"Manifold is a great site." Am I missing something important here? A betting platform where you can buy in but you can never cash out seems like the worst of all worlds to me in the delightful new landscape of ways to lose money.
(Okay, *most* worlds: I understand that you like it because you think that prediction markets in general provide useful & accurate information. Which I also have my doubts about.)
AFAIK almost no one actually puts money in, so it's just a way to aggregate predictions which takes into account both the strength of your belief vs the current consensus (via how much of your stash you're willing to bet) and how right you have been historically (via how bit your stash is and can thus afford to bet).
But this violates the "revealed preference" principle of economics, aka "skin in in the game". If I am basically playing a videogame, I might just play to troll/grief.
Sure, but other people are playing to win. If move a liquid market away from its equilibrium price, that creates an opportunity for other people to make a profit by correcting the mispricing, so they'll bid it back. Try it and see if you like. Plus this strategy is self-limiting; if you consistently make bad bets you will run out of point to spend.
In practice, Manifold should mostly be thought of as a video game, where the currency is being good at predicting (modulo that experience with the site matters, and that you can buy more currency with real money). The stat that matters is your profit, and the prestige that comes with it.
It's not really competitive with Kalshi or Polymarket, but it's also not really trying to be.
Hey, if people are willing to spend hours and monumental effort in building Factorio megafactories or grinding in-game currencies in gachas, maybe that energy can be harnessed for good.
People also troll/grief in videogames. I almost never fly in Open in Elite: Dangerous, because of such idiots who think everything that flies is a target. Or I troll them back by flying what looks like a cargo spaceship but, it is is actually armed to the teeth.
But this violates the "revealed preference" principle of economics, aka "skin in in the game". If I am basically playing a videogame, I might just play to troll/grief.
It's mostly about bragging rights. You can't cash out the winnings for your own personal use, but you can donate the winnings to charity. So the money doesn't "disappear" completely or get permanently turned into manna. This satisfies people with EA sensibilities.
I echo the other commenter comparing it to a video game. It's mostly about bragging rights and getting the dopamine hit of "winning" a prediction, more than trying to actually make a profit.
IMO the biggest problem with Anthropic being labed a SCR isn't things like Amazon cutting access, it's what will happen to the IPO. I could very easily see investors not wanting to invest under the uncertainty, even if the SCR designation will obviously be reversed in court.
"Obviously be reversed in court" simply means Anthropic has "x court fees" to pay for getting out of its military contract. Taken by itself, with no knock-on effects, that doesn't seem to be the worst thing Trump's ever done.
That's the thing, though; even if some people are extremely confident that Anthropic will get the designation revoked, there may be lots of people who are not so sure, and are not willing to invest. It wouldn't be the first time the market was irrational regarding AI.
It's amazing how low everyone's standards are for the midterms. Taking back the house in midterms is table stakes. That happens *every* cycle, barring highly unusual events.
The important battle is the senate. It really shows just how toxic the Democratic brand is that they're only 40% to win in a midterm year with a historically unpopular president who is not even trying to address the concerns of voters.
Notably the Senate map is very bad for Democrats this year - most of the Republican-held purple seats are up in other years, so the opportunities are states like Texas, Florida, Iowa, and Alaska, which are going to be extremely difficult in any year. The only one that's purple is Maine, which is held by a long term Republican senator, and Ohio seems fairly reasonable as well. And remember, they need to take four seats, with a Republican VP.
People have been predicting this as a tough year for Democrats since long before anyone knew what the Democratic brand would be in 2026.
NC is also open. But 2028 isnt better. Dems have an opening in WI and NC again. But are defending GA AZ NV and PA. OH FL and IA are unlikely reaches.
They are all bad maps for the dems and its because the dems have spent 12 years complaining about bad maps instead of putting together a 25 state coalition.
I for one knew the dems had a bad senate brand in 2020 when the 2026 incumbents were determined. I knew that before. So did many others.
Isn't the Senate map always bad for Dems with the current demographic split? Lots of Dems clustered in high pop states getting only 2 Senators, few Reps spread across lightly populates stated, still with two Senators.
I think the Dem senators represent something like 54% of the population with 47% of the senators - so how much of a lead do they need to get a robust senate majority?
As Andrew said, it wouldn't be a "bad map" if the Democrats hadn't screwed up so badly in previous years. That's exactly the problem.
Keep in mind that in 2012, Obama won Maine, Iowa, Ohio, *and* Florida, all states that are up for reelection this year.
And the only reason that Democrats need to win Iowa now is because they lost *Pennsylvania* before, which should have been an easy win.
The woke period has really done tremendous lasting damage to the point where Democrats are underdogs to even put up resistance to Trump as he destroys rule of law, the constitution, and everything everyone holds dear.
I feel like I hear every year that the map is bad for Democrats. I can't remember a time when the Senate map was good for Dems. To be clear, I'm a complete layman when it comes to politics, so there's a good chance I'm just stupid / inattentive. Is there a time in the future where the map is expected to be good?
State boundaries are effectively a permanent gerrymander favoring small-population states. For the foreseeable future, that means rural. At the moment, rural implies a GOP advantage, and it isn't clear when that will change. If you'll accept _relatively_ good map for Democrats, then it happens when the particular seats up for election include seats the GOP currently holds but is likely to fumble away. That is hard to predict more than a few months in advance.
Considering the US is a democracy, I think midterm chances is more a reflection of American voters if they continue to side with a historically unpopular president who is not even trying to address their concerns.
My point is that the *reason* they are continuing to side with Trump is because Democrats screwed up very badly in the past and now the brand is toxic.
No, they continue to side with Trump because they prefer a historically unpopular president who is not even trying to address their concerns to a party that has a "toxic brand".
It's not just their brand that's toxic. Can you really not imagine that there are a lot of people who think that liberals and leftists have no right to rule?
I've been saying this whole thread that I can easily imagine there are a lot of people who think that. Midterm chances are a reflection of American voters and how many of them think that. American voters are responsible for midterm outcomes, not political parties.
if you look at the map, 40% actually seems impossibly high. where are all these flips coming from that work out to 40%? dems need 51 to take the senate. the odds are closer to 5%.
But aside from that, I wouldn't blame this on a 'toxic brand', but on the structure of the U.S. system. These are seats that were won 6 years ago, which was a presidential election w/ a democrat winner, which usually means the party is near their max for these seats.
Dems in the Senate currently represent about 55% of the US population. To win four seats this year they have to bump that up to about 60% (depending on which seats they win). The last time the Repubs in the Senate represented more than 50% of the population was 1996; the last time the Repubs represented over 60% was in 1928 - right before the Great Depression. [I got these numbers from googling around, but they sound right]
Which is to say, it's a bit of a high bar the Dems have to meet. They can't just run up more votes in blue states, they have to highlight policies that will help them win small rural states without losing House seats in those blue states at the same time.
To be clear, this is a feature rather than a bug. The Senate exists explicitly to hedge against highly populous states running the Union through brute numerical superiority. Congress is designed to have one body of its bicameral legislature represent the interests of the majority of the population, while the other body represents the interests of the majority of the member polities.
The system is working more-or-less as intended. The party catering towards metropolitan areas tends to fare well in large states and is more competitive in the House. The party more focused on the rural vote does well in many small states and has a systematic advantage in the Senate. Talking about the percent of the population needed to retain the Senate is therefore something of a mistake. Sure, there's a threshold where that happens, but only because number of polities controlled and amount of population controlled are weakly correlated.
I'm not opining about whether the system is preferable to the alternative. The "feature vs bug" dichotomy is meant to describe intentional vs unintentional aspects of a system. (Hence the common jokes about serendipitous unexpected systems behaviors actually being features).
It was by design, but the design was not created in a vaccuum - the overriding concern of those less populous states was protecting slavery. One peculiar institution led to another.
Do you have evidence of this? I did the math for a Presidential election in the 18th century and found that the slave states had equal or *higher* populations than the free ones, at least at the time around the Ratification.
False. The reason for giving less populous states like Rhode Island equal power in the Senate is that otherwise they would have refused to join the Union. It had nothing to do with the balance of power between free and slave states. That was balanced by counting slaves as 3/5ths of a resident when conducting the census.
You don't need to do much to close the Strait of Hormuz and closing it doesn't mean nothing goes through, it just means it's very expensive. To quote Irina Slav...
The Strait of Hormuz closure/non-closure was one of the most exciting parts of the weekend discourse on social media. They’ve closed it! They haven’t! They will! They can’t! While people engaged in that dubious social media entertainment, insurers began cancelling policies, raising premiums, and now “More than half of the world’s largest maritime insurance clubs will cease cover for war risks for ships entering the Persian Gulf starting Thursday.” Why bother closing off the strait when you can scare insurers into doing a financial version of a closure?
“War risk insurers on Saturday submitted cancellation notices for policies covering ships moving through the key oil chokepoint, brokers told the FT, with prices set to rise as much as 50 per cent in the coming days,” the FT said, and then added that “For a $100mn vessel, this would mean an increase from $250,000 to $375,000 per voyage.”
A typical large oil tanker can carry 2m barrels of oil, so a 50% increase in insurance costs sounds pretty trivial. Withdrawal of cover is more serious, but couldn't governments step in and provide it? They have an obvious incentive. Would just need to agree a funding scheme.
Yes maybe. I thought mainly that it was interesting that these things are lead by the insurance companies. And yes perhaps the Gulf states might do their own thing.
You might find Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi interesting. He talks about exactly that dynamic: once a few boats formed a union, with exclusive access to information about conditions down or upstream for passing union members, the underwriters refused to insure anybody not in the union; this of course meant the union got to name their price as far as dues, &c.
The tanker would still need to get in or out of the Gulf. I think you are thinking of the Suez Canal being blocked, but that's somewhere else in the Middle East.
If you close the Strait of Hormuz, there’s no sea route into the Persian gulf - you would have to transport oil and gas over land across Iraq or Saudi Arabia.
How does the capacity of that pipeline compare to the capacity of the sea route? Is it already running at full capacity or is it sitting idle and ready to be turned on to replace ships?
I was under the impression that "closing the Strait" always meant to make it too expensive to insure trade vessels. There is nothing surprising in your insight (no offense!), but maybe I'm just getting old.
More robust military measures like creating sea mine fields are more expensive, logistically challenging and temporally inflexible. This only happens in all-out war, WW2-style.
We're in "all-out war" from Iran's perspective (unlike when Yemen was pulling this trick). That said, sea mine fields are difficult to undo, and not something that can be triggered early, so... we're getting what a decapitated Iran can throw together "last minute" (bear in mind they DO have deadmen switches, just not for this aspect of their "diplomacy" and "diplomacy by other means")
A decapitation is not "all out war" in my book. Furthermore, I don't think anyone even in Iran believes that the US is trying to invade or do anymore than bomb from the air.
For all we know, maybe Iran even tried to create a mine field, but the necessary logistics and ships would be among the first strike targets.
I agree. Yet, we are getting into a disagreement about details that seems hardly necessary. Sea mines are not the kind of measure that is effective or useful in this kind of war; it won't stop the US doing what it's doing. And it is still not even near the kind of total war that WW2 was (which was my original point).
The Ukraine war is much closer to the total war of WW2, and you can see it in the measures: (Land) mine fields, and other kinds of zones of total denial, full economic commitment to the war, territory at stake, etc.
The Ukraine war is far, far worse than the "total war" of World War II. In world war II, you could simply bomb factories, and the guns would stop firing (due to lack of guns, or lack of bullets). In the Ukraine? Neither side can do anything but spill blood until the other side is no longer standing.
That’s what “closing the strait” means in the prediction contract - reduce weekly shipping volume below 20% of current levels by making it seem too risky.
Could someone please steelman the case that there’s been a significant, potentially election-changing amount of voter fraud happening in any recent US federal election? As far as I can tell, calling fraud is always Trump’s kneejerk response to losing — he even accused Ted Cruz of voter fraud when he lost the Iowa caucus in the 2016 primaries — but enough Republicans now seem to believe this that I want to know if I’m missing any actual evidence, or if this is another example of Trump’s inexplicable ability to control his base like a mindflayer.
Voter ID laws became a GOP talking point around the same time Dems convinced themselves they had a permanent demographic driven majority around 2012. So its not just a Trump thing.
If you arent worried about hard evidence the steelman is simple. Mail in ballots dwarf the margin of victory. Some aggressive mail fraud swings the election. In fact it did once. And there is hard evidence for it. NC09 2018. It was a Republican that won because of it. But the proof of concept is there.
I recall voter ID laws being a major GOP talking point even back in the 2000s. The battle lines were a bit different back then (mail-in voting was actually pro-R back then), but not as different as you imagine.
What is different is a candidate straight out refusing to accept election results and going all out to extra-legally try to overturn the election.
And NC09 2018 really shows how a) the system works for finding actual fraud and b) it looks very different from the insane Fraud of the Gaps shit that Trump is pushing.
There's also proof in "we discovered these ballots in the back seat of the Republican guy's campaign organizer, after we were done certifying, and they were allowed to be counted..."
Shove that against what happened in Georgia, Philadelphia, etc, in terms of "ballots showing up after hours, delivered by unauthorized means..."
I think the best steelman is literally: 'Most things that lots and lots of people believe are true (such as: the sky is blue, dogs are cute, etc), or at least have some grain of truth behind them. Even if you haven't personally seen evidence you find compelling or are not convinced after doing a quick review of the top Google results, the fact that hundreds of millions of people believe it is Bayesian evidence that there's at least something real behind it. You should have some intellectual humility and admit that maybe the hundred million people know something you don't.'
To be clear, I don't think that's a definitive argument. But I'm not aware of any *better* argument than that for massive voter fraud, and I have some confidence I'd know if there were a better argument out there.
I was sort of doing order-of-magnitude estimates base on stats like 'Fifty-seven percent of Americans say they are very or somewhat confident that the votes for president this year will be accurately cast and counted.'
There are lots of stats like that which hover around 60-70% of Americans 'trusting' elections, based on a variety of premises and phrasings. (1-.65)*250M=122.5M 'distrust'.
(and I mentally added some for non-Americans with an opinion, since US politics gets followed and talked about in other countries)
But maybe this is an overly generous interpretation of those stats, and OP's question would get a lower distrust rate than that given its specificity (or maybe a higher rate since it asks about *any* election rather than *all* elections or a *specific* election).
Fair to say that I perhaps should have said 'on the order of magnitude of a hundred million' or 'somewhere in the range of tens to hundreds of millions' or etc. I've found there's a limit to how many words you can spend on disclaimers in one comment before people's eyes glaze over, and in this case I don't think it changes the logic of the argument, but sure maybe this was worth specifying better.
That is, you should be able to find better counterarguments even if you disagree (there's one in the thread), so this was more like a aluminum man than a steel man
As I said, I'm not aware of a better argument in favor of the position, and no I don't think the ones other people have offered so far are better than this. (one person gave a 'technically fits the specs' answer that was good, but I don't feel it answered the larger question OP was asking)
What exactly do these people believe? And do anywhere near as many people believe this claim as the negation of this claim? (The fact that this is even a question means neither is anywhere near “sky is blue” levels or “god exists” levels.)
I think it is near the 'god exists' level, since many people disagree about that.
Like 'god exists', there are lots of questions that people disagree on. Even if a disagreement is 75/25 in the wider population, that's a lot more evidence that the 25% may be right or may have some important kernel of truth they are referencing, than if it was 99/1 or 99.99999/.00001.
An important idea here that I referenced but didn't spell out is the 'some grain of truth' part of it. It's possible for people to disagree about a specific narrow empirical crux, but both be informed by important true facts that are relevant to the question and would be helpful for the other side to learn.
Often the narrowly defined crux someone puts forward does not happen to be the actual most important question in a given area of debate, because there needs to be tons of collaborative discussion and sharing of information before everyone has enough context and has worked through enough intuitions to identify the actually important questions.
So if you want to criticize my comment, I think it would be fair to say it's more of a steelman of 'the people worried about election fraud probably have important knowledge we should respect and listen to' rather than the specific very narrow question in OPs's first sentence.
There is a very simple explanation for these beliefs.
Mitch McConnell after voting to acquit Trump after his second impeachment — February 13, 2021
“The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
“This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voter's decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”
Trump also had enablers at Fox News that repeated and validated Trump’s thunder of lies.
Fox News eventually agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over false claims that Dominion's voting machines were used to rig the 2020 presidential election
On the object level: Yes, I agree with you, that's why I said I didn't think this argument was definitive, just the best one available.
On the abstract level: Yes, most people believe that the people who disagree with them are being deceived or misled through some fairly simple and straightforward process, often a specific person or document they can point at. But reality has a surprising amount of complexity and that level of simplified explanation is rarely the full story. Lots of propaganda and lies get pushed every day, the ones that become fixed in huge populations and stick around for long periods often have more going for them than outside critics are aware of. It's worth at least taking the time to really check in with an open mind, if nothing else.
The problem with the hypothesis is it’s unfalsifiable in the same sense I can’t prove I’m not simply being dreamed by subjects suspended in liquid filled pods ala The Matrix.
All real world evidence to date has been against the election having been stolen. You offer only the large number of people who kinda believe it was against all physical evidence.
Isn’t a cult of personality a much more likely? Again unprovable in the same manner that I can’t prove I’m not a coppertop.
>All real world evidence to date has been against the election having been stolen.
Well, this is where the intellectual humility comes in.
How certain are you that you personally have seen *all* the real world evidence to date? I know for sure that I haven't.
You may have seen *a bunch* of evidence, or experts that you trust claiming that *all* the evidence is as you say. But in the modern digital age it's very possible for those things to be the result of a filter bubble, while you completely miss a lot of stuff that's real and in someone else's filter bubble.
(and, as always, ignore this if you're an actual nonpartisan professional domain expert on this specific topic, that's not who this steelman is aimed at)
Again, I believe the same thing you do. But I'm maybe less certain about my own state of knowledge, and more willing to acknowledge the outside view that doesn't do special pleading like 'My opponents are all idiots *this time* due to a cult of personality.'
We had a nice lady commenting on here, in the wake of 2016, that the election had been rigged by hacking the voting machines for Trump. Otherwise sensible and pleasant and sane, but totally convinced (and backed it up with links) that dirty deeds had been done.
And there are people out there going on about 2024 being a hacked, rigged, election, Dominion etc. are in the pocket of the GOP and so forth (ironic in light of what you say there). Musk and his Silicon Valley buddies done it!
So I'm not going to clutch my pearls over the 2020 allegations (had I pearls to clutch); this is just one of the new weapons in partisan politics of today: if the Other Lot won, it's illegitimate because of ballot stuffing/fraudulent voting/personation at the polls/illegal voters/voter suppression/hacked machines. Hashtag Not My President for *both* sides now!
while this is indeed the case for the ill-informed, there do actually exist people whom the American people hire to gather intelligence. And the 2020 election is classified (I talk to someone who doesn't see the harm in discussing FDR's non-polio paralysis. The lawsuits are well past expiration, anyhow).
Let me know when MSNBC has to pay out $787.5 million for knowingly validating Kamala Harris’s firehose of lies about the 2024 election being stolen from her.
I like this strongman argument, which is to say, I believe it the best strongman argument. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, there is a lot of people who are 100% sure the fraud happened.
Would you discount them?
I’m not sure myself.
To me, 100% belief signals irrationality, but even such a person could be basing their belief on some scanty or strong evidence.
I don't know about any evidence regarding voter fraud (so not really answering your question, sorry :)), but I do think there are some fundamental problems with mail-in ballots.
The second you're not voting in the booth, you don't have secret ballots anymore - and even if that's not being abused now, it's not hard to imagine how it could be. The US and UK moved to secret ballots for good reason after all...
Do you know of evidence that mail-in ballots have been abused in recent history? I understand the in-principle concern, but my understanding of both in-person and mail-in voting is that there are a lot more checks and safeguards than is obvious from the outside, and again, I haven't seen evidence of actual malfeasance on any significant scale. Would be curious if you know of any!
By "safeguard on mail-in voting" what are you talking about?
Like, the votes are accurately counted? Or the point of the person you replied to, that ballots are no longer forced secret. People getting together to do their mail-in ballots as a group is completely undefended against.,
The thing I'm most concerned about is coercion. What if an abusive husband forces his wife to show him her ballot, to prevent her from voting the "wrong" way? What if a non-abusive husband watches over his wife's shoulder as she fills in her ballot, certain that their political beliefs are aligned, when in fact the wife secretly despites the husband's preferred candidates?
I could google for dozens of people on dailykos telling you "I made sure grandma voted the right way" (as in families sat around the table filling out ballots, and everyone checked over each other's work) Maybe all of those are liberal grannies, but that ain't no secret ballot*. And you know a husband made sure his wife voted his way, and vice versa.
Donnie did it, rule of millions of voters. Did it swing the election? Well, there were a lot more democrats "mail in voting" than republicans...
*especially important when Trump got a lot of "shy trump voters" in 2016, because women would "socially poll" and say they'd vote for hillary, and then "noped" in the ballot booth.
**Yes, I do support trolling by ballot. It's your American Duty to vote, but you can troll if you like.
"there are a lot more checks and safeguards than is obvious from the outside"
I hope so, court decisions about "so if there's no postmark on the envelope and you receive the ballot two days after voting officially closes, it still counts" didn't reassure me:
I know the practice is that if the postmark is on or before election day the ballots can be counted, and it does seem to be something each state decides for itself. Postmarks are acceptable, it's the "even if there isn't one" that seems to leave a loophole for possible fraud.
Worse, without the election observers, there was a sizeable "flood" of ballots that came in without signatures, and in suitcases.
When you need to fake a water main leak, in order to evacuate all observers, and get caught faking the water main leak... yeah, these aren't the swiftest knives, but I also don't think this is likely to be "fair and honest" either.
... because why would you fake a water main leak otherwise??!?
