You'd have to be spectacularly stupid to bet on these kinds of things without having insider knowledge, because you ought to know good and damn well by now that the people with insider knowledge are DEFINITELY betting on them.
Even if you are not "betting" similar trades are happening in the stock market as well. Large movements in oil futures shortly before policy changes are announced.
Insider trading is at least regulated in the stock market, albeit imperfectly. Imagine how much worse it would be if C-levels could just short their own stock during a board meeting. No one without insider knowledge would touch it.
Matt Levine often says something like "insider trading is not about fairness, it's about theft." The problem isn't that it's less fair to some stock traders than others, and that stock trading should be some form of perfect gambling where everyone has an equal chance of success. Stock trading is inherently about exploiting information asymmetries — that is what all "non-insiders" are trying to do. But insider trading is wrong because it's effectively stealing confidential information from the company & shareholders, which is in violation of & conflict with the fiduciary responsibility that board members, executives, and employees generally have towards shareholders.
Conceptually, I think that is the right analogy to think about. Prediction markets "want" to be a more accurate source of information, just like stock markets, so from that lens "getting" information to be more accurate is good. When government officials are placing bets on prediction markets, though, it's a massive violation of operational security, and leaking confidential information. They probably think that they are acting anonymously, but it creates so many opportunities for unfriendly state actors to get information, especially if people do it consistently.
Yes, 100%, it is information asymmetry. It happens in every "market" in the world.
The goal should be to balance the information asymmetry, not burry it.
Government officials using their power to affect war decisions ought to be a crime on it's own, not surfacing the information to the public through a prediction market.
This was my thought. If these markets continue allowing insiders, it’ll drive all of the cash from regular people away. So there will be way less money for insiders to win even if they are allowed.
So the perception of insiders is pretty bad for prediction markets as a business imo.
The sooner they knock off the rhetoric about the “theory” behind prediction markets and start thinking about it like a business, the sooner they will take insiders seriously.
I think the market could adapt if regular people left. Insider trading would become multilayered and complex. Insiders would scheme against lower-level insiders; decisionmakers would try to trick insiders into thinking that one thing will happen before doing the complete opposite thing. The world would become more erratic and unpredictable, even insiders wouldn't know what is going on.
Although Polymarket is currently spending a lot of money trying to market itself to working-class regular people to get hooked and scam their paychecks out of[0]
The problem is that the number of people who have any sort of “insider” (material non public) info at all is orders of magnitude lower than the number of people who are well-versed in material public info. And not all insiders are going to place bets.
Kalshi and poly market are going after mass market appeal which is why they buy Super Bowl ads.
Let's say that you know that event Y is going to be announced that will make event X more likely. Before Y is announced you buy shares in X on a prediction market or buy some asset that has price correlated with X. After the announcement you liquidate your position and pocket the difference.
Whether X actually happens or not is irrelevant to you. All that's relevant is the timing of the announcement of Y and the directional effect of Y on X.
A bet against an event is win/win if you want that event to occur. If you are a country that wanted the US to strike Iran, placing a large number of bets that they won't either gets you what you want or earns you money. It is one reason why you can't bet on someone being murdered, as it creates a deniable market to crowd source assassination. Strange that you can crowd source war, but not assassination.
Same goes for sport betting and yet here we are.
People like to bet. They willingly bet on things they have guaranteed disadvantage on (casino games like roulette, slots etc.).
People also drink pure poison (alcohol), smoke pure poison (cigarettes) and engage in brain dead activities like speeding and street racing.
Gambling should be judged as any other vice - people get something out of it (rush, hope, whatever) not by rational money allocation standards.
considering the scale involved, and the OSINT trend, is it possible that people could monitor and correlate stuff like airplane, or us navy activity to deduce when to enter ?
I saw a tweet about a trader placing an oil bet when they saw two military aircraft turn around on their way to Iran, via transponder. I believe before the deal was announced.
Traders have been using satellite images from around the world for DECADES, it seems more likely to be true than a conspiracy from a insider who actually makes the decision or has first line access to it.
in fact US army publicly admitting running a disinformation campaign involving flying planes knowing they would be seen by osint in the previous Iran attack from last summer
Do you buy oil or products made with it? Then sorry, you made a bet, and in fact you were just ripped off by your own government for the third time in a row.
Prediction markets are supposed to be providing the most accurate predictions.
The most accurate predictions come from insider information.
Poeple complaining about insider trading on prediction markets seem to be missing the point. They're supposed to have insider trading. That's the whole idea.
