> "Between A from B"? What grammatical construct is that? Not an English one....

You have a talent for distracting yourself with trivialities. Who cares about the principle of free speech when we have the mighty Strafgesetzbuch to guide us? And who cares about any type of speech when we can talk grammar? Marvelous.

I don't think I ever said anything about yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, but quoting sophistry used to falsely prosecute antiwar protesters is exactly the kind of bullshit I'd expect from your ilk. I bet if the court told you to catch escaped slaves, you'd get to it right away as your highest moral duty. How could anyone have any other morals than the ones listed in the StGB?

Yes, I could tell that you struggle to distinguish between "the goal of free speech" from "the laws regarding speech". For most people the content of the StGB is not as important as the principles it encodes or fails to encode. But there are many people like you who latch onto the legal text as their moral bible.

Some people really struggle to distinguish between "the goal of free speech" from "the laws regarding speech".

When you criticize the Dear Leader and he legally brings you to the People's Revolutionary Court, which follows all protocol to the letter before having you shot for lese majeste, nothing illegal has taken place. Still, the people might object to this state of affairs and seek to improve it.

I do not know where you lost the ability to distinguish between "legal" and "right". But this non-sequitur where someone complains about impingement on free speech (the principle) and gets a response like "akshually Germans are not entitled to free speech" is disturbingly common.

Allegedly the Roman Republic was founded when Sextus Tarquinius exercised his kingly right to sleep with other men's wives. I suppose if you were in Brutus' shoes, you would explain to the foolish men of Rome how procedure was followed and that's all that matters.

People's impulse has always been to restrict speech and to win by suppressing dissent. The 1st Amendment is an exception and has plenty of detractors, even among the terminally online who are beneficiaries of unfettered communication (remember "freeze peach"?)..

Web hosts today feel no shame about arbitrary moderation, shadow bans, if not disabling comments outright. The same journalists who somehow see themselves as the protectors of democracy have no issue writing for venues with public commenting disabled. It comes from the same sentiment - the citizen is a dumb and dangerous animal who should be controlled (still gets to vote tho..but we could think about fixes for that later). You cannot let dumb and dangerous animals post on the sites of venerable protectors of democracy such as the NYT! That would endanger civic life!

This impulse is omnipresent and not restricted to journalistic venues. What does OpenAI think of first when they talk about safety? Its not the killbots; their harnesses were initially motivated to prevent dumb and dangerous animals from asking about meth recipes or pictures of naked women. The citizen cannot be trusted with open AI, he has to be protected from himself. The citizen cannot be trusted with anything. Except voting, apparently. For now.

In practice it isn't enough to have a reason for revenge. Communism has proven remarkably resilient, and even the people of North Korea, despite having ample reason to exact revenge, have not been able to kill Kim (or his Cuban counterparts). Most people in history did not live in free countries, and even today, only a small set of countries have democracies (as flawed as ours are). This is why it's important for the populace to be armed and to zealously protect its rights - "renewed reasons for revenge" alone will only serve as seasoning for your stay in the labor camp.

Each nonprofit one day reorients from fulfilling the mission to enriching employees and management. What's unique about OpenAI is how quickly and publicly Altman could make the transition.

This is a common defense of HFT favoritism, but I don't see it happening in the real market. What you see in the market is exactly what you'd expect to see in any market - highly traded assets trade on narrow spreads, illiquid assets trade on very wide spreads. VOO has a 1 cent spread because a billion dollars of VOO are traded every day. On the other hand, despite all the sweetheart deals that HFTs benefit from, VOO260417C00720000 has a 100% spread - the kindly HFTs who can easily automatically quote both sides are nowhere to be found. The argument is that these people get discounts on their trading costs and mechanical advantages in how they do their trading because they also have a duty to provide narrow spreads, but those narrow spreads are nowhere to be found (except in places where you obviously don't need HFT for narrow spreads, like goddamn S&P).

> HFT's save money [..] ensuring the pricing is more fair

HFT is about being on the other side of everyone's trades and collecting money on the spread. Since you want to trade everything, this limits how much you can know about the things you trade. Arbitrage and price correction do not require colocated servers and trading fee exemptions and they should not be conflated with HFT. If you do HFT it is synergistic to also have a robust model for what the prices should be, but in many ways HFT is the polar opposite strategy of the trading involved in price discovery.

Are those other people in the room with you right now?

By the way, today I got Hunterbrook Media's yearly recap, which begins like this:

```
In 2025, Hunterbrook Media published dozens of investigations, driving impact across healthcare, housing, and the environment. (See below!)

No ads or clickbait. No exclusive paywalls.
[..]

But really, our business model is simpler than that.

We get paid to be right, to be rigorous. Because if the reporting is wrong, the investment or the lawsuit fails. And the reverse is also true. Markets and courts, while severely flawed, are still fairly good at getting to the truth — eventually.
```

The "skin in the game" principle is widely applicable.

> Let's assume for now that they've predicted things correctly because they were smarter, that their smartness, if it exists, benefits society, aside from any other of their qualities, let's set all these question aside. In that case, how does insider trading fit into this system? People who got inside information did so because they lucked into being in the right place at the right time, not because of ability to make correct predictions. They won't be able to make correct predictions next time, so the darwinian system ends up rewarding people with lower fitness.