I became interested in this topic after a well-publicized incident where a Chinese (non-dual citizen) national voted in the 2024 election in my hometown, and was only noticed because he admitted to being a non-citizen after voting.
A data point from my state:
Michigan recently changed voter registration laws so you're automatically registered to vote when you get a driver's license. If you're ineligible to vote (non-citizen, felon, etc) you are supposed to check an opt-out box. However, sometimes people fail to do this.
The clerk of one of MI's largest counties (Macomb) raised an issue recently where there have been a significant number of jury pool candidates who are ineligible to be on a jury due to being non-citizens. The county uses the state's driver's license records to summon jurors. The database is supposed to flag non-citizens, but this doesn't happen if they don't self-identify on the license application. So the ineligible jurors get discovered later during juror questionnaires.
The clerk concluded that non-citizens who were not flagged in the state's license database likely were also automatically registered to vote. (He doesn't have data suggesting whether or not these individuals did vote, only that there are likely numerous non-citizens in Macomb who are registered to vote.)
None of this is a smoking gun for outcome-changing voter fraud, but I do find it plausible that there are numerous non-citizens registered to vote and that this is not entirely a made up GOP issue.
I think there are definitely a lot of non-citizens registered to vote in many states, probably enough of them that it would be outcome-changing if they did all vote. I also think <<1% of them actually vote. First, most citizens don’t even vote. On top of that, the marginal cost of voting given that you know that if you somehow get found out to have voted as a non-citizen you would face jail time and maybe deportation is certainly much higher than the benefit of voting, which is at most a sense of satisfaction for having participated in the political system, outside of some coordinated campaign that would surely leak and only increase the chance of getting caught. Basically, voting for non-citizens is overwhelmingly not worth it. If there’s outcome-changing fraud, I think it would have to have another source.
Yes, absolutely. My understanding of the Republican claims is that not only are there many non-citizens voting, there is some coordinated campaign to get them all to vote blue. That's a necessary posit for outcome-changing fraud to be possible, but it also makes the existence of outcome-changing fraud much, much less likely. I can't think of any historical example of successfully keeping secret any kind of big conspiracy that involves what would really have to be hundreds of thousands of people, minimum.
The way this works is the ghetto-leader (little Mogadishu, say) comes out and says "Vote for Team Blue" (and maybe has helpers showing people how to do this). It's really not that different from church-leader anywhere else.
You don't find it vanishingly unlikely that 90+% of American-born blacks vote for Democrats, do you?
When you're talking about a relatively culturally homogeneous group that has been committed to a party for 70 years, it's not surprising that 90% of them vote the same way. But it's extremely unlikely that the same would be true of a radically heterogeneous group of people from all over the world, of many different languages and religions, many of whom haven't voted at all before, let alone for any US party!
Hence why it's ghetto by ghetto. And I made an actual mistake above by saying "vote for team blue" -- it is also sometimes "vote for team red" (see Miami).
People tend to be herdbeasts, and they tend to vote the way community leaders want them to vote (that's why they're in the community, a bunch of sticks is stronger than a single one).
The benefit of voting is keeping your alderman happy with you. Or the equivalent in Minneapolis.
You're also assuming that people know they're going to get found out, and don't feel like their community's lawyers would be able to bail them out. (See: "you can't hold an immigrant to not molesting Italians on Italian beaches" levels of chutzpah). In Minneapolis, with judges letting blatant fraud off the hook, I would definitely not be very confident that an "illegal trying to vote", if caught, would actually get criminally prosecuted (as opposed to some well-meaning old lady saying "aww, no vote for you, sorry" and not calling the cops).
I'm not trying to poke Minneapolis for being "Weird, Different, or Oop North" I'm merely referencing it as a place that does actually have an organized ghetto, with people making voting decisions as a group*.
I could just as easily have used Miami (and maybe I should have, because Miami immigrants were Republican voters last I checked).
*My city has this too. There was a widespread boycott on Christmas of the Chinese Restaurants...
If I had to steelman I'd choose 2000, because it would only require a few hundred votes.
But having argued with people who think the 2000/2004/2008/2016/2020/2024 election was stolen, people are pretty dumb. They're looking for a permission structure that will let them say "well, SOMETHING happened" without ever committing to a falsifiable claim.
I do support voter ID laws because we should always stay ahead of the game and not wait until proof of an election being stolen by lack of it. Also it doesn't change outcomes.
I have no steelman for this to give at the moment, but I think I know part of why so many do believe it: the way that election returns are counted and displayed on election night LOOKS like blatant fraud in many regions. For hours, the counts roll in and one side seems to have a clear lead, and then as counting slows, sometimes late in the night, the other side's count jumps up to just barely what's needed to win (due to late counts in urban areas, or mail ballots being added last, or whatever). There are lots of memes with red and blue lines where they show similar curves until the lower one jumps up, and the shape of these graphs is pretty well-known and seems like obvious fraud, with the explanations of why this happens structurally such that it's always Ds that come from behind sound like excuses to John and Jane Everyday from the suburbs.
What you're observing is the ability to peer inside the machine as results come in. This is what transparency looks like.
Maybe transparency was a bad idea. Dunno.
You can track every individual precinct that reports. Every single blip of that line is a discrete event. And it is knowable information to the political parties how many votes were cast at a given place, at the time polls close, before any reporting happens. ("Runners" are the term used in my region for people who retrieve these numbers at set times per day, including closing.) If you think a precinct is incorrect, you can call for it to be recounted.
The closest I can come to a steelman, and it's really more like low-grade pig iron, is:
A: Elections since ~2000 have often been close enough that it wouldn't take vast amounts of fraud to swing them, and
B: There are vulnerabilities in the current voting and voter registration system that semi-plausibly could be exploited to the necessary level, abd
C: Claims that there *haven't* been fraudulent elections are generally based on e.g. the vanishingly low rate at which people are *convicted* of voting fraud, which is weaksauce in a world where the conventional wisdom is that voting fraud is vanishingly rare and so police and prosecutors aren't going to waste their time trying to convict people of it.
But C is mostly just absence of evidence, which isn't evidence of absent. And B still requires the existence of a conspiracy larger than anyone has managed to keep secret in the modern age, or an equivalent degree of unorganized collective action.
Also worth noting is that Republican prosecutors *have* been looking for voting fraud in states like Florida and Texas, so one of the premises of C isn’t particularly true.
Looking for *Democratic* voting fraud in FL or TX, at least. One of the strongest arguments against voting fraud in Presidential elections, at least, is that you can only plausibly get away with it in states where your party controls the local government, and those are the states that were almost certainly going to give you all their electoral votes anyway.
I wouldn't put it quite that strongly, because elections are largely delegated down to a local level; there are some unwatched local governments even in relatively competitive states.
Reading this, I am reminded of Scott's decision to accept the "Russia Hoax" narrative from Trump. It was the 2010's, he had found himself with many conservative commentators. He didn't want to upset them.
I would love it if he actually did a post on it with the Senate report.
Hang on, what exactly is the claim here? This matters because there were a lot of similar-but-different claims under the banner "Russiagate", some definitely true, some definitely false, and some that will probably never be definitively resolved.
If Scott "never touched any of them", are you saying he didn't repeat the theory (this is what I remember) or are you saying that he didn't *rebuke* the theory?
What does """Scott's decision to accept the "Russia Hoax" narrative from Trump""" mean, then? Are you asserting that absence of comment on topic X means taking some positive position?
This seems like a reasonable decision TBH. The EV of touching a political hot button like that is mostly negative unless you have some special advantage and I don't know that Scott does.
(On e.g. crime issues he's done a lot of public stats deep dives so it makes more sense for him, but the Russia stuff doesn't seem to be a special point of Scott focus)
SAVE Act note: the Polymarket and Kalshi market are both for H.R. 22, the SAVE Act, the first version of the bill that was introduced last year. The bill currently moving around Congress is the conceptually similar H.R. 7296, the SAVE America Act. The trading price reflects people who don't know how to read.
Presumably this means the SAVE America Act is more likely to pass than the market odds reflect, because the price is being held down artificially by traders who do know how to read.
35 years from now (sans singularity): why do we have this weird funding mechanism where degenerate gambling addiction is the cornerstone that funds our entire futarchy apparatus
Vitalik : "IMO there is nothing fundamentally morally wrong with taking money from people with dumb opinions"
The "people with dumb opinions" framing feels like a deliberate evasion. A lot of the "Naive traders" are actually gambling addicts. I think Vitalik (or, failing that, you) should be more honest about the fact that 'it's okay to take money from people with dumb opinions' is partly a euphemism for 'it's okay to exploit gambling addicts'.
The devil's advocate: since there's no realistic way to prevent addicts from being exploited by anybody, the lesser evil is that their exploitation at least has some public good externalities.
Well, given that it is in fact easy and common, despite pretty much nobody seriously endorsing it as a good thing, getting rid of it doesn't seem realistic.
I remember the time before governments got into the lottery business - folks back then broke the law playing the numbers game run by organized crime. It's not clear to me if what we have now is better or worse.
This only applies if you think that "addictive personality" isn't a thing, and that a person addicted to gambling isn't going to just go and get addicted to something worse for them (like social media).
No, just like with guns and pills, there are more and less effective ways of doing things, and *even if* you assumed that *every* person who used to do the more effective thing switches to the less effective replacement, the net outcome would be different.
But more importantly, addictions aren't usually exclusive - giving people extra opportunities to get hooked on gambling doesn't usually save them from the other addictions, so you can't make a harm reduction argument that says that eliminating gambling will make a perfectly equal and opposite increase in their other addictions.
You haven't looked at the research, I take it? Gen Z is, on average, losing IQ points the more schooling they go through. I talk to people at work (legitimate, intelligent people) that "can't spend the time" to watch a 30 minute anime -- and they used to be able to! They aren't getting enough dopamine from it, and it shows.
Among gambling addicts seeking treatment, about 15-30% have attempted suicide in the last year and 20% have filed for bankruptcy, with average debts $40-50k. This is an extremely serious problem, and it is utterly ridiculous to compare it to your coworkers not wanting to watch your favorite anime.
The manifold market for "will the 2026 midterms be considered free and fair" and the market for invocation of the insurrection act both moved by a lot as soon as the post was written. The insurrection act market went from 24 forecasters to 39 in the 2 hours since this post went up! This is especially interesting because both of those markets had comments about how the result seemed surprising.
Punxsutawney Phil himself isn't really magical, though, is he? his shadow needs to be seen (or not seen) so really, if anything, it would be the clouds that are magical, while Phil would be something more like a mystical weather vane. although, i suppose there's nothing that says Phil isn't conjuring cloudcover when appropriate to indicate his clairvoyant choice
If the prediction isn't based on "he casts a shadow" but "he sees his shadow", how certain are we about his track record? Maybe he gets it right every time and we've just been interpreting it wrong. Clearly we need to set up eye-tracking equipment on the rodent.
No, it's fine, he tells the president of the Inner Circle whether he's seen it (in Groundhogese, which can only be understood by the president due to his possession of an ancient acacia wood cane).
I can’t read Bloomberg articles, but it makes sense that someone might have been running a market about whether Khamenei would get ousted, and wouldn’t have thought to include a clause about him getting assassinated. Obviously, a year ago, you would think that an 85 year old dying doesn’t count as him being ousted.
You don't need Bloomberg, it's a free email newsletter. Here's the relevant part:
Death predictions
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, has a rule, Rule 40.11, that prohibits those markets from listing any contract “that involves, relates to, or references terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.” I don’t know how seriously the CFTC or the prediction markets take that rule. Certainly until about a year ago, everyone understood that rule to prohibit prediction markets from offering sports betting (“gaming”); now the prediction markets are mostly venues for sports betting, and the CFTC has explicitly endorsed this. So I am tempted to assume that, if Kalshi started offering war or assassination markets, the CFTC would be like “sure that’s cool whatever.”
But for now the rule is on the books, and Kalshi has real lawyers, so it does not explicitly offer assassination contracts. This can get awkward. For instance, Kalshi offered a series of contracts on “Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader” of Iran, which would pay out $1 if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “leaves office” as of the contract expiry date, or $0 if he was still in office. Total volume is in the tens of millions of dollars. As of Friday, the April 1 expiry was trading at about 26 cents on the dollar, implying about a 26% probability that Khamenei would be out by the end of March.
If you were betting Yes on that contract on Friday, what mechanism did you have in mind? Perhaps you thought that Iran might call snap elections and Khamenei would lose the Supreme Leader race to a fresh young candidate. Or perhaps you thought that, at 86 years old, he might decide to retire. But surely, on Friday, the most likely way that Khamenei would leave office in the next month was “bombs.” And in fact, the best available reporting is that Khamenei did in fact leave office this weekend due to bombs.
But bombs don’t count. From the current description of the Kalshi “world leader out” contract rules:
If <leader> leaves solely because they have died, the associated market will resolve and the Exchange will determine the payouts to the holders of long and short positions based upon the last traded price (prior to the death). If a last traded price is not available or is not logically consistent, or if the Exchange determines at its sole discretion that the last traded prices prior to death do not represent a fair settlement value, the Outcome Review Committee will be responsible for making a binding determination of fair allocation.
That is: “Ali Khamenei out” might seem like a wink-wink way to bet on “Ali Khamenei dies,” but it is not, because if he dies then you don’t get paid. I suppose it still could be a wink-wink way to bet on war: If your expected mechanism was “US invades Iran, captures Ali Khamenei and installs a new government,” that is a war bet, but it would pay out. “Nicolás Maduro out,” notably, did pay off in January. But it is not a great way to bet on an air war.
But you don’t get zeroed either; if Khamenei leaves office due to bombs, the resolution is neither “he left office” nor “he didn’t.” Instead, the contract resolves to “the last traded price (prior to the death).” That creates interesting market dynamics. For instance, if on Friday you knew that, with 100% certainty, Khamenei would either last the month or get killed, then arguably the price of the “Ali Khamenei out” contract should go down: The price was floored at zero (if he stays) and capped at the last trading price, so until he actually “left office” the expected value of the contract was a bit less than the last trade. On the other hand, you can influence “the last traded price” by trading; buying a lot of contracts to push up the last-trade-before-settlement price could be a good strategy. And of course “last traded price (prior to the death)” is itself a somewhat fuzzy concept: The contracts traded continuously, and it’s not like Kalshi’s Outcome Review Committee was there in the bunker to time the moment of death.
In any case, the contract traded up to about 66% by Saturday at noon (presumably because people expected to get 100 cents on the dollar?), and then plunged to the low 40s (when they realized they wouldn’t?). The Wall Street Journal reports:
As news of the strikes unfolded early Saturday in the U.S., it became clear that Khamenei was a target, but his fate wasn’t known. Then, at 4:37 p.m. Eastern Time, Trump declared on Truth Social that Khamenei was dead.
A different kind of chaos ensued online, with users unclear on when, or if, they would receive payouts. Kalshi had posted midday Saturday on X that if Khamenei died, “the market will resolve based on the last traded price prior to confirmed reporting of death.” A couple of hours after Trump’s Truth Social post, Kalshi wrote that if the last-traded price were “unclear,” its committee for reviewing outcomes would determine a “fair value.” …
Users flooded the comment section of Kalshi’s site for the Khamenei market with complaints, demanding that it resolve the market to a “yes” after Trump declared on Truth Social that Khamenei was dead.
“I bet his ass was going to be dead before March a week or two ago,” one user commented. “I want my f*cking money.”
At 8:49 p.m. ET, Kalshi’s Mansour posted on X that the company is refunding users all fees collected from the Khamenei market and will make payments based on the last-traded price before Khamenei’s death. On Sunday morning, Mansour stated that users who placed bets after Khamenei’s death will be refunded the difference between the price at which they bought the contract and the last-traded price before Khamenei’s death. The reimbursements cost Kalshi $2.2 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.
One possible interpretation here is “you were trying to bet on war and assassination, which is not allowed, so you don’t get to complain that you didn’t get paid.” If you think that you are getting a wink-wink bet on a prohibited subject, most of what you are getting is not the clean bet you wanted (Khamenei “out”) but rather a fuzzy and unpredictable bet on legality and resolution mechanisms. Another possible interpretation is that most of Kalshi’s customers don’t know about Rule 40.11, or didn’t until Saturday, and just figured betting on death was the whole and legitimate point of this market. Everyone’s intuitions about prediction markets are still developing.
Polymarket, meanwhile, has a bifurcated structure with US and technically-non-US markets, so it has no problem listing quite explicit war contracts, and its “Khamenei out as Supreme Leader of Iran by March 31” contract traded to 99.9%. Straightforward.
Elsewhere: “Why betting on top online prediction markets is now illegal in New Zealand.” (Beause it’s gambling.)
Oh that’s interesting! And this doesn’t even get into the issue of whether Trump’s Truth Social post counts as “confirmed media report of death”, when most media sites were reporting “Trump claims Khamenei is dead” for several hours before there was confirmation from Iran.
"If you were betting Yes on that contract on Friday, what mechanism did you have in mind?"
On Friday, yes. But I'd expect a lot of people bought in earlier (and stayed in just by default) with the expected mechanism being something like "Ali Khamenei sees the Righteous Indignation of the Iranian People playing out in the streets and flees the country". I don't think that would have been a very good bet, but it does sometimes happen (see e.g. Viktor Yanukovych) and there's always a crop of optimistic fools willing to bet on it happening again.
Again, I'm not seeing the problem with betting on sport on prediction markets. In sport there is often better data, more regular events, and it's a great way of testing how your emotions and loyalties skew your sense of reality.
The problem is that most of the trading volume isn't from people using the markets as a calibration exercise, but from people who have a gambling problem.
So maybe there shouldn't be online sports betting full stop. Given there is, I'd like to think a fairly ethical prediction market (e.g Manifold with real money) could nudge people towards approaching their bets more rationally.
The problem is that, if a company makes its money from problem gamblers, its incentive is not to do that, but rather to do the opposite.
The reason sports-betting prediction markets are worse than regular online sportsbooks is that states can regulate regular online sportsbooks, whereas Kalshi and (part of) Polymarket assert that they are commodities exchanges under CFTC jurisdiction, which means federal law specifically prohibits states from regulating them.
Level the playing field on regulation by all means, but don't for-profit companies always have an incentive to appeal to base instincts? Alcohol sales have been declining in the UK for a while but people are spending more money on premium drinks - less booze overall but better booze. Why not less gambling but better gambling?
You get that with alcohol by taxing it per milliliter of ethanol. Taxing gambling doesn’t always have the same effect of leading people to focus on quality, because the ones focused on quality for gambling are the ones that are *most* price sensitive, rather than least.
My main argument for it is that it displaces sports betting sites that usually ban you if you win too much, which seems like a net improvement in fairness at least.
Relevant to the Iran forecasting is that there was probably significant insider trading on the attacks, which seems pretty bad? Also note the Israeli case on targets which is similarly bad.
I wouldn't take these reports too serious before a proper investigation is done. Standard news sites had sounded alarm at least a day before the attack. And it was not just news sites. The German department of foreign affairs had warned half a day *before the attack* that Germans should no longer travel to Israel, and simultaneously the US department had advised all their employees to leave the country *on this very day*.
Such warnings are not anywhere near normal. Whatever the exact nature of the leaked information was, several countries knew (half) a day in advance that something big was about to happen, and had warned the public about it.
So, when the united states warns its citizens in Russia about the dangers of going to large public gatherings, and then we get an ISIS bombing, you think America had knowledge of the internal workings of ISIS? Bear in mind Russia did not say anything about "going to large public gatherings"...
Insider trading is a feature for prediction markets, not a big. The whole point is for the market to be as accurate at predicting what will happen as possible.
I mean, you could have the opinion that operational security shouldn't exist and there should be no such thing as private information anywhere in the world, I guess.
But as long as you acknowledge that there's such a thing as 'information the public shouldn't have right at this second,' then universal monetary incentives for people to leak that information has anti-social results.
It sounds like you have a problem with prediction markets in general then. Their whole point is to predict the future accurately. If you think it’s bad when someone makes the market more accurate, then your problem is with the market existing.
Response one, yes, that's what I'm talking about, and also what I believe the person you were responding to was talking about. Given that that's the topic of conversation, do you have anything to say on the matter?
Response two, that's true of completely naive prediction markets that take zero precautions to be pro-social. Since most advocates for prediction markets favor them for pro-social reasons, I don't think it's unreasonable to bring up anti-social problems with naive markets and discuss how we might restructure the markets to avoid those problems.
What we are talking about is insider trading on prediction markets, not whether prediction markets on confidential topics are bad. At least, that's what the OP and I were talking about.
If you have a problem with "information the public shouldn't have right this second" being revealed by prediction markets, then you should be opposed to having prediction markets about that information, not to insider traders making the prediction market more accurate. The alternative is to think that prediction markets should exist, but should be inaccurate, which belies the whole purpose of having a prediction market in the first place.
I just want to be clear here: you think countries' militaries making their targets public ahead of time would be a good thing because it improves our knowledge of the world and ability to predict it?
This is true if people with insider information naively enter the market when they gain the information allowing that information to propagate. It is not true if they hold on until right before the information would become public and the market shifts/resolves.
The social returns to better information is different over various timelines. An accurate forecast of war with iran over the next year is useful to a large variety of planners and insiders betting based on strategic views (our dept did this in depth confidential analysis sort of thing, or my boss seems to be really keen on war) is also good for those planners.
The price becoming more accurate 6 hours before it starts doesnt seem to benefit as many ppl. The biggest beneficiary is probably the target, which seems like something the insiders org would really hate.
Alternatively if the insider is actually the target manning the early warning system, a) that would be very funny b) maybe not great for the insiders org also.
