Yeah, two easy fixes here: don't make the sidebar jump back to the top after loading a message, and sort by date. Otherwise I appreciate the view into this heartless sociopath's mind.
>Otherwise I appreciate the view into this heartless sociopath's mind.
I really don't think it's fair to characterize someone that way.
>>I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren't meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we're going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle. This is going to be an intense year.
Second, they raised a shit ton of money under the bull case of mass consumer adoption, which is going to be impossible if that said consumer feels it is rigged.
Let’s all be real here; for 95% of their use cases both now and in the future, they’re a sportsbook. Which is fine! But they’re not going to get to anywhere near returning a multiple on their manic valuation until they act like one. And the first thing to do is to stop with all of the pseudo-academic bullshit about what a prediction market is. And the second is for them to hire someone, anyone, who knows even the first thing about sports because everyone even tangentially connected to this market knows that before six months ago, Tarek and Shayne couldn’t differentiate between a football and a buttplug.
Interesting that this author was out ahead of this theme a full twelve years ago. Kudos.
It's not all that complex though, really. Just a bunch of adult children who were bullied mercilessly and now have convinced themselves, through the magic of Dunning-Kruger, that they are both eminently more suitable to run things and eminently justified in using that power to exact revenge on their (largely imagined) tormentors.
When LinkedIn went down this morning, unlike most of you I didn't panic. Instead, I was reminded of what's really important in life. That's right: My clients.
I decided to give my client Bob a call as I hadn't heard from him since I called him two days ago, and he hadn't picked up that time, or the seven times before that. But this time was different.
This time, he answered, and what happened next will surprise you.
Oh, the LinkedPocalypse of early 2026. I remember this time fondly as my family huddled around the campfire in the living room as we watched, for a glimpse, all humanity fade and return and fade and return as a broken light bulb that would flicker, not knowing its time was up.
“Why don’t you just watch tv?” you might ask. Can’t. Service update bricked my Samsung TV’s wifi capability.
You're right. I guess that means we should deny them any due process, target them (and anyone who looks like them, even vaguely) indiscriminately, and murder anyone who deigns to get in our way.
There's a lot of really interesting stories about the Eastern Bloc defections into the NHL in the late 1980s. IIRC, Alexander Mogilny, who was the best prospect in the world at the time, hid in a suitcase and defected during the World Junior Championships -- talk about bravery!
Once Mogilny defected, it was impossible for the system to hold. Mogilny (along with Pavel Bure and Fedorov) were groomed and training together to be the next great line combination in hockey; two years later, all three were in the NHL.
They won't collapse, but they won't reach their full potential. I would hate to be a16z sitting on their $10B post-money valuation Kalshi bags, that's for sure.
Insider trading is a feature, not a bug, say Shayne and Tarek, stupidly.
You can't have this amount of obvious manipulation and expect the average retail consumer to join. Same reason why there hasn't been mass consumer adoption of crypto. People just don't feel safe.
Even without insider trading it's a negative-sum game. Every dollar won is a dollar lost, and the platform takes a cut. Like all negative-sum games you should only participate if it's purely for entertainment or you have a clearly definable edge over the other players. If you can't spot the sucker, you are the sucker.
People like to gamble. I expect that the vast majority of interaction with these systems is seen by participants as gambling. "Who will win the presidential election" and "who will win the jets game" are similar kinds of questions. Both are negative sum.
And people do get upset and feel cheated when the bet isn't "fair." We just saw a big scandal where various athletes are changing their behavior in order to enable their buddies to win big in sports betting.
I really don't think that "well, we should just educate people about the fact that prediction markets are actually battlefields of insider information and their purpose is not to enable gambling on the future but instead to give society some model of future outcomes" is going to stick.
There has been virtually no adoption at all regarding crypto, except for being a financial product and in that regard it has already been adopted by people.
The average consumer is easily manipulated so there's not really a contradiction.
> Same reason why there hasn't been mass consumer adoption of crypto. People just don't feel safe.
The volatility and wild swings are a feature, not a bug, to retail investors who like this stuff. Investing in crypto is mainstream now. It's been advertised on TV for years. Download Robinhood, put money in, and trade the swings.
It's popular to "trade" crypto. The retail investors aren't buying to use it. They're not even doing crypto things with it, they're just getting an entry in the database of their investment platform. Everyone knows it's heavily manipulated and gamed, but they want to come along for the ride and make some money with the manipulators.
Prediction markets are exciting to the same audience for the same reason: Maybe outlier things can happen and you'll guess correctly ahead of time. That's the draw.
Oh man. Yeah, Sega Channel was amazing. It's true that it came pretty late in the Genesis' life and by that time, Sega was prioritizing Saturn but man, I loved SC and looked forward to the first of the month when all of the menus would switch.
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