6 ms·

[flagged]

• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• db48x 7mo ago
  > … libertine … Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you thesaurus them into your ideas.
• slashdev 7mo ago
  There are lots of bets on Polymarket about when certain politicians cease to be the leader of the country. Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Mojtaba Khamenei, Zelensky, etc. If they die, those markets are resolved in a predictable way. Death pools already exist, and it's a matter of time before we see an assassination attempt motivated by it.
  • littlestymaar 7mo ago
    We're already seeing “insider gambling” from the current administration so I'm pretty convinced we'll see assassinations motivated by polymarket gains alone soon enough.
    • c_o_n_v_e_x 7mo ago
      I suppose the extreme take would be that it becomes a de facto bounty hunting platform
  • waffletower 7mo ago
    It is a lot simpler and fairer to tax payers, due to high litigation costs, to simply make adhoc SaaS betting, as Polymarket provides, illegal. Why should tax payers have to pay for the regulation costs and, more broadly, society pay for the obvious disruption vectors arising from arbitrary speculation?
• jacquesm 7mo ago
  We could gamble on when Polymarket's operators die.
  • blurbleblurble 7mo ago
    This comment is art
  • kqr 7mo ago
    If I propose odds based on US insurance life tables for people of their age and gender, which side of the bet would you like to take?
    • irishcoffee 7mo ago
      The over. Rich people live longer.
      • blurbleblurble 7mo ago
        Even when there's a polymarket bet on their heads?
      • WalterBright 7mo ago
        Yes. I add that google says: "controlling for substance abuse reduces the gap by about 60% for men and 36% for women". I couldn't get it to quantify the effect of obesity. There are other imponderable factors at work. For example, does not-wealthy cause substance abuse or does substance abuse cause not-wealthy? We are all the sum of our choices.
  • Terr_ 7mo ago
    Or whether the company will fail or have a bad IPO.
    • kqr 7mo ago
      If I propose odds based on survival tables for other companies of that age (I think for six years, the annual risk is 9 %), which side of the bet would you like to take?
• scoofy 7mo ago
  Look, it's not the point your making, but Adam Smith was not a laissez-faire capitalist. If you want to do the "capitalism bad" thing, I would suggest learning a bit of history, or at least understand that the "laissez-faire" in laissez-faire capitalism is a political ideology, not an economic ideology. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/11/the-guardian-view-on-adam-smith-he-deserves-rescuing-from-the-free-market-myth https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/11/the-gu... More to your point... I don't think economic theory has anything to do with it. I'm a capitalist and I think that "prediction markets" is just an idiotic rebranding of "legalized gambling" and generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society, so it should be effectively banned. The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is because many states have found themselves under mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues however they can without raising taxes. It's shameful.
  • waffletower 7mo ago
    Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.
    • scoofy 7mo ago
      You're connection between an economic system with some kind of an amoral political view is a non sequitur. You could trivially operate gambling institutions in a socialist system. The gambling existing has nothing to do with the economic system itself. It has to do with the political climate.
    • Dylan16807 7mo ago
      Clearing up the incorrect connections you made is helpful. Someone largely agreeing doesn't mean they should ignore mistakes.
  • jkaplowitz 7mo ago
• notepad0x90 7mo ago
  On one hand, it isn't all that different than derivatives and other established securities. On the other, the extremes of gambling are deterimental. You can either take the libertarian view that it should be allowed until someone is put in harms way, or take the prohibitionist view that it should all be illegal. With the latter approach, you will be doing more harm than good potentially, because it will just become an underground betting market, fully unregulated and with the worst of people abusing it. I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match, or who will become the next presidential race nominee. At least no more than options trading, or betting on the price of oil, or a poker match. I agree that betting on someone else coming into harms way, be that violence or other types of harm (loss of property, livelihood, wellbeing,etc..) shouldn't be allowed. A sports team losing, or your preferred politician losing are not someone coming into harms way. I've commented on these lines before, but reactionary extremist approaches will always do more harm than good. also, politicians shouldn't be allowed to bet in even so much as a poker game!
