Yes. And indeed, when aggregated and averaged across all betters, nobody makes any money.

The question isn't what percentage of bets resolve to no, but whether there is a consistent bias in the prices away from the fair price, which has an expected value of 0, and what direction that bias is in.

Yes, Silicon Valley has some bits that don't quite match real life. But every now and then there's some true insight in it.

Like the bit where the crazy VC tells them that the last thing they need is revenue.

https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo?si=fU3Y3-ucHqgoBDLU

> If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.

Why? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?

I think there's so much ill-founded assumptions in eugenics BS that it's hard to know where to start, but as a genealogist, I can personally verify that upper or middle class, wealthier people, presumably the sort eugenicists identify with, clearly had at least a 2-3 generations head start on the demographic transition where I come from.

There are other trends, there's always some groups of people who started having fewer kids earlier or later for reasons not obviously related to class - but class is the big one.

The Arab parties are potential "kingmakers" in the coalition arithmetic. In particular, it was Mansour Abbas that made the "change government" (Lapid-Bennett) and if there's any chance of unseating Bibi again it'll come down to him. And to my knowledge he hasn't ruled out joining Bibi either, if there's a deal to be made.

A lot also depends on whether the Arab parties run together in the coming elections or not.

But it's still described as a $2M toll, not a 13.81M CNY toll. So I guess we're not there yet.

When a stock drops in value, the dollars don't flow anywhere, they just disappear. Think about this: For every buyer ("putting money in a stock") there is a seller ("taking money out of a stock') at exactly the same price. So dollars aren't "in" a stock at all - the shares exist and are said to have some dollar value based on the recent trading price or open orders in the market. When the price drops, it's because the collective consensus on how much those shares are worth changed, and the dollars assumed to have exist prior are just gone.

I live here, I don't need Polymarket to know that there will be missiles tomorrow. In fact, that's why I'm on HN now even though it's just past midnight here. Because it's a well known law of nature that just as I drift off to sleep my phone will violently alert me with this horrid bzzhhh-bzzhhh sound that missiles are incoming. Then I'll turn on the TV, any news channel, and see the "polygon of uncertainty" overlaid on a map of the country, updating in real time, and I'll decide how fast to put my shoes on. Polymarket odds ain't got nothing on that.

More seriously - I used to think this was a good argument. But the night before the war broke out, I checked Polymarket and the odds were under 20%. I also checked the news and listened to my gut, and I'm glad I made the call to fill up my car's tank and prepare my go-bag. Came in handy when we woke up to sirens and had to move fast to get closer to shelter.

Yes, it's anecdata, etc etc

It means holding the actual stocks in the underlying index, as opposed to synthetic replication, which aims to achieve returns matching the index via derivatives or other techniques.

It's physical in the sense that literal means not literal nowadays.

Or he's just a manchild who likes doing things that he thinks will make him look strong.

Picking on someone vastly weaker than you (especially while they're already getting beat up by somebody else) doesn't make you look strong, it mostly just makes you look like an asshole, and probably an asshole who is too scared or too weak to go after somebody who can actually fight back.

> it mostly just makes you look like an asshole

This is true, but only for a certain percentage of the US population. Large swaths of this country think that picking on our weaker neighbors evidence of our strength

It really wasn't rocket science. Even I packed my go bag and loaded up the car on Friday night, and I have no information they don't share on the news. (I live in Israel, and when the first siren woke me at ~8 on Saturday morning I jumped in the car and evacuated to a family member who lives in a building with a bomb shelter)

I could've been wrong, but it was a reasonable guess. The local Israeli news anchors were in the newsroom broadcasting within minutes of the attack going public, I guess they slept in the office with their clothes on too.