Yes, "charitable work". I'm sure a foundation like that could make a good front for child trafficking. Not that Bill would ever do such a thing obviously, his common interests with that old rascal Jeff must have strictly included other things.
Wait. Are you claiming that there's some sort of link between "Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011" and the Gates Foundation which launched in 2000 by merging with the Gates Sr. Foundation from all the way back in 1994?
> have you seen how anyone online reacts when speeding or red light cameras are installed? or when parking becomes discouraged for sake of pedestrians or residents?
That didn't address what the poster wrote, it's just a cheap reddit style of internet arguing that doesn't add anything. OP is right, society in general tolerates a bunch of regulations as to what and where and how they can drive.
Deaths from road accidents are (somewhat) more tolerated than say murder because of the enormous utility of cars. This is not bewildering to anybody who is not being disingenuous.
Is this really true? What is the evidence that Trump succeeded in money laundering, where is the dirty money coming from in these particular bets, and how do you propose the polymarket betting mechanism is able to clean the money?
A2: I don’t know. It would be great if the Department of Justice or Treasury investigated the matter, since the SEC no longer has the capability. However, since the interim Attorney General is a simp who expresses his love for the president repeatedly, that’s unlikely.
A3: Polymarket could make an effort to prevent activity that undermines the integrity of their platform. All betting platforms work to detect the use of the platforms by people like
Baseball players and their families. Most public employees names are public, so it should not be impossible to do the same.
The fact that obvious behavior like this happens reflects poorly on the platform. It’s pretty incredible that bettors are stupid enough to use a platform that actively undermines their wagers.
Thanks. A1 and A2 didn't answer my questions except that I think you're saying that you are not sure if any it is true or not. I was hoping for something substantive beyond the usual conspiracy theorizing.
On A3, money laundering doesn't mean hiding financial activity from the court of public opinion, it means to take an illegal income and put it through processes that obfuscates its origin and makes it difficult for law enforcement to notice or investigate so it can be used in legal markets. "Gambling" doesn't just clean money. Polymarket is electronic and the source and destination of transactions could be subpoenaed. That misconception probably comes from physical casinos where a person would walk in with cash and walk out with a receipt for chips and claim gambling earnings. Doesn't work when you have a paper trail in and out.
It would be stupid to the point of ridiculous to try to launder money this way, even from Trump, lol. Especially on such visible trades! Much more likely it's just making money from insider bets, because that is seemingly not illegal for prediction markets. If you were going to try to use this thing to launder (which seems ridiculous in the first place but maybe it's possible) you would do it with much more mundane bets surely.
> The fact that obvious behavior like this happens reflects poorly on the platform. It’s pretty incredible that bettors are stupid enough to use a platform that actively undermines their wagers.
Gambling is or can be a terrible mental health problem. Stupidity - arguably yes, but also an addiction. Which makes profiting from it pretty awful too really. Although regulations have struggled with how to deal with it because internet and black market gambling is so lucrative and easy to set up too unfortunately.
> how do you propose the polymarket betting mechanism is able to clean the money?
I would assume that dirty money (from dirty wallets) is placed on the "losing side" of the bet. And clean accounts take the "winning side" of the bets.
I don't think it would offend, Americans are the first to bemoan what happened to Detroit as far as I have seen. What will probably offend more is the fact that the USA is not really in decline, as much as that has long been the highbrow narrative.
It has lost ground in some industries, it has also invested and pioneered in high tech design and manufacturing, aerospace, computers, software, internet, etc. which has kept it strong. And I know GDP doesn't give you much picture, but it gives you something.
Australia is doing well too as a coal/LNG depot and iron ore mine for China, after giving up their manufacturing industry and any pretense at technology. The "Education" export sector has looked good on paper, but the penny is beginning to drop that universities have been allowed to be hollowed out and turned into degree mills chasing short-term profit like some wall street quarterly results whore, and when there is very little investment in science and technology in the country, "higher education" can never be at the forefront. I guess that's good, the world will "always" need iron ore, bauxite, uranium, and coal/gas (until it doesn't). But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil?
Australia has so little of its own capability that if something serious happened to our maritime trade (I'm not talking about the tiny blip in the Persian Gulf just now, but a serious conflict involving real players), they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy.
America has its problems, but it always has something on the go there. There's an energy in the air over there. Like China. People are determined to do something, reminds me of stories of the Australia that died before I was born. Australians aspire to work in a mine or in a worthless government bureaucrat jobs they can't get fired from, and accumulate rental properties. "But it's so 'laid back'", "but we don't have gun crime", "we have government healthcare" does not mean the road it is going down is not a dead end.
While I agree with your overall assessment of the Australia economy...
> But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil?
"It" is not going to run out in the foreseeable future. Australia is unimaginably huge and has deposits of pretty much everything somewhere. The state of Western Australia alone has 29% of the world's known iron ore, more than any other entire country (Brazil is #2 with 19%) and more than Russia and China combined.
Yeah but when they automate all the mining jobs away and the existing policy of bribing our politicians to not tax them gets to its logical conclusion, what's the point? We're just throwing away irreplaceable natural resources.
It really isn't hard to "foresee" 50-100 years into the future, and that's when iron ore could run out. Could even be sooner if production increases significantly.
> they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy.
What does this mean? That Australia is self-sufficient in food and energy but exports all of it or does it mean Australia is incapable of processing the raw materials into finished goods?
yeah, basically. We export iron ore and import cars. If the global trade system shut down we'd be sat on a huge pile of ore with absolutely no way of turning it into anything useful.