  • swid 7mo ago
    > I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match... I do wonder - what if the sports teams or politician loses intentionally; which could either be to profit off the loss or due to threats from an actor who seeks to profit? I heard that Kalshi paid out for when Khamenei was killed in Iran (the bet was for when he would go out of power), so murdering people could be another way to win such a bet on who will lose. Even injuring a sports player could easily change a game result. With so much money on the line, it doesn't seem like a good mix.
  • rescripting 7mo ago
    Athletes (both college and professional) frequently receive threats from sports betters. Since the betting apps let you make specific wagers such as whether a specific player will make more than 6 three pointers in a game the harassment can become quite targeted.
  • blacksmith_tb 7mo ago
    Let me make an obvious opposing argument: what is the social benefit in allowing people to gamble on the outcome of a sports match, or any other event? We encourage investment in the market in theory to allow companies to grow and produce things many people might benefit from (how well that works is another thing...). Gambling as far as I can see is net negative to everyone but the winners, and not entirely positive to them. Imagine if your next door neighbor dropped a cash-filled envelope that you found - lucky you? And if that was your neighbor's rent money? Like a lot of scams, the 'value' is only accrued by fleecing rubes, and it also creates a new class of super-bookies, which also not positive.
• mr_toad 7mo ago
  > libertine I think you mean libertarian. Unless there’s some spicy details of Adam Smith’s life that the history books left out.
  • rectang 7mo ago
    Dollars to donuts that "libertine" was just as deliberate as the "satanic" that followed it.
    • mr_toad 7mo ago
      I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, but if it was deliberate it’s worse; it descends beyond mere polemics and is just casting baseless and unfounded aspersions.
      • rectang 7mo ago
        I quite enjoyed it. Smith has long been commandeered by libertine laissez-faire cultists who have severed the “invisible hand” from his body of work to worship as a relic.
• unmole 7mo ago
  > Adam Smith's libertine What on earth does this even mean?!
• gac23 7mo ago
  For some reason people tend to forget the most important part of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", I guess it because the words "Love is the law, love under will" doesn't sound satanic enough. If you take the time to actually read some of his material you'll be surprised how much he (the 'satanist' Crowley) talks about God and angels (as positive forces).
  • westk01 7mo ago
    They won't understand friend.
• Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  Adam Smith's libertine didn't allow the concept of rent-seeking entities. It sure as well wouldn't allow polymarket gamblers "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce." "[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more." "The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. " "RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock" "[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind" "[Kelp] was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it" "every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends... to raise the real rent of land." - Adam Smith (Ch 11, wealth of nations) [Pasted this from a highly relevant reddit thread(0)] Adam Smith has wrote extensively about how much he disliked Landlords. It's a great tragedy that most people consider him with only his capitalist aspects but he was worried (from what I feel like) about landlords and many people forget that. So my point is, that Adam Smith would definitely be against polymarket betting because its a form of renting in some vague sense but more importantly an insider trading and just all the weird shenanigans that we also associate with the parasitic nature of landlords can be associated to polymarket gamblers/degenerate betters too (which is what this article talked about) (Pardon me if this got long but I genuinely feel puzzled by the fact that not many people in the world know that adam smith, the father of capitalism, even he was against the rent-seeking practices which I feel like can also be talked about to how large social media/corporations are feeling rent seeking on their platforms/algorithms too) A little ironic at the same time as well on how we justify the existence of these very things in the name of capitalism too. My feeling is that Adam Smith would feel some-what betrayed by what rent-seeking social media hubs and polymarket betting and crypto bro thing is being done in the name of capitalism, when he was so against the practices of rent-seeking. (0): YSK: Adam Smith spoke of landlords as cruel parasites who didn't deserve their profits & were so "indolent" that they were "not only ignorant but incapable of the application of mind." : https://www.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_smith_spoke_of_landlords_as_cruel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_s...
• zeckalpha 7mo ago
  Adam Smith actually would be against stuff like this. He gets misrepresented.
