Many people here are talking about how more powerful people are also corrupt and are getting away with it. All corruption is bad. This soldier put the life of everyone on the mission in danger by doing this.
All corruption is bad. Selective enforcement of the law is worse. It increases corruption by giving a strong incentive to win favors from powerful people.
The sentiment is not that this man shouldn't be prosecuted it is that the blatant double standard and growing endemic societal cancer that is corruption is being allowed to blossom while leaders target scape goats for the same behavior. What this administration is trying to signal with going after this guy is that the problem is not with them, it's someone else, that they're on the up and up. It is why scapegoating is an effective tactic
it's a blatant double standard if you have evidence of people "doing it and getting away with it", but you don't, you just suspect it. and it's scapegoating if blame is centered on a person or group to explain away the totality of a widespread (or made up) problem, and that is also not happening here, instead "a person did something" and got arrested.
I don’t understand the point of denying reality when it unfolds in front of you. Plenty of evidence for these things. Denial of obvious truth is an American epidemic and cultural export
The point is that none of the congressional cases would end in a conviction. So unless you want to suspend rule of law theres not really much we can do without some hard evidence.
Unfortunately enforcing any laws on congressmen is very difficult.
In all decent democracies elected politicians have immunity or similar safeguards, since the separation of powers (as theorized by Montesquieu in the middle of illuminism) which represents the foundation of democracy demands that both the legislative and executive power be separated from the judicial one.
“Making the politicians pay for their crimes” is often just a populist argument, while there are ways to incriminate them, expecting that they can be prosecuted like us normal citizens is not compatible with democracy.
You may not like what I said but I said it. Go read the original works by Montesquieu, he understood it first.
You said SHOULD. Yes, I absolutely agree that politicians (and I very intentionally do not call any names) should be criminally punished most harshly for abusing their position for personal enrichment or for some other egoistical goals. On the other hand, these are the people we, as totality of all voters, chose for their function. The main punishment for a politician in democracy should be the threat of losing next elections, not criminal prosecution. And of course, per definition, in every democracy every politician has a majority of citizens, who considers him stupid and in the hysterical environment of the current political life (hysterical for many more or less good reasons) such politician is not only opponent, but an enemy if not a traitor. There is an unfortunate tendency to convert this adversarial feeling into full blown hate and accusations of criminal misconduct.
I would argue the opposite, that having members of government who CANNOT be prosecuted like normal citizens is not compatible with democracy. I would think arguments to the contrary would have to assume other impediments to a properly functioning justice system, such as politically motivated prosecutions, widespread selective enforcement, etc.
Exactly. And the same is true of the judicial system btw, who must stay separate from other powers, meaning that it also has to police itself, which can create its own issues.
These are just the (little) costs of democracy. If you aren’t ready to pay them, you haven’t really considered the alternatives.
They didn't make the bet until after the raid - but before the announcement. Surely they endangered people, perhaps more and different people than simply those on the mission
Can you provide a reference? From a Reuters article:
> prosecutors said Van Dyke bet more than $33,000 on Polymarket between December 27, 2025, and January 2, 2026, that Maduro would soon be out of office and that U.S. forces would soon enter Venezuela
Incentivizes him to take on more risk to ensure mission success.
When someone bets 32k that a political opponent of the US is going to be kidnapped I think its fair to say some will assume it was placed by an insider.
He was incentivized to win the bet. The military does not want people to have outside loyalties because that creates problems any time they’re not perfectly aligned – for example, if they had orders to minimize team or civilian casualties you don’t want this guy starting a messy firefight because he’s thinking the target is getting away and willing to risk someone else’s lives for half a million dollars.
You also have to think about leaning information: if people do this, bodyguards around the world are going to monitor betting markets looking for unexplained changes. The military doesn’t like anything which can leak timing information since that increases the risk of a mission failing.
What exactly would that look like from the position of an individual low rank unit? What would $32k of risk look like on a foreign battle field? I'm struggling to understand this prerogative.
What would be far larger source of risk is if they bet _against_ the operation and then personally sabotaged it. That's far more understandable but it's not what happened here.
It apparently and sadly needs to be said on Hacker News, I'm not defending him, and he should be punished, but I genuinely can't apprehend the risk assessment logic here.
Easy to think of a scenario where he should stand down but instead continues with the mission, risking the lives of his team mates, or maybe civilians.
Thank you, this was my first thought as well. He essentially leaked classified mission info for the purpose of scoring some cash on it. Insider trading in congress is a big problem too, but there are some real differences here.
Both are true. No sympathy for this guy if he’s guilty as charged.
But also don’t forget that this guy’s trades are a drop in the ocean compared to the rest of the likely insider trading that’s visible in the Polymarket logs. (Eg on timing of Iran attacks, Trump tariff announcements, etc)
This is true, just like "all lives matter" is true, and it misses the point in the exact same way.
Those people you are replying to are not saying that this soldier should get away with his corruption because more powerful people are getting away with theirs. They are saying that those who abuse greater power are doing greater harm, and that their corruption should be punished with greater urgency.
On top of the harm the powerful people inflict directly through their corrupt actions, there's a secondary effect on the society at large. Unlike trickle-down economics, trickle-down corruption is a real thing. People see those in power get away with corruption and say "Why should I do the right thing?"
Of course, the usual answer from those in power ends up being "because we have the power to punish you and you don't have the power to punish us". And that's how you end up with the arrest and prosecution of a US soldier on the same 5 counts that the top politicians and their cronies are getting away with on a daily basis, aided by the president himself.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Legitimizing small time corruption because bigger corruption exists just legitimizes corrupt behavior in general. It should be offensive no matter who does it.
I have to ask: did you read what I wrote before you replied to me? I know the question might come across as an attack, but it's not. I'm genuinely curious about what process lead to your comment being a reply to mine, when mine explicitly states the following:
> Those people you are replying to are not saying that this soldier should get away with his corruption because more powerful people are getting away with theirs. They are saying that those who abuse greater power are doing greater harm, and that their corruption should be punished with greater urgency.
I did read it. Your point is effectively irrelevant. It means the same thing. Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.
It's like saying "we shouldn't worry about enforcing traffic laws because we need to use our resources to bring war criminals to justice" when the reason where not bringing war criminals to justice isn't for lack of concern, it's just that we have no coercive power.
Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.
> It's like saying "we shouldn't worry about enforcing traffic laws because we need to use our resources to bring war criminals to justice"
It most definitely isn't. At no point did anyone in this discussion say "we shouldn't worry about small time corruption". In fact, I explicitly said the opposite. And then I highlighted it after you essentially accused me of doing so, as you're doing again.
> Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.
No, it's not. No one is "creating" an "urgency chain". Justice isn't binary. Things can be more or less just, they're not either perfectly just or completely unjust with nothing in between. Similarly, different people have different levels of impact. That's the definition of power in this context: the level of impact your actions have. No one is "creating" these concepts out of thin air.
What is happening here is that people are complaining about injustice and other people -- like you and the person I initially replied to -- are trying to delegitimize those complaints by stating that "all corruption is bad".
Let me repeat this, in case it got lost despite earlier repetitions: yes, we all know that "all corruption is bad". Just like we all know that "all lives matter", but pointing out that banality only got popular after the "black lives matter" slogan surfaced in response to a systemic injustice against African Americans.
You're doing the same kind of thing here.
> Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.
On the contrary. If you always give up on caring because you don't have coercive power, you will never rectify injustices caused by imbalance of coercive power.
> This soldier put the life of everyone on the mission in danger by doing this.
Good. Unfortunately, they succeeded. If there was any moral justice in this world, every single US soldier involved with this would have died a horrible death. Fuck them. This was just another in a long string of global terroristic events that the US was involved in.
Being a member of the US military is morally wrong. And yes, I include you(now or in the past) and all of your family members in that equation. There is no doubt about the immorality of the US military apparatus.
Man, you've been on a streak of these purely vitriolic posts. Maybe take a break from the internet for a bit? These posts read like someone who needs help.
It's a short step from the Congress people taking advantage of foreknowledge, vs them MAKING self advantageous opportunities. And it's not guaranteed their "making" is in the public interest.
It's interesting they don't think they can get him for leaking classified information. To me that seems like the biggest issue--I mean sure, it's bad he made money on it, but it would have been really bad if he'd gotten someone killed by blabbing to the internet.
Maybe I'm making an incorrect assumption, but I assumed the information was already classified. He was betting on an outcome of a planned military operation based on his knowledge of those plans. My assumption is that information is super closely guarded, and likely classified at a high level. Telegraphing your invasion plans is generally not something you do unless you want disaster, right?
“Our Office will continue to hold accountable those who misuse confidential or classified information in a way that undermines and exploits our national security.”
But isn’t wire fraud harder to prove than leaking classified facts?
Unless the prosecution can prove that the trades meaningfully moved the market prices, it's probably going to be really hard to use the term "leaking".
I can't shake the feeling that there may be political reasons to not even attempt that angle. What legal precedent would it set if a judge actually ruled on that and the prosecution won? Which entities within the government would be financially inconvenienced?
So in prediction markets I've heard a lot of times people will collaborate in order to make certain predictions pay off higher sums by having more people put money on a certain bet.
Is it true with these markets the more people bet on a specific day and time, the value will increase more, increasing the overall payout? If that is true, I wonder if they're looking at anybody else helping place the bets or a group of people trying to wager a higher amount of money to increase the return?
Well yes. Someone has the other side of the bet, and it’s not 1:1 long:short. That’s how folks could hypothetically hire somebody to kill me, by putting $5M on “floam will survive the month” - if I’m not killed conspirators get their money back, with interest. But if I am verifiably dead, whoever knew in advance a hit man will kill me, that man gets paid.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, because we're not talking about outright market manipulation. Absent any other information, the market makers always assume that they might be trading against a better informed counterparty - so absent any other signal, the prices at which executions happen are themselves a signal.
