There was a recent feedback thread about how we don't have a giant misc Soap Box thread anymore. The tl;dr is we're just not sure it really makes sense to dump every single topic at all related to politics and religion and sociology into one massive thread. It's so broad it feels almost silly.
But people made very reasonable points about it feeling like starting a thread was almost intimidating, or they'd be judged for it. I'm here to tell you it's okay!
Read something interesting and just want to share? Go for it! You don't need to write an essay with a carefully thought out thesis. A link, maybe a quick excerpt, some basic explanation of why you thought it was interest, done. I'll do an example like I was starting a thread.
I read this piece yesterday in the Atlantic:
The basic premise is a personal journey through someone who never gambled jumping in with both feet with $10k in seed money from the Atlantic to get first hand experience and then be able to write about it. Spoiler: it went kinda badly, he got addicted, and burned through a lot of money and time he should have been spending with his family.
It was I think pretty fascinating from the perspective of someone who has no interest in this stuff, but is still bombarded with the ads and awareness. And apparently 50% of men are into it. Which is kind of a lot.
There's a lot to take in, from the predatory nature of gambling, to the way it's infiltrated all aspects of sports, the insider cheating scandals, etc. But this part where it pivots into the prediction markets is I think the giant red flag:
I don't think you have to be gambling genius to see how ugly this is getting, beyond anything we're traditionally seen before. And honestly what's traditionally been ugly has been bad enough.
Anyone here dabbling in this stuff?
That's it. I could write more, I probably wrote too much. Honestly it's easy for me to just share things I find interesting. I think it's a pretty damn relevant story on so many levels, from the more obvious political parts to the just society-level bits that don't need to be about insider trading on war or the bits about politicians being lobbied to not regulate it.
It's a long piece. Maybe skim it, but I found it compelling enough to read the whole thing. You can discuss it here. You can just comment on anything about how you feel about starting threads or how you like to read them. Whatever.
I just didn't want all the navel gazing to be off in a feedback thread most people weren't reading.
Start some threads! It would be really cool if even a handful of regulars thought it would be fun to experiment with posting a few new things more often, just to see where it goes.
But people made very reasonable points about it feeling like starting a thread was almost intimidating, or they'd be judged for it. I'm here to tell you it's okay!
Read something interesting and just want to share? Go for it! You don't need to write an essay with a carefully thought out thesis. A link, maybe a quick excerpt, some basic explanation of why you thought it was interest, done. I'll do an example like I was starting a thread.
I read this piece yesterday in the Atlantic:
SUCKER My year as a degenerate gambler (gift link)
The basic premise is a personal journey through someone who never gambled jumping in with both feet with $10k in seed money from the Atlantic to get first hand experience and then be able to write about it. Spoiler: it went kinda badly, he got addicted, and burned through a lot of money and time he should have been spending with his family.
It was I think pretty fascinating from the perspective of someone who has no interest in this stuff, but is still bombarded with the ads and awareness. And apparently 50% of men are into it. Which is kind of a lot.
There's a lot to take in, from the predatory nature of gambling, to the way it's infiltrated all aspects of sports, the insider cheating scandals, etc. But this part where it pivots into the prediction markets is I think the giant red flag:
I had been aware of platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to “invest” in predictive outcomes and trade their “positions.” I also knew that the platforms, which are available in all 50 states, were competing for market share in sports betting with FanDuel, DraftKings, and other incumbents.
But my curiosity wasn’t piqued until U.S. forces stormed Venezuela in January. Days before the operation, an anonymous user had created a Polymarket account and started wagering tens of thousands of dollars that President Nicolás Maduro would be in U.S. custody by the end of the month. When Maduro was captured, the account holder walked away with more than $400,000 in profit.
I assumed at first that the story was an example of obscene abuse—insider trading on a deadly military raid. But once I started playing around with the markets, it became clear that insider trading was a feature, not a bug. The platforms’ founders say they’re providing a social utility, moving the entire digital public square from social-media sites, where AI slop and rage bait reign, to prediction markets, where you are incentivized to invest based on what you genuinely know or believe. “People don’t lie when money’s involved,” Tarek Mansour, a Kalshi co-founder and its CEO, told The New York Times. And although the platforms technically prohibit manipulation—and, in Kalshi’s case anyway, insider trading—proponents have acknowledged that insiders making bets based on what they know only heightens the markets’ predictive value.
But scrolling through the available bets on Kalshi, I struggled to locate the civic spirit. Would anyone truly benefit because I could wager on which words Trump would use next week (5-to-1 payout on Somalian), or which nicknames he’d deploy for his political enemies (3-to-1 for Newscum)? Was the quality of the discourse improved by our ability to gamble on drug-boat bombings in the Caribbean or whether Gaza would experience a famine? “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” Mansour has said.
I don't think you have to be gambling genius to see how ugly this is getting, beyond anything we're traditionally seen before. And honestly what's traditionally been ugly has been bad enough.
Anyone here dabbling in this stuff?
That's it. I could write more, I probably wrote too much. Honestly it's easy for me to just share things I find interesting. I think it's a pretty damn relevant story on so many levels, from the more obvious political parts to the just society-level bits that don't need to be about insider trading on war or the bits about politicians being lobbied to not regulate it.
It's a long piece. Maybe skim it, but I found it compelling enough to read the whole thing. You can discuss it here. You can just comment on anything about how you feel about starting threads or how you like to read them. Whatever.
I just didn't want all the navel gazing to be off in a feedback thread most people weren't reading.
Start some threads! It would be really cool if even a handful of regulars thought it would be fun to experiment with posting a few new things more often, just to see where it goes.