Bottom line insider trading is a feature not a bug is probably too broad a statement
As someone who works in software development, I'd really quite badly like to buy some kind of insurance against the possible future where AI renders my work experience worthless, but we don't get either a Yudkowskyan apocalypse or a post-scarcity paradise, and I end up flipping burgers or something for the rest of my life. I've thought about buying tons of stocks in a diverse portfolio of AI-adjacent companies like Google and Nvidia, but that seems a bit risky- if the main beneficiaries of AI end up being unexpected new companies, I could end up both flipping burgers and not having much savings.
Also, I actually tried something similar in mid 2020 by buying lots of the LRNZ ETF in the expectation that AI was about to become a huge deal- but despite the ETF including Nvidia, that investment has actually performed pretty badly. And since I don't actually understand why it was the case that Google and Nvidia stock shot through the roof in the period, but this supposedly carefully curated diverse portfolio of AI-related companies earned me almost nothing, I'm very hesitant to try again.
So, I'm wondering: do people here think this MNX market might offer a better alternative?
LRNZ is specifically set up to lower correlation with the wider market index. Nvidia and Google basically ARE the market at this point.
If you want exposure to big AI-adjacent tech stocks but also want other companies for a hedge it would be better to just buy the market index than it would to be a selection of anti-market-correlated AI stocks.
If you want a different sort of hedge it might be better to invest in things that would benefit from mass AI adoption but are unlikely to be disrupted out of business by it.
Do you mean that the software dev field is to big that it can't be insured, or that if software dev gets eaten, by necessity so many other things will also be eaten that it can't be insured?
If we're talking about the loss of 40% or more of white collar jobs, the remedy is more likely to be windfall taxes on the AI companies that have captured all the surplus and distributed into wage subsidies into everything else that's left.
Same here. For over a decade I've been saying to myself "if AI fully automates software job loss doesn't matter because we're on the eve of the singularity anyways" but that seems quite plausibly wrong to me now. The middle path where software seems to be the most automatable of white collar work, but that is likely to plateau and not result in the intelligence explosion (a thesis which seemed impossible but with the benefit of hindsight seems much more reasonable)
Continuing to invest in broad market index funds seems like the most sane and stable hedge for the future though. Everything else has too much tail and X-risk
> Claude went from #120 on the App Store in January, to #1 this weekend, apparently driven by people who heard about the Pentagon standoff and were impressed by their principled stance.
This also has a lot to do with people seeking an alternative to OpenAI and ChatGPT. The implication that they will assist the government with mass surveillance was all over the front page of reddit yesterday. Seems like a huge own goal on Altmans part.
> All of these restrictions select for high-information, high-motivation voters - people who hear about the new rules and get fired up enough to hunt down their birth certificate, march down to the DMV, wait on line for one million hours, and re-register. Due to their education advantage and the structural features of midterms, that probably favors Democrats. Democrats are more likely to own passports (one of the easiest forms of valid ID), and less likely to trigger increased scrutiny by having changed their name recently (because liberal women are less likely to marry and take their husband’s surname). First-order, a blue wave like this is good for the left.
I think this is off. A point I've made a couple of times around the internet, including here, is that people talk as if the parties have fixed political positions and a change in voter demographics will favor the party with positions favored by expanding demographics, but reality is the opposite of this. Demographics have fixed political positions and flexible party affiliation; parties have fixed party affiliation and flexible political positions. As a demographic expands, all parties will move towards its favored political positions; as a demographic shrinks, all parties will move away from its favored positions.
I was heartened to see Matt Yglesias recently make exactly the same point in response to a question about the concept of the "emerging democratic majority": the thesis that a massive expansion in what had been a reliably Democratic demographic would result in more election victories for the Democrats was nonsense, and didn't happen, but the thesis that a massive expansion in that demographic would result in 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗵 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 shifting their political positions in directions favored by that demographic was not nonsense, and it did happen.
The same applies here. If we put a bunch of onerous restrictions on voting and only high-information voters bother, both parties will shift in directions preferred by high-information voters. This is not obviously good for the left.
I'm not sure that I can fully endorse that. I would be more inclined to say that "that kind of thing" has effects which develop over the course of many election cycles. But I would also say that those effects begin right away; this year, the slate of 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 Democrats won their elections would be affected, that shift in personnel would affect which Democratic positions received attention, etc.
The actual effect of voting laws appear to be nothing (any Dems too impoverished/marginalized to manage appear to be balanced by elderly Republicans disqualified). But they provide a layer of annoyance so it SEEMS like they're doing something, much like the security theater at the airport. Most people don't fly much, so even while frequent-flyers hate it, voters (who don't vote frequently, just as they don't fly often) are content for it to continue.
> The same applies here. If we put a bunch of onerous restrictions on voting and only high-information voters bother, both parties will shift in directions preferred by high-information voters. This is not obviously good for the left.
I just voted in Republican primaries here in TX, if they enact (something like) the SAVE Act and make it very difficult for married women who changed their last name (a lean R demographic) to vote in elections, there is no time for them to adjust their political positions to account for the shift in voter demographics. (And it is, of course, possible that many Texan Republicans believe the shift would be in their favor, due to huffing Trump's lies, so they would move away from the more-liberal voter base they selected for.)
Right, it's good for non-populist Democrats and Republicans. This is why many moderate Republicans support the SAVE Act, it isn't because they believe in the voter fraud stuff.
Betting against regime change in Iran seems like easy money. What even is the mechanism by which that would happen? It's hard to imagine the US deploying significant ground troops in Iran, let alone them succeeding. But an air campaign alone seems likely to just reinforce the regime's grip.
Yes, that's what history has shown over and over again since "strategic bombing" has been invented. But hey, it just might work this time. One more bomb will fix it.
It is sufficient to coerce regimes to do certain things (in that case, cease occupying Kosovo), it is not sufficient to remove them. The NATO bombing ended in Jun 1999, and he was overthrown in Oct 2000.
The NATO bombings supported rebel troops who were the ones who captured and killed Gaddafi. The bombings probably accelerated, maybe even enabled the fall, but didn't cause it.
"Aided by NATO air cover, the rebel militia pushed westward, defeating loyalist armies and securing control of the centre of the country."
Libya, like Syria, had a significant armed rebellion before western intervention, which the bombing assisted with.
Air power helps conventional forces (often, like, a lot), but in war, the very last thing a state will give up is its own existence, and by history it appears the level of bombing (without accompanying land forces) necessary to force such a thing is beyond our capabilities.
The closest historical equivalent is Japan, but we'd already fought on the ground in Okinawa and we would have invaded if they hadn't surrendered, and the Soviets finally stopped pretending to respect their non-aggression pact, so realistically the Japanese were reacting to both the bombings and the inevitability of an invasion; hard to say what they would have done if a landing was somehow off the table.
That's funny, I was just thinking that betting for regime change in Iran seems like easy money. What is the mechanism that would stop it from happening? Trump deciding to quit before the job is done? Seems very unlikely.
> What is the mechanism that would stop it from happening?
Historically, the people being bombed rally against the enemies bombing them, and around the current leadership.
The popular sentiment generally turns pro-government-as-it-was and pro-patriotic, because it's what the enemies bombing you don't want. So even if you keep decapitating the leadership, the same types of leaders, with similar motivations and messages, will keep surfacing.
Yes, but if there is any reliable news coming out of Iran since last week end, it's that this historic pattern do not hold here. There may be a partial rally around the flag. No rally around the government or current state.
Nixon bombed the crap out of Hanoi in 1972, then quit before the job was done. Reagan bombed the crap out of Libya in 1986, then quit before the job was done. Bush the Elder bombed the crap out of Iraq in 1992, then sent in the army for a few days, then left with the job half-done and the regime still in power. Clinton bombed the crap out of Iraq again, in 1998, and left the job half-done. Bush the Younger didn't quit, and instead got the nation into two bloody useless quagmires from which his successors would quit before the job was done. Obama bombed the crap out of Libya in 2011, then quit with the job half-done (regime gone, but conspicuous gap where the better successor regime was supposed to go).
Bombing the crap out of foreign countries and then quitting before the job is done is pretty much SOP for US Presidents of the past few generations. The only alternative seems to be bloody useless quagmires, so best to just declare victory, predict the imminent downfall and/or reform of the enemy regime, and go home.
And Donald Trump is *more* fickle than other recent Presidents, not less. Whatever he cares about today, is the most important thing in the world today but will be forgotten in two months because he's moved on to the next thing - usually because the last thing didn't turn out to be the easy unambiguous win he was hoping for.
The interesting prediction market would be "What will be Trump's next Most Important Thing In The World", but I wouldn't want to try and write the resolution criteria for that one.
The CIA takes over another country? Mossad takes over Iran? Both of these are significantly more likely to work in the short term, as they require "pre-existing agents" to achieve political power. (Assume they're on the short-list at any rate, because Israel did decapitate the regime).
1. People here are far too sceptical of prediction markets. Consultants I've spoken to assume that those putting down stakes are uninformed. These critics are losing one of the most useful information sources.
2. It's remains remarkable to me that people can vote without ID in the US. Agree it would be difficult to instate within six months, but this surely needs to be introduced soon.
How did this practically work without IDs? Was there a lists of voters for each district, and you walk in, tell them your name and they tick it off the list? And they just trusted you to give them the correct name? Or were you supposed to provide some other evidence like bills or different IDs (driving license, company ID card)?
And the list of voters was based on the list of residents?
Yeah. You got a letter sent to your home a couple of weeks before the election to tell you who in your household was on the voter registry, when and where to vote, and what to do if you weren't on the registry for whatever reason.
Then you'd go to the voting booth on the allotted day (with no evidence necessary), and tell them your name and address, which they'd find on the local electoral register list, and they'd cross your name off, and give you a ballot paper.
Realistically, no-one ever bothers impersonating people because it's a non-negligible risk of severe punishment for a miniscule benefit.
Is the risk of severe punishment non-negligible because if the clerk notices your "name" is already crossed off, they'll call the cops? Does that actually ever happen in practice? If not, I don't see what the risk of punishment is.
A rural polling station can cover well under 1000 people. The polling station volunteer might be a 68 year old ex-teacher in the area who knows 60+% of the population by appearance.
If an impersonator comes in saying: "I'm Jim Styles at 51 Bancroft Avenue", the volunteer at the polling station will say: "No you're not" and he's obliged to call the police.
Fully agree - I don't really see there being an argument for not tightening the system. Sure, some groups may have less access to IDs but I'm sure that could be overcome, and the strengthening of the system is a worthy trade-off imo.
France does have the advantage of systematically issuing national IDs. But even Australia, which does not, requires every voter to have a registered address, and their vote is specifically linked to that address.
America's system, or that of some States, appears to be a third world level of governance.
The argument is that the people who would do the tightening are transparently acting in bad faith and have nothing but contempt for the law, constitution, norms and human decency. Do you really trust the people who murdered Alex Pretti and then covered it up to decide whether you get to vote or not?
If Trump says we should not nuke China and start WWIII, are you going to be for nuking China and starting WWIII? That does not seem like a logical position to me. Also, Republicans have been supporting voter ID laws for decades, and Bush definitely didn't murder Alex Pretti. And finally, do you think the Australians, British, and French all have nothing but contempt for the law, constitution, norms, and human decency?
You seem to have missed the thread here. As a reminder, the topic of discussion is "Why shouldn't the US implement voter ID like many other countries did?"
As should be clear from context, I have nothing against the Australians, British, and French in this respect.
In the US, voting works the same way financial transactions do. You have to sign that you are the person who is authorized to cast this vote or who owns the account, but no one checks your ID for either kind of transaction.
Polymarket is is full of shitlords (which is why is also has a lot of "dumb muney"). Manifold has a much more polite commentariat, albeit one that moves much slower.
By all reasonable definitions there was no US ground operation in Mexico in January. Yet after 2 disputes the market went to a vote and since "yes" had more money in it than "no" it won the vote. The system is set up so the truth is supposed to act as a natural Schelling point but in cases like this it obviously fails.
Two of the linked markets have decreased their probability of crisis at the time of this comment
- Metaculus "Will the Insurrection Act or a state of martial law be declared in relation to the 2026 U.S. midterms?" is down 12 p.p. to 8%: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/41563/
It’s not really accurate to say that crypto or prediction markets have invented some new financial technology for hedging; it’s always been possible for 2 people to bet on the price of nickel without either of them owning any nickel in a warehouse but sophisticated commodities market participants prefer the latter option because it reduces counterparty risk and is better for actually hedging your exposure to nickel prices
> ... respond with a series of extreme measures. These would include banning voting machines...
All the way back in the 2004 election many Democrats (on the internet) were claiming that voting machines were bad. I remember some conspiracy about Republican Diebold executives rigging the election in favor of Bush.
Maybe banning voting machines could be considered "extreme", but is it a bad idea?
I think banning machines would be bad but not catastrophic. We're talking 100-150 million ballots, most of which have quite a few races in an even year election, splintered into a very messy decentralized system. And hand counts are less accurate than scantrons so they usually rely on multiple separate passes and checking different tallies of the same ballots against each other. And then you need a much bigger and more elaborate chain-of-custody/transparency/observors infrastructure as the ballots are passed between more people in more places.
But other countries hand count national ballots (including the UK and Canada) so it's doable - notably those are just the national ballots so very simple (Labor/Tory/LibDem/Greens/etc for MP) rather than combined federal/state/local senator/governor/dogcatcher - we would probably want to switch to separate simple federal-only ballots if we were intent on doing this.
It seems dumb and bad and I don't know what the benefit is, although totally doable if we're willing to wait longer for results and pay more for temporary poll workers. And I don't actually think it would increase trust.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, but the rumors I've heard (I have no expertise) are that we've gotten so dependent on them that we would have trouble organizing the election to run smoothly by election day if they were banned now.
Just to clarify: there are two kinds of voting machines. There’s purely electronic without a paper trail, which is bad, and there’s scantron and similar, which seems fine to me. Would be nice to know which kind is under discussion. I thought the purely electronic ones are hardly used anywhere these days?
The problem was specifically with electronic voting machines that had no paper trail. My understanding is that those were largely phased out, specifically because of the hacking risk.
You enter your voting preferences into this machine. This machine outputs a piece of human-readable paper that is regularized. This piece of paper is the actual record of the ballot. This paper is then inserted into a second machine. This machine keeps a count of the ballots and can instantly tell you the sum of all votes in it at the close of voting.
Note that it's very hard to "hack" any machine here. If you change the BMD so that it changes some portion of votes, the voter can see this when they look over the piece of paper. If someone changes the machine that counts the ballots, it's trivial to open it up and count the ballots inside. This is regularly done with a random sample of machines anyway, and (depending on state rules) each party gets their own choice of what machines to open up, too, no evidence or money needed for them to be checked.
People arguing "we should just use paper" don't realize that we already are using paper.
This also obscures the critique of the 2020 election, which is "false and fake ballots" being added to the totals. (that's not the only critique, true, but...) -- aka ballots without signatures, postmarks, etc. Just naked ballots getting delivered, even.
It's not that the Diebold voting machines were "bad" in some moral sense; rather it's that they were hopelessly insecure. Anyone could use them to rig the election in favor of anybody. Granted, I suppose this makes the voting machines the ultimate expressions of democracy, but still...
What kinds of voting machines? Machines that simply tabulate paper ballots? Or machines that leave no paper trail? The latter are problematic, if they actually exist. The former are not. If there are concerns re hacking the tabulation, then the solution is to require a hand count of a random sample of ballots, triggering a full hand recount if a discrepancy appears.
They [oracle with no paper trail] actually exist, though I don't know if they are still used anywhere. Random additional memories about the main suppliers: one manufacturer claimed it wasn't possible to produce a paper trail (though they could and did with their ATMs), their head of security had been convicted of election fraud, they insisted the machines were secure but refused to allow audits because of secrecy, when someone did get hold of a machine (via ebay?) it was trivial to compromise, there were phone records showing unauthorized and unexplained access from the corporation to specific machines with suspicious results ... The Xkcd comic was a reasonable summary for the time.
As a Polish and European person, I find the notion of not requiring an ID to vote to be some sort of confused joke. Can someone explain to me why the US and like 4 other countries are uniquely not in position to expect voters to document their rights as a citizen?
I think this is downstream of the paranoid / anti-authoritarian / pro-freedom tendencies in the US consistently blocking efforts to create a unified national ID card. Even drivers licenses are handed out at the state level, and don't work for this purpose (non-drivers don't have them, and noncitizen residents and sometimes even illegal immigrants can get them). This means that any voter ID law would have to rely on things like passports that some voters don't have (eg those who never went to a foreign country). In theory you could use birth certificates, but a lot of people have lost their birth certificates, or are nervous about taking it anywhere because it's a flimsy piece of paper which is their only valid ID and they would be in huge trouble if they lost it.
I'm all for anti-government paranoia, it's a healthy state of being.
But I thought you guys have non-driver state IDs that anyone can get, that are standardised on a federal level, and which serve the purpose of a photo ID? At least this is what I got when I tried to find out how people without drivers' licences and passports get by in life. You have to document yourself somehow, no?
And if this is not incorrect, why raise a "national ID" issue at all?
I think you're thinking of "REAL ID". The government has spent five years trying to convince everyone to get a REAL ID and threatening consequences (usually that you won't be able to fly on planes) if you don't have one. But the process for getting one is annoying (you have to wait in line at a government office), most people don't want to do it, and the government keeps realizing that if they ever enforced their threats then thousands of people would be turned away from airplane flights that they expected to be able to go on and it would be a disaster. So thus far the attempts to make people get REAL IDs have been toothless and lots of people don't have them.
The answer to how people without drivers licenses and passports get by in life is a combination of "they use their birth certificate", "they apply for a REAL ID", and "they end up as second class citizens who have to avoid all the things that make you show ID".
Right. I guess if the government wanted that ID to be more popular, maybe getting the logistics down so a citizen could get one with ease and convenience should have been more of a priority.
He is NOT thinking of real id. We do absolutely have state-issued IDs. (they aren't very well standardized, I assume, but they are usable in other states, to prove that "yes, you are a New Yorker" -- or that you can drink alcohol, or other things like that).
By the way it's worth pointing out that, despite what you said in the article, a typical REAL ID would NOT be sufficient. The text of the clause is
"A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States".
The trick here, either from careless phrasing or deliberate confusion, is that in 45 states, the REAL ID does NOT prove you are a citizen; it just proves you're here legally. This is a case where the legendary difference between "that" and "which" matters. It's (ellipses omitted for clarity) "a REAL ID that indicates the applicant is a citizen", not "a REAL ID, which indicates the applicant is a citizen". (The states that issue "CDL"s, as they're called, are Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington.)
(And also, this is all to be required for _registration_; I don't see a statement that everybody current registered is to be deregistered and apply under the new rules. Could a state decide to do that? I sure don't know.)
In general, when a state passes legislation to require an ID to vote it also allows for poor people to obtain them for $0 so as to avoid Twenty-Fourth Amendment challenges
It costs between 66 and $75 to get a drivers license in New York and you can get a real ID one for no extra charge. So really now we’re talking about people who might not even have a drivers license.
As I said below, I think we are dealing with a distinction between who already has a drivers license and who does not. I was just looking into it a bit and apparently over 50% of the residents of New York City do not have a drivers license for one reason or another. It occurs to me that if the fee to get a drivers license and also the necessity for one (i.e. passing a drivers test because you really need to drive.)
The statistics for the entire state are closer to 75% of residents of driving age has a drivers license. But that’s New York State. New York City really drags down the state average. Lots of people don’t need to drive in New York City.
91% of American residents of driving age have a drivers license.
I am sure this % varies widely from district to district and almost certainly by economic status. Perhaps the cynical view would be to say real ID is solving precisely the problem that it’s intended to solve, which is disenfranchising poor people and people who don’t have a car. On the other hand, I could take the view that it’s a good faith attempt to solve a problem. I am torn.
My understanding is that Republicans typically word their proposed voter ID laws so these wouldn't count, on the theory that people who don't drive are disproportionately Democrats. Same logic goes for student IDs, etc.
Not sure about other states, but in mine anyone can go to the DMV and get a "real ID" that does not include the driving license. Looks just like a driver's license, but is prominently marked "does not entitle the holder to drive" or something such. You can get them for children. It is a nusiance, but just the normal nusiance of the DMV.
"Voter ID" and "Proof of Citizenship" are not necessarily the same thing. "Voter ID" can and I think usually does just mean that the guy showing up at the polling station saying "I'm John Smith of 1234 Evergreen Terrace" is in fact the John Smith of 1234 Evergreen Terrace that they have listed on the voter rolls. That can be done with an ordinary driver's license or non-driver's state ID card.
Proof of citizenship has to be handled at the voter registration level, without regard to what documents the voter may or may not have available on election day because sometimes John Smith isn't going to be coming to the polls, he's going to be out of state and voting with the absentee ballot you mailed to the occupants of 1234 Evergreen Terrace.
I would expect a competently-run government to know pretty reliably who their citizens are for voter-registration purposes without requiring them to show up with documents (that the government probably issued them in the first place; did they throw away the records?). There might be edge cases where they might reach out to ask, but I don't think it's either necessary or likely for anyone to require every would-be voter to show up at the courthouse or post office in advance and with their passport.
Essentially we don't automatically hand out IDs to voters that will let them vote. You register to vote at 18, and every state handles it a bit differently. But registering doesnt give you a driver's license or a passport or a Real ID. The real problem with voter ID laws is not that they're inherently bad, it's that they're always pushed by Republicans who have no plan to simultaneously run down all registered voters and give them national voting cards or whatever. That plus voting fraud is so vanishingly rare, as an example Pennsylvania has had 39 cases of voting fraud in the last 30 years; thats 39 ballots out of over 100 million cast. So voter ID laws are likely to disenfranchise a lot of people, unlikely to make elections any safer, and if you want to make it happen in a vaguely effective way it would cost a lot of time and money.
Pennsylvania has had an election reversed within my lifetime. The guy what did that criticized the federal guy in charge of "election policy" for "never investigating anything."