Think about it: you have N market makers offering both sides of the trade with a spread between them. When there is no other meaningful activity, the best prices are more or less stable. Now someone comes in and buys one side of the trade. Each marker maker will, individually, make the same two decisions:
1. "If you bought at that price, I should raise my price and charge you more"
2. "Since you bought at that price, I must assume you have more information and I should get out the way to avoid an expensive mistake"
The magnitude of the decisions made depends on various factors, but as a short-hand the size of the made trades in respect to the overall liquidity available near the midpoint directs how strongly the market makers react. A tiny trickle of insignificant trades does not move the price in any meaningful way (unless the sizes are so small that the execution commission starts to make a difference). A sustained directional flood of trades will cause the midpoint (and volume) to move to the direction where the market makers can sell at higher prices and avoid accumulating any further losses.
Generally, to be successfully prosecuted for a crime, the prosecutor has to show that each and every "element" of the crime has to have happened. On the above page, there were 3 different court precedents who ruled what elements that the prosecutor needed to prove were in those cases.
The government is very big. They can have multiple priorities. The Dept of Justice does not provide medical care, education, or anything else you listed -- they prosecute crimes. And using classified military plans for personal gain while potentially putting fellow soldiers at risk seems like a crime that is worth prosecuting.
God money's not looking for the cure
God money's not concerned about the sick among the pure
God money, let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised
God money's not one to choose
No, you can't take it
No, you can't take it
No, you can't take that away from me
did he leak the information, or just speculate on it? is it leaking classified info when pentagon officials order lots of pizza and thus inform the world that a military operation is being planned?
"A military operation is being planned" is very different from "Maduro will be kidnapped in the next x hours".
"Pentagon planning a military operation" is not exactly classified information as it is safe to assume that Pentagon is always planning a military operation.
And literally every other thing they do on the internet.. remember that Strava shit? You have relatively technically unsophisticated people with high level access and not a lot of adult supervision. That seems like a juicy target. I assume there are a lot of well funded and staffed outifts around the world who have noticed the same thing.
There have been some cases where fitness tracker data shows where some military installations are located. Or when they're jogging on a ship that's taking them to deployment somewhere.
The Ukraine war has shown that cheap intelligence tricks can be used against the average recruit, like pretending to be a dating website and getting the GPS locations of horny enemy soldiers so your drones can drop grenades on them.
It doesn't need to be crypto wallet tracking. The amount of spyware being built into phone apps is where those agencies would be putting some effort into obtaining access to.
> "A military operation is being planned" is very different from "Maduro will be kidnapped in the next x hours".
IIRC, the bet was on "Nicolas Maduro out?":
> If Nicolás Maduro leaves office before February 1, 2026, then the market resolves to Yes.
So the bet wasn't specifically "Nicolas Maduro kidnapped?" or even "Nicolas Maduro out by January 3rd?" And IIRC there was a lot of Trump saber rattling about Venezuela in the days before, hence the creation of the bet. I could absolutely see a plausible way to link these publicly-available pieces of information into a winning bet:
did anyone have any reason to believe that was classified information that was leaked, instead of just a random person speculating? if not, then he had no intent to leak that information. If a random soldier told you, "iran will be nuked tomorrow" do you believe them? especially on a speculation platform, for all you know he's also guessing based on the same activites and events the public is observing. laws are all about intent and state of mind, what actually happened is irrelevant, what was intended is what matters. For example, killing a person is not a crime in and of itself, if it was all soldiers who kill someone in combat would be in prison, as would people who kill in self-defense. Matter of fact, if no classified information was actually leaked, but it could be proved that he intended to do something to leak classified info (which requires others to believe it is truthful information, instead of speculation) then that in itself is a crime.
Saying anything at all on a speculation platform, especially if others don't even know your identity (or you have no reason to believe they do), can only be treated as speculative intent, not intent to disclose classified information.
The site that he bought the crypto from to make a bet could trace it back to him, and many, if not all, crypto trading sites have shady ties with some governemnts around the world.
But from the perspective of the US DoJ the right people got killed (assuming of course they've determined the operation was legal according to their own rules, e.g. US law). The issue here is this guy telegraphed operational plans to the entire world which could have gotten (from the DoJ's perspective) the wrong people killed.
Because the JAG gets to prosecute stuff that violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That is their jurisdiction. They don't have the authority to prosecute state crimes, nor what naughty stuff you did at Disney.
And what I am saying is that the same articles of prosecution as in the soldier's case are applicable for their case too. Not going after them is a choice.
There's plenty of evidence of it happening, if you consider the odds of surges of pre-market trading of oil futures 20 minutes before Trump tweets on Iran happening coincidentally. The actual finding of who's who has to be done by the U.S. law enforcement, who aren't really interested.
There is circumstantial evidence. We need to collate that. But nothing trumps direct evidence. If someone has that I will bend over backwards to find a way to securely connect them with, at the very least, a reporter who can document it so it shows up in an internet search when an empowered staffer starts down this path.
The problem with this administration is that what you're saying will eventually happen. It will come out they were trading on this. And not a damned thing will happen.
Well, the supreme court has already given Trump full immunity for things like this, so they could easily label it a crime and start charging anyone involved they don't like. What you described sounds hilarious and crazy right now, but I fully expect something like this to happen eventually while the US further descends into fascism.
> “Kidnapping” is an uncomfortable word. It suggests force, illegality and wrongdoing. “Captured” sounds more respectable. It belongs to the language of war. “Seized” sounds calmer still — almost administrative, like someone found it on a supermarket shelf.
Wire fraud is simply the crime of committing a crime over wire. It just always doubles the counts and intensifies the punishment. Same goes for Count 5.
Count 1, 4, and 5 are the crime of committing a crime. Crime 1 is commiting a crime for personal reasons. 4 is commiting a crime over the wire. 5 is commiting a crime using money.
I feel like if you followed the NBA scandal involving Chauncey Billups the wire fraud charge for insider prediction market trading was inevitable.
Damon Jones didn't work for the NBA and basically just told some people the status of an injury to LeBron because he hangs out with him (in exchange for money). His crime I guess is gambling illegally? But wire fraud (I think they even say "creating a fraudulent market") was thrown in there.
Seemed inevitable they were going to start charging prediction market insiders the same way.
For count 3, the prediction markets consider the "bets" to actually be futures contracts, and futures contracts are regulated together with commodities (in the U.S. by the CFTC). There is ongoing litigation about whether this is the proper designation, but that is the U.S. government's position. Insider trading rules are more lax for futures than other products, but I believe this case likely does violate existing rules.
It seems like it would be highly demoralizing to US soldiers that they are prosecuted for betting on the outcomes of the battles they are risking their lives for but those insider trading commanding them aren't.
Imagine doing an easy tour in your air conditioned Kuwaiti logistics office and then getting blown to bits by a ballistic missile because no one bothered to tell you about the war that was being initiated which would cause such missiles in retaliation. Yeah, that's demoralizing too.
I mean, surely everyone in the middle east knew a war was on the horizon. Obviously not the exact plan or day, but it wasn't a secret that usa was gearing up for a war.
I imagine they were pissed. I dont think anyone likes being in the middle of a war. Nonetheless in the weeks leading up it was clear USA was moving massive amounts of naval assets into the region. It was on the news 24/7. I'm sure everyone in the military would have been able to read the tea leaves that something was going down soonish, even if they didn't know precisely what or when.
If you are in Kuwait you will find yourself under rockets whether you knew in advance or not
I think the worse aspect is if the news of an attack being leaked to the defender and you are being blown to bits as their ballistic missiles are not decimated in their preemptive strike.
They referred to soldiers that were killed by the start of the war. They thought the situation is normal, war was started without them knowing, got killed.
Soldiers can't catch a flight back home when war starts (or about to), and by the time the Iranians were able to attack back after the initial shock, all US soldiers knew there's a war going on
That's why I am having great difficulty following that argument
I would offer a small correction to your point: Instead of "ballistic missile", I would substitute "Shahed-type drones". It is much easier to detect (and shoot down) a ballistic missile than a Shahed-type drone.
I don't think this is true at all? A ballistic missile is way harder and more expensive to shutdown (they are flying at Mach 5-10 while you can outrun that type of drone with a mid tier car on the freeway)
Shahed is very primitive in general and not hard to shot down but because its extremely cheap it can be used to overwhelm any type of air defenses. Wasting $4 million to destroy a $50k drone doesn't scale at all.
> Imagine doing an easy tour in your air conditioned Kuwaiti logistics office and then getting blown to bits by a ballistic missile because no one bothered to tell you about the war that was being initiated which would cause such missiles in retaliation.
The purpose of my response wasn't about cost effectiveness; rather, it was about the lethality of a ballistic missile vs Shahed-type drone.
A ballistic missile is easily detected by a network of outer space satellites owned and operated by the US Space Force. Whether or not you can defend against it is a different question. There is sufficient time from the detected of ballistic missile launch to move to a hardened underground bunker. All US bases in the Middle East will have these. Soldiers will regularly train for incoming ballistic missile attacks and when/how to move to underground bunkers. As a result, it is very unlikely that soldiers in an "air conditioned Kuwaiti logistics office" would be killed by an incoming ballistic missile.
On the other hand, a Shahed-type drone (similar to a cruise missile) is much harder to detect because they fly very low and difficult to catch on rader until close to base. As a result, soldiers on base will have much less time to move to underground bunkers.
Sort of. Not saying that I think anyone should do this but just explaining for the sake of general knowledge.