But there is still the problem of knowing which new trades the insiders made before the bet is settled (maybe solved by being an insider of the prediction market), and also since prediction markets need money on both sides (you are betting against other people, not the 'house') when the insiders make their buy they probably eat up most of or all of the action on the other side.
You can trade on non-public information if you obtain that information unintentionally. Now you have to be able to prove it’s unintentional if the question came up. A real experience example of this is if you work in an office building and your neighboring company, a public company, is being raided by the FBI. Can you use that information to take a position in the market? Yes, according to multiple attorneys we spoke with.
I bring this up because we assume the trading is coming from insiders but I wonder if the parties behind this have baked in a layer similar to my story above.
To close this back to your comment, and I don’t have an answer here: is knowing who the insiders are and acting on that a crime? If you did know and didn’t report them, are you breaking a law? Or worse, you reported it to the deaf ears of a regulator that are focused elsewhere or are under resourced to respond now?
it's legal to follow FBI cars and see who they raid so as to make trades. you could even have a hedge fund specialized on this. it's called alternative data
you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails.
the only thing illegal is to be a designated insider - typically a restricted group of people with access to sensitive information
This interpretation is incredibly unlikely. The first and third paragraphs discuss legality, but the middle one was merely talking about likelihood of prosecution?
Even then it would be inaccurate: the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade
To be clear, I was responding about trading on internal communications, not specifically a raid. The practice of using internal communication to guide trading runs contrary to most company policies. I happen to have worked at a company where this kind of practice was both acknowledged and openly discussed. It was a strange place.
> the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade
You’re implying some specific combination of factors, but it’s not clear what you mean. What qualifies as "timing"? Around earnings, when trading volume is highest or just around some event? And what exactly counts as "lucky"?
Why would regulators scrutinize a sub-$25k purchase of my own company’s stock? That concern feels overstated. Granted, I’m not a lawyer. In practice I can place a trade at any time. If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny.
The claim that you "absolutely cannot do this" is simply incorrect. I stand by that.
> If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny
If they never make money, you’re fine. If they make a lot of money, it will get flagged ex post facto. Regulators then check if you or your family have any affiliations with the issuer; if they do, it’s flagged further. All of this typically happens automatically after companies’ stock prices move significantly.
Are you implying that there is arbitrage between the prediction market and the real market? Until now we were assuming that the prediction market is self-contained, with its other side staying within the confines of the prediction market.
insiders would presumably be bigger trades that show high conviction about improbable events. An insider would wait until the last minute to take advantage of low prices of a market close to expiration.
Apparently, according to you, lots of people are spectularly stupid because the only way you make money in a prediction market is for someone to bet on the opposing view point.
This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.
We are now definitely doing a lot of that. My manager has been saying things like, "I don't even know how it works, but I used AI to build [thing], and I just sent it to a PR." He's very strong technically, but the mindset has absolutely shifted to, "move fast and break things, yoloooooo". It's frustrating to say the least.
I don't mean this as a jab, but would you use Windows to develop software? Especially Windows that has AD teeth sunk into it where everything is "managed by your organization." It's just a thousand small cuts for seemingly no good reason.
I'm a c++ developer and I wouldn't use anything other than Windows to develop software, for one reason alone - Visual Studio is a fantastic tool that is better than any IDE I have ever tried it and imho it's the best product Microsoft makes. It just works and works well. And most console toolchains are only on Windows, so outside of iOS development I don't really have a choice.
No, but I also wouldn't let people who do not understand the soul of the OS to rewrite it.
If I were the microslop god for 6 weeks, I would force everyone to go to a boot camp and use Windows 7 for 4 of those weeks so they could see what made it so good.
No invasiveness, an OS that felt like yours. Just enough eye candy to not be distracting but to also feel like a clean modern system. Low system usage at idle. Calm, clean, and ready to roll when you clicked a button.
Windows is NEVER going to be MacOS, but the dev teams seem obsessed with macifying windows while also wedging that AI abomination copilot into every line of code, so windows is getting a tag team of rapid enshittification on top of already having been massively enshittified, and at least some portion of it is due to the people being paid to make it not understanding what it is supposed to be, the niche it held, and the reason for windows existence.
Yes, because you know what all of the 200,000+ employees are doing in every wing and branch of the entire company.
Then again, Microsoft themselves directly dispute your statement:
Across the landscape of more than 750,000 devices in use at Microsoft, we support Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices. Windows devices account for approximately 60 percent of the total employee-device population, while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are personally owned employee devices, including phones and tablets. Our employees are empowered to access Microsoft data and tools using managed devices that enable them to be their most productive.
Not to mention that most app designers use OSX for the design tools, which means that there is going to be by default some bleed between the two systems on design choices alone.
