26 ms·

Deadweight Loss as a Service

158 points by codon 3y ago

JonChesterfield 3y ago
Despite being satire, I think that could work in the US. It plays off the my team / their team dynamic and sends some fraction of the donated money onwards. Very like an inefficiently run fundraising organisation. There's an outside chance of the setup making a loss for the organisers but only if a pair is very unevenly matched (and that's fixable by letting the 'onmimatch' run down to 0%). I'm not even sure it qualifies as fraudulent.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  I think it is literally a satire of US FPTP voting. Tons of money go in and the winner receives a pittance. Compare to something like proportional representation or score voting.
  - dmurray 3y ago
    What? Other voting systems still end up with a winner. If you had score voting for the US President, people would still spend a fortune on it, and the winner would get the same as he does now. "No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in"
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      If we had score voting we wouldn't have to choose between an artificial two choices, the winner of which having barely any resources to actually accomplish anything. I'm interpreting the small amount of money as representing fear to do what the majority of their voters want, lest they lose a crucial 1-2% from the middle.
wand3r 3y ago
I know this is satire, but this is effectively how lobbying in America is really done.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Part of the satire is how they are trying to present an idea where they just take stacks of money as an innovation that is great for users.
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I didn’t even catch it was satire. I was like “that sounds like a funny bedroom project rather than an 8million funding startup. I don’t know if that makes me gullible or the world I live in crazy.
phiresky 3y ago
Reminds me of antistocks [1]: "We sell antistocks.” “Antistocks? Is that like . . . shorting a stock?” “Shorting is barbaric. Think how nice and simple going long is. And then with shorting you have to borrow from some specific person for some specific amount of time, and deal with margin calls and short squeezes and all that garbage. We asked ourselves - how can we make shorting as simple as going long? Antistocks are the answer. A Tesla antistock is a certificate which obligates you to pay us the value of a Tesla stock dividend each year.” “Why would anyone ever buy that?” “They don’t! We pay them X dollars to take it! Then when Tesla goes down, they pay someone else less than X dollars to take it from them, and keep the profit.” “What if they don’t pay the reverse dividend?” “I mean, that’s the counterparty risk you take with everything, isn’t it? Home loans, car loans, credit default swaps. If it helps, we’re limiting the product to accredited investors, so they can’t, like, pay a homeless guy $1 to take it off their hands.” “And you think people will prefer this to just shorting Tesla the normal way?” “It’s not just about shorting Tesla. This is the beginning of a whole new antifinance revolution. Lots of people want to invest in SpaceX, but they can’t, because Elon Musk selfishly refuses to go public. No one else can get around that. But we can! We print a million shares of synthetic SpaceX stock and a million shares of antistock, each antistock share requires you to pay one one-millionth of SpaceX’s yearly profits to the holder of one stock share. Or, you know how millions of ordinary people can’t afford homeownership anymore because Blackrock keeps buying up all the homes as investment properties? We just print a million synthetic houses and a million antihouses, where the antihouse owners have to pay the average rent in a certain area to the synthetic house owners each month. Blackrock gets to invest in real estate without having to worry about all those boring contingent things like mold or termites, and we can leave the real physical houses for ordinary families.” “Sorry, but this sounds like a terrible idea.” “I’m glad you think so! Would you like to be a seed anti-investor in our startup? If you’re right, then our antistock prices will never be this high again!” [1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-pa...
- paulgb 3y ago
  It’s a joke but it’s also essentially how binary prediction markets work: you have two contracts, each of which resolves to $1 or $0 depending (oppositely) on whether X happens. You then solicit bids on both. When the sum of the offer price of both exceeds $1, you sell one of each, and put the dollar you collect aside to pay out to whichever bet comes true.
reactordev 3y ago
I believe you may have something with Anti-dollar. Joking aside, there’s almost always a company on the other side of the coin. Boycotting or otherwise public outcry’s and cancel culture would look a whole lot different if it were a value-based voting platform where competing interests vie for the value. Add reporting for government agencies on what’s “hot” and it sends a clear picture on what the national sentiment is.
- codingdave 3y ago
  I know this is a joke, too, but I worry that you aren't seeing the joke if you think there is something here. This is a setup to take in dollars from everyone and arbitrage the sentiment difference across the userbase, effectively meaning they don't have to pay anything and just take the dollars home. That's the joke. And anyone who actually would put in dollars are who the joke would be being played upon were it real.
  - stevage 3y ago
    Yeah but imagine if there was something like this for real, only the dollars weren't greedily kept, but spent in some way that people on both sides support. Like, maybe pro-choice and anti-abortion supporters would both support the excess money going to support new mothers or adoption programs.
    - notahacker 3y ago