I'm simplifying things quite a bit, but almost all military contracts are 8-year (typically split into a 4-year active and 4-year reserve period). If you leave on your own volition during this period, you typically have to repay the cost to the government to train you. And any contract that you're on where you received a signing bonus you have to pay back.
The actual mechanism for doing this is a different between officers and enlisted and they're some paperwork but functionally you can leave if you're really motivated to and for the most part people won't stop you (outside of a few conversations where people advise you against it).
The type of discharge you receive depends on the circumstances but generally there's a way to still get an honorable discharge (hardship, education, family, conscientious objector).
There's also the more practical quitting special forces vs leaving the military entirely. Tier 1 units only want people who want to be there and if you don't you can get transferred to some other job in the military in like a day if you really wanted to.
They get transferred to a different unit - one that is not part of "special forces". A big part of the selection process is to find the soldiers who just won't quit.
One rather famous example is of a BUD/S (usually called SEAL) selectee who drowned himself. When pulled out of the pool and resuscitated, he apologized and thought he failed out of the selection process. The instructor replied something like "heck no, you passed. We can always teach you how to swim. No one can teach you to never give up".
> It seems like it would be highly demoralizing to US soldiers that they are prosecuted for betting on the outcomes of the battles they are risking their lives for but those insider trading commanding them aren't.
Why? The enlisted military has never had any issue with similar double standards in the past. George 'AWOL' Bush handily swept the military vote, as did Donald 'Bone Spurs' Trump.
Likewise, veterans routinely and overwhelmingly vote for people who cut veteran support and benefits, over people who don't.
If they think those people are fit to lead them, who are we to tell them they aren't?
Veterans generally don’t need additional support or benefits. Disability is basically a second pension at this point. SCD for veterans under 45 has risen from 16% in 2008 to 39% in 2022 [0]. If you know any young veterans, then anecdotally you will see this is true. You can (and should) get partial disability for all kinds of aches and pains that in a normal career would go ignored.
I just couldn't, in good conscience, keep bombing childrens schools under such demoralising conditions.
On the flip side: who if not me and my precision guided munitions, will protect America (and freedom) from the clear and present danger of 8 year old iranian girls.
"America will bomb you and 15 years later make a movie about how sad the soldiers are based on autobiographies of completely unrepentant sadists" remains true for another decade.
They are just ordinary gambling unless you allow insider trading and manipulation, because that’s the only way the market can acquire and represent novel useful information.
But if you allow those things, you run into a host of well-documented problems which are the reason why those things are forbidden in other markets.
As it stands, prediction markets seem like a tech-aligned rebranding of age-old rigged gambling products.
In theory no, because it provides financial incentive to perform a comprehensive analysis of available data or conduct thorough investigations. In practice, yep.
The original point is to use crowd wisdom. Crowds seem better than single individuals to predict outcomes of certain types of events.
I think this is visible in sports betting markets. Unless all games are rigged, games outcomes are fairly random events, and betting markets are pretty good at assessing the probabilities of a team winning. Same thing happens in finance. Option markets are really good at assessing the probabilities of asset movements.
The thing though is that these markets are only good in predicting recurring events like game results or financial asset movements. They are good _overall_, as in, if you take 100,000 sport games, the bettings odds are going to be overall in line with what actually happens.
Hence some people deduced that crowds with skin in the game were wise in predicting random stuff. And what happened then is that some of them thought this kind of predictive power could apply to any kind of event, and then predictive markets were created, with the idea that crowds could magically come up with odds for anything, and that would be fairly correct. But what works for recurring events don't hold for single events like Maduro's capture or the end of the Iran war. So the odds in these market is only the result of influence and insider information.
The result is that the odds are generally completely off, unless there is insider information. That's kind of what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. The bets there were on loans defaulting. These events are rare enough that it's impossible to assess their probability easily. And so banks relied on rating agencies (influence), to price the odds of these events happening. Rating agencies were wrong on a lot of these bets, meaning all the bets were placed at very very wrong prices, resulting in the crisis we saw.
The weird outcome of it all, is that those prediction markets have become insider information detectors. That's how they caught the guy. Whoever is winning big on these markets is necessarily cheating.
But I guess the main takeaway for me is that society is in such a state that a lot of people actually bet big on these things. Probably a combination of being fed dreams of fortune since childhood and the american dream not delivering. It's all very sad.
> They are just ordinary gambling unless you allow insider trading and manipulation, because that’s the only way the market can acquire and represent novel useful information.
Representing only public information without agenda is useful in itself. Words are cheap, and which words you get to see and which words you don't get to see is according to some non-truth incentive. Prediction markets say "you get to make money if you know what the truth actually is". Media says "you get to make money if you entertain people".
It's unfortunate there's also significant negative side effects to financialized prediction markets. I'm more favorable to non-financial prediction markets like Manifold, which say "you get to have social status if you know what the truth is". Seems as though that's the right balance, although you could see how such non-financial prediction markets can be more easily defeated by dedicated non-truth actors if it became prominent in the public conversation.
The idea is that people will lie lie lie since words are free, but make real decisions when it’s their money at stake.
It’s not that different from the general concept of pricing. People will swear they want to buy American, support small business etc. but when it’s time for new jeans they go to Walmart and buy the pair on sale.
Why does the market need to acquire and represent novel/useful information?
It's ordinary gambling, but more in line with poker than with roulette. Theoretically there could be some skill that comes into play in predicting it, but there is also a large element of luck. This is just an entertainment product.
There would still be a point to encourage better predictions from the public information through better modeling. We aren't always using the optimal models to predict. One example: LLMs are "just" predicting the next token given the public information of the tokens that came before, but they work considerably better at making that prediction than the models that came before them.
I am so happy to see that the US government will quickly and immediately prosecute and imprison someone for “insider trading” on Polymarket, while your average Congress member can “trade” with complete impunity.
This only the first and only arrest. There are countless instances of high volume bets being places before the Iran war strikes began. This white house is corrupt.
Special forces in America are somewhat famous at this point for having side hustles.. Betting on themselves like this is at least better than being murderous drug dealers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fort_Bragg_Cartel
It would be hard not to when you can type in amounts and get instant feedback on what you would make. I imagine him sitting there, typing in $1000 and seeing $3000 payout. Then thinking "What if I just took my $32,000 savings and put it on this bet?". Type that in, see $400k and think "I can't not do this!"
Not that I am endorsing the behavior, but it is not a given how many high profile operations the soldier might glean in a time relevant manner. That might have been the one shot, one opportunity to hit big.
Are prediction markets regulated? Is this about breaking the laws regarding prediction markets or is this about leaking classified information? I skimmed but not sure still.
Someone more cynical can say that this is about protecting Thiel’s investment(if people think it’s rigged may stop playing) or making sure that only big G makes money with classified information.
unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.
So what law is broken exactly? Will an engineer with classified information on F-35 use that for fixing his car be also prosecuted? I guess no, so is this about leaking the Maduro operation?
Insider trading and outcome manipulation seems to be the norm on unregulated markets anyway. Whats the crime?
By the letter of the law the guy fixing his car should be prosecuted, but like nobody is going to know and it’s not going to happen. In this case it’s pretty obvious the law was broken.
Kalshi is regulated and trading in this way on Kalshi is explicitly illegal. PolyMarket does not operate under US laws and I don't know if the same insider trading rules are a separate violation on top of just participating.
I don't know the exact legality of it all, but Polymarket wasn't operating in the US up until recently. Even though they are now, they maintain two separate markets. One that is somewhat regulated in the USA and a blockchain based market outside the US. For most of its existence it has very much been offering things that were illegal in the US even though they are based in NY.
Sure, but in some you’re explicitly predicting the time someone gets black bagged, or an invasion happens - or you’re predicting next months oil price, which may be a defacto proxy, but has less moral hazard if you’re a random special ops guy.
Solving insider trading is fundamentally impossible due to the burden of proof.
However I am convinced that forcing people to keep their shares for even just one week would stabilize the markets enough to make insider trading much more obvious (and easier to prosecute). It would also force a shift on perspectives more on the long run, instead of focusing on immediate speculation.
This was a prediction market, not a proper market trade, and I am glad I live in a country where that is outlawed. This is untaxed, unregulated gambling.
He is small fish. Yes, he was wrong and need to be punished, but still, an small fish on the deep ocean of government inside trading.
If you rob 100.000, you will have a problem with the police and will be arrested. If you rob 1 billion, the police will have a problem if they try to arrest you.
Nabbing the little guy for show, very much like Henry Hill taking one for Paulie and the gang. The same gang that robbed the Lufthansa vault at JFK Airport, stealing six million dollars in cash and jewelry.
When the history of this administration is written, provided that history itself has not been completely rewritten a la "1984," Goodfellas will be required reading/watching.
And the highly profitable daily mood-induced oil price bets will just be forgotten.
Wilhoit's Law:
Wilhoit's law.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
I made a similar argument and was downvoted. Yeah, the well-connected pay a fine when caught. This guy's mistake was not knowing he did not belong to that club. He amounted to no more than a fall guy.
Wilholt's essay is a nice one. But it amounts to defining the opposition in a way that's easy to tear apart followed by tearing it apart. It's a cute trick but isn't much of a basis for serious discussion.
Watch: Wilholt's essay consists of exactly and only one indefensible, rhetorical sleight of hand. Consequently, no one can honestly defend it. Attempts to do so are undeserving of serious scrutiny.
After tearing down a strawman, he claims high ground:
> The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
But you'll get a fair bit of support for Wilholt's so-called anti-conservative principle from a fair number of prominent conservative thinkers.
The modern US conservative party really does seem to believe only in that one principle and nothing else. They will pardon actual sex traffickers like Andrew Tate and worse as long as they're on their side. They will defend any action at all by Trump, no matter how vile or illegal or stupid or wrong. It's not a sleight of hand if its true.