It's similar with food: our Wheatbelt produces vast amounts of wheat. Which is great but kinda useless without global trade; we can't turn all that wheat into actual food ourselves.
Australia does not have the ability to manufacture enough fuel or fertilizer to feed or harvest or transport its crops and livestock or dig minerals and fossil fuels out of the ground. Is also incapable of making any of the machinery to do any of those things either. All of it has to come on boats.
Australia ships thermal and coking coal and iron ore and bauxite and uranium and lithium to China, Japan, Korea, and buys cars and steel and batteries and machinery back from them. It's not high-tech, smart, forward looking. It extremely extremely lucky (cursed by its luck, really) to have the natural non-renewable resources that it does, and it is hell-bent on squandering them all as fast as possible and having nothing to show for it by the end of it.
No it would be trivial to gain a thorough understanding of Middle East politics and the oil market for an enlightened people who were able to become foremost experts in epidemiology, molecular biology, global supply chain logistics, the war in Ukraine, semiconductor manufacturing, and many other fields entirely self-taught simply by obsessively reading social media and wikipedia.
"Infotainment" is the term I've heard to describe Reddit and other talking websites. People are looking to "win" like they do in sports or other recreational activities. It's a kind of fun that disguises itself as learning-- minus, of course, the actual work.
Can you make the same arguments for holding land and activity that requires land? Or holding any other valuable, limited commodity vs activity that requires that commodity, copper for example?
Investors in those things haven't caused an economic death spiral. It's considered shrewd and good business to buy and hold things that are seeing increasing demand.
> This further decreases dollars available on the market to use in trade, further increasing their value.
... thereby reducing the amount of dollars required to trade a given amount of other things. Where does the spiral come from?
Holding land isn't as straightforward as you describe it. Every parcel of land is different. It takes a lot of knowledge of many kinds to be the one who makes money from real estate, instead of losing outright for overpaying, underselling, or simply being whittled down by taxes and other expense. And its lack of liquidity creates high situation risk, for anyone who doesn't have a large enough csh buffer to weather life's turns, unscathed by any immediate needs.
But yes, sophisticated investors do make money on under utilized land. Parasitically.
And it is an economy damper. Under utilized land is poor economic optimization by definition. Not to mention the undertow it creates, in terms of unproductive scarcity, for people who actually need to utilize land - whether that is for homes or businesses.
The solution, as economist Henry George pointed out, is to tax land, but not the property on it. Tax the exlcusionalry holding of a limited resource, don't tax productive value created by people.
Taxing land and not property isn't as simple as taxing both, but it isn't rocket science either. There are lots of standards and practices, because distinguishing between the two is important for many reasons.
The irony of taxing property, the stuff that makes land productive, is that it is a wealth tax that hurts rich and poor alike. A poor person, unemployed, who spends their time bereft of reliable income improving their own home will now be taxed on the value added - every year for the rest of their lives or until they sell or lose their home. That is a very perverse situation.
So yes, the taxation situation that subsidizes under utilized property, which is also parasitically rewarded by gains in value far exceeding the lower taxes they pay (for having no development to tax), is continually damaging the economy.
I didn't describe anything as straightforward, the fact remains that there are limited goods/properties/commodities that are in demand, not just money. It's not up to me to show why it's exactly like money because that was the only property of money used to describe this detrimental problem, it's up to the person who says that is a problem with deflationary money. Money can also be taxed too, so that also is insufficient to make the case for why it is different than land. Or alternatively you could take a limited non-renewable commodity (say, copper) that is in demand but not taxed. Also you have still not addressed that increasing value of money naturally reduces the required amount of it necessary for making a particular trade. A fairly striking omission when claiming there are feedback spirals in such a system.
I've been hearing "nuclear should have been done 15-20 years ago" for 30 years at this point. Coal was dead 20 years ago killed by solar and wind too, turns out that we'll be lucky if we have passed peak coal today! And peak carbon is still a fever dream.
No, it's time for the anti-nuclear crowd to sit things out from now on. They've been continuously wrong for the past 50 years, the world should never have listened to any of them.
Nuclear is too expensive in ways that are effectively fixed costs. Solar is the cheapest form of power available on the market. I agree that we should have pushed nuclear 50, 40, 30, and 20 years ago, but now you’re asking the American people to pay more because something was the right call in the 90’s.
No, it wasn’t. In 2008, I went to a lecture by a professor researching better PV cells, and it was, “here’s the benchmarks solar needs to beat to be cost competitive with nuclear, let alone oil or natural gas. As you can see, we’re nowhere close, but here’s what concepts we think can get us there.”
Meanwhile, nuclear’s appeal is that it can scale incredibly well. It’s not cost competitive with oil or gas, and certainly not with solar, but it can put out a ton of energy. With the sudden need for more and more data centers, there’s now a market for that. But solar is cheaper, safer, and is ready to go now.
> I see music as "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth".
5.6MB? That's an astounding number of combinations. 1 followed by 1733933 zeroes.
> If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards. My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.
AI is not searching that space for novel patterns for the most part, it is taking what it has heard before and coming up with things based on that. Which isn't a dig at AI, that's pretty much how humans do things too. I don't think today's AIs would be able to come up with something like Stairway to Heaven if Led Zeppelin and the music they inspired had never existed though.
Agree. Maybe novel is the wrong term given my framing. "Listenable?" The combinatorial space of music is hyperastronomical, effectively infinite. And most of it is probably noise.
AI isn't "searching" in the standard indexing sense. But if say, Suno, is doing stable diffusion on fourier transform heat maps, and there's a finite space of configurations... it is using a heuristic approach to pick an option from a well-defined (gargantuan) set of options.
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