      Then imagine the incentives for campaigners to skip the two-sided prediction market and just spend their money on advertising directly to voters and lobbying politicians. Or the implications of implementing the only way to make this actually work by taking the pesky voters out of the decision process altogether and just letting the money decide the outcome...
      - priprimer 3y ago
        > letting the money decide the outcome some people call that data driven decision making and they like it others call it “skynet” and they fear it
jonstewart 3y ago
Lost opportunities: Tyler Cowen on Advisory Board; Powered by Stripe.
- notahacker 3y ago
  You should start a prediction market on which companies and individuals should be included in the next draft! (but seriously, it's pretty on point already. I was primed to post that I looked forward to seeing the Overcoming Bias entry taking this idea seriously, but they got around to namechecking Robin Hanson in the penultimate paragraph)
aaron695 3y ago
There's at least one learning tool where you pick a charity you hate and it donates your money if you don't do your weekly lessons. More to this idea, paying micropayments to remove money from articles would be interesting. It would flatten bias. Reporters don't want to piss people off, reporting true facts would minimise this. It'd be interesting to see what style of article would emerge. (And people can't be bother paying micropayments to support authors but they sure as hell will be bothered to hurt them)
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  Sadly, the name ‘hatreon’ appears to have already been taken by a defunct Patreon alternative, because otherwise that's exactly what this ‘business model’ could be called.
  - genewitch 3y ago
    grudgepay
ben_ipsen 3y ago
Being Rickrolled just doesn't have the same feels now that Youtube will immediately blast an add in your face before you can enjoy the classic.
- sentrysapper 3y ago
  I hadn't noticed that before but you're right, YT has ruined Rickrolling.
  - mcny 3y ago
    I like how different people have different perspectives of the same event. I use Mozilla Firefox with uBlock Origin. YouTube videos do not play automatically when I click on YouTube links from other websites. Personally, my conspiracy theory is that somehow the YouTube team twisted Google Chrome team's arms to force them to make a byzantine system so that YouTube videos would pretty much always auto play. I cannot imagine how any self-respecting programmer(TM) would agree to such nonsense unless they were being paid very handsomely.
    - ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
      > Personally, my conspiracy theory is that somehow the YouTube team twisted Google Chrome team's arms to force them to make a byzantine system... You're not far off. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_index https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_...
      - felipemnoa 3y ago
        Makes sense. Youtube kept blocking me because it detected ad blocking mechanisms. Being stubborn I would simply reload the page and clicked the x button before it had a chance to load up the blocking code and then the video would play fine. After a while youtube gave up and no longer tries to force me to uninstall the ad blocking mechanisms. That or the ad blocking mechanisms got better.
shpx 3y ago
The organization pairs won't be exactly 1-to-1 because building is harder than destroying, different organizations are more efficient and money is non-linear. If you had a "dump oil in national parks" and a "clean up oil dumped in national parks", you'd need $1000 for every $1 of effort dumping oil. So at best this system is a discovery mechanism for comparatively valuing organizations, but it's not really set up that way because there's a big difference between an Antidollar™ donated to cancel out a dollar and a dollar donated after you've reached 0 dollars difference from the counter party.
- j4yav 3y ago
  It's satire.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    The comment might be too, but you never know on the Internet. Poe's Law.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - j4yav 3y ago
      Turtles all the way down.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
mcherm 3y ago
Satire at its finest, I was 2/3 of the way through the article and still trying to tell whether it was a spoof, or the public unveiling of a terrible, TERRIBLE startup.
- mnmalst 3y ago
  I didn't realize until I read the comments. I am not smart...
  - passion__desire 3y ago
    I consider this to be Trust Pollution. When you trust something, you will believe it without much thinking, caught off-guard. Is this the best April Fool's ever? Witness - BBC News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqp0x6ajGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqp0x6ajGE
- rf15 3y ago
  The company name alone already tipped me off. It's all very ridiculous, and yet posted here.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  The gratuitous use of the TM emoji instead of ™ seemed like a giveaway to me.
virtualritz 3y ago
Reads to me like: even more power to people with deep pockets, if this was for real.
- aconbere 3y ago
  filed under “#fiction”
jtbayly 3y ago
I had no idea this was fake until I came here to figure out what I was missing/why anybody would be stupid enough to give money to this. You could say that reveals something about me. I disagree. It says something about the crypto scene and things being promoted even here over the last few years.
- xyst 3y ago
  Besides the name of the product. This is what convinced me it was satire: “… efficient using the latest AI and blockchain technology. “
m3kw9 3y ago
If my money can be destroyed like that why would I donate through this plat form even though I get 50% more? It doesn’t enough for me to overcome the risks of some group diverting all my funds to an opposite cause