The goal is not to build a ruling class of enlightened capitalist oracles. Rather, you have a democratic system where everyone with conviction can put some skin in the game and get a vote. People like to criticize this - "X is a bubble, look at all the suckers investing in it, this proves that the market is irrational". Could be true! You can make a bad wager and in doing so you will push the price the wrong way and inflate the bubble even more. It's just that it is a self-correcting system, because most people who bet incorrectly will lose their shirt and their vote on the market. The natural consequence of this is "the rich get richer" - if you have a pattern of successful investing, that pattern is likely to continue, just as having a pattern of successfully repairing computers or any other enterprise. The ruling class of rich investors is formed as a result of the self-correcting market, but it's not the goal; it's an unfortunate consequence.

The person with insider knowledge, regardless of his virtue or of what he deserves, has information. By trading on his insider info he pushes the prices in the correct direction. Yes, maybe next time he uses his extra votes to make a dumb bet. Or maybe next time he comes back with more insider info, or does not trade at all. Regardless, the system is self-correcting; if he misuses the votes he will lose them.

> What I'm seeing now is a bunch of people mindlessly pouring a ton of money into the AI bubble, so doesn't seem to be the case to me.

A lot of people share this sentiment. They may even be right. Few have bet their life savings against the trend. In many ways I even sympathize, because shorting is unnecessarily difficult in the current regime; it is not actually possible to short a bubble while also eliminating the risk of premature liquidation. I will leave the "naked shorting should be legal" hot take for another day though.

I do not know if the expected cashflows from AI will materialize. I do know that if every influencer with an opinion had shorted bitcoin at $1 or whenever they decided that it's bullshit, we'd have a lot of humbled, homeless influencers. There are a lot of people willing to yap about how $CURRENT_TOPIC is a bubble, but if they aren't millionaires from their proven track record of recognizing bubbles, with corresponding market positions against the bubble, it's just yapping.

> Wouldn't that tip them off ahead of time that this operation will take place, possibly resulting in this operation failing completely?

Right, there is a tradeoff. You want an efficient market and you also want to keep military secrets. But you do not need insider trading law to keep military secrets - leaking those is illegal with or without insider trading law. The insider trading we want is like, "Pepsi CFO notices that the books are stinky and makes a big bet against the company" (contrast with "Pepsi CFO sabotages the books so he can short" which is illegal at the "sabotage" part for fiduciary reasons). Or "line accountant "

Theft is already a crime.

> But what is the societal upside of allowing a company to exploit "real losers" in this case?

Every regulation has costs. Every single one. Even if we ignore all the ink already spilled on efficiency and price discovery, the onus is on the regulator to justify the burden that he imposes on society. Even our current nanny states are not paternalistic enough to ban sports betting and other gamified gambling, so how can that be the basis for banning insider trading of all things?

This has already happened with rationalists betting on each other's weddings, iirc there was even a CEO who rattled off a bunch of keywords on an earnings call because there was a market on whether the topics will be raised in the earnings call. Contrary to expectations, prediction markets did not immediately implode.

BTW you can short META and try to kill Zuck right now, yet somehow stock markets have not caused the apocalypse. It's truly a mystery!

You probably know that it goes beyond that. We all know of the SEC Rule 10b5-1 trading plan abuses from recent years - file a trade that will happen in 6 months, when your current insider information will be obsolete. In 6 months, you have more info, and you can cancel the trade shortly before it happens using that info. It is my honestly held belief that the entire insider trading framework is a kludge made to satisfy the fairness instinct of laymen, consequences be damned. You can see it in how different the actual legal justification (theft) is from what people actually think it is. You can see it from how inconsistently the rules are enforced, from how nobody knows where the line is drawn, from the mental acrobatics lawyers have to do to explain what's allowed (e.g. why you can leak to journos but not to acquaintances).

> lets see if its not already covered by some other law (e.g. fiduciary duty) and then we can talk

> Anyone can make stupid postulations - many people's initial objection to prediction markets back in the day was that they'd be used for assassinations.

> Capture of Maduro is far less clear, given that the same party is still in power in Venezuela, or that it's not clear if it's even possible to convict him of anything at all.

There is a lot of dough in translating events to prices. If you knew two weeks ago that Maduro will be captured, you could've bet on Exxon (oil good). You could've bet against Exxon (Chevron works in Venezuela and will now trounce Exxon). Many ways to read the tea leaves, only some correct. But that's the point of "the rich get richer" - if you make the wrong inference, today you will push the price the wrong way, and tomorrow you won't get a say anymore because you've been separated from your money by savvier speculators.

Prediction markets allow some separation of responsibility. You can just get paid for knowing that Maduro will fall (iirc someone bet $30k on a small market shortly before the operation, evidence of insider knowledge), and then the guys who run more complex trading engines can ingest "Maduro likely to be replaced" and make downstream predictions.

> As I understand, while Venezuela has huge oil reserves, it isn't that big an oil producer currently

Some take this as a basis to bet on lower oil prices. "Venezuela is not producing now, because it is a mismanaged communist hellhole, but it will become wealthier and more productive as the communists are driven out." That is one story that you can bet on, if you have the capital and the conviction (and some are doing so).

> Much more importantly though, you may perhaps get 'price discovery' when you learn of actual events that definitely happened.

The earlier you know the better. For example some people want us to make changes to forestall global warming now, not when the droughts and other predicted effects have "definitely happened". There is a concrete benefit in wealth and collective well-being if usage and production adjust before an actual shortage has materialized (one man's toilet paper hoarding is another man's demand smoothing).

> In other words, you discover absolutely nothing.

Your objection is more relevant to central planning, the idea that a small committee shall understand the economy (and then wisely steer it and whatever). With markets, there is no need for the inference to be explainable to any one person, much less a layman. We just let a bunch of overconfident monkeys make their assertions, and after some time we cull the ones who got it wrong. The ones who are correct get more votes over time. Why were they correct, are they using insider info? Who cares.