> while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are
Pretty much everyone has an android or iOS device in their pocket. A lot of those devices are enrolled into Microsoft MDM in order to access email/teams/etc. These phones are part of the stats. Dev work in general is done on Windows boxes, unless you are in specific teams that have other requirements. Default is Windows, specifically Windows laptop.
Worst case somewhere around 50,000-150,000 tablets.
That leaves ~200,000 unaccounted for devices with only macOS on the table. I think the saturation is higher than you have experienced, although I'll give that it's entirely possible that the areas you worked in were not one of them.
Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too. Transmissions, fuel pumps, timing belts, radiators (mostly), fuel injectors, emissions systems, etc are all out of the picture in an EV. Servicing those things may be infrequent but is often extremely expensive.
I think this is the biggest thing that non-EV owners do not understand. Or perhaps they do but not the full scope because money is spent little by little over the years. the oil changes, brakes, belts, starters, alternators, whatevers… I have 2014 Tesla S and I literally spent practically nothing for 11 years. I had to put in a new modem, replaced 12V battery twice and that’s about it. Still on original brakes (102k miles) because with regenerative breaking I hardly ever use the brakes, I mean there is just nothing to spend your money on (I even called Tesla in the beginning of my ownership and was like “do I need to being the car in for something” to be met with “is something wrong with the car? no? why are you calling us then??!” :) ). I will never own a non-EV car again and neither will my kid or anyone in my family
I hear a lot of Teslas banging around corners in my town and it leads me to believe that EV drivers freed from annual dealer maintenance actually believe that tie rod ends don't need to be inspected and replaced.
I recently had to do some service (12 years to the day of the purchase) and mechanic, who worked for tesla for a decade and now has a local shop, told me exactly the same thing - you got shit that moves, you gotta lube it once in a while! but I own another EV and 47.5k miles later the car hasn’t seen a dealership since I drove off it.
> Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too.
OK? Then don’t forget to add a replacement battery, replacement battery heating and cooling system, factor in a few extra sets of tires over a lifetime of the vehicle, you can also assume the suspension will wear out earlier, so at least ball joints if not also struts.
I’m an automotive EE, there is no free lunch.
I have a car we just got rid of in our research shop, in order to replace the battery the entire rear suspension and half of the interior had to come out. To an insurance agency, the car was literally totaled between the cost of the battery and the labor to replace it.
I think EVs today are intended to last shorter than the battery. There has been examples of model 3s reaching 250k+ miles on the original battery, a number most cars (ICE or EV) do not come close to before being salvaged. There are also startups re-purposing battery packs for stationary use ex. from old Nissan leafs. So I don't think you should consider battery pack replacement costs as part of owning a EV.
All the school buses near where I live (Sierra Nevada mountains in California) have these - it's cool to watch them lower and start spinning.
But chains aren't enough in some common situations around here that locals, including school bus drivers, know well. When we get a good size snow storm (multiple feet) and the sun comes out a day or two later, thick ice forms on the sections of road that the sun hits - snow melt runs across the road during the day and freezes at night, getting thicker and smoother each day. When that happens on our steeper inclines, chains on AWD/4WD vehicles are not enough to get up those inclines or to stop on the way down them. Locals know where those spots are and take other routes in those situations. It's hard for me to imagine autonomous vehicles having such local information in remote areas like this anytime soon.
We ran 100% of our workloads on VMWare this time last year. We'll be at 0% this time next year. We were heading that direction over the long term anyway, but the Broadcom shenanigans made us double down on that effort. They may actually be more unpleasant to deal with than Oracle, which is something I would have thought to be impossible.
Also S3 related: the bucket owner can now be configured as the object owner no matter where the object originated. In the past this was exceedingly painful if you wanted to allow one account contribute objects to a bucket in another account. You could do the initial contribution, but the contributor always owned the object, and you couldn't delegate access to a third account.
I don't use them when it's an option - but Home Depot in particular often has zero actual cashiers. They've always got a couple people standing around in self checkout to assist when the system (inevitably?) doesn't work properly, though...
HD has really good self checkouts though. They don't require any interaction with the touch screen except hitting "Done", nor do they have over-sensitive anti-theft scale systems.
It's just a wireless barcode scanner on a table with a receipt printer and a payment terminal. The screen shows everything you've scanned with pictures! and legible product descriptions, which makes it really easy to make sure you scanned everything correctly.
I bet it works better for Costco because they don't stock any items with weights low enough not to be registered by the scale.
Also, the last time I went to my local Costco, you were no longer permitted to check yourself out at the self-checkouts. They didn't remove them, but they had started using them as cashier-staffed checkouts.