158 points by codon 3y ago

Despite being satire, I think that could work in the US. It plays off the my team / their team dynamic and sends some fraction of the donated money onwards. Very like an inefficiently run fundraising organisation. There's an outside chance of the setup making a loss for the organisers but only if a pair is very unevenly matched (and that's fixable by letting the 'onmimatch' run down to 0%). I'm not even sure it qualifies as fraudulent.

plagiarist 3y ago
I think it is literally a satire of US FPTP voting. Tons of money go in and the winner receives a pittance. Compare to something like proportional representation or score voting.
- dmurray 3y ago
  What? Other voting systems still end up with a winner. If you had score voting for the US President, people would still spend a fortune on it, and the winner would get the same as he does now. "No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in"
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    If we had score voting we wouldn't have to choose between an artificial two choices, the winner of which having barely any resources to actually accomplish anything. I'm interpreting the small amount of money as representing fear to do what the majority of their voters want, lest they lose a crucial 1-2% from the middle.

wand3r 3y ago

I know this is satire, but this is effectively how lobbying in America is really done.

plagiarist 3y ago
Part of the satire is how they are trying to present an idea where they just take stacks of money as an innovation that is great for users.
wodenokoto 3y ago
I didn’t even catch it was satire. I was like “that sounds like a funny bedroom project rather than an 8million funding startup. I don’t know if that makes me gullible or the world I live in crazy.

phiresky 3y ago

Reminds me of antistocks [1]: "We sell antistocks.” “Antistocks? Is that like . . . shorting a stock?” “Shorting is barbaric. Think how nice and simple going long is. And then with shorting you have to borrow from some specific person for some specific amount of time, and deal with margin calls and short squeezes and all that garbage. We asked ourselves - how can we make shorting as simple as going long? Antistocks are the answer. A Tesla antistock is a certificate which obligates you to pay us the value of a Tesla stock dividend each year.” “Why would anyone ever buy that?” “They don’t! We pay them X dollars to take it! Then when Tesla goes down, they pay someone else less than X dollars to take it from them, and keep the profit.” “What if they don’t pay the reverse dividend?” “I mean, that’s the counterparty risk you take with everything, isn’t it? Home loans, car loans, credit default swaps. If it helps, we’re limiting the product to accredited investors, so they can’t, like, pay a homeless guy $1 to take it off their hands.” “And you think people will prefer this to just shorting Tesla the normal way?” “It’s not just about shorting Tesla. This is the beginning of a whole new antifinance revolution. Lots of people want to invest in SpaceX, but they can’t, because Elon Musk selfishly refuses to go public. No one else can get around that. But we can! We print a million shares of synthetic SpaceX stock and a million shares of antistock, each antistock share requires you to pay one one-millionth of SpaceX’s yearly profits to the holder of one stock share. Or, you know how millions of ordinary people can’t afford homeownership anymore because Blackrock keeps buying up all the homes as investment properties? We just print a million synthetic houses and a million antihouses, where the antihouse owners have to pay the average rent in a certain area to the synthetic house owners each month. Blackrock gets to invest in real estate without having to worry about all those boring contingent things like mold or termites, and we can leave the real physical houses for ordinary families.” “Sorry, but this sounds like a terrible idea.” “I’m glad you think so! Would you like to be a seed anti-investor in our startup? If you’re right, then our antistock prices will never be this high again!” [1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-pa...

paulgb 3y ago
It’s a joke but it’s also essentially how binary prediction markets work: you have two contracts, each of which resolves to $1 or $0 depending (oppositely) on whether X happens. You then solicit bids on both. When the sum of the offer price of both exceeds $1, you sell one of each, and put the dollar you collect aside to pay out to whichever bet comes true.

reactordev 3y ago

I believe you may have something with Anti-dollar. Joking aside, there’s almost always a company on the other side of the coin. Boycotting or otherwise public outcry’s and cancel culture would look a whole lot different if it were a value-based voting platform where competing interests vie for the value. Add reporting for government agencies on what’s “hot” and it sends a clear picture on what the national sentiment is.

codingdave 3y ago
I know this is a joke, too, but I worry that you aren't seeing the joke if you think there is something here. This is a setup to take in dollars from everyone and arbitrage the sentiment difference across the userbase, effectively meaning they don't have to pay anything and just take the dollars home. That's the joke. And anyone who actually would put in dollars are who the joke would be being played upon were it real.
- stevage 3y ago
  Yeah but imagine if there was something like this for real, only the dollars weren't greedily kept, but spent in some way that people on both sides support. Like, maybe pro-choice and anti-abortion supporters would both support the excess money going to support new mothers or adoption programs.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Then imagine the incentives for campaigners to skip the two-sided prediction market and just spend their money on advertising directly to voters and lobbying politicians. Or the implications of implementing the only way to make this actually work by taking the pesky voters out of the decision process altogether and just letting the money decide the outcome...
    - priprimer 3y ago
      > letting the money decide the outcome some people call that data driven decision making and they like it others call it “skynet” and they fear it

jonstewart 3y ago

Lost opportunities: Tyler Cowen on Advisory Board; Powered by Stripe.

