Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.
It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.
Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.
When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.
That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.
Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.
If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.
In theory slippery slopes are a fallacy, but it's really something else when there are people out there actively looking for slanted surfaces and applying experimental lubricants to every single one they can find.
Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.
In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.
And what is a "terrorist organization" to you?
The US has state sponsored domestic terrorist organizations like the Proud Boys for example.
"Scathing execration" comes to mind as a possible first step on the evolutionary chain from the latter to the former.
Is it wrong to ask foreign visitors to follow US laws and come here legally? Is that evil or racist?
Not wrong. Naive. You can be right all day and not get the outcome you imagine being right will get you.
So can I come to the US illegally...?
50 million already have.
We need to be dismantling the illegals, not the cameras that are catching them.
And when you succeed, you will find the illegal immigrants were not the cause of society's problems.
Recent result from Penrose showed that a gravitational gradient also collapsed wave functions. So it's not just you. The universe is doing it too.
Yes. lf they need to do is hire a team of crack programmers and system architects and have them start work on replacing the systems. Keep them hired as a key department of the post office and they will maintain the system. If it's good they could even license it out to others.
I've seen this happen in other contexts. E.G. in a semiconductor firm, they designed their own tools. Then they made that a whole department and spun it out as one of the chip design tool vendors which is still around today.
If you just outsource it, you will get a product that serves the needs of the vendor, not the customer.
Politicians: How do we stop climate change?
Experts: Reduce consumption, limit abuses by the powerful, instate a carbon tax with teeth
Politicians: Unacceptable! AI, how do we stop climate change?
Every single LLM since GPT-3.5: Reduce consumption, limit abuses by the powerful, instate a carbon tax with teeth
Politicians: Unacceptable! Techbros, how do we stop climate change?
Techbros: FEED ME!
"It ain't over until it's over." -- Casey Stengel