Go read a few months worth of the National Review.
Many prominent conservative thinkers are not particularly big fans of Trump. They like portions of his initiatives and policies but not him as a standard bearer, because he does dumb, ill-principled stuff at odds with conservatism.
Peggy Noonan of the WSJ can't write two sentences without letting you know how much she disdains Trump, e.g.
I guess I should clarify it to the modern US conservative party. I know there are a few dissenters even there, but 95% of them vote the way he wants and of course we could have impeached Trump and many cabinet officials long ago if they voted that way. They unquestionably enable this administration. I think its fair to say they represent the conservatives broadly, certainly they are the people the nations conservative citizens elected and continue to support.
A few annecdotal voices dont change reality; american conservatism is poisoned, and must be rejected by all sane/moral humans for multiple generations.
>Peggy Noonan of the WSJ can't write two sentences without letting you know how much she disdains Trump, e.g.
This is the functional equivalent of a fictional character named Neggy Poonan saying "I really hate the Nazi's, but you know if I don't vote for Hitler the other guy will win"
Authority-wise, a MSG in the army isn't exactly a little guy either. That's quite a senior role. In their battalion they likely head either operations, intelligence or supply.
This isn't joe schlub making side bets here. This is a senior late-career enlisted in an extremely sensitive position violating all of their trust and authority to cash out big.
That MSG works for a Captain or a Lieutenant. If said MSG is good, there might be a future of advising a commanding officer on uniforms and length of grass at increasingly higher echelons. The rank is not newsworthy.
Everything about this statement is completely wrong.
False, conspiratorial, dogmatic, juvenile.
The arrest and indictment of someone for betting on Polymarket - which has not yet been tested in court - is going to give huge attention and precedence to the likely illegal activities of some of Polymarket shenanigans coming out of the white house.
Edit: if this was political, it would be pushed in the other direction. This is the NY DOJ doing their jobs.
It's by the Southern District of NY and the case will get national attention.
This is a hugely negative thing for the Administration, as District Attorneys, SEC staff, etc. are going to be actively seeking how this could parlay into investigations and indictments of the people in the White House making Polymarket and other speculative bets just before government actions.
There are 100's lawyers reading that right now getting inspired on how they can take action to turn their investigative powers onto whoever those actors are aka family members or associates of those in the White House / Cabinet.
An investigation could be done at the State Level, away from the control of the DoJ, and, if it yields evidence, it wouldn't have to even make it's way through the courts in order to be political destructive.
The suggestion by the OP this has anything to do with ideology or the ruling power throwing one under the bus is ridiculous. Note that the ruling regime isn't above such a thing, but that's not what is happening here because it definitely does not serve their interests - it's the total opposite.
This could turn into a political nightmare that crashes the party.
Edit: if we want to be 'hopefully cynical' - recognize that this could absolutely be the vector that takes the man down, or even many of them. Imagine how many WH, Cabinet Members, family members could get investigated for this and under purvue of state investigators where the investigation can't get shut down.
I don't think this is going to be Hacker News fascinating discourse, but the current USA administration is so openly, brazenly, continuously, gleefully corrupt; continuously fire people with ethics and competence and bring in the in-group of equally corrupt ; and have continuously been rewarded for that behaviour; that I feel the OP is merely observationally factual.
The current Executive is 'brazenly criminal', yes, but there is nothing much 'factual; about the OP's comment.
None of this remotely has to do with 'Conservatism', it's certainly not ideological, and it's likely not political either.
This indictment is going to cause a massive headache for White House as they have likely been involved in 'insider trading'.
This is actually regular Justice, finally seeing some movement, to cynically characterize it as otherwise, totally against common sense (aka it's bad for the WH) is just unsound. I think it demonstrates the kind of bubble a lot of people live in, which is maybe understandable in the current climate, where horrible behaviours have gone unpunished. But still. This is the story of a state doj doing their job.
This might burst some bubbles but this is absolutely a little guy because anything below a field grade officer (or the CSM sidekick below brigade) is a little guy and a battalion is actually quite low on the food chain.
Yes, there are some hard working NCOs and junior Os out there that make shit happen, but they are not the decision makers and make for great fall guys when shit hits the fan.
He may be a little guy but that doesn't mean that he's a fall guy. The Special Forces at Fort Bragg are a law unto themselves. I've just finished reading The Fort Bragg Cartel and the things some of those guys have been up to, and the leniency of both their commanding officers and the local civilian police toward them, are shocking. Drug smuggling, murder, theft of arms, coming back from deployment with tens of thousands of dollars taped to their persons...not to mention the war crimes.
I read this as "why are they going after a soldier who made $30k when they could be going after guys who made seven figures off of expertly timed trades on going to war with Iran"
Pursuing this case doesn’t mean they’re excluding other cases. If you read the article this case was very clear because he made amateur moves and didn’t conceal his identity at all.
This was an easy nab. All leaks should be pursued regardless of who did it.
Zero chance? What odds are you offering, because this bet looks very appealing?
I am guessing that you would not actually go all-in against a penny, and I’m curious to know what implied probability you actually offer. I will see your bet amount as an expression of your confidence level. If you say that you don’t bet, I’ll take that as an indication that you have no confidence, and believe the probability to be something above 50%
Initially I did set a number to be donated to a favorite charity but decided it was in poor taste/mean spirited and quickly edited it out. We don’t need to be petty just because we disagree.
The Trump admin will not be held accountable for the blatant market manipulation and betting on internal info they engage in. That’s the smart “bet” metaphorically speaking. It’s a self enriching circus.
According to Google Gemini, there are over 16,000 master sergeants. Might as well be some random, especially when it's literally the president himself, cabinet members, congress, and other cronies directly doing the same and even worse things.
Master sergeant is a respectable rank (first of senior NCO) but it’s not exactly a high ranking position. Speaking from AF experience, you’ll have a couple of them or higher in a 50 person squadron, and levels like group/wing command they’re oftentimes among the lowest ranking person in the room.
This is absolutely a low level soldier getting dragged.
Some of those generals were fired because they were women or minorities. Others because they spoke ill of Trump (meaning that they showed "insufficient loyalty").
As other comments said, this wasn’t exactly a “little guy” in rank.
He also made it all very obvious and traceable for them through the email addresses he used. From the report it doesn’t appear that he made any effort to conceal his identity or hide his tracks until afterward, by which time it was too late.
I don’t know why people are trying to defend this guy. We should be upset when anyone tries to use confidential information for personal gain. It’s also a security risk if anyone is incentivized to place bets based on confidential info.
I know you’re trying to make a separate point about Congress, but it’s silly to try to turn this into a class warfare thing. Congress didn’t even have this information at the time.
I haven't seen anyone defend his conduct, but it is natural to discuss his political clout because of this line on TFA:
> Today’s announcement makes clear no one is above the law
What others are saying, IIUC, is that no reasonable person believes an enlisted soldier (even a senior one) is above the law and that in fact there is a history of them being used as fall guys or scapegoats for people who do enjoy protection on the basis of their social class or government position.
Without this specific statement from the FBI director, then it would be "soldier gets caught doing bad thing" and the other part would be off topic. But the article itself introduces the idea of class and impunity.
> don’t know why people are trying to defend this guy
It’s a hot take. It’s also a one off. You don’t have to strategize building the case law to then enable further investigations and prosecutions, a process which takes year and is beyond the internet’s attention span. (Silver lining: these takes are also mostly meaningless. Gears will grind on.)
Because the path to Rule of Law is not deleting/refusing to enforce all laws.
Rule of Law means no one is above the law. In practice this is an aspiration (in the U.S. and everywhere else) but giving up on that isn’t going to make the world better.
There seems to be a pattern that if someone who was not pre-selected by some elites ends up making their own money (I.e. real 'self-made') they are swiftly attacked by the system. On the other hand, look at Nancy Pelosi; she didn't get into any trouble.
Are people allowed to be self-made anymore?
For me personally, after years of planning and hard work, I once managed to secure myself about $40k of passive income from a blockchain in crypto; this lasted a few years but eventually the founders suspiciously abandoned the entire tech stack (for no reason) and switched to Ethereum; this destroyed the opportunity for me; literally lost that stream entirely. Now, recently, I was able to re-establish a passive income stream of about $10k per year from a non-crypto source; this is from an opportunity I took over 10 years ago... I'm worried about that being taken away somehow.
For everyone saying this isn't some little guy... compared to the administration which is engaging in the same thing, it's a little guy designed to be a distraction.
When the history of this administration is written
I often think about how much we can trust history 20-30 years from now. It is hard to trust history from hundreds of years ago, either because it was written by victors or because there just isn't enough material in the first place. I suppose we have the opposite problem now (and in the future) - too much noise and junk, whole bunch of it generated by AI slop - where does one even start?
Oh, and let’s not forget the politicians like Pelosi, the Clintons and many other top Democratic Party politicians, repeatedly engaged in insider trading of stocks, often times using classified information, for multi million dollars profits. Almost never investigated. Practically never convicted.
The special forces soldier bet on his team's success. He risked his life. His bet would not alter his behavior in anyway incongruous with mission objectives. Is that really that bad if the direction of the bet isn't unethical?
He could have died and this would be a non-story, just someone throwing 32k away before they were killed in action.
People are focusing on the use of confidential information and calling this insider trading, which is fair, he had knowledge that the trading public did not. But to lump him in with refs who call games wrong on purpose is ridiculous. In one example you are betting on something you want to happen anyway, it is not deception. In the other, you are profiting from deliberate fraud. I think there needs to be some sort of category difference between these two.
I think the bigger issue is that he effectively leaked the raid. Now intelligence agencies will be constantly watching the geopolitical questions on prediction markets for big bets. Of course the Trump administration seems to be leaking through prediction markets as well and I doubt they’ll face any consequences.
