Yeah, their budget is now 90% secret police activities, and only 10% the kinds of things that are actually important… like interfacing with INTERPOL, and acting as a barrier to arms dealing and human trafficking.

Since we can’t abolish something 90%, we need to assign those duties to another organization, until ICE is left with nothing except evil/redundant duties, and THEN abolish it.

Why did you write this?

It’s literally from a Chick Tract. It’s an ancient meme… circulating for the past 10 years or so.

KYM

Whether the person posting it is right or wrong, it’s not really an endorsement of religion. It’s like “scapegoat”, or “omg”.

Apes of the Nation.

So your technique for breaking down ideas is to invoke an appeal to majority, and then be condescending about it?

Holy shit, I’m outmatched. It might take years for me to recover from the epic own I’ve just received.

I concede. There are countless other discussions that need your brave insights. It would be selfish to take up even one second more of your time. Godspeed.

Yeah, if that were the only thing I wrote, my contribution to this discussion would be complete garbage.

OK, let’s see the evidence for that assertion.

Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research - PMC

There’s one.

But obviously it’s not a guarantee if you don’t know what you’re doing. We also have documentation on where these methods fall short, such as when it’s based on exponential growth, rare events, or something else that humans are bad at understanding. Infectious Disease Forecasting.

But again, good statisticians are prepared to address those things.

And you have no idea of the mechanisms that shape that market.

That’s even better. If I don’t understand the mechanisms shaping the market, I won’t be able to correctly identify predictive variables for my model. In that case, I would be better off trusting the prediction market.

Obviously it would be better if the person building the model understood the mechanisms… but that takes time and money. If you’re managing 30 models, that might not be worth it.

I think it’s like plane crashes. We hear a lot about when things go wrong, but if it actually works, there’s nothing to talk about.

A friend’s grandmother lives in an HOA. She never has issues.

We should probably have the dues, complaints, charters, and whatnot be public to avoid some of the mystery. You wouldn’t move to a new state without being able to look up the constitution, other laws, or tax rates on a public site… (well you shouldn’t anyway). I don’t understand why we’ve decided it’s okay at the community level.

You probably live in a blue area. (Most people live in a blue area.) The actual situation is that we’ve polarized. People around you, in the blue area, have moved left. People elsewhere, in the red areas, have moved right.

Pew Research for some graphics.

In certain ways, this has been a victory for civil liberties. Gay people from small towns can move to a place where they might have entire neighborhoods of likeminded people. Trans people from small towns can move to a place where they won’t be shot on sight. Hell, someone in NYC who suddenly finds Jesus can go to a smaller town where no one will make fun of them for proselytizing AND they can hang out with likeminded people AND they get cheaper rent.

But it’s also more dangerous than it has ever been to be an immigrant. Wealth inequality has been rising. Increases in wages has been vastly outpaced by increases in the cost of housing and healthcare, and combined with inflation, we’re making more units of USD, sure, but we aren’t able to sustain any better a quality of life. Corporate Taxes were increased for small companies, and cut for large companies.

Depending on whether you’re more focused on the kinds of people living around you, or on the wide-reaching systemic changes that have been taking place, you’re going to notice different things. The really really important stuff that has shifted to the right is kind of boring, so you wouldn’t have seen much reporting on it.

If the contract isn’t something that meets the criteria for an efficient market, then yeah, it’s not something that can be used to give reasonable probabilities.

But for something like, winner of the democratic presidential primary, or the proce of gold in a month… then it’s genuinely a better predictive model than what a statistician would be able to come up with.

It doesn’t provide anything beneficial to anyone but its owners.

For statistics purposes, it gives me something incredibly beneficial. Simply by knowing the price of a contract, I can know with decent accuracy how likely something is to happen.

If you’re not in the field, you wouldn’t necessarily appreciate how valuable that is.

I third Linux mint.

Communism always ends with corrupt, power hungry dictators.

What if head government positions in general are attractive to corrupt, power hungry dictators?

The Weimar Republic wasn’t communist, and it got a corrupt, power hungry dictator.

The United States isn’t communist, and it’s dealing with a corrupt, power hungry dictator.

Israel isn’t communist, and it’s dealing with a corrupt, power hungry dictator.

I wonder if maybe there are other factors in play that you aren’t considering.

always

Always? Are you sure? Let’s say there’s a corrupt, power hungry person looking for a government spot. How would communism make it easier for the person to get into power, than in a capitalist system?

Briefly, between the age of elves and the age of men, we had an age of utter clownery.

Hell, with these numbers, you could get 16 dentists, have them compete head to head in a 4-level tournament, and still afford an espresso machine for the winner.

Well, it’s the aggregated opinion of people who use the site. Kalshi doesn’t set the price; people making the bets set the price based on the odds others are willing to accept.

There’s a sampling bias for sure, but since the odds given for this bet are based on how much people are willing to pay for that bet, this gives a very good approximation for how people actually feel about something.

It actually ends up being more reliable than most opinion polls in that way.

For jalapeños and other peppers, the pithy center is where most of the pungency comes from. It’s also more bitter than the rear of the pepper. If you chop into quarters lengthwise, it’s easy to cut the seeds and pith away from the flesh. You’re the left with a milder, sweeter result.

… in case you’re in an experimental mood.

shit like onions and actually use some real fucking spices from India and Mexico

… but… India eats a lot of onions… because as great as the spices are, onions are also great. You can have both. You should have both.

I don’t want a one-time, 5% wealth tax. I want a recurring wealth tax. At 0.5%, such a tax outpaces the one time 5% in ten years.

I would settle for one time 5%… but it’s just so short-sighted. 5% in one sudden movement is actually a big ask… and are we actually going to be able to pull that off more than once?

A recurring wealth tax 1) is better in the long-term, 2) is less disruptive to the stock market (which we should care about, as long as this is the sustem we have) 3) makes for a more predictable economic environment, so people with money might actually still want to live in CA.

In NYC the most surveilled areas actually have lower murder resolution rates.

There’s really no way that could be a causal relationship. It’d be worth diving into the data to figure out which variables are related to each of these.

They included the Spotify logo. It’s just <insert song here> rather than labelling the picture as “Fortunate Sons”.