> Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction.
But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?
The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event.
This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking into the Situation Room.
Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for violating these rules. I’m still not sure what changed (other than money buying the crumbling of regulation).
> But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?
You can, if you cover your tracks well enough. Or donate to a President willing to keep the SEC off your back.
I get that people in power can place bets on their own actions. But again, they can just do that in the stock market. A lawmaker might know a law is going to pass and trade on that insider knowledge. Or maybe the vice president owns shares in Haliburton and then helps encourage invading Iraq... what's old is new again, I guess.
Discord specifically wanted to solve this by assuming everyone was a minor until they proved their age. Minors still have access to most spaces unless that space (or DMs with adults) was flagged / identified as adult-content.
This is a pretty clear counter example to your snowball fallacy.
> Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
Not necessarily. There are facial scan tools which make a guess based on visual appearance of the face. They aren’t perfect, but they might have error rates comparable to systems which require linking to government ID systems.
But generally the ToS has few, if any, requirements for the company. Usually the ToS is just a list of demands they make of the user in exchange for the service. But the company usually reserves the right to terminate service for any reason, as well as change the serice in any way they want, and change the terms of the "contract" at any time.
Ok that's no way to build a functional society, though. Humans are certainly not the entities in this conflict with the time or resources to go to court.
>If the company violates their ToS, you can take them to court (or arbitration).
This is my favorite...how exactly can I monitor compliance? No evidence of non-compliance - get tossed out of court. No court order for discovery - no ability to monitor/gather evidence compliance.
The idea that this is even a potential for mutuallity on a TOS is just farcical.
Often I see a popup to accept TOS after the update, which was run without me agreeing to anything.
At which time the company has unilaterally denied my access to something I already paid for without seeking my affirmative consent.
In theory I could stop whatever I'm doing, go email the company a brief to the point letter indicating they've broken their ToS and are unacceptably impairing my ability to use my property under the contract that I did agree to, and giving them an opportunity to amend their problem and give me a rollback path.
Realistically the outcome of this is a brushoff and needing to file a consumer protection complaint or get a lawyer.
If the feature is something like "my car" I can't afford that opportunity cost and am coerced into accepting their contract by the way they presented the amended terms.
I figure ToS for physical devices should be blanket outlawed. They're fraught enough for purely online services. Physical devices keep all of that baggage then add additional questions about whether or not I own physical objects that I purchased.
Paul Warburg on YouTube is a geopolitical analyst. His video from this weekend[1] walks through the many reasons why the energy market is resilient and adjusts to issues like Hormuz being temporarily impassable, ship insurance risk, the geopolitical uncertainty of Iranian leadership, the price of oil/gas and how changes in the supply/demand curve cause other wells elsewhere in the world to take up the slack, etc.
Russia paid for the pipelines because they were desperate for customers in the post-2022 sanctions era. China has remarkably little ability to refine the crude domestically and they aren’t even using most of that domestic capacity.
I kmow there is a wide discontent in Iran. But I am quite sure that had the people known what this would be used as a pretext for, they would use more judgement.
They just forgot for a moment that regardless of what ayatollahs tell about internal affairs, what they tell about the west is quite true.
You act like they all act rationally with maximum information.
Kids are growing up with the culture of sports betting, meme stocks, Robinhood for easy investing (even if you can’t afford a single share of a stock), virtual items and loot boxes, “blind box” products, etc. the entire economy runs on taking advantage of people with gambling compulsions / addictions.
And to answer your rhetorical-but-not-really question, not all people know they are “the fish” (referring to the quote from the movie Rounders).
But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?
The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event.
This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking into the Situation Room.
Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for violating these rules. I’m still not sure what changed (other than money buying the crumbling of regulation).
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