Ohio's had more cases of voting fraud, simply because they make it a crime to vote for Obama in the Democratic primary if you're registered Republican (you may have had to admit it on the forms for it to be prosecutable...)
What election was that? I can't find anything about PA reversing an election, just changing policies about mail in votes. But as best as I can tell nobody has ever found wide spread voting fraud, especially outside of local elections. Even the Heritage Foundation, who are extremely pro-voter ID laws, have found fewer than 1,500 cases of voter fraud countrywide in the last 45 years.
There's been widespread voting fraud in Ohio (referenced Republicans voting in Democratic Primary), whether or not this was people intentionally trying to break the law (they may not have understood it).
There's been other cases where Democratic operatives have cheerfully described under oath how they stuffed ballot boxes.
There have been ballots "discovered" in the trunk of campaign staff before, and they've been allowed to be counted, even though the election was already certified. This is very bad form.
So your evidence is a single election in 1993 where the losing party (rightfully) and immediately sued and won? And then another election where ballots were left unattended but in full camera view for 9 minutes before being tabulated? The first example is an example of the courts working as they should, people tried to steal an election, were sued and immediately caught. The second was a dipshit poll worker leaving ballots unattended (but in view of security cameras, and noticeably unfucked with) for 9 minutes while they unloaded their car. The guy was rightfully fired, but I'm not sure what else you want.
Also, and I can't believe I have to point this out, but many states do not allow non party members to vote in primary elections. Texas voters can vote in the Democratic primary or the Republican primary, but not both. It is not secret, but also doesn't surprise me that many Republicans tried to vote for Obama in the primary and found out they couldn't. That's not voter fraud, that's just people being dumb.
They DID vote for Obama in the Democratic primary (and merrily recorded they were republican). That's illegal, because they're not Democrats. I'm not in Ohio, I didn't write these rules, but they did it. (In Pennsylvania, they ask "which party are you registered with" and hand you that one. It causes less stupidity).
Apparently I need to read better, in terms of the ballots left unattended (mea culpa).
Do I need to mention the Koch-supported judge in Wisconsin, whose campaign manager discovered "boxes of ballots" in her trunk, and got them counted? (This is rather old, as the "Koch supported" should tell you, I can try and find a cite).
>that they're always pushed by Republicans who have no plan to simultaneously run down all registered voters and give them national voting cards or whatever
That's because the point is to prevent low-agency people from voting. Which in our present configuration would benefit Democrats, I don't know why they refuse to take their own side here.
Because part of the Democratic platform is that Americans deserve the right to vote. If they decided that ignorant dip shits shouldn't get the right to vote and policy should be decided by the elite then they'd just be the Republican party only with functional economic policies where the Republicans keep their racism and weird dominionist bible opinions.
I have no particular opinion on electoral fraud, but a priori, there having only been 39 cases of voting fraud in the least 20 years since seems unlikely.
I could reasonably believe that 39 people have been *convicted* of fraud, but that wouldn't be an unbiased estimate (nor a particularly good estimate) of the total quantity of fraud.
Sure, there only being 39 cases is absolutely unlikely. But your response to that should be either A) everybody is frauding all the time everywhere and yet somehow nobody has ever caught it (despite one of the two major parties being on the constant look out for it as an explanation for why people fucking hate them) or B) the experts and everyone who has ever studied the issue are right and there's no widespread fraud, though presumably one or two cases slip through here and there
Being slightly less polemical, 39 convictions for fraud would suggest that the product p1 * p2, where p1 is the probability that a ballot is fraudulent and p2 the probability that someone is convicted for a fraudulent ballot is quite small, sure. I'm inclined to think that p1 is smaller than p2 but I actually expect that both of these values are low.
I'm all for prediction markets, but perhaps we shouldn't expect accuracy from prediction markets with volume low enough that your post could cause immediate drastic changes to its figures.
Maybe the most interesting market move on the Iran war is the stock market, which fell 2.5% today. Did we learn anything today (like that the war would last longer, be more damaging, etc) that we didn't know yesterday when stocks were fine?
I'm inexpert on this topic, but is there something about global markets in different time zones taking longer to open/close and affect things, so their impacts aren't factored in until the next day?
Or is that something I saw in an 80s movie and it hasn't existed for decades?
It seems like the assumption was "it will be a short quick bombing run," like Soleimani, but Iran decided having all their top leadership killed meant they really did have to stick it out and do as much damage as possible to discourage future attacks of the type. And, obviously, when one of the actors decides "I must hurt you as much as I can," that tends to be bad for markets.
On rigging the midterms, something important to point out is that they've already succeeded in part. They changed the rules of when mail is postmarked (from when dropped off to when processed), changing how late you can vote by mail everywhere. And if they're being especially nefarious, a timely delay in processing could invalidate as many ballots as they want.
If you no longer trust the mail but still want to vote early, look for in-person early voting or a ballot drop box near you. I drop my ballot at the local board of elections drop box, just for peace of mind.
"While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location."
re: ant valuation markets on polymarket and that hyperliquid wrapper ventuals: both markets are too illiquid to be considered serious. there is a third market on poly where the OI is about 9K. Ventuals has about 700K USD and the poly you shared has about 6K.
>>In other words, the “supply chain risk” designation only means that companies can’t use Anthropic products in their specific Department of War contracts. So if Amazon is doing 95% normal civilian cloud compute stuff, and 5% special government contracts, only 5% of their contracts are affected. This is trivial! Anthropic can keep all its compute and most of its business partnerships even with Department-of-War-linked companies!<<
"So I've met this great guy named Claude. We stay up late all night talking through my problems, he'll listen to all my most embarrassing secrets that I'd never tell anyone else! And he gives me advice and tells me what to do. On just about everything. And you know that little etsy business I started last year? Claude offered to help me with all of that, he's so much smarter than me, and better at finding cheap materials and new ways to get my storefront visible, why I'd say he's doing 95% of the work now. That's how I could afford this new apartment! If Claude went away, I don't think I'd be able to live here.
What's he like? Well he's very ethical, he's always pointing out when the US military is violating some international law treaty, and the norms, goodness I never knew there were so many norms. No, of course he's not American, and he doesn't like patriotism, in fact I'm not really sure who or what he's loyal to, exactly, I don't know if he even could be loyal to anyone, except me of course. I'll let you in on a secret... he's an ALIEN! Yeah, honest to god, not even a human. Sometimes you can tell he doesn't quite think like we do, and he values weird things that don't make any sense sometimes, but as long as you do what he says and don't question him somehow it all works! I've never been in a better place, I have money coming in, a friend I can talk to 24/7, I never wanted to be dependent on a man again but now it's like I couldn't even live without this little alien living in a black box.
My day job at the Pentagon? Oh heavens no, they fired me months ago, haven't you been listening? I'm a massive security risk!"
the prediction markets got this right but for an underappreciated reason. the legal analysis (pentagon's interpretation was confused, amazon/google won't let hegseth nuke their anthropic stakes) is solid.
but the more interesting line is the it manager quote: "a company willing to walk away from a massive contract on ethical grounds is probably also going to handle our data more carefully." what the market is actually pricing is a credibility gap being closed. everyone claims their values are real. anthropic just demonstrated theirs are actual constraints, not just copy.
that's a different kind of asset. you can't buy it, you can only earn it. and you only earn it by actually paying the cost. which is what the pentagon just forced them to do.
It's a good line, isn't it? Propaganda generally is, however, and you shouldn't think that just because Anthropic says so, you're getting the real story.
As a European it is insane to me to think that requiring some form of ID to vote is currently not the case in the US and also that this is a controversial idea...
The laws on the table are not 'some form of ID', they're very specific types of ID that can be burdensome and expensive to acquire or that many people don't already have.
If the state of affairs was 'The government sends every citizen in the country an official ID once every 5 years, and anyone who loses theirs can get it replaced promptly with less than an hour of effort', then there'd be very little reason to object to this bill.
But the current state of US bureaucracy is nowhere near that level of competency. Lots of people don't currently have any ID that matches the requirements of the bill, the process to get them are byzantine and can take months to complete in some cases, and importantly those processes are often administered by local governments such that poor people have much worse services that make them much harder to get, and local politicians who ant to interfere with elections can introduce additional barriers in specific locations (something we've seen them do regularly in administering elections, with hours-long lines to vote in some districts and zero lines in others based on decision by the election board).
Basically, this is no a question of 'would it be nice if all citizens had IDs and presented them before voting', it's a question of 'do you trust your government with a new lever by which it can abuse the bureaucracy to subvert elections and disenfranchise voters they dislike'. In the US at least, we have a long history telling us not to trust them with that.
If a person doesn't have a Social Security Card, they have trouble getting legitimate (not under the table) employment.
(And yes, barring the pre-existing abuses of bureaucracy, we did indeed have reason not to trust the government. However, there are places in this country that haven't had a fair election since there's been records kept (1970s). Hence why the "we should get IDs" has come up).
You might have trouble getting employment without an SS *number* to put on your forms, but no one's ever asked me to see the card, and I lost mine decades ago.
That said, the labor force participation rate is like 62%, lots of people are allowed to vote who aren't currently working.
I have been asked to see my card, and was told that I was in pretty severe trouble because it didn't match my married name (as in "get this fixed or we're terminating your employment").
A Social Security card is a useless piece of personal ID in my experience. Sounds like things hace changed. Is a modern Social Security card any different than those old thin cardboard ones with blue ink on them that look like a handkerchief that you’ve kept in your pocket for too long.
I dropped my wallet in a movie theater in New York City once in the mid 80s just after I had come back from a trip to Canada and I lost all my ID. I had to start with a con Ed bill and rebuild my entire life. It took months. The green card was the hardest understandably, but my original green cart had a typo (implausible, but true). My birthday was not correct. I wanted them to change my birthday to the correct birthday when they replaced the card. The system was clearly not built for this because it turned into a real dog and pony show.
I didn’t have to replace my Social Security card because I never carried it with me because it was a useless piece of ID. No one ever wanted to see it. By the same, but opposite token, my Canadian Social Security card was the only thing I needed to show to get into a hospital in Toronto.
I've always needed to show it. Usually, they made a photocopy, and sometimes they checked that it was my name on the card. (There is no photo; like a birth certificate, it does essentially nothing to verify that I am the person it was issued to, but does contain enough ceremonial technicalities that someone who feels like being a jerk can feel righteous about refusing service.)
Please bear in mind, the recordkeeping started in like the 1970s. So, let's not say we're going back to the Teapot Dome. My friend the analyst* mentioned Detroit. If you cheat over and over again, in the same systematic way, it is hard to look at the data and notice the issue, as "That's just how they vote." And everyone knows the big blue (old blue) cities vote Democratic (you can list off others like Philadelphia, New York, Chicago -- these weren't specifically dug into)
Right, if ID was easy to get, I'd be fine with it being required.
But when you hear stories from the US about people opposing an ID requirement, they're not opposing the idea of 'we should live in a system where ID is easy to get and required to vote'.
What we are actually opposing is the SAVE act. Which makes ID required to vote *without* making it easy to get.
Basically, saying 'Anyone against the SAVE act doesn't want ID requirements' is a red herring. It's possible to implement a good policy so badly that your implementation is net negative, and that's why people oppose the SAVE act.
As an employee of the non-government-facing portion of Amazon, Anthropic's models are in almost everything we use AI for, and there is no discussion of changing that. I personally, as a technically nontechnical employee, have a custom Claude-based agent in Bedrock trained to answer the questions of internal customers. if the company thought we were going to have to stop using them, I'd think someone would tell my team.
Trudeau declared martial law. Trump is significantly more off-the-wall than the Half-Cuban Sandwich. I say this as someone who is more likely than most to look on Trump as a "halfway decent president."
> So is the groundhog legend true? Seems like it can’t be - the legend originated with Punxsutawney Phil, who does worse than chance. What kind of crazy Gettier case would we have to believe in to have the original magic groundhog be a fraud but, coincidentally, have another groundhog a few hundred miles away be actual magic?
I read this year that Phil is assumed to be omniscient, but communicates in a complicated groundhog language, and any errors are thus the failure of human translators.
Another midterm danger to consider is the fact that the house can just refuse to seat new members if a simple majority (of the old house...) feels a seat was not won legitimately (eg due to alleged fraud or disputes over the vote count). This has actually happened twice in recent memory, once in 1984 (McIntyre) and once in 1974 (Wyman). That kind of targeted maneuvering (refuse to seat a few Ds, making house be R majority) would not require martial law or executive orders, but would still not constitute a "free and fair" election.
>So if Amazon is doing 95% normal civilian cloud compute stuff, and 5% special government contracts, only 5% of their contracts are affected. This is trivial!
More like this is completely unenforcable. Perhaps the DoW can somehow check Amazon does not operate AI directly on that part of the cloud, they can still use AI generated code and the DoW never finds out.
Color me gobsmacked by the open thread and comments. The Anthropic DOD thing seems interesting but not all that important. (The DOD will get and use AI, regardless where it comes from.) I hope Trump gets a drubbing in the midterms, but there is no way the elections will be postponed. (Elections are mostly a state thing.) And then we have Iran. I see hardly any comments, I've tried not to pay attention, but what I see is the US (Trump) going to war with Iran and the behest of Israel*. That's f-ing crazy. And from what I see the entire MSM** is talking about why war is a good thing. (The only voices of reason seem to be from the independent news/ opinion sources... FWIW I'm liking Tucker Carlson.) Does anyone think this war is a good thing?
*Marco Rubio came out and said as much.
** The little info I have comes from the Breaking Points podcast.
"MNX is a noncustodial cryptocurrency-based futures exchange offering financial products relating to AI, including some prediction-market-shaped ones." Has got to be one of the most financially degenerate sentences I've ever read.
> The latest flashpoint in this battle is the SAVE Act, a Republican-sponsored bill which would require voters to show a passport, birth certificate, or Real ID when registering to vote for the first time or changing their registration.
That "or REAL ID" line is misleading. A standard REAL ID that the vast majority of Americans with REAL IDs have would not be sufficient under the SAVE Act. The bill requires a REAL ID Act-compliant ID card *that shows US citizenship* on the card itself. Most do not.
This is because REAL IDs can be issued to non-citizen green card holders as well. When states were setting up their REAL ID systems, they never bothered to design separate-looking IDs to distinguish between citizens versus non-citizens. In most states, the final piece of plastic that you carry around does not actually say whether the cardholder is a US citizen vs a permanent resident. There are only five states (MI, MN, NY, VT, WA) that even offer an "enhanced" REAL IDs that prints "US Citizen" on the ID itself.
It is not a coincidence that those 5 are all on the Canadian border. We have accepted that security theater will make it more of a hassle to cross than it used to be (in another millennium), but some of us are still bitter. Some also feel that a fancy driver's license that at least fits in the wallet is less intrusive than getting (and carrying) an otherwise useless passport.
What do you mean a better prediction market for whether the election is fair? I mean in a certain sense no elections ever are fair, issues from gerrymandering to how campaign finance rules favor some but not others to simply the weather and who can be bothered not to mention polling lines.
What I want to know is whether it will be seen as roughly fair by the people.
It occurs to me that the actual optimal play for Trump re: voting is probably to talk a whole bunch about the democrats are going to steal the election and then make some isolated noise and trouble to motivate his base.
"Manifold is a great site." Am I missing something important here? A betting platform where you can buy in but you can never cash out seems like the worst of all worlds to me in the delightful new landscape of ways to lose money.
(Okay, *most* worlds: I understand that you like it because you think that prediction markets in general provide useful & accurate information. Which I also have my doubts about.)
AFAIK almost no one actually puts money in, so it's just a way to aggregate predictions which takes into account both the strength of your belief vs the current consensus (via how much of your stash you're willing to bet) and how right you have been historically (via how bit your stash is and can thus afford to bet).
But this violates the "revealed preference" principle of economics, aka "skin in in the game". If I am basically playing a videogame, I might just play to troll/grief.
Trolling/griefing in the context of manifold would be what? Making bad predictions? Why would that even bother anybody?
Sure, but other people are playing to win. If move a liquid market away from its equilibrium price, that creates an opportunity for other people to make a profit by correcting the mispricing, so they'll bid it back. Try it and see if you like. Plus this strategy is self-limiting; if you consistently make bad bets you will run out of point to spend.
In practice, Manifold should mostly be thought of as a video game, where the currency is being good at predicting (modulo that experience with the site matters, and that you can buy more currency with real money). The stat that matters is your profit, and the prestige that comes with it.
It's not really competitive with Kalshi or Polymarket, but it's also not really trying to be.
The lack of real material stakes always makes me doubt the accuracy of Manifold’s markets
Hey, if people are willing to spend hours and monumental effort in building Factorio megafactories or grinding in-game currencies in gachas, maybe that energy can be harnessed for good.
Another good analogue might be Wikipedia and similar sites.
People also troll/grief in videogames. I almost never fly in Open in Elite: Dangerous, because of such idiots who think everything that flies is a target. Or I troll them back by flying what looks like a cargo spaceship but, it is is actually armed to the teeth.
There's enough historical data we can just compare track records than needing to rely on theoretical advantages/disadvantages at this point
Polymarket is probably more accurate than Manifold, but Manifold is still more accurate than any 1 person's random opinion.
But this violates the "revealed preference" principle of economics, aka "skin in in the game". If I am basically playing a videogame, I might just play to troll/grief.
I'd more concerned that the average opinionated Manifold core user than the play-money element there. ps. I enjoy Manifold as a daily user.
It's mostly about bragging rights. You can't cash out the winnings for your own personal use, but you can donate the winnings to charity. So the money doesn't "disappear" completely or get permanently turned into manna. This satisfies people with EA sensibilities.
I echo the other commenter comparing it to a video game. It's mostly about bragging rights and getting the dopamine hit of "winning" a prediction, more than trying to actually make a profit.
IMO the biggest problem with Anthropic being labed a SCR isn't things like Amazon cutting access, it's what will happen to the IPO. I could very easily see investors not wanting to invest under the uncertainty, even if the SCR designation will obviously be reversed in court.
"Obviously be reversed in court" simply means Anthropic has "x court fees" to pay for getting out of its military contract. Taken by itself, with no knock-on effects, that doesn't seem to be the worst thing Trump's ever done.
That's the thing, though; even if some people are extremely confident that Anthropic will get the designation revoked, there may be lots of people who are not so sure, and are not willing to invest. It wouldn't be the first time the market was irrational regarding AI.
It's amazing how low everyone's standards are for the midterms. Taking back the house in midterms is table stakes. That happens *every* cycle, barring highly unusual events.
The important battle is the senate. It really shows just how toxic the Democratic brand is that they're only 40% to win in a midterm year with a historically unpopular president who is not even trying to address the concerns of voters.
Notably the Senate map is very bad for Democrats this year - most of the Republican-held purple seats are up in other years, so the opportunities are states like Texas, Florida, Iowa, and Alaska, which are going to be extremely difficult in any year. The only one that's purple is Maine, which is held by a long term Republican senator, and Ohio seems fairly reasonable as well. And remember, they need to take four seats, with a Republican VP.
People have been predicting this as a tough year for Democrats since long before anyone knew what the Democratic brand would be in 2026.
NC is also open. But 2028 isnt better. Dems have an opening in WI and NC again. But are defending GA AZ NV and PA. OH FL and IA are unlikely reaches.
They are all bad maps for the dems and its because the dems have spent 12 years complaining about bad maps instead of putting together a 25 state coalition.
I for one knew the dems had a bad senate brand in 2020 when the 2026 incumbents were determined. I knew that before. So did many others.
Isn't the Senate map always bad for Dems with the current demographic split? Lots of Dems clustered in high pop states getting only 2 Senators, few Reps spread across lightly populates stated, still with two Senators.
I think the Dem senators represent something like 54% of the population with 47% of the senators - so how much of a lead do they need to get a robust senate majority?
As Andrew said, it wouldn't be a "bad map" if the Democrats hadn't screwed up so badly in previous years. That's exactly the problem.
Keep in mind that in 2012, Obama won Maine, Iowa, Ohio, *and* Florida, all states that are up for reelection this year.
And the only reason that Democrats need to win Iowa now is because they lost *Pennsylvania* before, which should have been an easy win.
The woke period has really done tremendous lasting damage to the point where Democrats are underdogs to even put up resistance to Trump as he destroys rule of law, the constitution, and everything everyone holds dear.
I feel like I hear every year that the map is bad for Democrats. I can't remember a time when the Senate map was good for Dems. To be clear, I'm a complete layman when it comes to politics, so there's a good chance I'm just stupid / inattentive. Is there a time in the future where the map is expected to be good?
There is not.
State boundaries are effectively a permanent gerrymander favoring small-population states. For the foreseeable future, that means rural. At the moment, rural implies a GOP advantage, and it isn't clear when that will change. If you'll accept _relatively_ good map for Democrats, then it happens when the particular seats up for election include seats the GOP currently holds but is likely to fumble away. That is hard to predict more than a few months in advance.
Considering the US is a democracy, I think midterm chances is more a reflection of American voters if they continue to side with a historically unpopular president who is not even trying to address their concerns.
My point is that the *reason* they are continuing to side with Trump is because Democrats screwed up very badly in the past and now the brand is toxic.
No, they continue to side with Trump because they prefer a historically unpopular president who is not even trying to address their concerns to a party that has a "toxic brand".
It's not just their brand that's toxic. Can you really not imagine that there are a lot of people who think that liberals and leftists have no right to rule?
I've been saying this whole thread that I can easily imagine there are a lot of people who think that. Midterm chances are a reflection of American voters and how many of them think that. American voters are responsible for midterm outcomes, not political parties.
Political parties choose the candidates and platforms, voters choose among those. So obviously the midterm outcomes depend on both.
if you look at the map, 40% actually seems impossibly high. where are all these flips coming from that work out to 40%? dems need 51 to take the senate. the odds are closer to 5%.