  • waffletower 7mo ago
    It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences. He shouldn't be personally faulted for it, he was just one man sharing his thinking a long time ago. Living people are to blame for not correcting for these shortcomings enough. I learned that it would have been best to have just said laissez-faire capitalism instead of invoking his name.
    • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
      > He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences Smith wrote about the political economy. He absolutely considered the balance between public and market interests. Most people talking about The Wealth of Nations have never read it.
      • TZubiri 7mo ago
        A hint is in the name, it's called the wealth of nations not the wealth of the sovereign individual.
    • kasey_junk 7mo ago
      You’ll not find “the invisible hand” in wealth of nations as a major concept. It was a throw away phrase that wasn’t a central part of his writing.
      • waffletower 7mo ago
        So many Smith apologists. I don't believe he should be demonized, and perhaps I am guilty of this by mentioning his name and 'satanic' in the same sentence, but he decidedly should not be lionized either. So many are drunk with history and shirk the work to evolve and transcend it. It doesn't matter if Adam Smith had morality and consideration, those are not ideals his writing ultimately bred, what matters are the free market ideals he clearly encouraged long ago, are now wildly out of control.
• casey2 7mo ago
  Yes famous libertine Adam Smith, up there with Marquis de Sade and Ami Perrin Your logical conclusion is a slippery slope. Lets follow your argument to it's logical conclusion, humans are evil therefore, regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans OMG you are sooo evil I'm absolutely shook. How could you! Why ought we take your misunderstandings to the"ir natural" extreme?
  • jakelazaroff 7mo ago
    I don't think "regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans" is the logical conclusion of "prediction markets incentivize antisocial behavior".
• WillPostForFood 7mo ago
  Wild misunderstanding of Smith. He considered it a moral defect, wrote several pieces criticizing gambling, and criticized state run gambling. "The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities, is an ancient evil... their absurd presumption in their own good fortune, is even more universal."
  • aerhardt 7mo ago
    Par for the course for many who mention Adam Smith. Another classic libel is bringing up his name in cases of gross misconduct by a business or a businessman, but he was very critical of the excesses of merchants. Smith was a moral philosopher first and an accidental economist second.
    • ihaveajob 7mo ago
      Yes! As a beginner-level, amateur armchair economist who hated philosophy class in high school, I have to admit I was surprised to learn about this when reading https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/economix https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/economix by Michael Goodwin. The book overall seems to lean liberal whenever there's a political choice to be made, and yet it paints Adam Smith in a much more positive light that one would imagine, if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left. A really fun book, also!
      • dragonwriter 7mo ago
        > if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left. Leftists I've known are more likely to quote Smith than criticize him. He seems to be seen by leftists as an important figure in political economy (flawed in not reaching certain important questions, perhaps, but not much in how he addressed those questions he did consider.) Even his argument that the class whose understanding of their own interests is best aligned with the common interests is the landed aristocracy (the bourgeoisie having interests opposed to the common interest, while the working class shares—by its sheer size, defines—the common interests but lacks an understanding of what their real interests are in the domain of interest) [0] is seen as describing exactly a problem than the Left (see, e.g., Marx and discussions of class consciousness) sees as central to solve, rather than being a regressive idealized preference. The Left criticizes a lot of the arguments people who appeal to a mythologized caricature of Smith use his name to defend, sure, but that's a different thing than criticizing Smith. [0] Which is about as far as you can be from leaning liberal where there is a political choice to be made, though given the complete displacement of the landed aristocracy as an economically-meaningful distinct class it is largely irrelevant in practical terms in the 21st century.
• _doctor_love 7mo ago
  I don't know you, but I do know that you haven't studied Adam Smith. edit: lol bring the downvotes, I actually read The Wealth of Nations PLUS Smith's other essays.
• noname123 7mo ago
  My apologist response would be that Polymarket isn’t the root cause—it’s more of a mirror. It simply makes the incentives and speculation already present in late-stage capitalism more transparent and accessible for anyone to participate in. You argue that platforms like this encourage speculation about things like celebrity deaths. But celebrity culture is already heavily monetized—think Page Six, Access Hollywood, livestreamed royal weddings, or endless coverage of Taylor Swift’s personal life. Conceding the point to you that death pool bets increases a significant security risk to celebrities (never mind the appeal to emotions), would that such a risk acceptable to have a more accurate and non-biased informational poll of who might be next U.S. president or who/when will US/Israel strike next made available to the wider public?
