I think by your own definition the headline is warranted in its use of gambling. The act of betting on predictions is in service of “being right” ostensibly. But is really just about the monetary reward. I don’t see betting on predictions serving any other purpose. Other risks in life have other purpose, in which the risk is accepted because of the reward of the other purpose. Gambling is risk without any other sort of side reward or effect.
It depends on the person making the bet. With sophisticated enough brain scanning technology, we could distinguish between "placing the bet to achieve a feeling" vs. "placing the bet because they believe it is mispriced".
It's not possible for a 3rd party to, at a distance, determine why someone placed a bet in a prediction market.
At a casino, it is possible. Most of the games are negative EV. So if someone plays any of the games, then it can't be because they are trying to maximize EV, it must be for some other reason (like a feeling).
I guess I’m trying to say that in both cases you outline, the purpose of the act lies solely in the risk itself. Believing something is mispriced simply means the perceived risk is very low (or even negative) but the action is taken _because_ of the risk itself. No other purpose is served. Unlike other monetary instruments which could be consider stores of wealth. or other life decisions which have outside intrinsic values in which the risk is a consideration but not the primary object.
> Believing something is mispriced simply means the perceived risk is very low (or even negative)
That's not what risk means. Risk is the amount you stand to lose, and expected value is the mean outcome (calculated by integrating across all possible outcomes).
The EV can be positive or negative, and that corresponds to a mispriced asset.
Risk can only go to zero, but it can also be arbitrarily high.
Managing risk is its own thing, but to give an intuition: How much should you bet on repeated fair coin tosses that pay out 3:1, if you have $100?
More than 0, because it is positive EV, but definitely not the whole 100.
Risk management is about playing vs. not playing and bet sizing.
Gambling is taking on risk without positive EV. A 1:1 cointoss is the quintessential example. EV is 0, you won't make or lose anything in the long run playing this game. But it adds uncertainty, you could have twice as much or nothing.
Gambling is risk-seeking, the variance of outcomes has value (to a gambler) on its own.
I fail to understand how your quote doesn't describe land lords? It is:
1. An act of growing one's own wealth (no other purpose to land lording)
2. It is accomplished by taking advantage of economic conditions (perhaps not "manipulating")
3. Does not create any new wealth.
And a little further down is this:
> Rent-seeking implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity.
Which to me certainly sounds like someone who's only contribution is ownership.
How does this make any sense in any context? An individuals actions can never have zero impact on others. The mass concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has an enormous impact on the rest of the population.
Like all problems, It’s possible there are many contributing factors. Power laws may be one. The usual suspects might carry some of the blame as well. These things are not mutually exclusive. It’s unlikely there is one “solution” that will fix the systemic issues that create reverse centaurs. I don’t see the value in writing someone off simply because they do not explore the entire solution space.
My original post fell short in that I criticized Doctorow without offering substance or examples. [Ironically, this is exactly what I accused him of!]
Later, in response to various people here, I wrote a more substantive critique, which I stand by. And I stand by my original opinion: Doctorow is a talented and entertaining writer, but I can't take him seriously.
One thing to consider is that Many people simply do not have the time, energy, and/or equipment to cook food from raw ingredients. These factors are common in poorer households where people are working multiple jobs, etc.
I literally just puts the thighs in the air fryer (I have a cheapy one from Tesco) for 30 minutes. The steamer I have was £15 in Sainsburys (it was on offer).
Most kitchen equipment except for the white goods is dirt cheap and even the really cheap stuff can last for years. Most meals take me 30-40 minutes to cook maximum.
That isn't 30-40 minutes me standing in the kitchen cooking. That is how long it takes to cook in the air fryer (the thighs take about 30-35 minutes). I literally have a timer telling me when to put on the veg and the potatoes. I think prep time is max 10 minutes and then 10 minutes to wash up.
In any-event. It is objectively more expensive to buy junk food, that includes the cheaper junk. Once I cut out the trips to the takeaway and the deli, I was surprised at how much more money I had per month.
That's certainly an improvement, but still involves me planning to eat in half an hour instead of just snacking right now. But I shouldn't be presenting myself as representative of any demographic except maybe bedroom coders. I tend to agree that junk and expense correlate. I don't eat junk, I eat random crap, it's very different.
Getting off this planet is easy without absurd missions like going to Mars. We could build space habitats or moon bases. Going to live on Mars is not an option for us at this time. We lack the biological resilience to do so. I won't even mention that it must be a planetary effort to even have some chance of success.
> If that's true what would be explanation of his gaming/streaming?
It's a PR stunt. He pays someone to play for him and level up his account. Then, he plays for a bit and it's painfully obvious that he's inexperienced.
He doesn't take criticism very well either. He recently removed a live streamers Twitter verification for pointing out his lack of skill. How's that for a "free speech" platform?
Elon is extremely partisan, insecure, and rich. That's it.
Looking back, the SSD was garbage so I ended up using my own nvme. But it’s a little solid piece. It came with some windows but I just put Debian on it.
The price is not that much higher than pi with all the accessories and give you multiples of performance
I have two of these. One caveat I'd mention is that the power buttons are flimsy. On one of them I have to push kinda hard to get it to do anything, so I dread it if they ever lose power.
This doesn’t make sense to me. People will always pay when there is value to them. Or at least perceived value. Libraries are free but people still pay for books and subscribe to audible.
But nobody is lending books for money, like people used to lend videotapes. Thar particular type of business has been salted by libraries.
People will pay when it gets them something they value, but the moment someone offers that for free, completion on price of that thing becomes impossible. Instead, competition moves to ancillary aspects of a thing, such as e.g. delivery, or integrations, or lifestyle marketing.
Case in point: neither Amazon nor Audible compete with libraries on just letting you read books - they compete on delivery (ease of access).
I don't know if you meant it (apologies if not) - but libraries, and CC, and FOSS software, and Wikipedia are all good things in humanity. We should aim for more such good things.
"Salted" or not -- it's up to supporters of free markets/capitalism to figure their shit out.
I very much agree that the things you mention are all good things. Condemning them in general is not what I meant, though I can see how my comments could be read that way.
No, my point is more specific: it's that those things play with the free market about as well as NaN plays with floating point math. That by itself isn't bad; the market isn't the best answer to everything. However, in case of F/OSS, I wish people acknowledged that, by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.
> ... by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.
Could you please elaborate on this or point me to a source where that exact mechanism is explained? Because this runs somewhat opposite to my experiences where FOSS was more of a desperate way to escape proprietary software, particularly OS like IBM with which you would have to wait for fixes from "the market" for days instead of being able to fix it yourself, like this article explains (in vastly superior English to mine): https://cacm.acm.org/practice/free-and-open-source-software-...
Whenever I read about how AI is going to automate art or some other creative job I think about a quote I read (maybe here) that went something like “that which is made without effort is enjoyed without pleasure”.
Or likening addon AI capabilities to a supervillain's anti-power: "When everybody is super (artistic, whatever), then no one will be!" - Syndrome, Incredibles.