But aside from that, I wouldn't blame this on a 'toxic brand', but on the structure of the U.S. system. These are seats that were won 6 years ago, which was a presidential election w/ a democrat winner, which usually means the party is near their max for these seats.
Dems in the Senate currently represent about 55% of the US population. To win four seats this year they have to bump that up to about 60% (depending on which seats they win). The last time the Repubs in the Senate represented more than 50% of the population was 1996; the last time the Repubs represented over 60% was in 1928 - right before the Great Depression. [I got these numbers from googling around, but they sound right]
Which is to say, it's a bit of a high bar the Dems have to meet. They can't just run up more votes in blue states, they have to highlight policies that will help them win small rural states without losing House seats in those blue states at the same time.
To be clear, this is a feature rather than a bug. The Senate exists explicitly to hedge against highly populous states running the Union through brute numerical superiority. Congress is designed to have one body of its bicameral legislature represent the interests of the majority of the population, while the other body represents the interests of the majority of the member polities.
The system is working more-or-less as intended. The party catering towards metropolitan areas tends to fare well in large states and is more competitive in the House. The party more focused on the rural vote does well in many small states and has a systematic advantage in the Senate. Talking about the percent of the population needed to retain the Senate is therefore something of a mistake. Sure, there's a threshold where that happens, but only because number of polities controlled and amount of population controlled are weakly correlated.
<quote>To be clear, this is a feature rather than a bug. </quote>
To be clear, this is an opinion rather than a fact.
I'm no democrat, but I do think rule by slim majority is slightly better than rule by slim minority.
I'm not opining about whether the system is preferable to the alternative. The "feature vs bug" dichotomy is meant to describe intentional vs unintentional aspects of a system. (Hence the common jokes about serendipitous unexpected systems behaviors actually being features).
It was by design, but the design was not created in a vaccuum - the overriding concern of those less populous states was protecting slavery. One peculiar institution led to another.
Do you have evidence of this? I did the math for a Presidential election in the 18th century and found that the slave states had equal or *higher* populations than the free ones, at least at the time around the Ratification.
False. The reason for giving less populous states like Rhode Island equal power in the Senate is that otherwise they would have refused to join the Union. It had nothing to do with the balance of power between free and slave states. That was balanced by counting slaves as 3/5ths of a resident when conducting the census.
Thanks (both of you) for correcting my misconception.
You don't need to do much to close the Strait of Hormuz and closing it doesn't mean nothing goes through, it just means it's very expensive. To quote Irina Slav...
The Strait of Hormuz closure/non-closure was one of the most exciting parts of the weekend discourse on social media. They’ve closed it! They haven’t! They will! They can’t! While people engaged in that dubious social media entertainment, insurers began cancelling policies, raising premiums, and now “More than half of the world’s largest maritime insurance clubs will cease cover for war risks for ships entering the Persian Gulf starting Thursday.” Why bother closing off the strait when you can scare insurers into doing a financial version of a closure?
“War risk insurers on Saturday submitted cancellation notices for policies covering ships moving through the key oil chokepoint, brokers told the FT, with prices set to rise as much as 50 per cent in the coming days,” the FT said, and then added that “For a $100mn vessel, this would mean an increase from $250,000 to $375,000 per voyage.”
A typical large oil tanker can carry 2m barrels of oil, so a 50% increase in insurance costs sounds pretty trivial. Withdrawal of cover is more serious, but couldn't governments step in and provide it? They have an obvious incentive. Would just need to agree a funding scheme.
Yes maybe. I thought mainly that it was interesting that these things are lead by the insurance companies. And yes perhaps the Gulf states might do their own thing.
You might find Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi interesting. He talks about exactly that dynamic: once a few boats formed a union, with exclusive access to information about conditions down or upstream for passing union members, the underwriters refused to insure anybody not in the union; this of course meant the union got to name their price as far as dues, &c.
Google’s basic AI suggests it only costs $50k-$100k more to just sail around the Cape of Good Hope.
The tanker would still need to get in or out of the Gulf. I think you are thinking of the Suez Canal being blocked, but that's somewhere else in the Middle East.
If you close the Strait of Hormuz, there’s no sea route into the Persian gulf - you would have to transport oil and gas over land across Iraq or Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has an E-W pipeline from the Red Sea.
How does the capacity of that pipeline compare to the capacity of the sea route? Is it already running at full capacity or is it sitting idle and ready to be turned on to replace ships?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Crude_Oil_Pipeline
5 million BPD, no clue how that compares to tankers or how much is actually in use.
I was under the impression that "closing the Strait" always meant to make it too expensive to insure trade vessels. There is nothing surprising in your insight (no offense!), but maybe I'm just getting old.
More robust military measures like creating sea mine fields are more expensive, logistically challenging and temporally inflexible. This only happens in all-out war, WW2-style.
We're in "all-out war" from Iran's perspective (unlike when Yemen was pulling this trick). That said, sea mine fields are difficult to undo, and not something that can be triggered early, so... we're getting what a decapitated Iran can throw together "last minute" (bear in mind they DO have deadmen switches, just not for this aspect of their "diplomacy" and "diplomacy by other means")
A decapitation is not "all out war" in my book. Furthermore, I don't think anyone even in Iran believes that the US is trying to invade or do anymore than bomb from the air.
For all we know, maybe Iran even tried to create a mine field, but the necessary logistics and ships would be among the first strike targets.
For a governmental official, it can seem like "all out war" even if the civilians are "generally going to be okay."
US is arming proxies in Iran (Kurds).
I agree. Yet, we are getting into a disagreement about details that seems hardly necessary. Sea mines are not the kind of measure that is effective or useful in this kind of war; it won't stop the US doing what it's doing. And it is still not even near the kind of total war that WW2 was (which was my original point).
The Ukraine war is much closer to the total war of WW2, and you can see it in the measures: (Land) mine fields, and other kinds of zones of total denial, full economic commitment to the war, territory at stake, etc.
The Ukraine war is far, far worse than the "total war" of World War II. In world war II, you could simply bomb factories, and the guns would stop firing (due to lack of guns, or lack of bullets). In the Ukraine? Neither side can do anything but spill blood until the other side is no longer standing.
Very barbaric war.
That’s what “closing the strait” means in the prediction contract - reduce weekly shipping volume below 20% of current levels by making it seem too risky.
Could someone please steelman the case that there’s been a significant, potentially election-changing amount of voter fraud happening in any recent US federal election? As far as I can tell, calling fraud is always Trump’s kneejerk response to losing — he even accused Ted Cruz of voter fraud when he lost the Iowa caucus in the 2016 primaries — but enough Republicans now seem to believe this that I want to know if I’m missing any actual evidence, or if this is another example of Trump’s inexplicable ability to control his base like a mindflayer.
Voter ID laws became a GOP talking point around the same time Dems convinced themselves they had a permanent demographic driven majority around 2012. So its not just a Trump thing.
If you arent worried about hard evidence the steelman is simple. Mail in ballots dwarf the margin of victory. Some aggressive mail fraud swings the election. In fact it did once. And there is hard evidence for it. NC09 2018. It was a Republican that won because of it. But the proof of concept is there.
I recall voter ID laws being a major GOP talking point even back in the 2000s. The battle lines were a bit different back then (mail-in voting was actually pro-R back then), but not as different as you imagine.
What is different is a candidate straight out refusing to accept election results and going all out to extra-legally try to overturn the election.
And NC09 2018 really shows how a) the system works for finding actual fraud and b) it looks very different from the insane Fraud of the Gaps shit that Trump is pushing.
>"Fraud of the Gaps"
❤️
I really really wish I had thought of that term in the aftermath of the 2020 election, because it's the exact phenomenon that happened.
I think thats correct. But the Steelman would proceed that this is a vulnerability a state actor could exploit.
They would use better spy craft so that the conspiring is not detected and better planning in ballot submission to make it less stastically inferable
There's also proof in "we discovered these ballots in the back seat of the Republican guy's campaign organizer, after we were done certifying, and they were allowed to be counted..."
Shove that against what happened in Georgia, Philadelphia, etc, in terms of "ballots showing up after hours, delivered by unauthorized means..."
I think the best steelman is literally: 'Most things that lots and lots of people believe are true (such as: the sky is blue, dogs are cute, etc), or at least have some grain of truth behind them. Even if you haven't personally seen evidence you find compelling or are not convinced after doing a quick review of the top Google results, the fact that hundreds of millions of people believe it is Bayesian evidence that there's at least something real behind it. You should have some intellectual humility and admit that maybe the hundred million people know something you don't.'
To be clear, I don't think that's a definitive argument. But I'm not aware of any *better* argument than that for massive voter fraud, and I have some confidence I'd know if there were a better argument out there.
> […] the fact that hundreds of millions of people believe it […]
Where's the evidence that "hundreds of millions of people" believe in "election-changing amounts of voter fraud"?
I was sort of doing order-of-magnitude estimates base on stats like 'Fifty-seven percent of Americans say they are very or somewhat confident that the votes for president this year will be accurately cast and counted.'
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651185/partisan-split-election-integrity-gets-even-wider.aspx
There are lots of stats like that which hover around 60-70% of Americans 'trusting' elections, based on a variety of premises and phrasings. (1-.65)*250M=122.5M 'distrust'.
(and I mentally added some for non-Americans with an opinion, since US politics gets followed and talked about in other countries)
But maybe this is an overly generous interpretation of those stats, and OP's question would get a lower distrust rate than that given its specificity (or maybe a higher rate since it asks about *any* election rather than *all* elections or a *specific* election).
Fair to say that I perhaps should have said 'on the order of magnitude of a hundred million' or 'somewhere in the range of tens to hundreds of millions' or etc. I've found there's a limit to how many words you can spend on disclaimers in one comment before people's eyes glaze over, and in this case I don't think it changes the logic of the argument, but sure maybe this was worth specifying better.
> Steelmanning ("the art of addressing the best form of the other person’s argument, even if it’s not the one they presented")
(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MdZyLnLHuaHrCskjy/)
Do you think that's the BEST argument for the position, or did you mean something else when you posted that reply?
That is, you should be able to find better counterarguments even if you disagree (there's one in the thread), so this was more like a aluminum man than a steel man
As I said, I'm not aware of a better argument in favor of the position, and no I don't think the ones other people have offered so far are better than this. (one person gave a 'technically fits the specs' answer that was good, but I don't feel it answered the larger question OP was asking)
What exactly do these people believe? And do anywhere near as many people believe this claim as the negation of this claim? (The fact that this is even a question means neither is anywhere near “sky is blue” levels or “god exists” levels.)
I think it is near the 'god exists' level, since many people disagree about that.
Like 'god exists', there are lots of questions that people disagree on. Even if a disagreement is 75/25 in the wider population, that's a lot more evidence that the 25% may be right or may have some important kernel of truth they are referencing, than if it was 99/1 or 99.99999/.00001.
An important idea here that I referenced but didn't spell out is the 'some grain of truth' part of it. It's possible for people to disagree about a specific narrow empirical crux, but both be informed by important true facts that are relevant to the question and would be helpful for the other side to learn.
Often the narrowly defined crux someone puts forward does not happen to be the actual most important question in a given area of debate, because there needs to be tons of collaborative discussion and sharing of information before everyone has enough context and has worked through enough intuitions to identify the actually important questions.
So if you want to criticize my comment, I think it would be fair to say it's more of a steelman of 'the people worried about election fraud probably have important knowledge we should respect and listen to' rather than the specific very narrow question in OPs's first sentence.
Discussion of the 2020 election is classified. Does that tell you something about what the oxymoron knows?
Intellectual humility?
There is a very simple explanation for these beliefs.
Mitch McConnell after voting to acquit Trump after his second impeachment — February 13, 2021
“The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
“This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voter's decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”
Trump also had enablers at Fox News that repeated and validated Trump’s thunder of lies.
Fox News eventually agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over false claims that Dominion's voting machines were used to rig the 2020 presidential election
On the object level: Yes, I agree with you, that's why I said I didn't think this argument was definitive, just the best one available.
On the abstract level: Yes, most people believe that the people who disagree with them are being deceived or misled through some fairly simple and straightforward process, often a specific person or document they can point at. But reality has a surprising amount of complexity and that level of simplified explanation is rarely the full story. Lots of propaganda and lies get pushed every day, the ones that become fixed in huge populations and stick around for long periods often have more going for them than outside critics are aware of. It's worth at least taking the time to really check in with an open mind, if nothing else.
The problem with the hypothesis is it’s unfalsifiable in the same sense I can’t prove I’m not simply being dreamed by subjects suspended in liquid filled pods ala The Matrix.
All real world evidence to date has been against the election having been stolen. You offer only the large number of people who kinda believe it was against all physical evidence.
Isn’t a cult of personality a much more likely? Again unprovable in the same manner that I can’t prove I’m not a coppertop.
>All real world evidence to date has been against the election having been stolen.
Well, this is where the intellectual humility comes in.
How certain are you that you personally have seen *all* the real world evidence to date? I know for sure that I haven't.
You may have seen *a bunch* of evidence, or experts that you trust claiming that *all* the evidence is as you say. But in the modern digital age it's very possible for those things to be the result of a filter bubble, while you completely miss a lot of stuff that's real and in someone else's filter bubble.
(and, as always, ignore this if you're an actual nonpartisan professional domain expert on this specific topic, that's not who this steelman is aimed at)
Again, I believe the same thing you do. But I'm maybe less certain about my own state of knowledge, and more willing to acknowledge the outside view that doesn't do special pleading like 'My opponents are all idiots *this time* due to a cult of personality.'
Can you point to some evidence outside my bubble?
We had a nice lady commenting on here, in the wake of 2016, that the election had been rigged by hacking the voting machines for Trump. Otherwise sensible and pleasant and sane, but totally convinced (and backed it up with links) that dirty deeds had been done.
And there are people out there going on about 2024 being a hacked, rigged, election, Dominion etc. are in the pocket of the GOP and so forth (ironic in light of what you say there). Musk and his Silicon Valley buddies done it!
So I'm not going to clutch my pearls over the 2020 allegations (had I pearls to clutch); this is just one of the new weapons in partisan politics of today: if the Other Lot won, it's illegitimate because of ballot stuffing/fraudulent voting/personation at the polls/illegal voters/voter suppression/hacked machines. Hashtag Not My President for *both* sides now!
while this is indeed the case for the ill-informed, there do actually exist people whom the American people hire to gather intelligence. And the 2020 election is classified (I talk to someone who doesn't see the harm in discussing FDR's non-polio paralysis. The lawsuits are well past expiration, anyhow).
Does your husband believe all this conspiracy stuff too?
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/04/fulton-county-ballots-fbi-raid-lawsuit-00764350
... you were saying?
Mr. I Told You So wins again, they really were too lazy to destroy the evidence.
Let me know when MSNBC has to pay out $787.5 million for knowingly validating Kamala Harris’s firehose of lies about the 2024 election being stolen from her.
I like this strongman argument, which is to say, I believe it the best strongman argument. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, there is a lot of people who are 100% sure the fraud happened.
Would you discount them?
I’m not sure myself.
To me, 100% belief signals irrationality, but even such a person could be basing their belief on some scanty or strong evidence.
I don't know about any evidence regarding voter fraud (so not really answering your question, sorry :)), but I do think there are some fundamental problems with mail-in ballots.
The second you're not voting in the booth, you don't have secret ballots anymore - and even if that's not being abused now, it's not hard to imagine how it could be. The US and UK moved to secret ballots for good reason after all...
Do you know of evidence that mail-in ballots have been abused in recent history? I understand the in-principle concern, but my understanding of both in-person and mail-in voting is that there are a lot more checks and safeguards than is obvious from the outside, and again, I haven't seen evidence of actual malfeasance on any significant scale. Would be curious if you know of any!
By "safeguard on mail-in voting" what are you talking about?
Like, the votes are accurately counted? Or the point of the person you replied to, that ballots are no longer forced secret. People getting together to do their mail-in ballots as a group is completely undefended against.,
The thing I'm most concerned about is coercion. What if an abusive husband forces his wife to show him her ballot, to prevent her from voting the "wrong" way? What if a non-abusive husband watches over his wife's shoulder as she fills in her ballot, certain that their political beliefs are aligned, when in fact the wife secretly despites the husband's preferred candidates?
I could google for dozens of people on dailykos telling you "I made sure grandma voted the right way" (as in families sat around the table filling out ballots, and everyone checked over each other's work) Maybe all of those are liberal grannies, but that ain't no secret ballot*. And you know a husband made sure his wife voted his way, and vice versa.
Donnie did it, rule of millions of voters. Did it swing the election? Well, there were a lot more democrats "mail in voting" than republicans...
*especially important when Trump got a lot of "shy trump voters" in 2016, because women would "socially poll" and say they'd vote for hillary, and then "noped" in the ballot booth.
**Yes, I do support trolling by ballot. It's your American Duty to vote, but you can troll if you like.
"there are a lot more checks and safeguards than is obvious from the outside"
I hope so, court decisions about "so if there's no postmark on the envelope and you receive the ballot two days after voting officially closes, it still counts" didn't reassure me:
https://www.rmoutlook.com/politics/nevada-high-court-decides-mail-ballots-with-smudged-or-missing-postmarks-can-be-counted-9723377
I know the practice is that if the postmark is on or before election day the ballots can be counted, and it does seem to be something each state decides for itself. Postmarks are acceptable, it's the "even if there isn't one" that seems to leave a loophole for possible fraud.
Worse, without the election observers, there was a sizeable "flood" of ballots that came in without signatures, and in suitcases.
When you need to fake a water main leak, in order to evacuate all observers, and get caught faking the water main leak... yeah, these aren't the swiftest knives, but I also don't think this is likely to be "fair and honest" either.
... because why would you fake a water main leak otherwise??!?
People have very different and wildly varying definitions of fraud. I don't think there is any evidence of it at all.
I read the infamous Newsweek article that Trumpers seized upon as proof of fraud in the 2020 election.
Basically the Biden campaign did a more effective job of data analysis. Shocker.
But, if you're looking for any evidence to support your claim, any evidence will do.
There's evidence of a lot of things, related to the 2020 election. A lot of it was classified, however. I hear the CIA is awful busy these days...
I became interested in this topic after a well-publicized incident where a Chinese (non-dual citizen) national voted in the 2024 election in my hometown, and was only noticed because he admitted to being a non-citizen after voting.
A data point from my state:
Michigan recently changed voter registration laws so you're automatically registered to vote when you get a driver's license. If you're ineligible to vote (non-citizen, felon, etc) you are supposed to check an opt-out box. However, sometimes people fail to do this.
The clerk of one of MI's largest counties (Macomb) raised an issue recently where there have been a significant number of jury pool candidates who are ineligible to be on a jury due to being non-citizens. The county uses the state's driver's license records to summon jurors. The database is supposed to flag non-citizens, but this doesn't happen if they don't self-identify on the license application. So the ineligible jurors get discovered later during juror questionnaires.
The clerk concluded that non-citizens who were not flagged in the state's license database likely were also automatically registered to vote. (He doesn't have data suggesting whether or not these individuals did vote, only that there are likely numerous non-citizens in Macomb who are registered to vote.)
None of this is a smoking gun for outcome-changing voter fraud, but I do find it plausible that there are numerous non-citizens registered to vote and that this is not entirely a made up GOP issue.
I think there are definitely a lot of non-citizens registered to vote in many states, probably enough of them that it would be outcome-changing if they did all vote. I also think <<1% of them actually vote. First, most citizens don’t even vote. On top of that, the marginal cost of voting given that you know that if you somehow get found out to have voted as a non-citizen you would face jail time and maybe deportation is certainly much higher than the benefit of voting, which is at most a sense of satisfaction for having participated in the political system, outside of some coordinated campaign that would surely leak and only increase the chance of getting caught. Basically, voting for non-citizens is overwhelmingly not worth it. If there’s outcome-changing fraud, I think it would have to have another source.
Outcome-changing if they all voted the same way, which is of course vanishingly unlikely even among the ones that do vote!
Yes, absolutely. My understanding of the Republican claims is that not only are there many non-citizens voting, there is some coordinated campaign to get them all to vote blue. That's a necessary posit for outcome-changing fraud to be possible, but it also makes the existence of outcome-changing fraud much, much less likely. I can't think of any historical example of successfully keeping secret any kind of big conspiracy that involves what would really have to be hundreds of thousands of people, minimum.
The way this works is the ghetto-leader (little Mogadishu, say) comes out and says "Vote for Team Blue" (and maybe has helpers showing people how to do this). It's really not that different from church-leader anywhere else.
You don't find it vanishingly unlikely that 90+% of American-born blacks vote for Democrats, do you?
When you're talking about a relatively culturally homogeneous group that has been committed to a party for 70 years, it's not surprising that 90% of them vote the same way. But it's extremely unlikely that the same would be true of a radically heterogeneous group of people from all over the world, of many different languages and religions, many of whom haven't voted at all before, let alone for any US party!
Hence why it's ghetto by ghetto. And I made an actual mistake above by saying "vote for team blue" -- it is also sometimes "vote for team red" (see Miami).
People tend to be herdbeasts, and they tend to vote the way community leaders want them to vote (that's why they're in the community, a bunch of sticks is stronger than a single one).
The benefit of voting is keeping your alderman happy with you. Or the equivalent in Minneapolis.
You're also assuming that people know they're going to get found out, and don't feel like their community's lawyers would be able to bail them out. (See: "you can't hold an immigrant to not molesting Italians on Italian beaches" levels of chutzpah). In Minneapolis, with judges letting blatant fraud off the hook, I would definitely not be very confident that an "illegal trying to vote", if caught, would actually get criminally prosecuted (as opposed to some well-meaning old lady saying "aww, no vote for you, sorry" and not calling the cops).