While it seems like an interesting point - a kind of 'doubling down' - its not clear cut at all.
Firstly, the dichotomy you presented for the individual is: succeed, live, and make loads of money vs fail, die, and lose a fair chunk. The argument you make with this dichotomy is that the gambling doesn't affect anything. However the reality is that there are many ways for the mission to end - fail, live, lose a fair chunk being notable because when the mission is going sideways the individual becomes incentivised to put themselves and others at greater risk to make a successful outcome more likely. Succeed, live, lose your squad mates, make loads of money becomes more likely as well as fail, live, lose your squad mates.
Secondly, insider trading is and always will be a signal for others. If you're only allowed to bet in one direction it becomes a form of information leak - monitor who is liquidating their assets to gamble on outcomes. For any project it becomes a signal to others - if your boss isn't remortgaging to gamble more then you know its time to jump ship. This will in turn have significant effects on outcomes.
I was under the impression that insider influence was the point of these systems? Want something to happen? Bet a lot of money that it won't, pulling the market forces towards the action you want.
It goes from "taking out a hit" to "betting that someone will live to next Thursday". It's such an obvious outcome of these systems that I was operating on the assumption that it was the actual point.
So maybe the thing this guy did wrong was to be so face-palmingly pants-on-head obvious about it that they had to shut it down?
“Super markets trade money for food. An obvious outcome is that someone without money will shoot the employees to steal food. Therefore the purpose of supermarkets is to facilitate murder”
Less so "supermarkets" specifically and moreso "capitalism" and the answers to your conclusion is obviously, yes.
This is why welfare systems exist. Because otherwise the system will push people to crime, especially so in our current implementation of Capitalism where it is possible to become unemployed/unemployable through no fault of one's own.
Which is also horrifying if you think about it for more than a second.
"Want something to happen? Bet a lot of money that it won't" goes both ways. "Want to make money and have power over missile systems? Bet, and then make something happen."
There have been multiple times where the final vote count was the difference of a handful of votes.
No one is guilting anyone to vote and some will say that neither party represents what they want and that sucks. But ultimately there has to be one side that even if you don't overall like them you would still rather they get elected.
So vote for who you think might be best. And if they have policies you don't agree then contact your representative and say "I voted for you but do not want xyz policy". The more who speak up the better.
I'm not American. And surprise: regardless of your reasons you get judged by the government you put in power, since foreign policy is how the rest of us experience your choices.
And your choices are evidently you're completely okay with the current situation as well.
Maybe. I'm not actually that invested in people voting. But that doesn't negate the hypocrisy of complaining when you're, through inaction, endorsing the status quo.
Its valid to say a lot of things. But it doesn't escape you from having to own those choices.
You are what you'll accept, and you looked at the choices given and said "I'm okay with either one".
Because the consequences of whatever mutual dissatisfaction you had still means one of them gained power and implemented their agenda anyway. And you were okay with that.
You don't get to not make a decision and then pretend you aren't culpable for your inaction.
the other person was talking about not making a decision, so you've transposed an idea not mentioned at all onto my comment
good luck out there
what to remember: the goal of the parties are to win friends and influence people, it's a weird meme that you aren't doing that and neither is the other party. time to re-evaluate the communication style yeah? proselytizing isn't working
The idea that nobody in American politics is trying to win friends nor influence people is indeed a very weird meme! As you say, that implies there's a big lane of persuasion that isn't being filled for some reason, even though everyone who's heard of Dale Carnegie knows it ought to be.
Have you considered the possibility that the meme might be false? That would explain neatly why it's so weird.
People act like the pervasiveness of insider trading in Congress is an indisputable fact, when there have been only a few trades with suspicious timing, which is similar to what you would expect statistically from 535 wealthier people trading with no insider information. The only case where I feel like insider trading is likely was Richard Burr's sales before COVID.
Beating the market isn't evidence of insider trading. Everyone invested deeply in tech beat the market, which is what Paul Pelosi did. If he did trade with insider information, he did it in a way that was subtle enough to look sufficiently like normal trading. This is nothing like the smoking gun of a 4x spike on oil futures 1 hour before a major announcement or a hyperspecific bet on Polymarket.
At this point insider trading issue has run away so hard I don't see how it can be tamed without revolutionary frameworks. If we look at crypto then I'm not sure we want to live in a world where insider trading is normalized either so we ought to start working on these new frameworks as soon as possible but nobody seems to care.
I’d argue that the level of corruption we’re seeing, not just in the USA but all over the Western world, hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
> nobody seems to care
And it would seem that the masses tend to agree.
We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Yes we should just calmly ignore private insurance death panels, propped up by politicians, killing treatable people at scale rather than put the fear in a few thousand rich people physics didn't see fit to spare from eventual biological death anyway (since they love to trot out that argument).
To say nothing of the processed food and automobile industries.
But, being more respectful to you and who i orignally replied to — yes actual revolution could/would be brutal and could/would create a much worse daily life for the non-elites.
Still, as I bet you could agree when not aguing semantics, its inexusable for people to declare we should accept corruption
> yes actual revolution would be brutal, and could/would create a much worse daily life for the non-elites.
50% of revolutions in the past 200 years have been non-violent, and the non-violent ones have a much higher success rate. Even for violent revolutions, most aren't brutal. When there is brutality, it's usually because the pre-existing conditions were already brutal.
There's not much reason to replace good functioning governments. There are some examples, although typically they are foreign-backed regime changes masquerading as revolutions.
Good and functioning are not the same thing. Look at North Korea. It's definitely not a failed state, but it's also about as far away from a "good" government as you can get.
For most revolutions, the state needs to be unable to maintain control over it's populace. The ones where it can still maintain control is where it gets bloody.
Giving so many people the ability to vote was absolutely a fundamental shift in the social, political, or societal order, so is absolutely a traditional revolution. This is just the 'no true scotsman' argument.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
I am familiar with the Reign of Terror, which gets capitalized because of it's singular uniqueness, but I am also not an 18th century French peasant, or a Frenchman at all for that matter. I doubt most of the people on this thread are either. When I say "we" I am referring to an immensely large group of people for whom "the revolution" refers to an event which did not include a reign of terror.
That’s until food and energy price increases become unbearable for the masses. While the first test is already here with gas prices, we’ll have the second test soon in the form of 50% price increases on food in developed Western countries.
In some places, like the Philippines, gas/fuel prices are up 70-100% since the start of the Special Four Day Operation in Iran. It's easy to say "who cares doesn't affect me", which sounds nice. But the Philippines is a major manufacturing hub of stuff that keeps life artificially cheap in the west. The rest of SE Asia is undergoing similar rapid price increases. Thailand, Malaysia, etc make lots of electronic components which will be facing a huge squeeze very soon.
The reason for those price increases is those countries don't have massive fuel stockpiles. The west does have big stockpiles, and they're artificially suppressing the price of fuel by releasing those stockpiles and hoping the special operation is over before their stockpiles run out. Because if prices shoot up now, people will realize just how truly disastrous it all is and actual consequences for various governments may be had, so the only option is to kick the can down the road and hope it somehow resolves itself.
Asia is in a particularly bad situation, because even for countries that do have stockpiles, they get basically all of their oil from Iran, the UAE, east coast of Saudi Arabia, etc. Now they have no oil. America can pretend it's a 4D chess move and now those countries will buy American oil and make their economy great again. But the thing is America isn't selling any additional oil to Asia. But America is 100% dependent on cheap things made in Asia, things that are built with plastic made from middle eastern oil and powered by electricity generated from middle eastern oil and shipped on boats running on middle eastern oil. All these things take months to show any effects to Americans and Europeans, so until then, it's just a game of burying heads in the sand until the situation suddenly explodes.
For a lot of us this perturbation hurts portfolios, tightens the belt, and hurts business investments… But oil and food production are tied together in numerous ways.
We’re looking at fuel shocks, downstream the agricultural, fertilizer, and food shocks are gonna cost untold anguish and many lives. Farmer suicides and famines, as the start of a destabilizing wave.
1) for the second time in my adult life I have to ask aloud how shit Dick Cheney was saying on 60 minutes ca 1993 escaped the notice of the entire US military and its commander in chief
2) the obvious lack of a post-strike plan and confusion about how mountains and waterways work make it hard to pin down how elementary and remedial the eff-ups here really are, so incompetent and indifferent
> Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Well, given that people are behaving more and more violently towards said fat cats I think it's clear we're starting to reach a breaking point and people are caring. It wasn't too long ago that I saw people cheering on LinkedIn when that healthcare CEO got got, so if people are willing to put their professional profiles at risk you have to imagine it's far worse behind closed doors.
Personally I really dislike living in interesting times and greatly prefer advocating against corruption rather than letting things slide until they get a lot worse.
It was slow for 30 years, the last couple of years have been insane.
I'd say that either way the population will not rebel. If the government is smart they'll just pay for the populations Netflix, burgers and beer. It's enough to keep people passive.
>We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
There is no we to prevent any revolution occurring once corruption or "mere" wealth distribution unsustainable discrepancy are passing some thresholds, after which it simply will feedbackloop exponentially.
Pauperization that allows some party to have chip exploitable labour too frightened to have strong collective claims is also building the social structure of bloody revolution as masses feel like rushing into brutality is the only viable left option.
Thresholds by themselves dont auto trigger some state change because the state is aware of them too.
The police and intelligence are well paid to keep an eye on all kinds of signals. Unless the situation reaches a point they cant pay the cops any voilence will be shut down fast, because over time they have become quite good at it. Just like we have become good at running gigantic boilers without them exploding. Even poor states are good at it. Because anyone running a farm, factory, depending on banks, telcos, ports, power grid etc are all very dependent on the state to keep the lights on. More efficent they get the more dependent they are on external structures staying in tact to stay afloat.
