HOW MANY PEOPLE will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.
They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.
The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.
Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.
If you believe the hype, the promise of these companies isn’t in the money they take in as bookkeepers. They argue that the bets they collect offer a more accurate forecast of the future than traditional institutions. (In fact, they’ll tell you that you’re not betting at all but trading on futures contracts — a distinction that feels so tenuous it’s hard to justify with a full-throated explanation.)
Can bet on large swaths of people dieing but where’s the bet that Trump will be assassinated? Don’t they want an accurate forecast of that as well?
See? And then when I say humanity deserves to go extinct, I have a “sad outlook” or I am “pessimistic”
Fucks sake, man.
Most people forget stuff like that in minutes. And if you’re like me and remember, that’s how it is…
We fucked up society so long ago. Humans have systematically, over thousands of years, allowed the worst of us to beat down and oppress the rest until only their systems remained.
We fucked up and idk if we can be fixed without tearing everything down that reinforces our current society.
We need a complete and total reset of society.
Owners of the app should be drug into the streets and beaten to death. Can we bet on that?
I’ll gladly help. We should also televise it.