  • lokar 7mo ago
    I don't think it is a mirror, quite the opposite. I think most Americans (and probably europeans?) think a lot of this is in fact very bad, and should be stopped. The problem is that our lawmakers are not mirroring what the voters want.
• kortilla 7mo ago
  > I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the comments. This is a bad faith start to any argument. It speaks past the conclusion that one side needs apologetics/advocates in the first place.
  • aaron695 7mo ago
    [dead]
• Manuel_D 7mo ago
  People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting on the outcome of the war, but in practice they are.
  • eek2121 7mo ago
    Hard disagree. In most countries, you can not anonymously trade stocks, for starters, where you can anonymously bet on Polymarket.
  • thephyber 7mo ago
    > Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company? The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event. This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking into the Situation Room. Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for violating these rules. I’m still not sure what changed (other than money buying the crumbling of regulation).
    • Manuel_D 7mo ago
      > But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company? You can, if you cover your tracks well enough. Or donate to a President willing to keep the SEC off your back. I get that people in power can place bets on their own actions. But again, they can just do that in the stock market. A lawmaker might know a law is going to pass and trade on that insider knowledge. Or maybe the vice president owns shares in Haliburton and then helps encourage invading Iraq... what's old is new again, I guess.
• arduanika 7mo ago
  This is a serious news story that should be concerning to all sides, including people who are generally pro-markets. Thus, I wish that we had produced a top comment that was critical of Polymarket without being deranged. (Libertine? Adam Smith for totally unfettered markets? Satanic?) If the prediction markets cannot produce a satisfactory solution to this problem, then their license to operate should be seriously cut back by regulators. Bets on a vast set of propositions that involve journalistic judgement should be banned, if they can't be blackmail-proofed. The social utility of these markets as info aggregators is marginal at best, and it is dwarfed by the harm of threats to reporters. It is in Polymarket's court to figure out how to resolve this amicably. Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police. If your KYC has neglected to gather that info, then freeze all money on that side of the market until each bettor has identified themselves. Or some other means of fixing it, I don't know. Figure it out. If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs. And if it comes down to it, I'm pretty sure that Shayne spends most of his time in the US, and we have extradition with Israel.
  • sam0x17 7mo ago
    Polymarket being an incompetent cabal that doesn't deserve to have a license is so passe, so ingrained in the standard recurring narrative that comes up whenever prediction markets are mentioned, and so universally agreed upon at this point that it frankly isn't that interesting to a lot of people. We all agree with it already, there is no one left to convince, certainly not on this site, better to talk about more interesting things that are nevertheless related. It's, well, boring, and this is exactly why a comment like this wasn't the top comment. I'm not saying a comment like this wouldn't be true, it would, it just isn't going to be a top comment, and that fact is unsurprising. I do share your sentiment though, that it would have been nice if human attention worked slightly differently here, but it does not. > Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police Woah there, didn't see this coming to be honest. But, I mean we already trust Israel to spend our tax dollars on genocide, so heck, why not, they'll do a great job! > If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs First of all, why is it time to get tough on limiting human rights, why is your freedom of speech and freedom of privacy the first thing on the chopping block, rather than Polymarket's license to operate, which is a much more obvious target for all of our disdain. And also, it's physically impossible to crack down on VPNs 100%, especially within the constitutional framework we have in the US, and the technical reality of the modern internet. Keep in mind the US Government itself invented TOR to help destabilize and leak information out of autocratic regimes that have implemented sweeping censorship and blocking of VPNs (you know, the sort of autocratic regime you apparently want to start here in the US given your comments on the matter). From a technical perspective, with SSL being standard for most web traffic it is utterly trivial to set up VPNs that hide in all kinds of ways that look completely innocuous and are unblockable. You can even hide