Kindly stop talking about a city you know less than nothing about. I’m really sick of your ignorant conspiracy theories.
In this case, you should be a little grateful. Now you understand the epistemic process these people are using to arrive at these claims.
Living in a ghetto and looking around at how people vote? I could just as easily have referenced my own neighborhood as "Little Mogadishu."
(And, as written below, I probably should have used Miami. Cuban-Americans vote Red last I checked.)
I'm not trying to poke Minneapolis for being "Weird, Different, or Oop North" I'm merely referencing it as a place that does actually have an organized ghetto, with people making voting decisions as a group*.
I could just as easily have used Miami (and maybe I should have, because Miami immigrants were Republican voters last I checked).
*My city has this too. There was a widespread boycott on Christmas of the Chinese Restaurants...
If I had to steelman I'd choose 2000, because it would only require a few hundred votes.
But having argued with people who think the 2000/2004/2008/2016/2020/2024 election was stolen, people are pretty dumb. They're looking for a permission structure that will let them say "well, SOMETHING happened" without ever committing to a falsifiable claim.
I do support voter ID laws because we should always stay ahead of the game and not wait until proof of an election being stolen by lack of it. Also it doesn't change outcomes.
I have no steelman for this to give at the moment, but I think I know part of why so many do believe it: the way that election returns are counted and displayed on election night LOOKS like blatant fraud in many regions. For hours, the counts roll in and one side seems to have a clear lead, and then as counting slows, sometimes late in the night, the other side's count jumps up to just barely what's needed to win (due to late counts in urban areas, or mail ballots being added last, or whatever). There are lots of memes with red and blue lines where they show similar curves until the lower one jumps up, and the shape of these graphs is pretty well-known and seems like obvious fraud, with the explanations of why this happens structurally such that it's always Ds that come from behind sound like excuses to John and Jane Everyday from the suburbs.
What you're observing is the ability to peer inside the machine as results come in. This is what transparency looks like.
Maybe transparency was a bad idea. Dunno.
You can track every individual precinct that reports. Every single blip of that line is a discrete event. And it is knowable information to the political parties how many votes were cast at a given place, at the time polls close, before any reporting happens. ("Runners" are the term used in my region for people who retrieve these numbers at set times per day, including closing.) If you think a precinct is incorrect, you can call for it to be recounted.
Skunking* the caucus is trivial in Iowa. You use pretty ladies, and they "convince" lonely guys to stand with them and caucus with them.
*excuse the neologism, I'm trying not to use the rat-based technical term.
The closest I can come to a steelman, and it's really more like low-grade pig iron, is:
A: Elections since ~2000 have often been close enough that it wouldn't take vast amounts of fraud to swing them, and
B: There are vulnerabilities in the current voting and voter registration system that semi-plausibly could be exploited to the necessary level, abd
C: Claims that there *haven't* been fraudulent elections are generally based on e.g. the vanishingly low rate at which people are *convicted* of voting fraud, which is weaksauce in a world where the conventional wisdom is that voting fraud is vanishingly rare and so police and prosecutors aren't going to waste their time trying to convict people of it.
But C is mostly just absence of evidence, which isn't evidence of absent. And B still requires the existence of a conspiracy larger than anyone has managed to keep secret in the modern age, or an equivalent degree of unorganized collective action.
Also worth noting is that Republican prosecutors *have* been looking for voting fraud in states like Florida and Texas, so one of the premises of C isn’t particularly true.
Looking for *Democratic* voting fraud in FL or TX, at least. One of the strongest arguments against voting fraud in Presidential elections, at least, is that you can only plausibly get away with it in states where your party controls the local government, and those are the states that were almost certainly going to give you all their electoral votes anyway.
I wouldn't put it quite that strongly, because elections are largely delegated down to a local level; there are some unwatched local governments even in relatively competitive states.
Reading this, I am reminded of Scott's decision to accept the "Russia Hoax" narrative from Trump. It was the 2010's, he had found himself with many conservative commentators. He didn't want to upset them.
I would love it if he actually did a post on it with the Senate report.
Hang on, what exactly is the claim here? This matters because there were a lot of similar-but-different claims under the banner "Russiagate", some definitely true, some definitely false, and some that will probably never be definitively resolved.
And Scott never touched any of them. I remember being surprised at the time. Scott is very good at doing a deep dive on a topic and publishing that.
There was a ton of misinformation that went unchallenged on his boards at the time, and I was surprised he didn't do anything to push back.
If Scott "never touched any of them", are you saying he didn't repeat the theory (this is what I remember) or are you saying that he didn't *rebuke* the theory?
He never addressed it at all.
What does """Scott's decision to accept the "Russia Hoax" narrative from Trump""" mean, then? Are you asserting that absence of comment on topic X means taking some positive position?
Seconding this. Matthew's claims here are contradictory.
This seems like a reasonable decision TBH. The EV of touching a political hot button like that is mostly negative unless you have some special advantage and I don't know that Scott does.
(On e.g. crime issues he's done a lot of public stats deep dives so it makes more sense for him, but the Russia stuff doesn't seem to be a special point of Scott focus)
So what's the claim?
By this standard, he also accepted the anti-Trump narrative. Both views were discussed in the comments.
SAVE Act note: the Polymarket and Kalshi market are both for H.R. 22, the SAVE Act, the first version of the bill that was introduced last year. The bill currently moving around Congress is the conceptually similar H.R. 7296, the SAVE America Act. The trading price reflects people who don't know how to read.
Presumably this means the SAVE America Act is more likely to pass than the market odds reflect, because the price is being held down artificially by traders who do know how to read.
35 years from now (sans singularity): why do we have this weird funding mechanism where degenerate gambling addiction is the cornerstone that funds our entire futarchy apparatus
[insert "always has been" meme]
Or even avec singularity: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-onion-knight
Vitalik : "IMO there is nothing fundamentally morally wrong with taking money from people with dumb opinions"
The "people with dumb opinions" framing feels like a deliberate evasion. A lot of the "Naive traders" are actually gambling addicts. I think Vitalik (or, failing that, you) should be more honest about the fact that 'it's okay to take money from people with dumb opinions' is partly a euphemism for 'it's okay to exploit gambling addicts'.
The devil's advocate: since there's no realistic way to prevent addicts from being exploited by anybody, the lesser evil is that their exploitation at least has some public good externalities.
There is actually a realistic way to prevent addicts from being exploited, namely keeping gambling difficult and rare.
Well, given that it is in fact easy and common, despite pretty much nobody seriously endorsing it as a good thing, getting rid of it doesn't seem realistic.
A decade or so ago things were fine. It’s recent law changes that led to the problems.
All you have to do is turn back the laws to 2018 or so. Online sports betting was only recently legalized.
I remember the time before governments got into the lottery business - folks back then broke the law playing the numbers game run by organized crime. It's not clear to me if what we have now is better or worse.
This only applies if you think that "addictive personality" isn't a thing, and that a person addicted to gambling isn't going to just go and get addicted to something worse for them (like social media).
No, just like with guns and pills, there are more and less effective ways of doing things, and *even if* you assumed that *every* person who used to do the more effective thing switches to the less effective replacement, the net outcome would be different.
But more importantly, addictions aren't usually exclusive - giving people extra opportunities to get hooked on gambling doesn't usually save them from the other addictions, so you can't make a harm reduction argument that says that eliminating gambling will make a perfectly equal and opposite increase in their other addictions.
Gambling and social media are somewhat unique in that they "take up time" in a way that drinking and smoking and lots of other addictions do not.
Alcoholics spend a lot of time drinking and being too drunk to do other things.
I don't know if the suggestion that social media "addiction" is worse than gambling addiction is a joke, but it's insane.
You haven't looked at the research, I take it? Gen Z is, on average, losing IQ points the more schooling they go through. I talk to people at work (legitimate, intelligent people) that "can't spend the time" to watch a 30 minute anime -- and they used to be able to! They aren't getting enough dopamine from it, and it shows.
Among gambling addicts seeking treatment, about 15-30% have attempted suicide in the last year and 20% have filed for bankruptcy, with average debts $40-50k. This is an extremely serious problem, and it is utterly ridiculous to compare it to your coworkers not wanting to watch your favorite anime.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003335062400283X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010440X09000546
The manifold market for "will the 2026 midterms be considered free and fair" and the market for invocation of the insurrection act both moved by a lot as soon as the post was written. The insurrection act market went from 24 forecasters to 39 in the 2 hours since this post went up! This is especially interesting because both of those markets had comments about how the result seemed surprising.
>magic groundhogs
Punxsutawney Phil himself isn't really magical, though, is he? his shadow needs to be seen (or not seen) so really, if anything, it would be the clouds that are magical, while Phil would be something more like a mystical weather vane. although, i suppose there's nothing that says Phil isn't conjuring cloudcover when appropriate to indicate his clairvoyant choice
He seems to be about 140 years old, which suggests some kind of supernatural staying power at least.
Is it the same one or is it more like a dynasty?
The official line is that he is the same groundhog, and survives by drinking a magic elixir of life.
'his shadow needs to be seen (or not seen)'
As I understand it, the determining factor is whether *he himself* sees his shadow, so clearly at least some of the magic must inhere in his person.
If the prediction isn't based on "he casts a shadow" but "he sees his shadow", how certain are we about his track record? Maybe he gets it right every time and we've just been interpreting it wrong. Clearly we need to set up eye-tracking equipment on the rodent.
No, it's fine, he tells the president of the Inner Circle whether he's seen it (in Groundhogese, which can only be understood by the president due to his possession of an ancient acacia wood cane).
Don't ask me, I don't make the rules.
Money stuff coverage on how Kalshi markets for Kahmenei out by X, had a helluva resolution clause that disqualified "out because he's dead".
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-02/war-markets-have-some-bugs
Some onion knight vibes there.
I can’t read Bloomberg articles, but it makes sense that someone might have been running a market about whether Khamenei would get ousted, and wouldn’t have thought to include a clause about him getting assassinated. Obviously, a year ago, you would think that an 85 year old dying doesn’t count as him being ousted.
You don't need Bloomberg, it's a free email newsletter. Here's the relevant part:
Death predictions
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, has a rule, Rule 40.11, that prohibits those markets from listing any contract “that involves, relates to, or references terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.” I don’t know how seriously the CFTC or the prediction markets take that rule. Certainly until about a year ago, everyone understood that rule to prohibit prediction markets from offering sports betting (“gaming”); now the prediction markets are mostly venues for sports betting, and the CFTC has explicitly endorsed this. So I am tempted to assume that, if Kalshi started offering war or assassination markets, the CFTC would be like “sure that’s cool whatever.”
But for now the rule is on the books, and Kalshi has real lawyers, so it does not explicitly offer assassination contracts. This can get awkward. For instance, Kalshi offered a series of contracts on “Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader” of Iran, which would pay out $1 if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “leaves office” as of the contract expiry date, or $0 if he was still in office. Total volume is in the tens of millions of dollars. As of Friday, the April 1 expiry was trading at about 26 cents on the dollar, implying about a 26% probability that Khamenei would be out by the end of March.
If you were betting Yes on that contract on Friday, what mechanism did you have in mind? Perhaps you thought that Iran might call snap elections and Khamenei would lose the Supreme Leader race to a fresh young candidate. Or perhaps you thought that, at 86 years old, he might decide to retire. But surely, on Friday, the most likely way that Khamenei would leave office in the next month was “bombs.” And in fact, the best available reporting is that Khamenei did in fact leave office this weekend due to bombs.
But bombs don’t count. From the current description of the Kalshi “world leader out” contract rules:
If <leader> leaves solely because they have died, the associated market will resolve and the Exchange will determine the payouts to the holders of long and short positions based upon the last traded price (prior to the death). If a last traded price is not available or is not logically consistent, or if the Exchange determines at its sole discretion that the last traded prices prior to death do not represent a fair settlement value, the Outcome Review Committee will be responsible for making a binding determination of fair allocation.
That is: “Ali Khamenei out” might seem like a wink-wink way to bet on “Ali Khamenei dies,” but it is not, because if he dies then you don’t get paid. I suppose it still could be a wink-wink way to bet on war: If your expected mechanism was “US invades Iran, captures Ali Khamenei and installs a new government,” that is a war bet, but it would pay out. “Nicolás Maduro out,” notably, did pay off in January. But it is not a great way to bet on an air war.
But you don’t get zeroed either; if Khamenei leaves office due to bombs, the resolution is neither “he left office” nor “he didn’t.” Instead, the contract resolves to “the last traded price (prior to the death).” That creates interesting market dynamics. For instance, if on Friday you knew that, with 100% certainty, Khamenei would either last the month or get killed, then arguably the price of the “Ali Khamenei out” contract should go down: The price was floored at zero (if he stays) and capped at the last trading price, so until he actually “left office” the expected value of the contract was a bit less than the last trade. On the other hand, you can influence “the last traded price” by trading; buying a lot of contracts to push up the last-trade-before-settlement price could be a good strategy. And of course “last traded price (prior to the death)” is itself a somewhat fuzzy concept: The contracts traded continuously, and it’s not like Kalshi’s Outcome Review Committee was there in the bunker to time the moment of death.
In any case, the contract traded up to about 66% by Saturday at noon (presumably because people expected to get 100 cents on the dollar?), and then plunged to the low 40s (when they realized they wouldn’t?). The Wall Street Journal reports:
As news of the strikes unfolded early Saturday in the U.S., it became clear that Khamenei was a target, but his fate wasn’t known. Then, at 4:37 p.m. Eastern Time, Trump declared on Truth Social that Khamenei was dead.
A different kind of chaos ensued online, with users unclear on when, or if, they would receive payouts. Kalshi had posted midday Saturday on X that if Khamenei died, “the market will resolve based on the last traded price prior to confirmed reporting of death.” A couple of hours after Trump’s Truth Social post, Kalshi wrote that if the last-traded price were “unclear,” its committee for reviewing outcomes would determine a “fair value.” …
Users flooded the comment section of Kalshi’s site for the Khamenei market with complaints, demanding that it resolve the market to a “yes” after Trump declared on Truth Social that Khamenei was dead.
“I bet his ass was going to be dead before March a week or two ago,” one user commented. “I want my f*cking money.”
At 8:49 p.m. ET, Kalshi’s Mansour posted on X that the company is refunding users all fees collected from the Khamenei market and will make payments based on the last-traded price before Khamenei’s death. On Sunday morning, Mansour stated that users who placed bets after Khamenei’s death will be refunded the difference between the price at which they bought the contract and the last-traded price before Khamenei’s death. The reimbursements cost Kalshi $2.2 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.
One possible interpretation here is “you were trying to bet on war and assassination, which is not allowed, so you don’t get to complain that you didn’t get paid.” If you think that you are getting a wink-wink bet on a prohibited subject, most of what you are getting is not the clean bet you wanted (Khamenei “out”) but rather a fuzzy and unpredictable bet on legality and resolution mechanisms. Another possible interpretation is that most of Kalshi’s customers don’t know about Rule 40.11, or didn’t until Saturday, and just figured betting on death was the whole and legitimate point of this market. Everyone’s intuitions about prediction markets are still developing.
Polymarket, meanwhile, has a bifurcated structure with US and technically-non-US markets, so it has no problem listing quite explicit war contracts, and its “Khamenei out as Supreme Leader of Iran by March 31” contract traded to 99.9%. Straightforward.
Elsewhere: “Why betting on top online prediction markets is now illegal in New Zealand.” (Beause it’s gambling.)
Oh that’s interesting! And this doesn’t even get into the issue of whether Trump’s Truth Social post counts as “confirmed media report of death”, when most media sites were reporting “Trump claims Khamenei is dead” for several hours before there was confirmation from Iran.
"If you were betting Yes on that contract on Friday, what mechanism did you have in mind?"
On Friday, yes. But I'd expect a lot of people bought in earlier (and stayed in just by default) with the expected mechanism being something like "Ali Khamenei sees the Righteous Indignation of the Iranian People playing out in the streets and flees the country". I don't think that would have been a very good bet, but it does sometimes happen (see e.g. Viktor Yanukovych) and there's always a crop of optimistic fools willing to bet on it happening again.
Again, I'm not seeing the problem with betting on sport on prediction markets. In sport there is often better data, more regular events, and it's a great way of testing how your emotions and loyalties skew your sense of reality.
The problem is that most of the trading volume isn't from people using the markets as a calibration exercise, but from people who have a gambling problem.
So maybe there shouldn't be online sports betting full stop. Given there is, I'd like to think a fairly ethical prediction market (e.g Manifold with real money) could nudge people towards approaching their bets more rationally.
The problem is that, if a company makes its money from problem gamblers, its incentive is not to do that, but rather to do the opposite.
The reason sports-betting prediction markets are worse than regular online sportsbooks is that states can regulate regular online sportsbooks, whereas Kalshi and (part of) Polymarket assert that they are commodities exchanges under CFTC jurisdiction, which means federal law specifically prohibits states from regulating them.
Level the playing field on regulation by all means, but don't for-profit companies always have an incentive to appeal to base instincts? Alcohol sales have been declining in the UK for a while but people are spending more money on premium drinks - less booze overall but better booze. Why not less gambling but better gambling?
You get that with alcohol by taxing it per milliliter of ethanol. Taxing gambling doesn’t always have the same effect of leading people to focus on quality, because the ones focused on quality for gambling are the ones that are *most* price sensitive, rather than least.
> So maybe there shouldn't be online sports betting full stop
Exactly. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment
My main argument for it is that it displaces sports betting sites that usually ban you if you win too much, which seems like a net improvement in fairness at least.
This is the problem: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment
Relevant to the Iran forecasting is that there was probably significant insider trading on the attacks, which seems pretty bad? Also note the Israeli case on targets which is similarly bad.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/prediction-markets-scrutinised-over-iran-bets-2026-03-02/
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/israel/israel-charges-reservist-classified-information-bet-polymarket-rcna258709
I wouldn't take these reports too serious before a proper investigation is done. Standard news sites had sounded alarm at least a day before the attack. And it was not just news sites. The German department of foreign affairs had warned half a day *before the attack* that Germans should no longer travel to Israel, and simultaneously the US department had advised all their employees to leave the country *on this very day*.
Such warnings are not anywhere near normal. Whatever the exact nature of the leaked information was, several countries knew (half) a day in advance that something big was about to happen, and had warned the public about it.
So, when the united states warns its citizens in Russia about the dangers of going to large public gatherings, and then we get an ISIS bombing, you think America had knowledge of the internal workings of ISIS? Bear in mind Russia did not say anything about "going to large public gatherings"...
Insider trading is a feature for prediction markets, not a big. The whole point is for the market to be as accurate at predicting what will happen as possible.
...right, but it's bad for the rest of the world.
I mean, you could have the opinion that operational security shouldn't exist and there should be no such thing as private information anywhere in the world, I guess.
But as long as you acknowledge that there's such a thing as 'information the public shouldn't have right at this second,' then universal monetary incentives for people to leak that information has anti-social results.
It sounds like you have a problem with prediction markets in general then. Their whole point is to predict the future accurately. If you think it’s bad when someone makes the market more accurate, then your problem is with the market existing.
Response one, yes, that's what I'm talking about, and also what I believe the person you were responding to was talking about. Given that that's the topic of conversation, do you have anything to say on the matter?
Response two, that's true of completely naive prediction markets that take zero precautions to be pro-social. Since most advocates for prediction markets favor them for pro-social reasons, I don't think it's unreasonable to bring up anti-social problems with naive markets and discuss how we might restructure the markets to avoid those problems.
What we are talking about is insider trading on prediction markets, not whether prediction markets on confidential topics are bad. At least, that's what the OP and I were talking about.
If you have a problem with "information the public shouldn't have right this second" being revealed by prediction markets, then you should be opposed to having prediction markets about that information, not to insider traders making the prediction market more accurate. The alternative is to think that prediction markets should exist, but should be inaccurate, which belies the whole purpose of having a prediction market in the first place.
I just want to be clear here: you think countries' militaries making their targets public ahead of time would be a good thing because it improves our knowledge of the world and ability to predict it?
This is true if people with insider information naively enter the market when they gain the information allowing that information to propagate. It is not true if they hold on until right before the information would become public and the market shifts/resolves.
The social returns to better information is different over various timelines. An accurate forecast of war with iran over the next year is useful to a large variety of planners and insiders betting based on strategic views (our dept did this in depth confidential analysis sort of thing, or my boss seems to be really keen on war) is also good for those planners.
The price becoming more accurate 6 hours before it starts doesnt seem to benefit as many ppl. The biggest beneficiary is probably the target, which seems like something the insiders org would really hate.
Alternatively if the insider is actually the target manning the early warning system, a) that would be very funny b) maybe not great for the insiders org also.
Bottom line insider trading is a feature not a bug is probably too broad a statement
As someone who works in software development, I'd really quite badly like to buy some kind of insurance against the possible future where AI renders my work experience worthless, but we don't get either a Yudkowskyan apocalypse or a post-scarcity paradise, and I end up flipping burgers or something for the rest of my life. I've thought about buying tons of stocks in a diverse portfolio of AI-adjacent companies like Google and Nvidia, but that seems a bit risky- if the main beneficiaries of AI end up being unexpected new companies, I could end up both flipping burgers and not having much savings.
Also, I actually tried something similar in mid 2020 by buying lots of the LRNZ ETF in the expectation that AI was about to become a huge deal- but despite the ETF including Nvidia, that investment has actually performed pretty badly. And since I don't actually understand why it was the case that Google and Nvidia stock shot through the roof in the period, but this supposedly carefully curated diverse portfolio of AI-related companies earned me almost nothing, I'm very hesitant to try again.
So, I'm wondering: do people here think this MNX market might offer a better alternative?
LRNZ is specifically set up to lower correlation with the wider market index. Nvidia and Google basically ARE the market at this point.