The world today is a much more complicated place, full of interdependcies(as covid showed us), than what it was when revolutions were seen as the solution to anything.
So Organizing and Voting still remains the easier way to cause change as tempratures rise. Thats the control and feedback mech.
Protests have already been mitigated by tactics researched and documented among the most authoritarian think tanks.
Believe it or not, wealthy people plan ahead to protect their hoard and they have had several decades since Gandhi to figure out how to neuter peaceful protests that threaten their status.
> Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Worker's compensation in real terms has been almost flat for the last 50 years, 50 years which have seen the largest increase in productivity in recorded history by far. I'm surprised this is still not enough to you.
And that's using the fake, government approved definition of "real wages" where they pretend the existence of smartphones cancels out a 200% increase in rent, which it doesn't. Real real wages have declined.
> We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
We, today, are better not attempting revolution because revolutions are painful. But we are also on a downward slope which will eventually reach below a threshold where 2 things happen: their* life will be much worse off than any revolution, but also they will no longer be able to mount a revolution.
I've lived through a violent revolution. Not knowing what's happening, not knowing what tomorrow brings, while getting shot at are all terrifying. I can genuinely say that most of what came after was better. A few paid a high price for the several generations that came after to mostly have it better.
I am not advocating revolution, just doing what it takes to change course. Even voting appropriately could do it.
*I say they because it might not happen in our lifetime. But we are selling our kids' futures for our current comfort. They'll be the ones really paying our debt.
> hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
A certain amount of corruption is normal - as Doctorow pointed out, all complex ecosystems evolve parasites. It's much better to have a democracy with some corruption than a police state that enforces its laws perfectly.
Now, when people realise the current state of their democracy and how it reflects the needs of the people, then they'll start considering bringing out the guillotines.
The general population's standard of living HAS gone backwards too fast.
Just look at something like Office Space. Just twenty seven years ago, it was a satire of the indignities and disrespect of work life. Today, the movie's work environment would be incredibly cushy.
> I’d argue that the level of corruption we’re seeing, not just in the USA but all over the Western world, hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
What level of corruption would warrant revolutionary action? How much more corrupt can you get than sending forces into combat in a war of choice that disrupts the global economy and kills thousands to win a bet on a crypto platform and shift the news cycle away from accusations of rampant pedophilia among the elite and the lack of prosecution thereof?
I doubt they did it for the purpose of crypto bets, that was just a side benefit. They did it because Israel owns our government, and this is the first time we've had a president far enough out of touch with reality to not push back.
Age limits (for Congress/Judiciary/Presidency) would be a much more targeted fix. Past ~75 you just don't have enough years left to be at risk of being affected by the things you're implementing. Dying in office of old age should be a deeply shameful way to go.
Yeah I don't really see how that is an argument that current corruption isn't too extreme.
> Age limits (for Congress/Judiciary/Presidency) would be a much more targeted fix.
Would it? There are plenty of corrupt people in office younger than 75, to say nothing of the countless unelected people in close proximity to power. Only 42 out of 535 members of congress are over 75. On the supreme court, Alito only turned 76 3 weeks ago, and the only other justice over that threshold is Thomas who is 77. Trump was under 75 for his entire first term. Biden, Trump, and Reagan are the only presidents who have ever been in office over the age of 75. Such an age limit would do basically nothing to change the composition of government. While there may be compelling reasons for such an age limit like ensuring mental acuity, it is not a remedy for corruption.
I wasn't saying that age limits would fix all, or even the most important problems. I'm just saying that we're only at war with Iran because Trump's dementia is leaving him disconnected from reality.
MAGA propaganda is so effective that it got those who never believed in the economic utility of the stock market to begin with to call for revolution to preserve the integrity of the market.
The cost of insider trading mostly get passed to the rich. The reason why insider trading is illegal isn't that it's particularly morally wrong as much as it disincentivizes participation in the markets.
It's just that the problem is not the trading or betting side, the problem is the information producing side.
E.g. imagine he placed a bet that Maduro would get shot in is left eye and die.
Same goes for the congress. Them making money is by far a smaller issue compared to the havoc they can cause trying to make a few bucks on their crazy bets.
Interestingly enough, trading and gambling are things that a blockchain is a pretty good fit for. There is a public ledger and trace of ownership for the trades / lays. And depending on how it is set up, payout is autonomous, as long as no one party controls the network.
It can be solved by enforcing the laws already on the books. Insider trading is illegal.
If the laws are not enforced or selectively enforced you live in a nascent fascist state, not a democracy, what you need is a return to the rule of law, not the abolition of it.
I don't think anyone who has been paying attention over the last year could conclude that laws are not being selectively enforced. So I guess the next question is what options provide a realistic way of restoring justice.
Until the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Collateral Debt Obligations were regulated differently in different states. Some said it was insurance, and thus regulated it like insurance. Some said it was gambling and banned it outright. Instead, regulation was handed to a toothless new agency who got little funding for enforcement and the rest of the world got the 2008 financial crisis.
That would require a functioning legislative branch that could pass laws. However a major political program of the past decades has been to gum up Congress and prevent its functioning. There's very limited bandwidth to accomplish legislation, and there's hundreds of good fixes that can't fit through, so I doubt the US will be able to fix this anytime soon, unless there's bigger scandal.
Insider trading is already illegal (this case proves it). If the problem is under-enforcement, then I agree that better enforcement is the fix.
Banning gambling is a completely separate intervention addressing a different activity, and clearly wasn't required to bring charges in this case.
The tendency of governments to create new laws instead of enforcing existing ones is how we end up with absurdly complex legal systems and the loopholes that come with them.
I think a good compromise there is to get rid of shorting.
And tax capital gains at a rate inversely proportional to how long the shares were held. E.g., 90% if held less than a second, 10% if held over 10 years.
what makes 'shorting' special? I understand what shorting is from a non-market-junkie point of view (essentially betting that a stock will go down).. is that just more 'gameable' than buying stock.. i guess i don't see the difference between 'i bet this will go up' and 'i bet this will go down' it's still a bet.
I assume it must be much easier to modify the market to make a stock price go down (e.g. hack the CEO account to say something silly/dangerous) vs trying to make the stock price go up.
Rather than banning gambling I think you need to ban congress critters from trading. Polymarket is a quick and anonymize way of making long bets on your inside information.
But there are plenty of other stock-based bets they already do make to trade on confidential info.
They should be allowed to hold an ETF with fully locked contribution schedules. Anything more is corruptible.
(Also, if congress critters’ wealth was coupled to the index instead of specific interests, maybe we’d get less pork overall.)
Very few people feel impacted by that. If you consider bombing Iran was going to happen anyway because distractions are needed, the money made by the whale that consistently predicts the movements of the current administration is a relatively small thing compared to starting a war for no good reason.
One possible solution is to make all trades public and traceable to the person who made the decision and the people who benefit from that.
I meant the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Maybe this is more of a thing in Europe, even if not perfect here.
Technically this is stealing from the people who bet against the Maduro raid happening; and it’s cheating because we assume those people taking that side of the bet weren’t privy to the planning.
He’s only stealing from the US military if the DoD is taking the other side of prop bets on US military operations on polymarket. Which… I mean maybe it’s a reasonable insurance strategy? US military bets that they’re gonna screw up a raid on Venezuela, then either everything goes well and they end up with a successful operation, or it all goes to hell and they wind up winning a consolation cash prize. Hedging operational success by taking the over on casualty estimates… dark.
Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them.
Tulsa once had what was known as Black Wall Street. There were too many successful black men, so 1921 in the whites massacred everybody. They even brought in planes and dropped bombs.
People died, yes. But there was no white supremacism. There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street. It was triggered by an attempted rape.
People were murdered and homes and businesses destroyed by a white mob because they were black. How is that anything but white supremacy?
> There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street.
It was one of the wealthiest black communities in america at a time. “Black wall street” was a nickname, not a literal description of a stock exchange.
> It was triggered by an attempted rape.
No, it was triggered by an attempted lynching of a black man. Or if you want to be more specific, because the community there stood up to protect the arrested man. It was triggered by a black community stopping a lynching.
Your assertions are an ahistorical revisionist fantasy.
Are we now not at all allowed to reference problems in other societies? We can complain about western society, and complaints from 100 years ago, when even my grandfather wasn't born yet, are valid criticism of America/Europe/... but things that happen today in India, Pakistan, Turkey are off limits?
No one did of course, but it's a common tactic of distraction to try to focus the attention on something else.
That way people don't have to experience the discomfort thinking about the negative thing going on in their own society.
You can already hear the pseudo-theories, justifying the differences for eternity. Blue blooded, of lazy blood, etc. Apply yourselfs and you will win.. adding insult to injury, when you can not win, you must in addition be lazy with only yourself to blame.
Except in the United States it is true. Something like 80% of new military recruits come from military families (parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent).
Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
That gating on medical training has always been there (at least for 40 years, if not more). But the number of doctors from doctor families has increased.
And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.
Always been gated. But the slider has been dragged even further in the purity test direction. The intelligent un-pure now tend to become NP or PA, those programs still let you practice independently and slide more towards academics and less at whether a rich person set you up to be taken care of while you play mother Teresa until the switch flips the day you are accepted.
Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
That would increase competition and thus depress wages for existing doctors, who are the ones who make the decisions here. I heard, from a medical school attendee, that she overheard some doctors discussing whether it would be a good idea to require a fifth year of medical school to become a general practitioner (luckily, they were like, "Eh... nah"). It did not seem like it bothered them that this would make it even harder for civilians to get medical care.
