insecurity/rage-bait and I would say that many social medias are the same as well, its just that the facebook example to me feels so eggregious and should be a uniting front for many to agree that there's a problem indeed.
You will be right when you say economical value is generated from profiting from insecurity/bypassing regulations but at what cost?
you might have been an insider working on the Apple Newton, and being enthusiastic about it you might have broken the rules and traded on your "knowledge"... and you would have lost your shirt. Same with your very knowledgeable enthusiasm about myriad other technologies. Ever wonder why Wall St doesn't show up at HN asking everybody's opinion about AI in order to leverage that info into billions?
an important element of "the wisdom of crowds" is many bits of microknowledge. How many Teslas will be sold next year is very dependent on how much the people who buy Teslas will earn next year (or how secure they will feel in their jobs) working in myriad other industries that have nothing to do with Tesla, along with the price of lithium, tires, and even ... wait for it... gasoline.
Polymarket's words you quote can just as likely refer to the wisdom of crowds. Or even, and this is the subtle part: Polymarket's insiders may believe, like you, that they are creating a market to trade on inside information, and yet they, like you, could be made wrong by the superior sum knowledge of the crowd exerting its invisible hands all together to tank your Apple Newtons.
Yes they are. Polymarket has an ad glorifying a "fictional" scenario where someone gets a job as a janitor in a video game company to bet on related events in polymarket
>Research shows prediction markets are often more accurate than experts, polls, and pundits. Traders aggregate news, polls, and expert opinions, making informed trades. Their economic incentives ensure market prices adjust to reflect true odds as more knowledgeable participants join.
>If you’re an expert on a certain topic, Polymarket is your opportunity to profit from trading based on your knowledge, while improving the market’s accuracy.
You know what's a great knowledgeable participant? An insider.