That was the old NCR Fastlane implementation, done wrong. They left the item security feature enabled and left the bag scales turned on. This also happened at IKEA US (which lead to them being pulled out for a long while).
A lot of retailers have dumped NCR and gone in-house for their self checkout software packages now and made it so much better. Home Depot took their custom point-of-sale and built their own self checkout frontend on top of it to allow all checkout lanes to “convert” to self checkout.
Target also did the same, dumping NCR’s software and rolling in-house software on top of the hardware to make it Not Suck.
... except at the "PRO" checkouts. Which are actually just ordinary check-out lanes. Anybody can go through them. The signs mean nothing whatsoever.
I never go through their self-checkouts unless I've only got one or two pre-packaged items. I usually park on the "PRO" side, enter through those doors, check out on that side, and leave through those doors.
When I am being abused by a faceless corporation I simply withdraw my business entirely and direct my capital towards a competitor. Sometimes this is very inconvenient for me, but change has to start somewhere, right?
Exactly this, last time I went to HD I had a cart with maybe 20 items, NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands. Now I decided that if a place doesn’t have human cashiers I just don’t shop there and give priority to small stores, I might pay more but at least I know the profits are for a neighbor.
> NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands.
I'm pretty sure this is illegal. All businesses need to accept cash somewhere, somehow. I am curious what would happen if you forced the issue and announced to the attendant that you intend to pay in cash.
As far as I know this is not accurate. A business may be required to accept cash in order to settle an outstanding debt that it is owed, but I don't think anything prevents them from simply refusing to do business with you from the outset if you don't accept their payment terms.
>As far as I know this is not accurate. A business may be required to accept cash in order to settle an outstanding debt that it is owed, but I don't think anything prevents them from simply refusing to do business with you from the outset if you don't accept their payment terms.
That depends on where you are. In NYC, businesses have been required to accept cash in person since 2020[0]. In 2025, New York State[1] followed suit.
You're right. And I'm surprised. There are states and cities that mandate a cash option, but most don't, including my own. I now side with the OP. There was a time I carried $50 around at all times to avoid being tracked by my card data, but then got lazy. Need to return to this habit.
The only store where I insist on paying cash is (maybe not surprisingly) Home Depot, because they have this odd, shameless practice of tying your in-store purchases with your web account, and sending emails in response. No thank you.
In the HDs I've seen the customer service counter has a couple cash registers and is staffed. I assume the registers are there so they can check out people who are there to pick up an item that they ordered for pickup, but they will also handle regular checkouts.
> You'd have to reindex the metadata (roles access), which may be substantial if you have a complex enough schema with enough users/roles.
Right, but this compare this to the original proposal:
> A basic implementation will return the top, let's say 1000, documents and then do the more expensive access check on each of them
Using an index is much better than that.
And it should be possible to update the index without a substantial cost, since most of the 100000 documents likely aren't changing their role access very often. You only have to reindex a document's metadata when that changes.
This is also far less costly than updating the actual content index (the vector embeddings) when the document content changes, which you have to do regardless of your permissions model.
I don't understand how "using an index" is a solution to this problem. If you're doing search, then you already have an index.
If you use your index to get search results, then you will have a mix of roles that you then have to filter.
If you want to filter first, then you need to make a whole new search index from scratch with the documents that came out of the filter.
You can't use the same indexing information from the full corpus to search a subset, your classical search will have undefined IDF terms and your vector search will find empty clusters.
If you want quality search results and a filter, you have to commit to reindexing your data live at query time after the filter step and before the search step.
I don't think Elastic supports this (last time I used it it was being managed in a bizarre way, so I may be wrong). Azure AI Search does this by default. I don't know about others.
It's not at all uncommon to trade a tanker load of oil, and this may result in the tanker being re-directed mid-trip, or being anchored somewhere for a while. Those are normal shipping events. (Yes, there are parking spaces for oil tankers. Here are the ones in the San Francisco Bay.[1])
I have read of an oil trader who bought a trainload of railroad tank cars of oil as a similar deal. That was a bigger hassle, because finding and paying for a storage track to park the tank cars became his problem. There is a market in railroad siding for storage, but there are not that many available spaces. Most of them are in Outer Nowhere, someplace where there used to be something that needed track but no longer does.[2] Managing this tied up a lot of high-priced broker time. Supposedly worked out OK, but nobody wanted to do it again.
Have you got a link to a different account? This one describes it as an XML parsing error (expecting true/false instead of 0/1) combined with some hubris on the part of the the trading exec ("what part of ‘execute my f*ing trade’ don’t you understand!")
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