Theoretically yes. But I think at least part of the decision they've made is to delegate a chunk of the decisionmaking to doctors' guilds. Which—on the one hand, they are experts of a sort, but on the other hand, they have an obvious conflict of interest.
> “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” the AMA and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. “The current rate of physician supply — the number of physicians entering the work force each year — is clearly excessive.”
> The groups, representing a large segment of the medical establishment, proposed limits on the number of doctors who become residents each year.
> The number of medical residents, now 25,000, should be much lower, the groups said. While they did not endorse a specific number, they suggested that 18,700 might be appropriate.
I've read about that before. I personally am of the belief that Medicare funding for residency slots should be eliminated over time. Also freely allow the opening and expansion of medical schools and teaching hospitals. Over time things should settle into a comfortable equilibrium of enough doctors making decent wages for everyone to be treated at a reasonable cost.
But maybe that's a free market fantasy. Who knows.
Or the alternative. Government-owned everything healthcare - facilities, hospitals, med schools, doctor practices. Doctors only work for the government.
The current system is neither here nor there and is designed for maximum profit.
No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades—unless there's a ceiling that the top m > n have all hit. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible.
MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam annually." So it should work fairly well for them to sort by MCAT and take however many they have (or expect to have) room for.
I think OP's point was that the governing boards don't want the people with the top n grades. They want certain people, and by making the admissions criteria fuzzy, they can pick and choose those certain people and then say "well, our admission criteria is subjective," and "we are looking for 'well rounded people," and all kinds of other vague weasely ways to let them legitimately shape the student body in the way they want.
One of my roommates who was premed had a "hot car" poster as a motivational study aid. After a short term as a candy striper at a local hospital, he changed majors. The system works! ;-)
At a certain point, grades become arbitrary and won’t necessarily select for the best candidates. Obviously the current system doesn’t, either.
The actual solution is to increase the number of slots for training doctors to match the huge number of qualified applicants. It makes even more sense given that there is a shortage of doctors and health care costs are astronomical.
I want a doctor who was a strong student with diverse experiences, lots of soft skills and can handle the entire psychological spectrum of being a doctor, not the doctor who was solely the best at exams.
There are all kinds of doctors though? The ones who don't have soft skills or diverse experiences can go into pathology or other fields that don't involve as much patient interaction. Why lose out on their gifts altogether if they're genuinely interested in medicine.
> No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible.
I live in Ontario and we're there. 40% of Waterloo students had above a 95% average in high school. The average GPA to get into UofT med school is 3.94/4.00 GPA.
What has happened as a result is students killing themselves and each other. If you fail one test in any course, you cannot move to the next level.
So, if you go on the UofT subreddit there's endless stories of pre-med students sabotaging each other. Faking friendliness, destroying notes, etc etc. This is arguably rational because the pool is small and there's little to gain by studying harder if you already have a perfect GPA.
You don't want this type of person as a doctor. They will sabotage others because that is how they got ahead in the past. In a medical environment that kills people.
> This is arguably rational because the pool is small and there's little to gain by studying harder if you already have a perfect GPA.
So there is a low ceiling, and if they instead used MCAT or something with a higher ceiling (where, apparently, the number of perfect scores is about 50 per year—in America, presumably lower in Canada due to population size), then studying harder would benefit them. That seems like a much better outlet for competitive urges.
But also, how small is the pool of qualified applicants? If there were something like "they're going to take n people from your school, at which there are 30 plausible candidates", then sabotaging one might conceivably be worthwhile. But if the pool is—well, Google says 3,000 medical students get accepted each year in Canada (and the qualified applicant pool is presumably at least somewhat larger), and sabotaging one person is extremely unlikely to help you personally. (This is one case where it's good that the expected-value "benefits", of sabotaging person X, are widely distributed among thousands of medical candidates, and thus it's a "free-rider problem" where no individual candidate has a strong motivation to do the work.)
Is there some multi-stage thing where they pick 10 people from each high school, or 30 from a town, or something? Or is there major grading on a curve, or a big benefit for being the top person in your classroom of 15? That seems like how you would get real incentives for this backstabbing behavior. Otherwise, I can't see how it's rational (even to a complete sociopath), and would have to chalk it up to individual miscreants and possibly some kind of culture that encourages it in other ways.
Military academies are not upper class at all, mostly middle class folks. Officers are generally of the same stock as any other white collar job in engineering, law, business, etc.
In the United States i suspect some portion of this is due to "legacy" admissions whereby some child is admitted to a competitive program or given very advantageous scholarships not because of their hard work and displayed competence, but because of their parents. I know that it will be very possible for my children to end up at ivy league if they take the legacy advantage I've given them, even though ivy league has been completely off the table for me my entire life. They'll start _much, much_ higher on the ladder than I could.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. They were not "removed", they were made to be disallowed if and only if the school wanted to receive a certain kind of government funding. Some schools have enough money that they can ignore this. Notably, Stanford said they would give up the funding to keep their policy of legacy admissions.
So the richest, most prestigious schools where legacy admissions are a gateway to the upper classes, will keep the policy.
I wonder how much of this has to do with seeing someone you are close to work as a doctor makes being a doctor (or military recruit, SWE, etc.) seem real and achievable to you. When I was little I wanted to be a firefighter purely because my father was a firefighter; it wouldn’t surprise me if the same goes for a lot of other people.
I can't prove it, but I've heard more than one story of those with relatives in the military managing to get someone to pull rank and put them on better and upwards promoting assignments.
Obv not a great sample, but within my peer group, none have parents or siblings. I have an uncle. Grandparent is a weird one - for anybody born in the 70s as I was, it’s almost a given to have a grandparent or four who served. Being European, all of mine served at the tail end of WWII or immediate aftermath.
As I read through the distinctions between "class" and "caste" helpfully provided by search engine AI, a sensation that formal caste systems are more honest than inexplicit "class" systems grew in my mind.
The claims are that different outcomes in income, occupation, education, marriage, etc can result in changes in a person's "class." But even in the statistically insignificant number of Horatio Alger stories, did the person's class really change? Did Eliza from Pygmalion change classes or just learn how to "code switch?"
They are synonyms as that includes "nearly the same."
The only difference I can detect is that "class" allows members to move between groups and "castes" do not; however, all the outcomes are identical. So they are absolutely synonymous in most peoples eyes.
Not so much class or caste, but a dual-state where an elite have a normative or lawless state, and specific or arbitrary others suffer a parallel prerogative or punitive state. This is the essence of corrupt authoritarianism.
Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal.
More like three. One class where you can do whatever you can pay for, another with a set of annoying but almost reasonable rules and the last one for whom any actions and their mere existence is illegal, but whose presence is very much relied upon to do things.
It's a simplified model to expose unseen hypocrisy and injustice that originated with the persecution of jews in the German Nazi justice system. In reality, 2 or 3 is too simplistic as the US values people differently in different contexts with numerous attribute privilege points. Don't be old, brown, short, homeless, and unattractive in America except to be constantly harassed.
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part.
Historically aristocracy was the military class. Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.
A military coup in the U.S. is imaginable, which probably explains some of the top brass purges (until recently, where it's probably an attempt to deflect blame for the massive Iran fuck up).
Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.
I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked.
The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
>The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
What a poorly thought out and questionably motivated take. It will no doubt be well received here.
In any case, reconstructing out legislature to copy european stuff isn't gonna change anything if the legislature still sees fit to vest so much power in the executive.
Your main point is valid, but I'd argue it's less the power of the President and more the two-party system and the weakness of Congress that is the root of many American governance problems. Executive power has grown in the vacuum of Congressional impotence.
As far as reforms, we need more to be sure, but there's at least the 22nd Amendment, formalizing the two-term tradition that Washington initiated and FDR abrogated into a hard limit, that means Trump can't legally keep power past 2028.
I think, despite all the furor whipped up and attempts by high-ranking officials to foment a coup, the military is actually very unlikely to disobey Presidential orders; this is based on my frequent interactions with military officers over the last ten years. Do you perceive some other, more likely, coup scenario?
A coup from the same military that happily deployed foot soldiers into American cities to perform law enforcement duties they were not trained to perform? And is happily killing boat-people in the Caribbean? And ran a covert operation to kidnap a foreign head of state? And ran another covert operation to assassinate political leaders in another sovereign state and are now bombing that same state into rubble for no publicly disclosed reason?
Yeah, no coup is happening here. Our military is built around civilian control via the White House. That ain't changing any time soon. Ignoring the various uses of force above, when the generals were called before Hegseth to bend the knee, all but one of them did.
China dervies a ton of authority and Legitmacy from the PLA (peoples liberation army) and Russia is run by from Inteligence service members of the KGB low level ones to be sure but I don't see how China and Russia are counter examples. The US isn't their yet we will see if the backslide happens in the next two years but I think its of a different qualia than we see in the "typical" Authorithian State.
Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist
In fact, the current administration, not headed by someone from the military (and VP has military credibility but not leadership) is not at all aligned to the military except in that their base appreciates the imprimatur of honorable military service. In fact, Trump 1 was in many ways a huge refutation to Trump of the idea that the military guys were leaders he could count on. Their brain-trust positions had more left-alignment than he maybe imagined. His administration, in 2025, fired high-ranking officers in a way that suggested he entered with the reverse conclusion: not military leaders as high-competence straight-shooters, but as all being suspect for having risen unstoppably in a system pervaded by partisan platitudes and shibboleths. Fortunately, the administration didn't take the Soviet approach of purging all those under suspicion.
They just finally had to fire their SecNav because reality butted heads with their ideological conclusion was that business experience was more conducive to military success. Unfortunately for their very-much-not-military-led plan, SecNav probably needs a bit more user experience from time in Navy leadership to successfully work within that labrythine bureaucracy.
