“Another way to look at this is that billionaires have joined a war on professional administrative class of public servants precisely because of their proximity to formal mechanisms of accountability.”
That part! Everything from documentation to compliance mechanisms to whistleblowing is a threat.
It seems the “wisdom of crowds” angle is doing a lot of PR for prediction market platforms.
These are really economic redistribution machines.
A small group of traders capture most of the gains, while everyone else supplies the cash and the idea that this is just collective intelligence.
Hm.
Oooh! More news on prediction markets!
“The top 1 per cent of users capture about 84 per cent of all gains, while the top 0.1 per cent capture nearly 60 per cent. In effect, most participants lose money to a small group of sophisticated traders…”
www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/pe...
1/7. We Americans have a hard time seeing ourselves in the world, and so even when we want to criticize our fascist oligarchs we fail to see the international networks of which they are nodes.
Small byelections, big consequences! #cdnpoli
I've been offline for 4 days. What did I miss?!
Oh.
Who has jurisdiction? Not the states!
We have some answers to a few of the questions posed in my piece: "U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the sports-related event contracts that Kalshi allows people to trade on its platform."
www.reuters.com/world/new-je...
So glad that congress isn’t alive to see this.
Yesterday, four astronauts swung around the far side of the moon, traveling farther from the Earth than any humans had ever gone before, taking some spectacular photographs along the way. theatln.tc/19ze00pK
📸: NASA; Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP / Getty
As @dandrezner.bsky.social concludes, the war is a strategic defeat for the United States. We are worse off than before the war, and already there have been military and civilian costs. As many experts have said, hard to see opening Hormuz militarily. 5/ danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-strate...
You don’t get “America First” by undermining alliances.
You just get “America Alone.”
the saga continues…
If you are wondering who regulates the death markets, the short answer is the Trump admin is claiming to do so, but mostly to stop anyone else from engaging in meaningful regulation. Oh, and Don Jr is advising both Polymarket and Kalshi.
The 2027 budget proposal calls for cuts to nondefense spending, including funding for education and the EPA. on.wsj.com/4cpgJYV
🤦🏽♀️
FEMA Official Says He Teleported to Waffle House. Experts Are Dubious. Gregg Phillips, who is in charge of responding to fires and floods, says the hand of God suddenly and mysteriously moved him to a 24-hour breakfast spot in Rome, Ga.
Folks, I give you the New York Times
“LinkedIn supremacy” is just a phrase I guess I never thought I’d read under any circumstance.
“Like free Black people before the Civil War who carried the burden of proof to demonstrate that they were not enslaved people […], the burden of proof today has been borne disproportionately by US citizens and immigrants who are people of color…”
Fascinating piece re evolution of mobility rights!
Both the CFTC and states have various forms of consumer protection. In terms of things like harassment, it might be really left up to a messy interplay between gov regulated consumer protection and the platform’s own Terms of Service - which would be a bit more difficult for gov’ts to influence.
TIL there's an "End Prediction Market Corruption Act" bill that would ban (a subset) of government officials from trading on non-public information, sponsored by Merkley and co-sponsored by four fellow Senate Dems, and IMHO more lawmakers should get on board.
www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...
As of right now, states have a legit interest only to the extent that user eligibility is different in state jurisdiction (21 years old) and users can be taxed differently. States might also have their own ideas about what kinds of markets are ‘appropriate’
Courts have gone both ways. Congress is now approaching it from a few directions at once: some bills target what can be traded, others target who can trade. None of it asks the harder question: who is actually equipped to govern this? /4
CFTC or states? (Or Congress?) The CFTC is filing briefs in courts across the country to make sure states can't step in. But, Nevada, Massachusetts, New York, Tennessee — all in court arguing these platforms are unlicensed gambling operations. /3
A platform that calls itself "the future of news" opened a market on nuclear detonation and then quietly archived it. Users have pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars on bets placed suspiciously close to the deaths of foreign leaders and US military strikes. So, who's supposed to stop this? /2
My newest for @donmoyn.bsky.social 's blog! I wrote about prediction markets, and why governing them is, at its core, a federalism problem.
Polymarket and Kalshi are caught between a federal regulator claiming exclusive jurisdiction and states insisting it's theirs to police. /1 🧵