notahacker 3y ago
You should start a prediction market on which companies and individuals should be included in the next draft! (but seriously, it's pretty on point already. I was primed to post that I looked forward to seeing the Overcoming Bias entry taking this idea seriously, but they got around to namechecking Robin Hanson in the penultimate paragraph)

aaron695 3y ago

There's at least one learning tool where you pick a charity you hate and it donates your money if you don't do your weekly lessons. More to this idea, paying micropayments to remove money from articles would be interesting. It would flatten bias. Reporters don't want to piss people off, reporting true facts would minimise this. It'd be interesting to see what style of article would emerge. (And people can't be bother paying micropayments to support authors but they sure as hell will be bothered to hurt them)

YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
Sadly, the name ‘hatreon’ appears to have already been taken by a defunct Patreon alternative, because otherwise that's exactly what this ‘business model’ could be called.
- genewitch 3y ago
  grudgepay

ben_ipsen 3y ago

Being Rickrolled just doesn't have the same feels now that Youtube will immediately blast an add in your face before you can enjoy the classic.

sentrysapper 3y ago
I hadn't noticed that before but you're right, YT has ruined Rickrolling.
- mcny 3y ago
  I like how different people have different perspectives of the same event. I use Mozilla Firefox with uBlock Origin. YouTube videos do not play automatically when I click on YouTube links from other websites. Personally, my conspiracy theory is that somehow the YouTube team twisted Google Chrome team's arms to force them to make a byzantine system so that YouTube videos would pretty much always auto play. I cannot imagine how any self-respecting programmer(TM) would agree to such nonsense unless they were being paid very handsomely.
  - ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
    > Personally, my conspiracy theory is that somehow the YouTube team twisted Google Chrome team's arms to force them to make a byzantine system... You're not far off. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_index https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_...
    - felipemnoa 3y ago
      Makes sense. Youtube kept blocking me because it detected ad blocking mechanisms. Being stubborn I would simply reload the page and clicked the x button before it had a chance to load up the blocking code and then the video would play fine. After a while youtube gave up and no longer tries to force me to uninstall the ad blocking mechanisms. That or the ad blocking mechanisms got better.

shpx 3y ago

The organization pairs won't be exactly 1-to-1 because building is harder than destroying, different organizations are more efficient and money is non-linear. If you had a "dump oil in national parks" and a "clean up oil dumped in national parks", you'd need $1000 for every $1 of effort dumping oil. So at best this system is a discovery mechanism for comparatively valuing organizations, but it's not really set up that way because there's a big difference between an Antidollar™ donated to cancel out a dollar and a dollar donated after you've reached 0 dollars difference from the counter party.

j4yav 3y ago
It's satire.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  The comment might be too, but you never know on the Internet. Poe's Law.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - j4yav 3y ago
    Turtles all the way down.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

mcherm 3y ago

Satire at its finest, I was 2/3 of the way through the article and still trying to tell whether it was a spoof, or the public unveiling of a terrible, TERRIBLE startup.

mnmalst 3y ago
I didn't realize until I read the comments. I am not smart...
- passion__desire 3y ago
  I consider this to be Trust Pollution. When you trust something, you will believe it without much thinking, caught off-guard. Is this the best April Fool's ever? Witness - BBC News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqp0x6ajGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqp0x6ajGE
rf15 3y ago
The company name alone already tipped me off. It's all very ridiculous, and yet posted here.
ryukoposting 3y ago
The gratuitous use of the TM emoji instead of ™ seemed like a giveaway to me.

virtualritz 3y ago

Reads to me like: even more power to people with deep pockets, if this was for real.

aconbere 3y ago
filed under “#fiction”

jtbayly 3y ago

I had no idea this was fake until I came here to figure out what I was missing/why anybody would be stupid enough to give money to this. You could say that reveals something about me. I disagree. It says something about the crypto scene and things being promoted even here over the last few years.

xyst 3y ago
Besides the name of the product. This is what convinced me it was satire: “… efficient using the latest AI and blockchain technology. “

m3kw9 3y ago

If my money can be destroyed like that why would I donate through this plat form even though I get 50% more? It doesn’t enough for me to overcome the risks of some group diverting all my funds to an opposite cause