Tag: us

Prediction Markets

Internet gambling is good for consumers. Too bad America wants to ban it

The spread of the internet has made the online gambler king. The emergence of large online gambling companies has slashed gaming operators’ margins and driven up payout ratios for gamblers. And the punters have embraced it in their millions, especially in America, where illegal gambling has long flourished. Last year 12m Americans placed about $6b in online bets, 50% the world’s total. You might have hoped politicians would greet such a demonstration of popularity with moderation—welcoming online gambling’s benefits and curbing its inevitable excesses. Instead they have put all their chips on red. Last weekend Congress passed a bill that will stop banks making payments to online gambling sites, adding to an already formidable legislative arsenal that outlaws most online gaming.

congress just killed a golden goose.
2006-12-03: uh crap i would have LOVED to attend this one. prediction markets is one of my permathreads.
2007-01-30: performance matters for betting markets too. to get even faster you’d have to factor out the humans clicking the buttons, but i guess that would require betting to grow up from being entertainment.
2007-04-24:

The key drivers in both filtering and consensus making in such systems is often positive feedback. For Digg, good stories get “dug” which makes them more likely to be seen and dug further. Poor stories do not get dug, rank lower, are less likely to be dug and slowly disappear. In ant trails, pheromone deposition stimulates further deposition if the food source really is good. Perhaps software developers should be given a cache of tokens. They can give the manager of a project 2 tokens each day if they think the project worth continuing. The manager can hire a programmer for the day [for 1 token] if he has enough tokens. Thus, crappy projects soon get filtered out by consensus. [The 2 vs 1 token prevents too much fluidity in the project and damps some random fluctuations].

2007-12-06:

In a new book, “Imperfect Knowledge Economics”, Mr Frydman sets out an alternative approach to prediction, in which the forecaster recognizes that his model will inevitably be less than perfect. Their work has received glowing praise from Nobel-prize-winning economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Edmund Phelps, who wrote the introduction to the book—though it is unlikely to have gone down so well with Robert Lucas, who won the Nobel for his work on rational expectations.

2008-01-07:

Despite the markets’ strong forecasting abilities, there is a slight optimistic bias driven mainly by new employees. On average, outcomes that were good for Google were overpriced by 20%. This bias was strongest on days after appreciations in Google stock and, ironically, for outcomes under our own control! We also find biases against extreme outcomes and short selling. Given a range of 5 outcomes, the middle ones were typically overpriced and unprofitable by comparison with the outliers.

hmm, i must have slept through that one.
2021-04-21:

are prediction markets doomed to repeat errors as grave as giving Trump a 15% chance of overturning the election in early December, and a 12% chance of overturning it even after the Supreme Court including 3 judges whom he appointed telling him to screw off? My answer is, surprisingly, an emphatic yes, and I see a few reasons for optimism.

2022-02-09:

In 2010, Philip Tetlock (one of the signatories on the pro-prediction market letter) did some pretty basic forecasting work, not even prediction market level, and proved that he could significantly outperform top analysts at the CIA with access to classified information. The government refused to hire him or use any of his methods, and continued shutting down new prediction markets as they arose. Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. The US is becoming the North Korea of forecasting. Every other civilized country allows prediction markets. In a perfect world, they could ignore our constant own goals and move on without us. But because America has a disproportionate share of money, users, coders, and entrepreneurs, a US-less prediction market ecosystem won’t be living up to its potential. That means decreased ability to gather and process information and worse decision-making worldwide.

Destined for Destiny

written by one of the onion guys

Written from the heart, not from the brain, this definitive autobiography takes readers on a journey through the 43rd President’s life, including his hardscrabble beginnings as the child of West Texas oil millionaires, the remarkable academic performance that earned him entry into the finest East Coast schools, and his proud service to the country as an occasional member of the National Guard sometime around 1972 or 1973.

Xenophobia

Anti-immigrant, racist hysteria is a common, and successful, tactic of political extremists in times of political and economic turmoil. It was used by the Nazis to great effect, and was also used by governments in most of the affluent nations of the world during the 1930s when that affluence suddenly disappeared and everyone was looking for a scapegoat. When the population is deeply unhappy, as is the case now in the US, there is a natural preference to blame the misfortune that has given rise to that unhappiness on ‘outsiders’ rather than accepting that the blame lies with deep flaws in the systems and values on which the very social fabric of the country is founded.

i will be very surprised if the republicans don’t win in 2008, frankly

Scientist For America

Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.

dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.

New Orleans consequences

The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city’s population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

george friedman has the best analysis by far. as usual, the MSM offer no insight beyond gory pictures.

Obesity

Riding on the metro in DC, I was informed that the 69M obese in the US are hype. I’m glad the food industry is looking out for me and even providing me with helpful cartoons.
2007-03-31: The obesity gas connection

US citizens are burning 3.7B liters of gas a year more than they did in 1960, because they are much heavier. That’s about $2.2B worth of fuel, and a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

2007-04-27: Congress promotes obesity through agricultural subsidies. Ever heard of HFCS?
2007-09-11: plus the reduction in burger and fries consumption would cause less brazilian forest to be burned, further reducing emissions.

