Isnt this silly when you can calculate the chance of war in Iran by oil futures instead. Prediction markets are just explicit markers of information that is already being traded on in 100 different ways.
Like, I think in a way it's just not viable to patch every little loophole a corrupt or morally bankrupt administration could exploit and all damage it could cause, and probably not without making the administration itself useless. It's a still a good idea to patch as much as feasible, in part to if slightly discourage the worse from seeking power in the first place. But in a way, it's garbage in, garbage out. Laws will never be able to magically turn corrupt and misguided decisions into ever good ones. The robust solution is promoting wisdom, ethics, civility and education, so people make good democratic choices for themselves and others.
This is why I'm opposed to prediction markets - they're gamified futures contracts (unsurprising given the founders at Kalshi are ex-Citadel and why Intercontinental Exchange executed growth equity rounds with Polymarket). A lot of degenerate gamblers are basically being taken to the cleaners as they lack the experience to actually mitigate risk or understand how to strucure futures contracts.
And an actual insider has much easier and much more legally defensible alternatives to conduct insider trading than using a platform that has KYC requirements.
No, but anyone who has an introductory knowledge of derivatives and their history will know of the Onion Futures Act, which banned "the trading of futures contracts on onions" to predictable (albeit long term) effects.
Broadly speaking, the less someone knows about derivatives and the further their work is from the production of any good (versus services), the more likely they are to get upset about it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act#cite_note-fo...
The Hittites and Bronze-Age Egyptians had forward-deliverable contracts that, if you squint, they would trade amongst each other. The idea of being able to assign a contract to a third party to which you're a beneficiary is about as old as civilisation. In part because it's obvious. In part because it's impossible to police. But mostly because it's useful.
(I'm ignoring insurance and reinsurance, both of which are derivatives and rely heavily upon them.)
"Scale back derivatives" is a reasonable argument. "Ban derivatives" is silly.
> Not comparable
Totally comparable. I'm actually struggling to think of an infrastructure-building civilisation in history that didn't have some form of tradable forwards.
That is what my reading recollection is recalling on 'derivative-like".
> This is the way the jew make money.. and made a fortune the past ten years, selling short the shipping futures, let the goyim deal in the real world.
One instance obviously, but not often do you hear them say the quiet part out loud. Most of the times it’s just firms profiting off hardship and/or prior knowledge, which is easy to hide.
You or I certainly don’t have a say in this
Marco Rubio said outright we went in because of Israel. Just watch Trump's speeches, he literally talks about the power of the Israel lobby and hopes he is doing a good job for them. Netanyahu has visited Trump 7 times in the last year, each visit has been leading up to this move. Trump's biggest mega donors are Israeli dual citizens with strong ties to their home country. Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Elison (who has conveniently taken control of the TikTok algorithm and banned the phrase "#freepalestine" through his connection with Trump) have donated hundreds of millions for this exact outcome. These donors have direct ties to the Israeli government.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/13/who-is-miriam-adel...
There is very little evidence that the strikes are being driven by oil, in fact oil is the perfect excuse to use as cover. It was the exact same thing with the Iraq war. Iraq and Iran were the two largest threats to Israel, we went into Iraq to regime change them and now we are finishing the job with Iran. Now there are no threats to Israel's expansion to the rest of the middle east. The ruling party (Likud) supports the Greater Israel project, which aims to expand Israel's borders to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.
Thanks for having my back! I think of HN as a community of intelligent people and it's always disappointing to be reminded that that alone is no guarantee of healthy discourse.
If they didn’t want Israel dragging the US into wars they could’ve just placed a call to Iran to warn them.
There's a bitter irony in this issue -- toppling the regime in Iran would be a wonderful thing, but doing so via bombs is not the way. We have Afghanistan and Iraq as very dear lessons in how not to do it.
Deciding not to betray your ally isn't a "moronic cover story".
If you're going to portray that as the alternative you actually make their actions sound more reasonable.
Of course if you actually wanted to start this war, and wanted a low effort cover story, you’d…do exactly this kind of lazy, low effort lie.
Which of those claims is untrue? Is there a claim I missed?
"The US could have snitched to Iran" does not contradict any of those claims.
Also I'm not convinced that warning Iran would have made things much safer for US troops. And you can say what you want about what the US priorities should be, but that's a whole different discussion.
And what you think is "trivial" is far from certain.
It’s an absolute howler that the United States would be led around by the nose by a country smaller than New Jersey. C’mon, man. You honestly believe that the massive military buildup that preceded this was just a wild coincidence?
If the Israelis were actually pushing the US around in the way we’re supposed to believe in this story the US would absolutely ruin them in a heartbeat. Netanyahu would be in prison in a timeframe measured in hours.
The US might have already decided it was going to attack, but it just as easily might not have.
They didn't say it was their absolute only option or something like that, as far as I know. (If they did say that you needed to mention it.) That would have been a clear lie. Saying Israel moved first is just... plausible.
I don't like having my intelligence insulted by such brazen falsehoods, so in that regard this is true.
I'm happy for your heroic amounts of credulity, it must make life a lot easier in this administration.
> I don't like having my intelligence insulted by such brazen falsehoods, so in that regard this is true.
Okay I guess I assumed you disliked the stuff you were calling a lie and a moronic cover story.
> I'm happy for your heroic amounts of credulity, it must make life a lot easier in this administration.
It's not that I'm being very credulous, it's that they said very little about their decision process. The claims you're objecting to are relatively minor details about the situation. You keep exaggerating the implications of their claims every time you say why they must be wrong.
The downing of flight MH-17 as reported by Russian media was instructive. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russian-m...
I also frequently refer back to why Russian language has 2 different words for truth: istina and pravda.