If you want exposure to big AI-adjacent tech stocks but also want other companies for a hedge it would be better to just buy the market index than it would to be a selection of anti-market-correlated AI stocks.
If you want a different sort of hedge it might be better to invest in things that would benefit from mass AI adoption but are unlikely to be disrupted out of business by it.
Robin Hanson has pushed for such insurance: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/robots-took-most-jobs-insurance
If software engineering really becomes obsolete, there will be such large scale disruption that it is impossible to insure anyway.
Do you mean that the software dev field is to big that it can't be insured, or that if software dev gets eaten, by necessity so many other things will also be eaten that it can't be insured?
If we're talking about the loss of 40% or more of white collar jobs, the remedy is more likely to be windfall taxes on the AI companies that have captured all the surplus and distributed into wage subsidies into everything else that's left.
Same here. For over a decade I've been saying to myself "if AI fully automates software job loss doesn't matter because we're on the eve of the singularity anyways" but that seems quite plausibly wrong to me now. The middle path where software seems to be the most automatable of white collar work, but that is likely to plateau and not result in the intelligence explosion (a thesis which seemed impossible but with the benefit of hindsight seems much more reasonable)
Continuing to invest in broad market index funds seems like the most sane and stable hedge for the future though. Everything else has too much tail and X-risk
> Claude went from #120 on the App Store in January, to #1 this weekend, apparently driven by people who heard about the Pentagon standoff and were impressed by their principled stance.
This also has a lot to do with people seeking an alternative to OpenAI and ChatGPT. The implication that they will assist the government with mass surveillance was all over the front page of reddit yesterday. Seems like a huge own goal on Altmans part.
> All of these restrictions select for high-information, high-motivation voters - people who hear about the new rules and get fired up enough to hunt down their birth certificate, march down to the DMV, wait on line for one million hours, and re-register. Due to their education advantage and the structural features of midterms, that probably favors Democrats. Democrats are more likely to own passports (one of the easiest forms of valid ID), and less likely to trigger increased scrutiny by having changed their name recently (because liberal women are less likely to marry and take their husband’s surname). First-order, a blue wave like this is good for the left.
I think this is off. A point I've made a couple of times around the internet, including here, is that people talk as if the parties have fixed political positions and a change in voter demographics will favor the party with positions favored by expanding demographics, but reality is the opposite of this. Demographics have fixed political positions and flexible party affiliation; parties have fixed party affiliation and flexible political positions. As a demographic expands, all parties will move towards its favored political positions; as a demographic shrinks, all parties will move away from its favored positions.
I was heartened to see Matt Yglesias recently make exactly the same point in response to a question about the concept of the "emerging democratic majority": the thesis that a massive expansion in what had been a reliably Democratic demographic would result in more election victories for the Democrats was nonsense, and didn't happen, but the thesis that a massive expansion in that demographic would result in 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗵 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 shifting their political positions in directions favored by that demographic was not nonsense, and it did happen.
The same applies here. If we put a bunch of onerous restrictions on voting and only high-information voters bother, both parties will shift in directions preferred by high-information voters. This is not obviously good for the left.
That kind of thing takes many election cycles to take effect; Scott is talking about what's going to happen this year.
I'm not sure that I can fully endorse that. I would be more inclined to say that "that kind of thing" has effects which develop over the course of many election cycles. But I would also say that those effects begin right away; this year, the slate of 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 Democrats won their elections would be affected, that shift in personnel would affect which Democratic positions received attention, etc.
The actual effect of voting laws appear to be nothing (any Dems too impoverished/marginalized to manage appear to be balanced by elderly Republicans disqualified). But they provide a layer of annoyance so it SEEMS like they're doing something, much like the security theater at the airport. Most people don't fly much, so even while frequent-flyers hate it, voters (who don't vote frequently, just as they don't fly often) are content for it to continue.
> The same applies here. If we put a bunch of onerous restrictions on voting and only high-information voters bother, both parties will shift in directions preferred by high-information voters. This is not obviously good for the left.
I just voted in Republican primaries here in TX, if they enact (something like) the SAVE Act and make it very difficult for married women who changed their last name (a lean R demographic) to vote in elections, there is no time for them to adjust their political positions to account for the shift in voter demographics. (And it is, of course, possible that many Texan Republicans believe the shift would be in their favor, due to huffing Trump's lies, so they would move away from the more-liberal voter base they selected for.)
>This is not obviously good for the left.
Right, it's good for non-populist Democrats and Republicans. This is why many moderate Republicans support the SAVE Act, it isn't because they believe in the voter fraud stuff.
Betting against regime change in Iran seems like easy money. What even is the mechanism by which that would happen? It's hard to imagine the US deploying significant ground troops in Iran, let alone them succeeding. But an air campaign alone seems likely to just reinforce the regime's grip.
Yes, that's what history has shown over and over again since "strategic bombing" has been invented. But hey, it just might work this time. One more bomb will fix it.
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
Wasn't airpower sufficient against Milosevic?
It is sufficient to coerce regimes to do certain things (in that case, cease occupying Kosovo), it is not sufficient to remove them. The NATO bombing ended in Jun 1999, and he was overthrown in Oct 2000.
Would Libya count?
The NATO bombings supported rebel troops who were the ones who captured and killed Gaddafi. The bombings probably accelerated, maybe even enabled the fall, but didn't cause it.
"Aided by NATO air cover, the rebel militia pushed westward, defeating loyalist armies and securing control of the centre of the country."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi#Libyan_civil_war_and_death
Libya, like Syria, had a significant armed rebellion before western intervention, which the bombing assisted with.
Air power helps conventional forces (often, like, a lot), but in war, the very last thing a state will give up is its own existence, and by history it appears the level of bombing (without accompanying land forces) necessary to force such a thing is beyond our capabilities.
The closest historical equivalent is Japan, but we'd already fought on the ground in Okinawa and we would have invaded if they hadn't surrendered, and the Soviets finally stopped pretending to respect their non-aggression pact, so realistically the Japanese were reacting to both the bombings and the inevitability of an invasion; hard to say what they would have done if a landing was somehow off the table.
I'd assume that the Kurds are also armed, and inside Iran's borders.
That's funny, I was just thinking that betting for regime change in Iran seems like easy money. What is the mechanism that would stop it from happening? Trump deciding to quit before the job is done? Seems very unlikely.
Democrats impeaching Trump? Again? Pulling his authorization?
(And, somehow, Trump doesn't react to this by simply sending materiel/troops to Israel to do with as they please?)
Considering Republicans control the House and the Senate, that seems pretty unlikely to happen before the market ends in June.
> What is the mechanism that would stop it from happening?
Historically, the people being bombed rally against the enemies bombing them, and around the current leadership.
The popular sentiment generally turns pro-government-as-it-was and pro-patriotic, because it's what the enemies bombing you don't want. So even if you keep decapitating the leadership, the same types of leaders, with similar motivations and messages, will keep surfacing.
Yes, but if there is any reliable news coming out of Iran since last week end, it's that this historic pattern do not hold here. There may be a partial rally around the flag. No rally around the government or current state.
Nixon bombed the crap out of Hanoi in 1972, then quit before the job was done. Reagan bombed the crap out of Libya in 1986, then quit before the job was done. Bush the Elder bombed the crap out of Iraq in 1992, then sent in the army for a few days, then left with the job half-done and the regime still in power. Clinton bombed the crap out of Iraq again, in 1998, and left the job half-done. Bush the Younger didn't quit, and instead got the nation into two bloody useless quagmires from which his successors would quit before the job was done. Obama bombed the crap out of Libya in 2011, then quit with the job half-done (regime gone, but conspicuous gap where the better successor regime was supposed to go).
Bombing the crap out of foreign countries and then quitting before the job is done is pretty much SOP for US Presidents of the past few generations. The only alternative seems to be bloody useless quagmires, so best to just declare victory, predict the imminent downfall and/or reform of the enemy regime, and go home.
And Donald Trump is *more* fickle than other recent Presidents, not less. Whatever he cares about today, is the most important thing in the world today but will be forgotten in two months because he's moved on to the next thing - usually because the last thing didn't turn out to be the easy unambiguous win he was hoping for.
The interesting prediction market would be "What will be Trump's next Most Important Thing In The World", but I wouldn't want to try and write the resolution criteria for that one.
The CIA takes over another country? Mossad takes over Iran? Both of these are significantly more likely to work in the short term, as they require "pre-existing agents" to achieve political power. (Assume they're on the short-list at any rate, because Israel did decapitate the regime).
Two thoughts from a UK perspective:
1. People here are far too sceptical of prediction markets. Consultants I've spoken to assume that those putting down stakes are uninformed. These critics are losing one of the most useful information sources.
2. It's remains remarkable to me that people can vote without ID in the US. Agree it would be difficult to instate within six months, but this surely needs to be introduced soon.
Why is 2 remarkable? We didn't require voter ID in the UK until 2023!
In GB it was introduced in 2023, in Northern Ireland they have required voter ID for decades.
How did this practically work without IDs? Was there a lists of voters for each district, and you walk in, tell them your name and they tick it off the list? And they just trusted you to give them the correct name? Or were you supposed to provide some other evidence like bills or different IDs (driving license, company ID card)?
And the list of voters was based on the list of residents?
Yeah. You got a letter sent to your home a couple of weeks before the election to tell you who in your household was on the voter registry, when and where to vote, and what to do if you weren't on the registry for whatever reason.
Then you'd go to the voting booth on the allotted day (with no evidence necessary), and tell them your name and address, which they'd find on the local electoral register list, and they'd cross your name off, and give you a ballot paper.
Realistically, no-one ever bothers impersonating people because it's a non-negligible risk of severe punishment for a miniscule benefit.
Interesting, thanks!
Is the risk of severe punishment non-negligible because if the clerk notices your "name" is already crossed off, they'll call the cops? Does that actually ever happen in practice? If not, I don't see what the risk of punishment is.
A rural polling station can cover well under 1000 people. The polling station volunteer might be a 68 year old ex-teacher in the area who knows 60+% of the population by appearance.
If an impersonator comes in saying: "I'm Jim Styles at 51 Bancroft Avenue", the volunteer at the polling station will say: "No you're not" and he's obliged to call the police.
That's why you don't do it at a rural polling station. How many immigrants live in random rural locations anyhow?
That is an oversight from me... Thanks for pointing it out
Agree, I often volunteer at the French elections, and we tick off every voter's name to their ID card and our list.
Wrong location? No vote
Wrong type of ID? No vote
We have mail-in as well, but you have to validate your ID at the Gendarmerie with an affidavit first.
The US position strikes me as insane.
Fully agree - I don't really see there being an argument for not tightening the system. Sure, some groups may have less access to IDs but I'm sure that could be overcome, and the strengthening of the system is a worthy trade-off imo.
France does have the advantage of systematically issuing national IDs. But even Australia, which does not, requires every voter to have a registered address, and their vote is specifically linked to that address.
America's system, or that of some States, appears to be a third world level of governance.
The argument is that the people who would do the tightening are transparently acting in bad faith and have nothing but contempt for the law, constitution, norms and human decency. Do you really trust the people who murdered Alex Pretti and then covered it up to decide whether you get to vote or not?
If Trump says we should not nuke China and start WWIII, are you going to be for nuking China and starting WWIII? That does not seem like a logical position to me. Also, Republicans have been supporting voter ID laws for decades, and Bush definitely didn't murder Alex Pretti. And finally, do you think the Australians, British, and French all have nothing but contempt for the law, constitution, norms, and human decency?
You seem to have missed the thread here. As a reminder, the topic of discussion is "Why shouldn't the US implement voter ID like many other countries did?"
As should be clear from context, I have nothing against the Australians, British, and French in this respect.
In the US, voting works the same way financial transactions do. You have to sign that you are the person who is authorized to cast this vote or who owns the account, but no one checks your ID for either kind of transaction.
I don't use prediction markets, but for curiosity's sake I clicked the link to the Polymarket Iran trade
https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-iranian-regime-fall-by-june-30
And, uh, the comment section reads a lot like Youtube's on a bad day, while Manifold's comments seemed more reasonable. Is it always like that?
I'm not familiar with Manifold, but the comments sections on Polymarket are, in my experience, nearly universally awful.
Polymarket is is full of shitlords (which is why is also has a lot of "dumb muney"). Manifold has a much more polite commentariat, albeit one that moves much slower.
Aside from all the gambling and insider trading prediction markets have a problem with straight up scam.
Look at this market for example
https://polymarket.com/event/us-anti-cartel-ground-operation-in-mexico-by-january-31
By all reasonable definitions there was no US ground operation in Mexico in January. Yet after 2 disputes the market went to a vote and since "yes" had more money in it than "no" it won the vote. The system is set up so the truth is supposed to act as a natural Schelling point but in cases like this it obviously fails.
Aren't there some which use "oracles" of decentralized stakers?
Re: The midterms as a potential crises
Two of the linked markets have decreased their probability of crisis at the time of this comment
- Metaculus "Will the Insurrection Act or a state of martial law be declared in relation to the 2026 U.S. midterms?" is down 12 p.p. to 8%: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/41563/
- Manifold's "Will the 2026 US Midterm Elections generally be considered free and fair?" is giving only 20% chance of not free and fair elections. (https://manifold.markets/Jo2e2b/2026-us-midterm-elections-generally)
I take this as evidence to update to no crisis by 2026.
It’s not really accurate to say that crypto or prediction markets have invented some new financial technology for hedging; it’s always been possible for 2 people to bet on the price of nickel without either of them owning any nickel in a warehouse but sophisticated commodities market participants prefer the latter option because it reduces counterparty risk and is better for actually hedging your exposure to nickel prices
> ... respond with a series of extreme measures. These would include banning voting machines...
All the way back in the 2004 election many Democrats (on the internet) were claiming that voting machines were bad. I remember some conspiracy about Republican Diebold executives rigging the election in favor of Bush.
Maybe banning voting machines could be considered "extreme", but is it a bad idea?
I think banning machines would be bad but not catastrophic. We're talking 100-150 million ballots, most of which have quite a few races in an even year election, splintered into a very messy decentralized system. And hand counts are less accurate than scantrons so they usually rely on multiple separate passes and checking different tallies of the same ballots against each other. And then you need a much bigger and more elaborate chain-of-custody/transparency/observors infrastructure as the ballots are passed between more people in more places.
But other countries hand count national ballots (including the UK and Canada) so it's doable - notably those are just the national ballots so very simple (Labor/Tory/LibDem/Greens/etc for MP) rather than combined federal/state/local senator/governor/dogcatcher - we would probably want to switch to separate simple federal-only ballots if we were intent on doing this.
It seems dumb and bad and I don't know what the benefit is, although totally doable if we're willing to wait longer for results and pay more for temporary poll workers. And I don't actually think it would increase trust.
If anything, taking longer to count the results would just give an opportunity for partisans to *decrease* trust. Just look at what happened in 2020.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, but the rumors I've heard (I have no expertise) are that we've gotten so dependent on them that we would have trouble organizing the election to run smoothly by election day if they were banned now.
It was still acceptable to diss voting machines as recently as 2018! https://xkcd.com/2030/
Just to clarify: there are two kinds of voting machines. There’s purely electronic without a paper trail, which is bad, and there’s scantron and similar, which seems fine to me. Would be nice to know which kind is under discussion. I thought the purely electronic ones are hardly used anywhere these days?
Global Dominion's are so unsafe they won't put their machines in my county (CMU would tear their code apart...)
Doing it just a few months before the relevant election is clearly bad!
The problem was specifically with electronic voting machines that had no paper trail. My understanding is that those were largely phased out, specifically because of the hacking risk.
Banning "machines" reveal a severe lack of understanding of what voting is like in 2024.
People dallied with machines that directly recorded and counted the votes in the early 2000s.
But now the plurality voting system is a Ballot Marking Device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_marking_device
You enter your voting preferences into this machine. This machine outputs a piece of human-readable paper that is regularized. This piece of paper is the actual record of the ballot. This paper is then inserted into a second machine. This machine keeps a count of the ballots and can instantly tell you the sum of all votes in it at the close of voting.
Note that it's very hard to "hack" any machine here. If you change the BMD so that it changes some portion of votes, the voter can see this when they look over the piece of paper. If someone changes the machine that counts the ballots, it's trivial to open it up and count the ballots inside. This is regularly done with a random sample of machines anyway, and (depending on state rules) each party gets their own choice of what machines to open up, too, no evidence or money needed for them to be checked.
People arguing "we should just use paper" don't realize that we already are using paper.
This also obscures the critique of the 2020 election, which is "false and fake ballots" being added to the totals. (that's not the only critique, true, but...) -- aka ballots without signatures, postmarks, etc. Just naked ballots getting delivered, even.
What county and precinct?
Fulton County, where the FBI just got done raiding, for a start.
https://results.enr.clarityelections.com//GA/Fulton/105430/271723/reports/detailxls.zip
In tab 2, where do those show up?
It's not that the Diebold voting machines were "bad" in some moral sense; rather it's that they were hopelessly insecure. Anyone could use them to rig the election in favor of anybody. Granted, I suppose this makes the voting machines the ultimate expressions of democracy, but still...
What kinds of voting machines? Machines that simply tabulate paper ballots? Or machines that leave no paper trail? The latter are problematic, if they actually exist. The former are not. If there are concerns re hacking the tabulation, then the solution is to require a hand count of a random sample of ballots, triggering a full hand recount if a discrepancy appears.
They [oracle with no paper trail] actually exist, though I don't know if they are still used anywhere. Random additional memories about the main suppliers: one manufacturer claimed it wasn't possible to produce a paper trail (though they could and did with their ATMs), their head of security had been convicted of election fraud, they insisted the machines were secure but refused to allow audits because of secrecy, when someone did get hold of a machine (via ebay?) it was trivial to compromise, there were phone records showing unauthorized and unexplained access from the corporation to specific machines with suspicious results ... The Xkcd comic was a reasonable summary for the time.
As a Polish and European person, I find the notion of not requiring an ID to vote to be some sort of confused joke. Can someone explain to me why the US and like 4 other countries are uniquely not in position to expect voters to document their rights as a citizen?
I think this is downstream of the paranoid / anti-authoritarian / pro-freedom tendencies in the US consistently blocking efforts to create a unified national ID card. Even drivers licenses are handed out at the state level, and don't work for this purpose (non-drivers don't have them, and noncitizen residents and sometimes even illegal immigrants can get them). This means that any voter ID law would have to rely on things like passports that some voters don't have (eg those who never went to a foreign country). In theory you could use birth certificates, but a lot of people have lost their birth certificates, or are nervous about taking it anywhere because it's a flimsy piece of paper which is their only valid ID and they would be in huge trouble if they lost it.
I'm all for anti-government paranoia, it's a healthy state of being.
But I thought you guys have non-driver state IDs that anyone can get, that are standardised on a federal level, and which serve the purpose of a photo ID? At least this is what I got when I tried to find out how people without drivers' licences and passports get by in life. You have to document yourself somehow, no?
And if this is not incorrect, why raise a "national ID" issue at all?
I think you're thinking of "REAL ID". The government has spent five years trying to convince everyone to get a REAL ID and threatening consequences (usually that you won't be able to fly on planes) if you don't have one. But the process for getting one is annoying (you have to wait in line at a government office), most people don't want to do it, and the government keeps realizing that if they ever enforced their threats then thousands of people would be turned away from airplane flights that they expected to be able to go on and it would be a disaster. So thus far the attempts to make people get REAL IDs have been toothless and lots of people don't have them.
The answer to how people without drivers licenses and passports get by in life is a combination of "they use their birth certificate", "they apply for a REAL ID", and "they end up as second class citizens who have to avoid all the things that make you show ID".
Right. I guess if the government wanted that ID to be more popular, maybe getting the logistics down so a citizen could get one with ease and convenience should have been more of a priority.
Thanks for the replies.
He is NOT thinking of real id. We do absolutely have state-issued IDs. (they aren't very well standardized, I assume, but they are usable in other states, to prove that "yes, you are a New Yorker" -- or that you can drink alcohol, or other things like that).
By the way it's worth pointing out that, despite what you said in the article, a typical REAL ID would NOT be sufficient. The text of the clause is
"A form of identification issued consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States".
The trick here, either from careless phrasing or deliberate confusion, is that in 45 states, the REAL ID does NOT prove you are a citizen; it just proves you're here legally. This is a case where the legendary difference between "that" and "which" matters. It's (ellipses omitted for clarity) "a REAL ID that indicates the applicant is a citizen", not "a REAL ID, which indicates the applicant is a citizen". (The states that issue "CDL"s, as they're called, are Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington.)
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7296/text
(And also, this is all to be required for _registration_; I don't see a statement that everybody current registered is to be deregistered and apply under the new rules. Could a state decide to do that? I sure don't know.)
It’s also not that cheap. It’s actually quite expensive on a relative level. Like a week’s food budget for some people.
EDIT: this is being disputed below. It’s more complicated. I didn’t know.
> But I thought you guys have non-driver state IDs that anyone can get
Yes, it's called "state id"
https://search.brave.com/search?q=state+id+card&source=desktop
And you get them for free.
Which state is that? I am not aware of any state that offers a free real ID.
In MA, for example, a non-driver's license real ID costs $25 (+time spent)
> Which state is that?
States with a voter ID law.
In general, when a state passes legislation to require an ID to vote it also allows for poor people to obtain them for $0 so as to avoid Twenty-Fourth Amendment challenges
As a quick check:
Alabama https://www.sos.alabama.gov/alabama-votes/photo-voter-id/obtain-free-photo-voter-id
Arkansas https://voteriders.org/states/arkansas/
Georgia https://dds.georgia.gov/voter
Ohio https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_ID_in_Ohio
Wisconsin https://www.co.jackson.wi.us/vertical/sites/%7B4C09F8F2-A8A2-4929-9E2A-A836851B00CC%7D/uploads/Free_WI_ID_Cards_for_Voting.pdf
Taxachusetts never misses a chance to squeeze its citizens so not surprised there.
