They're not gambling if you have a real-world stake in an outcome addressed by one of these markets.

That definition is bonkers. If I gamble in a casino, I have a real-world stake in an outcome. If I turn to my neighbour and make a side bet about the outcome of my primary bet, it doesn't become insurance, it's just another bet.

Secondly, calling them markets seriously is also bonkers. They are full of insider traders and professional quants who take most of the money from stupid college kids who are desperately worried about their future employment prospects. These are markets in name only, and you're falling for it.

Thirdly, Kalshi and Polymarket both make side deals with the large finance companies for billion dollar investments. The product is you. Well, your money, they don't care about you. Jane Street is the top performer in this space and has repeatedly been found guilty of insider trading and market shenanigans all over the world. Good luck hedging your "real-world stakes" against those guys.

After that, you should tell them to also build a Thunderdome so that all the AIs can fight each other in leather rags, while playing the new tune on loudspeakers. There's only one rule: Two AI enter, one AI leaves.

That's a well known side effect of mathematics! May I suggest using an LLM to count them for you?

There's a lamb! That makes one!
Look,another lamb! That makes two!
Another lamb! That makes four!
And one more crocodile! That makes five!
There's another lamb! That's six!
...

These kinds of undersea maps used to be posted regularly on this site.

They only show the sea cables of course, there are lots of buried land connections everywhere too. The world is way more connected than it was in the 1990s, when the Hacker Tourist went around chasing fibre.

In this particular case (Hormuz), the impacted Gulf states have 1) plenty of money to pay, 2) plenty of redundant connections with neighbouring countries, and 3) as you rightly point out, Starlink is also an option.

Iran has a few satellites itself, and gets help from Russian intelligence. That's how they've managed to pinpoint and bomb all the US military bases hidden inside the Gulf states.

I already told you, the rent seeking won't work. This is a nothing burger.

Try Goedel LAMBs, they're ma-a-a-ny times easier to count!

He totally should. Iran would welcome the money, and when he set foot into his new "kingdom" on the first day they could hang him and make life better for the rest of us.

He definitely IS a gaslighting fucktard. He's always been one.

Years ago, when he turned Google from a promising tech company into an evil spy company, he used to prance around telling reporters to suck it up, because if they didn't want to have their private data hoovered up and published on the Internet, maybe they shouldn't be doing things in private at all. Then a reporter from CNET looked up Schmidty's address and published it in a story for all to see. Schmidt promptly attacked the reporter and CNET like the gaslighting fucktard he already was, misusing the growing power of Evil Google for his own ends.He's done lots of these things.

Maybe even all the real numbers between 0 and 2! (using twice the space)

IF this is true, it's a perfect, real-world, textbook example of rent-seeking. The classic example is putting a chain across a river used for commerce; this is exactly the same, updated for modern technology. Excellent! Economics students take note!

You're wrong on this one. The Internet was designed by DARPA precisely for this kind of situation, namely routing around damage to the network because of war damage.

The end effect of attempting to cut cables and prevent repair ships from... ahem... repairing the cables in Hormuz during a war or otherwise is that traffic will be transparently diverted to other cables in the network.

Nobody will notice, except for the neighbouring Gulf states, who will probably see traffic slowdowns, as their other connections must take the packets, and _possibly_ (but that's a long shot) more expensive Internet pricing.

Literally nobody in the rest of the world will notice any sustained slowdowns on packets. This is completely unlike the oil price hikes, which will remain for at least as long as the US and Israel keep inflaming the region.

You're not wrong. Grok Ani already "looks French" after they convince "her" to change her outfit...

Bond franchise has been bought by Uncle Jeff. So the next Bond will be American (and Jeff's wife Lauren will have a scene as a Bond girl).

Too bad Apple beat them to it.

Gold iphones have been a thing in Saudi for many years already. Apparently the cheaper regular iphones stain too easily (with all the oil fumes).

Why would that matter? Surely, the physical supply is occurring in Lake Tahoe, so the laws governing the service contract are local unless there's an explicit agreement in the terms to vary the jurisdiction.

lol