$1 in real gasoline prices would reduce obesity in the US by 15% after 5 years.

2007-09-18: No comment necessary.

Many 5-passenger vehicles are rated 385 kg, maxing out if their 5 occupants weigh more than 77 kg each. 6 90 kg people would overload the 7-passenger Dodge Grand Caravan minivan.

2008-03-29: More fatties are found, unsurprisingly.

More than 50% of American adults considered to have normal body weight have high body fat percentages — greater than 20% for men and 30% for women — as well as heart and metabolic disturbances. The finding conflicts with the widely held belief that maintaining a normal weight automatically guards against disorders such as high levels of circulating blood fats and a tendency to develop metabolic syndrome, which often leads to type 2 diabetes.

2008-12-22: The war against fat people has begun.
2010-06-08: Fighting obesity with that other staple, security. brilliant!

27% of all Americans ages 17 to 24 are too overweight to join the military. Now, the group of retired military officers that prepared the report is asking Congress to pass a nutrition bill that would make school lunches healthier.

2011-03-25: Obesity deaths

Since 2001, premature death from obesity has exceeded death from malnutrition.

2015-07-27: a large part of the decline is due to people drinking fewer sodas.

Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago.

2015-08-11: There are few public health interventions as beneficial as destroying the soft drinks industry.

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, is backing a new “science-based” solution to the obesity crisis: To maintain a healthy weight, get more exercise and worry less about cutting calories.

The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media. To help the scientists get the word out, Coke has provided financial and logistical support to a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.

2016-03-23: soda taxes are very odd:

Why not just target the output, rather than some random subset of inputs? We could tax obesity if we wanted to. Or if we want to seem less punitive, we could award tax credits to obese people who lose weight. A tax directly pegged to reduced obesity would certainly be a much more efficient way to achieve the stated policy goal of reducing obesity. We are unwilling to humiliate the obese by taxing them directly, and so our chosen policies do less to help…the obese.

2016-12-31: Viral components of obesity?

During the experiment, both groups of chickens consumed the same amount of food. By the end of the experiment, only the chickens infected with the SMAM-1 virus had become fat. However, even though the infected chickens were fatter, they had lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels in their blood than the uninfected birds. “It was quite paradoxical,because if you have a fatter chicken, you would expect them to have greater cholesterol and circulating triglycerides, but instead those levels went in the wrong direction.” Though Dhurandhar and Atkinson have conducted several strong studies showing the contribution of Ad-36 to fatness, skepticism remains. “I remember giving a talk at a conference where I presented 15 different studies in which Ad-36 either caused or was correlated to fatness. At the end of it, a good friend said to me, ‘I just don’t believe it.’ He didn’t give a reason; he just didn’t believe it. People are really stuck on eating and exercise as the only contributors to fatness. But there is more to it.”

2018-08-16: Sugar is everywhere

Yes, we ate more in 1976, but differently. Today, we buy 50% as much fresh milk per person, but 5x more yoghurt, 3x more ice cream and – wait for it – 39x as many dairy desserts. We buy 50% as many eggs as in 1976, but a 33% more breakfast cereals and 2x the cereal snacks; 50% the total potatoes, but 3x the crisps. While our direct purchases of sugar have sharply declined, the sugar we consume in drinks and confectionery is likely to have rocketed (there are purchase numbers only from 1992, at which point they were rising rapidly. Perhaps, as we consumed just 9kcal a day in the form of drinks in 1976, no one thought the numbers were worth collecting.) In other words, the opportunities to load our food with sugar have boomed. As some experts have long proposed, this seems to be the issue.

2022-01-29: The energy balance theory is bogus

“People get fat because they take in more calories than they expend” is wrong. “Consider using the identical logic to describe, say, why people get wealthy. Economists would be embarrassed by a money-balance theory of wealth: People get rich because they take in more money than they spend. Clearly wealthy people did. We know that because they’re wealthy. The increase in wealth is the positive money balance. But this says nothing about how or why they accumulate such wealth. In obesity research, this tautological logic — saying the same thing in two different ways but offering no explanation for either — was allowed to become the central dogmatic truth.“ Then what does cause obesity? “People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.“

2022-08-14: Wegovy uses a hormone to regulate hunger. It’s wildly effective.

Once it becomes obese, the human body tends to push itself to rebound to its previous highest weight. Scientists don’t fully understand why, or how to stop it. Many speculate that our brains have not adjusted to living in a time of plenty. “There’s been a selection bias towards those people who could better protect body weight during times of famine. But now we don’t have a shortage of food.” When a patient stops taking Wegovy, their appetite returns within weeks and they pack on weight. Patients who came off the drug regained 7% of their body weight. “We used to think that behavior causes the weight state, but now we think the weight state actually causes the behavior”.

CMS specialists

The Certified Metrication Specialist (CMS) program is the only bona-fide metric certification program available. It is a carefully monitored program under the direction of some of the nation’s top metric-system experts who operate as the USMA Certified Metrication Specialist Board. The CMS program is designed to provide documentary evidence for individuals who can qualify as metric specialists because of their education and experience in the use of the modern metric system which is known as SI (the International System of Units).