exfiltration traffic in DNS queries, and I even got to see this a few times in practice when I still worked for the DoD back in the day. People will go to all kinds of lengths to get information in and out of a closed system and stopping that is like trying to catch air with your hands, you will always just end up hurting/restricting the average citizen and the bad actor who wants to slip through will still slip through. Such a ban or KYC program is also fundamentally against every notion of privacy and freedom enshrined by the constitution and even more so by the founding spirit and values of the internet and reputable tech circles that care about privacy and freedom. You sound just as bad as Zuckerberg and Palantir trying to push KYC on Linux right now to help build a better mass-surveillance state for their fascist overlords. You seem to be the sort who would be extremely supportive of that project, though I sincerely hope that is not the case. > we have extradition with Israel For now. Once the Boomers finish their reverse mortgages and are finally out of the equation we'll hopefully cut all funding, sanction Israel, and label them a terroristic genocidal state, which they are. As usual, moral progress is always delayed by rich old men refusing to let go. Ethnostates are also extremely problematic in their own right, never mind genocidal ones. Certainly not morally praiseworthy, certainly not good "ally" material. Should be sanctioned in the very very least, definitely not subsidized. And the funniest part is I agree with you that Polymarket is bad, which is your underlying point that you care so strongly about throughout this thread, but your arrogance and sudden undeserved spitefulness, in response to completely innocuous, imaginative, on-topic comments, just comes off as really bitter and makes you hard to talk to and even harder to agree with. Like you really have an axe to grind and I think it is rooted in some sort of deep-seated fear that everyone around you is as evil and misanthropic as you claim to be through your espoused values.
• throwaway27448 7mo ago
  Calling Adam Smith a libertine is beyond insane
  • triceratops 7mo ago
    Yeah I wonder if they meant libertarian.
• triceratops 7mo ago
  Did you actually mean libertine or libertarian? I'm extremely confused.
• singleshot_ 7mo ago
  Inventing Assassination Markets in 2026, not bad.
• obirunda 7mo ago
  The problem is that you are identifying a symptom of an ongoing societal moral decline with an economic system. Spend some time on Dostoevsky or Kant. When morality is solely based on our current nationalism/hedonism hybrid in the West you end up at these extreme morally dubious exploits whether in a free or autocratic society. I don't claim to know what can help society become more ethical. What do you propose will improve society's ethical foundations? It's often the case that staunch critics of a system or another don't usually have much to offer in terms of ethics, they pontificate in favor or counter a given system without exploring whether society's ethics dwell on shaky foundations, they spend a lot of time talking about the technicalities, the merits of this or that implementations when in reality all societies whose ethical foundations crater, do not recover their ethics through policy reform alone. There are so many examples of this disconnect. Prohibition did not make for a society that wanted less alcohol, or felt that consuming alcohol was unethical, it actually had the counter effect, opening the door for a considerable larger problem of crime supported production. The war on drugs was/has been no different. To see this as the top comment here, where you picked Adam Smith as your straw man, could have been Karl Marx or any other thinker, and say it boils down to this or that simple mistake.. Are you serious? There are much deeper issues driving this thirst for Gambling we have embraced of late amongst other dubious things that have been normalized. But pick whatever economic system you want, install it anywhere and the existing ethical issues you currently have will still be there.
• bluegatty 7mo ago
  "ubiquity of Adam Smith's libertine, some would even label satanic ("Do what you wilt"), Ok this has nothing to do with Adam Smith ... what are you talking about? Agree with him or not, Adam Smith was a Christian Ethicist more than he was an Economist, and never even remotely hinted at any of those things. Smith was literally one of those 'Nothing will work unless people with power act responsibly' kind of thinkers. He was way more on the 'prude' than 'libertine' side. Also - you're not likely using the term 'libertine' in the sense that you mean, look that one up as well. Finally, even if you mean 'selfish libertarian' - this is also probably not that. These are just horrible people, probably with gambling addictions, that would be doing all sorts of other horrible things otherwise. There's no 'isms' here. They're just villains, same as it ever was. They are all over the place, far more common than we'd imagine.