The movie _Casino_ highlights how insider information was and is used to improve the house odds [0].
Information about a players wellbeing and their life goes a long way. Example, they would pay paper boys to talk to coaches to find out non public information. Such as if a player of the team is going through relationship problems.
All of which is significantly harder than putting up a gigantic billboard that says "Have insider knowledge on an important event? Place a bet here using crypto!"
Every important event in the world has dozens if not hundreds of people "in the know" before it happens. Not everyone has paper boys, chatty coaches, or the time/energy required to connect all those dots.
The entire flow insider information is reversed from "go out and look for it" to "invite it in anonymously"
Was the ", again" left off, or is this going to be the first time you've seen the movie when you do watch it? I know new people are born every day, but Casino is one of those movies that I'd have expected any one old enough to be reading this board to have seen already. This is no judgment on anyone for not seeing it. Just a comment on my skewed view of the world I guess
I didn't see it for the first time until like 2020. Nobody in my family was in to mobster movies and my friends in my 20s never brought it up to watch with me
Sports betting has been around forever, and it has been gamed forever. Gambling is often an addiction and some cheating doesn’t stop people from doing it
To corrupt a Polymarket bet, there needs to be only one person with inside knowledge of a planned event's timing, outcome, duration, etc in order to destroy the other side. The vast majority of Polymarket-bettable events have at least a few dozen if not hundreds or thousands of people with prior knowledge. Polymarket is now a known market where they can (conveniently through crypto) participate. It is basically a billboard saying "do you have interesting inside knowledge? Come here and make some money!"
To corrupt a sport bet, there needs to be an actual manipulation of events perpetrated by a very small, very closely watched and analyzed group of people (athletes or officials).
In my view, it seems immediately obvious that as prediction markets become even more mainstream (and so the billboard effect gets stronger), Polymarket bets will have a significantly higher rate of corruption than sports bets.
I can't think of anybody, who has significant power, who isn't seen as horrible by somebody else, and often by quite a lot of somebody elses. With power people always end up trying to make the world a better place. The problem is one man's better place is another's dystopia.
Yep! I count sects of Christianity among those groups and you're right that there are many more just waiting for the right situation and leader to really push them into full blown eschatology.
> If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon, it would not spread quickly but die out. If it is very contagious .. but very, very slow incubation time, so it infects the whole world, before becoming a deadly disease ..
This is a made up equilibrium that actually does not need to exist in nature.
Viruses and bacteria can in fact be both extremely, extremely contagious and extremely, extremely lethal.
> If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon,
Trivially: you actually can have a virus that kills everything it touches not soon. Nothing in biology or chemistry or physics prevents it.
> Viruses and bacteria can in fact be both extremely, extremely contagious and extremely, extremely lethal.
Sure, but those two things would tend to work against it becoming a pandemic— unless it managed those two things but also kept its host healthy enough for long enough before becoming lethal to adequately spread it.
I looked into this once, it depends on how splashy the death is. A virus that made people explode instantly into a fine mist of airborne virus particles could be perfectly adequate for a pandemic (although holding off until help arrives might work even better).
I think we can safely assume that OP was picking a bit of a ridiculous hypothetical example to make a point that it’s possible for something to be deadly and transmissible, although in nature Baculovirus in Caterpillars has a similar mechanism (encourages their host to eat a lot, then climb to the top of a plant so when it turns to ooze it infects others) or cordyceps although both of these aren’t as highly transmissible as they hypothetical explode virus.
But the Black Death mixed high contagion and high mortality as an actual example that shows they aren’t mutually exclusive.
What? That's your second strawman in two comments.
Nobody said you claimed they were harmless. People are taking issue with your assertion that biological agents can be either contagious or lethal (not both), and therefore you discount its risk. This implied tradeoff between contagiousness and lethality simply is not enforced by anything in nature.
The natural emergence of a pathogen that's both highly contagious and highly lethal would be a much rarer event than the natural emergence of one that's either contagious or lethal, but we're talking about engineered pathogens. There is no reason to think that pathogens cannot be deliberately created that are both of those things.
To be clear, the sticking point is actually that the DoD signed a deal with Anthropic a few months ago that had an Acceptable Use Policy which, like all policies, is narrower than the absolute outer bounds of statutory limitations.
DoD is now trying to strongarm Anthropic into changing the deal that they already signed!
> It is reasonable to assume some gratitude should be allowed, otherwise you'd have to ask how long a teacher should be tossed into jail for receiving a "Best teacher ever" mug from his students.
This is unfathomably ridiculous and you know it. Profoundly bad faith argument.
The difference is that a teacher is on government payroll, while politicians, at least those in the Congress are not.
And when I was a teacher that was strict guidelines on what gifts you can receive. Usually under a certain limit it’s fine. If it is too expensive you have to report it.
Not really, because that's the core issue had hand, but I might not have made my intention with the argument sufficiently clear.
The question the court looked at: Did Congress intend "receiving gifts as a bribe" and "receiving gifts as gratitude" to be two separate crimes for non-federal employees as it is the case for federal ones (In which case handling the issue would have been left up to the states)?
The majority opinion refused to consider the moral argument (although they snuck it in in their argument on a lack of fair notice), but IMO that's by far the most intuitive one, when you allow yourself to look at the problem from the legislative perspective. By looking at the extremes it becomes very clear that there are two very different problems:
Imagine a group of students doing much better than their peers on their final exam thanks to the efforts of their teacher and they gift him a "Best teacher ever" mug.
But now reverse the causality:
Imagine a teacher demanding to be gifted a "Best teacher ever" mug before putting extra effort into preparing his students for their final exam. The group that gifted him the mug does much better than their peers as a result.
IMO these should be two very different crimes, but there is also a valid argument that they are about equivalent, as pursued by the dissenting opinion.
But that's not something a court should legislate.
No, it's already in the law that it only applies if it is intended to and corruptly accepted as an influence on official decision-making.
A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.
If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.
> it only applies if it is intended to and corruptly accepted as an influence on official decision-making.
The majority opinion argues that this is one of the primary differences between a bribe and a gift of gratitude.
> A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.
No, which is a large part of this whole argument. The interpretation the government used and was (indirectly) backed by the minority opinion, was, that the statute would not cover "innocuous or obviously benign" gratuities. But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.
And that's where we arrive back at the core of the problem.
For a bribe, the question of whether or not a corrupt state of mind existed can be judged at minimum by if the official act was corrupted. Usually this standard doesn't exist for gratitudes. These do not require a corrupt state of mind to be criminal, but their criminality derives solely from the heightened standard of responsibility of an official when performing official duties. Just like a heightened standard of responsibility when operating a motor vehicle or carrying.
> If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.
Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.
And gratitudes do not become legal in general. It's just that the involvement of the federal government ends and states are now free to handle such cases however they think is appropriate.
> But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.
Easy: someone would complain and a court would decide based on the specifics of the situation. Most laws work this way and cannot actually resolve based on a programmatic list of facts.
> Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.
Are you arguing that grading (outside of "something like a theater performance") is fully objective? Because... it's not.
People don't play in corrupt markets for very long.
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