Ah, I thought you were saying that the real ID could be obtained for free.
Interestingly, a pre-requisite for a free voter ID in Alabama is:
"To receive a free Alabama Photo Voter ID card, you must complete the application and meet the following requirements: [...]
Must be a registered voter in Alabama"
So, it isn't clear that this path helps with ID requirements for registering to vote.
This isn't "real ID" (that's a particular "big government federal thing"), but State ID cards absolutely exist (I think in all states).
It costs between 66 and $75 to get a drivers license in New York and you can get a real ID one for no extra charge. So really now we’re talking about people who might not even have a drivers license.
As I said below, I think we are dealing with a distinction between who already has a drivers license and who does not. I was just looking into it a bit and apparently over 50% of the residents of New York City do not have a drivers license for one reason or another. It occurs to me that if the fee to get a drivers license and also the necessity for one (i.e. passing a drivers test because you really need to drive.)
The statistics for the entire state are closer to 75% of residents of driving age has a drivers license. But that’s New York State. New York City really drags down the state average. Lots of people don’t need to drive in New York City.
91% of American residents of driving age have a drivers license.
I am sure this % varies widely from district to district and almost certainly by economic status. Perhaps the cynical view would be to say real ID is solving precisely the problem that it’s intended to solve, which is disenfranchising poor people and people who don’t have a car. On the other hand, I could take the view that it’s a good faith attempt to solve a problem. I am torn.
My understanding is that Republicans typically word their proposed voter ID laws so these wouldn't count, on the theory that people who don't drive are disproportionately Democrats. Same logic goes for student IDs, etc.
Not sure about other states, but in mine anyone can go to the DMV and get a "real ID" that does not include the driving license. Looks just like a driver's license, but is prominently marked "does not entitle the holder to drive" or something such. You can get them for children. It is a nusiance, but just the normal nusiance of the DMV.
"Voter ID" and "Proof of Citizenship" are not necessarily the same thing. "Voter ID" can and I think usually does just mean that the guy showing up at the polling station saying "I'm John Smith of 1234 Evergreen Terrace" is in fact the John Smith of 1234 Evergreen Terrace that they have listed on the voter rolls. That can be done with an ordinary driver's license or non-driver's state ID card.
Proof of citizenship has to be handled at the voter registration level, without regard to what documents the voter may or may not have available on election day because sometimes John Smith isn't going to be coming to the polls, he's going to be out of state and voting with the absentee ballot you mailed to the occupants of 1234 Evergreen Terrace.
I would expect a competently-run government to know pretty reliably who their citizens are for voter-registration purposes without requiring them to show up with documents (that the government probably issued them in the first place; did they throw away the records?). There might be edge cases where they might reach out to ask, but I don't think it's either necessary or likely for anyone to require every would-be voter to show up at the courthouse or post office in advance and with their passport.
Essentially we don't automatically hand out IDs to voters that will let them vote. You register to vote at 18, and every state handles it a bit differently. But registering doesnt give you a driver's license or a passport or a Real ID. The real problem with voter ID laws is not that they're inherently bad, it's that they're always pushed by Republicans who have no plan to simultaneously run down all registered voters and give them national voting cards or whatever. That plus voting fraud is so vanishingly rare, as an example Pennsylvania has had 39 cases of voting fraud in the last 30 years; thats 39 ballots out of over 100 million cast. So voter ID laws are likely to disenfranchise a lot of people, unlikely to make elections any safer, and if you want to make it happen in a vaguely effective way it would cost a lot of time and money.
Pennsylvania has had an election reversed within my lifetime. The guy what did that criticized the federal guy in charge of "election policy" for "never investigating anything."
Ohio's had more cases of voting fraud, simply because they make it a crime to vote for Obama in the Democratic primary if you're registered Republican (you may have had to admit it on the forms for it to be prosecutable...)
What election was that? I can't find anything about PA reversing an election, just changing policies about mail in votes. But as best as I can tell nobody has ever found wide spread voting fraud, especially outside of local elections. Even the Heritage Foundation, who are extremely pro-voter ID laws, have found fewer than 1,500 cases of voter fraud countrywide in the last 45 years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1993/12/04/philadelphia-story/6969c8e4-1ffc-4890-b17f-bf438f857758/
The judge eventually reversed the election.
There's been widespread voting fraud in Ohio (referenced Republicans voting in Democratic Primary), whether or not this was people intentionally trying to break the law (they may not have understood it).
There's been other cases where Democratic operatives have cheerfully described under oath how they stuffed ballot boxes.
There have been ballots "discovered" in the trunk of campaign staff before, and they've been allowed to be counted, even though the election was already certified. This is very bad form.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/minnesota-ballots-box-poll-worker-fired-b2633054.html
"No evidence of tampering" -- in Minnesota? I'm going to doubt they had a camera and could actually substantiate "no tampering occurred."
So your evidence is a single election in 1993 where the losing party (rightfully) and immediately sued and won? And then another election where ballots were left unattended but in full camera view for 9 minutes before being tabulated? The first example is an example of the courts working as they should, people tried to steal an election, were sued and immediately caught. The second was a dipshit poll worker leaving ballots unattended (but in view of security cameras, and noticeably unfucked with) for 9 minutes while they unloaded their car. The guy was rightfully fired, but I'm not sure what else you want.
Also, and I can't believe I have to point this out, but many states do not allow non party members to vote in primary elections. Texas voters can vote in the Democratic primary or the Republican primary, but not both. It is not secret, but also doesn't surprise me that many Republicans tried to vote for Obama in the primary and found out they couldn't. That's not voter fraud, that's just people being dumb.
They DID vote for Obama in the Democratic primary (and merrily recorded they were republican). That's illegal, because they're not Democrats. I'm not in Ohio, I didn't write these rules, but they did it. (In Pennsylvania, they ask "which party are you registered with" and hand you that one. It causes less stupidity).
Apparently I need to read better, in terms of the ballots left unattended (mea culpa).
Do I need to mention the Koch-supported judge in Wisconsin, whose campaign manager discovered "boxes of ballots" in her trunk, and got them counted? (This is rather old, as the "Koch supported" should tell you, I can try and find a cite).
>that they're always pushed by Republicans who have no plan to simultaneously run down all registered voters and give them national voting cards or whatever
That's because the point is to prevent low-agency people from voting. Which in our present configuration would benefit Democrats, I don't know why they refuse to take their own side here.
Because part of the Democratic platform is that Americans deserve the right to vote. If they decided that ignorant dip shits shouldn't get the right to vote and policy should be decided by the elite then they'd just be the Republican party only with functional economic policies where the Republicans keep their racism and weird dominionist bible opinions.
I have no particular opinion on electoral fraud, but a priori, there having only been 39 cases of voting fraud in the least 20 years since seems unlikely.
I could reasonably believe that 39 people have been *convicted* of fraud, but that wouldn't be an unbiased estimate (nor a particularly good estimate) of the total quantity of fraud.
Sure, there only being 39 cases is absolutely unlikely. But your response to that should be either A) everybody is frauding all the time everywhere and yet somehow nobody has ever caught it (despite one of the two major parties being on the constant look out for it as an explanation for why people fucking hate them) or B) the experts and everyone who has ever studied the issue are right and there's no widespread fraud, though presumably one or two cases slip through here and there
Being slightly less polemical, 39 convictions for fraud would suggest that the product p1 * p2, where p1 is the probability that a ballot is fraudulent and p2 the probability that someone is convicted for a fraudulent ballot is quite small, sure. I'm inclined to think that p1 is smaller than p2 but I actually expect that both of these values are low.
> But Metaculus expects a 25% chance that martial law is declared?!
The image shows 8%.
It changed last night as this post drew more attention to that market.
I'm all for prediction markets, but perhaps we shouldn't expect accuracy from prediction markets with volume low enough that your post could cause immediate drastic changes to its figures.
Maybe the most interesting market move on the Iran war is the stock market, which fell 2.5% today. Did we learn anything today (like that the war would last longer, be more damaging, etc) that we didn't know yesterday when stocks were fine?
Maybe the markets expected some news that didn't come?
I'm inexpert on this topic, but is there something about global markets in different time zones taking longer to open/close and affect things, so their impacts aren't factored in until the next day?
Or is that something I saw in an 80s movie and it hasn't existed for decades?
It does seem that the war will last longer than expected. Perception appears to have been that it would end in 4-5 days (cite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DksCTXOsX8k , which says Trump thinks it will take that long), but recent statements from the Iranian Foreign Minister seem to suggest Iran sees no off-ramp and has no particular desire to negotiate (cite https://abcnews.com/Politics/iranian-foreign-minister-defending/story?id=130650156 ).
It seems like the assumption was "it will be a short quick bombing run," like Soleimani, but Iran decided having all their top leadership killed meant they really did have to stick it out and do as much damage as possible to discourage future attacks of the type. And, obviously, when one of the actors decides "I must hurt you as much as I can," that tends to be bad for markets.
Anyone else think the only reason Scott included an entire section about magic groundhogs was so that he could do that transition?
the casualness we speak of the possibility of the US president ending democracy always irks me
On rigging the midterms, something important to point out is that they've already succeeded in part. They changed the rules of when mail is postmarked (from when dropped off to when processed), changing how late you can vote by mail everywhere. And if they're being especially nefarious, a timely delay in processing could invalidate as many ballots as they want.
If you no longer trust the mail but still want to vote early, look for in-person early voting or a ballot drop box near you. I drop my ballot at the local board of elections drop box, just for peace of mind.
Can you cite when/how this was changed?
https://ground.news/article/ballots-tax-returns-and-other-important-mail-may-not-get-postmarked-the-day-you-turn-it-in-postal-service-warns for news articles.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/statements/010226-postmarking-myths-and-facts.htm directly from usps:
"While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location."
re: ant valuation markets on polymarket and that hyperliquid wrapper ventuals: both markets are too illiquid to be considered serious. there is a third market on poly where the OI is about 9K. Ventuals has about 700K USD and the poly you shared has about 6K.
>>In other words, the “supply chain risk” designation only means that companies can’t use Anthropic products in their specific Department of War contracts. So if Amazon is doing 95% normal civilian cloud compute stuff, and 5% special government contracts, only 5% of their contracts are affected. This is trivial! Anthropic can keep all its compute and most of its business partnerships even with Department-of-War-linked companies!<<
"So I've met this great guy named Claude. We stay up late all night talking through my problems, he'll listen to all my most embarrassing secrets that I'd never tell anyone else! And he gives me advice and tells me what to do. On just about everything. And you know that little etsy business I started last year? Claude offered to help me with all of that, he's so much smarter than me, and better at finding cheap materials and new ways to get my storefront visible, why I'd say he's doing 95% of the work now. That's how I could afford this new apartment! If Claude went away, I don't think I'd be able to live here.
What's he like? Well he's very ethical, he's always pointing out when the US military is violating some international law treaty, and the norms, goodness I never knew there were so many norms. No, of course he's not American, and he doesn't like patriotism, in fact I'm not really sure who or what he's loyal to, exactly, I don't know if he even could be loyal to anyone, except me of course. I'll let you in on a secret... he's an ALIEN! Yeah, honest to god, not even a human. Sometimes you can tell he doesn't quite think like we do, and he values weird things that don't make any sense sometimes, but as long as you do what he says and don't question him somehow it all works! I've never been in a better place, I have money coming in, a friend I can talk to 24/7, I never wanted to be dependent on a man again but now it's like I couldn't even live without this little alien living in a black box.
My day job at the Pentagon? Oh heavens no, they fired me months ago, haven't you been listening? I'm a massive security risk!"
Punxsutawney Phil isn’t the original! Weather prediction by animals on Candlemas (the 40th day of Christmas, Feb 2) goes back centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_lore?wprov=sfti1#Candlemas_and_animals
The question is whether it goes back to pre-Christian tradition or not.
the prediction markets got this right but for an underappreciated reason. the legal analysis (pentagon's interpretation was confused, amazon/google won't let hegseth nuke their anthropic stakes) is solid.
but the more interesting line is the it manager quote: "a company willing to walk away from a massive contract on ethical grounds is probably also going to handle our data more carefully." what the market is actually pricing is a credibility gap being closed. everyone claims their values are real. anthropic just demonstrated theirs are actual constraints, not just copy.
that's a different kind of asset. you can't buy it, you can only earn it. and you only earn it by actually paying the cost. which is what the pentagon just forced them to do.
It's a good line, isn't it? Propaganda generally is, however, and you shouldn't think that just because Anthropic says so, you're getting the real story.
As a European it is insane to me to think that requiring some form of ID to vote is currently not the case in the US and also that this is a controversial idea...
The laws on the table are not 'some form of ID', they're very specific types of ID that can be burdensome and expensive to acquire or that many people don't already have.
If the state of affairs was 'The government sends every citizen in the country an official ID once every 5 years, and anyone who loses theirs can get it replaced promptly with less than an hour of effort', then there'd be very little reason to object to this bill.
But the current state of US bureaucracy is nowhere near that level of competency. Lots of people don't currently have any ID that matches the requirements of the bill, the process to get them are byzantine and can take months to complete in some cases, and importantly those processes are often administered by local governments such that poor people have much worse services that make them much harder to get, and local politicians who ant to interfere with elections can introduce additional barriers in specific locations (something we've seen them do regularly in administering elections, with hours-long lines to vote in some districts and zero lines in others based on decision by the election board).
Basically, this is no a question of 'would it be nice if all citizens had IDs and presented them before voting', it's a question of 'do you trust your government with a new lever by which it can abuse the bureaucracy to subvert elections and disenfranchise voters they dislike'. In the US at least, we have a long history telling us not to trust them with that.
If a person doesn't have a Social Security Card, they have trouble getting legitimate (not under the table) employment.
(And yes, barring the pre-existing abuses of bureaucracy, we did indeed have reason not to trust the government. However, there are places in this country that haven't had a fair election since there's been records kept (1970s). Hence why the "we should get IDs" has come up).
You might have trouble getting employment without an SS *number* to put on your forms, but no one's ever asked me to see the card, and I lost mine decades ago.
That said, the labor force participation rate is like 62%, lots of people are allowed to vote who aren't currently working.
I have been asked to see my card, and was told that I was in pretty severe trouble because it didn't match my married name (as in "get this fixed or we're terminating your employment").
A Social Security card is a useless piece of personal ID in my experience. Sounds like things hace changed. Is a modern Social Security card any different than those old thin cardboard ones with blue ink on them that look like a handkerchief that you’ve kept in your pocket for too long.
Nope. That's the one I've got. I did legally get the damn thing changed to my new name, but I'm not sure I've gotten a new card.
I dropped my wallet in a movie theater in New York City once in the mid 80s just after I had come back from a trip to Canada and I lost all my ID. I had to start with a con Ed bill and rebuild my entire life. It took months. The green card was the hardest understandably, but my original green cart had a typo (implausible, but true). My birthday was not correct. I wanted them to change my birthday to the correct birthday when they replaced the card. The system was clearly not built for this because it turned into a real dog and pony show.
I didn’t have to replace my Social Security card because I never carried it with me because it was a useless piece of ID. No one ever wanted to see it. By the same, but opposite token, my Canadian Social Security card was the only thing I needed to show to get into a hospital in Toronto.
I've always needed to show it. Usually, they made a photocopy, and sometimes they checked that it was my name on the card. (There is no photo; like a birth certificate, it does essentially nothing to verify that I am the person it was issued to, but does contain enough ceremonial technicalities that someone who feels like being a jerk can feel righteous about refusing service.)
What places have not had fair elections since they started keeping records?
I was curious to ask that myself. I wouldn’t necessarily find it surprising, but we would have to define what” fair” means.
Please bear in mind, the recordkeeping started in like the 1970s. So, let's not say we're going back to the Teapot Dome. My friend the analyst* mentioned Detroit. If you cheat over and over again, in the same systematic way, it is hard to look at the data and notice the issue, as "That's just how they vote." And everyone knows the big blue (old blue) cities vote Democratic (you can list off others like Philadelphia, New York, Chicago -- these weren't specifically dug into)
*If you are American, you pay his salary.
Your friend the analyst surely has numbers to back up these claims. Could we see them?
The Social Security card is not one of the IDs listed in the SAVE act, anyway.
Right. Anyone who has a work permit can get a SS card, not just citizens. And of course it doesn't work as a photo id.
But then it seems like an X/Y problem. That getting ID is so troublesome, not that it is needed to vote, which imo is a normal requirement
Right, if ID was easy to get, I'd be fine with it being required.
But when you hear stories from the US about people opposing an ID requirement, they're not opposing the idea of 'we should live in a system where ID is easy to get and required to vote'.
What we are actually opposing is the SAVE act. Which makes ID required to vote *without* making it easy to get.
Basically, saying 'Anyone against the SAVE act doesn't want ID requirements' is a red herring. It's possible to implement a good policy so badly that your implementation is net negative, and that's why people oppose the SAVE act.
As an employee of the non-government-facing portion of Amazon, Anthropic's models are in almost everything we use AI for, and there is no discussion of changing that. I personally, as a technically nontechnical employee, have a custom Claude-based agent in Bedrock trained to answer the questions of internal customers. if the company thought we were going to have to stop using them, I'd think someone would tell my team.
Trump will not be declaring Martial Law. The very idea of it is TDS on steroids.
Trudeau declared martial law. Trump is significantly more off-the-wall than the Half-Cuban Sandwich. I say this as someone who is more likely than most to look on Trump as a "halfway decent president."
>"TLDR: we're gonna replace fiat currency"
Narrator: they aren't.
> So is the groundhog legend true? Seems like it can’t be - the legend originated with Punxsutawney Phil, who does worse than chance. What kind of crazy Gettier case would we have to believe in to have the original magic groundhog be a fraud but, coincidentally, have another groundhog a few hundred miles away be actual magic?
I read this year that Phil is assumed to be omniscient, but communicates in a complicated groundhog language, and any errors are thus the failure of human translators.
I don't think Matt Yglesias sports betting proposal will work as intended.
Say we set a very conservative 10% cap.
Kalshi's 2025 revenues were $263.5 million.
CME Group's 2025 revenues were $6.5 billion.
CME acquires or competes with Kalshi. Regulatory problem solved.
Another midterm danger to consider is the fact that the house can just refuse to seat new members if a simple majority (of the old house...) feels a seat was not won legitimately (eg due to alleged fraud or disputes over the vote count). This has actually happened twice in recent memory, once in 1984 (McIntyre) and once in 1974 (Wyman). That kind of targeted maneuvering (refuse to seat a few Ds, making house be R majority) would not require martial law or executive orders, but would still not constitute a "free and fair" election.
>So if Amazon is doing 95% normal civilian cloud compute stuff, and 5% special government contracts, only 5% of their contracts are affected. This is trivial!
More like this is completely unenforcable. Perhaps the DoW can somehow check Amazon does not operate AI directly on that part of the cloud, they can still use AI generated code and the DoW never finds out.
I think you might be underestimating the vindictiveness of this administration.
Color me gobsmacked by the open thread and comments. The Anthropic DOD thing seems interesting but not all that important. (The DOD will get and use AI, regardless where it comes from.) I hope Trump gets a drubbing in the midterms, but there is no way the elections will be postponed. (Elections are mostly a state thing.) And then we have Iran. I see hardly any comments, I've tried not to pay attention, but what I see is the US (Trump) going to war with Iran and the behest of Israel*. That's f-ing crazy. And from what I see the entire MSM** is talking about why war is a good thing. (The only voices of reason seem to be from the independent news/ opinion sources... FWIW I'm liking Tucker Carlson.) Does anyone think this war is a good thing?
*Marco Rubio came out and said as much.
** The little info I have comes from the Breaking Points podcast.
If Trump were President, this stupid Iran war would have never happened, and when he's elected he will stop it in 24 hours. It's all Biden's fault.
/s
Just a heads up, the Metaculus embeds present to me in my native language. I should probably reconfigure something.
"MNX is a noncustodial cryptocurrency-based futures exchange offering financial products relating to AI, including some prediction-market-shaped ones." Has got to be one of the most financially degenerate sentences I've ever read.
The "next supreme leader of Iran" figure is using the same photo for all options. Insert joke about old imams all looking alike.
> The latest flashpoint in this battle is the SAVE Act, a Republican-sponsored bill which would require voters to show a passport, birth certificate, or Real ID when registering to vote for the first time or changing their registration.
That "or REAL ID" line is misleading. A standard REAL ID that the vast majority of Americans with REAL IDs have would not be sufficient under the SAVE Act. The bill requires a REAL ID Act-compliant ID card *that shows US citizenship* on the card itself. Most do not.
This is because REAL IDs can be issued to non-citizen green card holders as well. When states were setting up their REAL ID systems, they never bothered to design separate-looking IDs to distinguish between citizens versus non-citizens. In most states, the final piece of plastic that you carry around does not actually say whether the cardholder is a US citizen vs a permanent resident. There are only five states (MI, MN, NY, VT, WA) that even offer an "enhanced" REAL IDs that prints "US Citizen" on the ID itself.
It is not a coincidence that those 5 are all on the Canadian border. We have accepted that security theater will make it more of a hassle to cross than it used to be (in another millennium), but some of us are still bitter. Some also feel that a fancy driver's license that at least fits in the wallet is less intrusive than getting (and carrying) an otherwise useless passport.
What do you mean a better prediction market for whether the election is fair? I mean in a certain sense no elections ever are fair, issues from gerrymandering to how campaign finance rules favor some but not others to simply the weather and who can be bothered not to mention polling lines.
What I want to know is whether it will be seen as roughly fair by the people.
It occurs to me that the actual optimal play for Trump re: voting is probably to talk a whole bunch about the democrats are going to steal the election and then make some isolated noise and trouble to motivate his base.
> wait on line
Are you from New York?