Which is why power is much more complex than brute force. Sheer physical or military power is not the be-all and end-all, just a facet of the total picture (and in fact, social creatures that humans are, even just adversarial aspects of power are a subset of power).
> It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it.
This is true up until it isn't. Their security is through obscurity. Being able to deflect the masses. Manipulating the balance, if you will. But they are not special. They are still unprotected sacks of flesh. And we've recently seen just how vulnerable they are. If that desire spread, you will see more.
Indeed. Then, there’s a revolution and heads start rolling. But again, this does not happen when power disappears; it happens when the balance changes, e.g. when a significant chunk of the army sides with a part of the people.
> Their security is through obscurity
Not at all. They can be very blatant about it. Look at Iran for example. Or Russia. Everyone knows who controls what, there is nothing obscure about it.
People with guns don't stand much of a chance against people with armies. Sure armies can turn on an individual, but that just means that particular individual has lost power, and that power has been transferred to whatever new individual commands the loyalty of the many. It's not imaginary, it's emergent.
And how are the people who shot these politicians doing now? How about the US and Japanese governments? Clearly shooting a politician doesn't mean either that you gain their power or that the power structure they led evaporates.
That is exactly the type of pacificity that plays into their hand. Life is good and bad at the same time. It is important to hold those two at the same time.
The vast majority of people don't want to take the bet of a tiny chance of doubling their lot in life for the downside risk of literally being tortured and dying and probably ruining the life of any loved ones.
Most people aren't degenerate gamblers.
The workaround is organization. With sufficient organization, you can start to drag the tiny chance to a slightly bigger chance, and slightly reduce the downside risk maybe.
Some parts of American society are absurdly bad at organizing, and basically gave up 60 years ago.
Reminds me of the riddle[1][2] from Game of Thrones / A Clash of Kings:
Lord Varys: Three great men sit in a room: a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies?
Tyrion Lannister: Depends on the sellsword.
Lord Varys: Does it? He has neither crown, nor gold, nor favor with the gods.
Tyrion Lannister: He has a sword, the power of life and death.
Lord Varys: But if it's swordsmen who rule, why do we pretend kings hold all the power? When Ned Stark lost his head, who was truly responsible? Joffrey? The executioner? Or something else?
Tyrion Lannister: I've decided I don't like riddles.
[pause]
Lord Varys: Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
soldiers are disposable, they prolly threw him under the bus hoping that would be the end of the matter and they could walk away with the rest of the money.
I think an important distinction is not really the class matter, it’s really more a jealousy and spite that the political and bureaucratic betters could not profit from it, not that he did so much.
If he had had the means of letting all or maybe just a relevant and important enough cadre of aristocrats know the inside information, he would have surely not been prosecuted. I know this from first hand knowledge.
It may seem the same or like a distinction without a difference to some, but that is really how things work and why he was prosecuted, not because he profited, but because he did not let others in on it and they really want to discourage that behavior, hence his flogging and his public flogging at that. And yes, if you get the sense that it’s like organized crime, then yes, that is and long has been how the US government and many other governments have functioned for a long time now. It’s what also makes them so easily controlled by the US. It could have easily also been swept under the rug while still sending a signal within the system, but it wasn’t and we were all told about it.
And that is how the ruling parasites really get rich, none of that hard work and smarts stuff; those are the stories told to keep the peasant cattle voting for the slaughterhouse, dreaming of the wide open pastures of also becoming rich by working hard.
Fraud, cheating, lying, manipulation … that’s the name of the American dream game.
I again apologize to anyone who feels what and how I say things is “flame bait” or a personal attack, it’s simply just how I speak and like to challenge people’s comfortable assumptions. Feel free to dismiss what I say of you disagree with me. No offense intended and no flaming or whatever necessary, it’s just people speaking to each other or not. We’ll all be fine if we keep talking, even if you don’t like what others have to say or want to control how they say things.
I like how when people talk about corruption they think about Nancy Pelosi or some other congressman/senator making couple million $ on the stock market over their entire careers due to insider trading. Just last week Trump made a bet of around $1B on the price of oil going down before doing a fake announcement.
> I like how when people talk about corruption they think about Nancy Pelosi or some other congressman/senator making couple million $ on the stock market over their entire careers due to insider trading
So, two things. First, she's made quite a bit more than a few million dollars. Second, she's been an example of being a "suspiciously good trader" for years and years and years. Has anything happened to her? Republicans talk about her and do nothing about it. Democrats say it's a conspiracy theory. The behavior has quite clearly been normalized.
I think corruption happens long ago before Trump. I’m thinking more on the inequality of wealth and how a smaller percentage of people takes a bigger share of the wealth since I don’t know when. Trump is in fact the symptom of that corruption and part of the reason people elected him. But he definitely makes it worse especially in his second presidency.
Nowadays super riches run the show and even the illusion of democracy is gone.
Another thought: many political elites are probably waiting and pushing for Trump to fail to take over. It is us who are going to suffer.
I too wonder why "Nancy Pelosi" has become basically synonymous with Congress insider trading when she's not even close to the top of the list among congresspeople.
Sexism will play a role, but a big part of the reason why Pelosi gets so much flak is that she did nothing to stop it when the democrats were in charge, thus directly paving the way to the current shitshow.
What other reason is there for an otherwise unremarkable character to become the public face of the issue for years?
Chuck Schumer is the whip of the party, as mentioned she isnt even top 10 in performance, her party didnt legalise the activity, other members are aggresive in their pursuit of insider trading information (MTG was part of the most committees during her tenure, but she skipped almost all votes after that, she just wanted the scoop adn then bolted) ...
So why her?
The most common excuse is "well people demand more of dems because everyone knows republicans are crooks", which doesnt explain why more senior leaders, ex presidents etc are the ones hounded instead of her.
how ever surveys by lobbys like the ones owned by the Koch brothers show which politicians people find unlikeable. Unsurprsingly many are unremarkable women, just like Nancy, which makes them easy targets for public campaigns in favour or against.
If you name the most talked about politicans of the past 20 years, outside of the pres (Obama, Biden, Trump) you get mostly women (Sarah Palin, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, MTG, Kristi Noem, Laurent Bobert) that is not a coincidence and it explains why no one could pick Schumer, who is senior leadership, in a police line up but can tell you the many dogs Kristi killed
Because of the Nvidia trade just before the CHIPS act passed.
Which is ridiculous because the entire thing was largely fabricated by the media for those juicy clicks. It was a "half truth" story that hinged on the public's general ignorance of derivatives trading.
While she acquired Nvdia shares days before the bill passed, it was entirely coincidental, because she had put in for those shares over a year prior. Craziest of all, which the media would never fucking say, is that she lost money on the trade.
Nancy Pelosi's most infamous insider trade is one she lost money on. It's one of the core stories I use as an example of how shamelessly misleading the media is. Destroying the country for ad views.
I actually don’t know the details of the specific crimes. Eg if you’re a soldier and you post on Facebook that you’re about to go on a raid to depose a head of state, that’s presumably a secrecy violation you would be punished severely for. The insider trading can be like this too in that you’re improperly using the information you are privy to due to your being an insider. If you’re a congressperson and you tweet that the government is about to do such a raid, I don’t know what the legality of that is – perhaps you have some kind of privilege to reveal these things and any censure must happen politically (eg impeachment, losing elections, etc) rather than legally. I don’t know what the rules for insider trading would then be – legislators are not insiders in the way that soldiers are.
Ignoring the moral argument, it isn’t all that clear to me that this would actually be a crime for a legislator under US securities law. It may be that new laws would be required to be able to punish legislators for this kind of behaviour.
He was charged with "unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of non-public government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.". Supposedly, unlawful use of government confidential information could also be applied to legislative and other people in the government
Congress sometimes includes an exemption for themselves from some crimes. Others are excused by the Constitution:
> The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
> The law prohibits the use of non-public information for private profit, including insider trading, by members of Congress and other government employees.
When the people feel everyone is corrupt without any evidence then the next step is getting actual corrupt leaders like Trump's government and soldiers like this that feel corruption is standard behavior
Did congress do it with classified ops data, or with their voting stuff?
The main difference between the two is that betting on the date of a classified op indirectly reveals classified data that can tip off an adversary and cost lives.
The only reason we know about the trades in Congress is because they're following the law and reporting them. I don't think there is any evidence that members of Congress: 1) have access to classified info like this, and 2) are betting on polymarket.
That's not to say the behavior isn't extremely slimey but they are acting within the law. Your comment doesn't mention the executive branch and the various crypto "ventures" going on, like the Whitehouse dinner for investors of $TRUMP coin of which we have no idea who invested or what they got from it.
Between citizens united, gerrymandering, the electoral college, winner take all elections, and voter supression, I don't think we can say that "elections" in America reflect the will of the people.
America is fine with the rich and powerful doing that. Just not one of the normies. Just look who they elected to President. You cannot with a serious face suggest otherwise.
But when's the last time you had $300 million in your personal budget to spend on advertising to a specific human being to improve your personal income?
When's the last time you got a call from an actual politician begging you for money and "support"?
US congress members spend the vast vast majority of their time on the phone begging a list of rich people for a piss of nickles to fund advertising for their next election. There's always a subtle threat of strings attached.
Both the prince and pauper are forbidden from sleeping under the bridge.
My first thought as well, but you can imagine how dangerous it would be if special forces started tanking their performance due to betting market considerations.
If Nancy can get some stock for cheap prior to landing a big government contract, that's not the same as a solider possibly tipping the hand of a delicate military operation.
No one likes insider trading especially when it's done by politicians, but let's not pretend they're the same
I thought prodiction markets benefit from insider knowledge. Isn't the whole point that insiders make bets, thereby surfacing knowledge and allowing for more accurate forecasts? So wouldn't we want more military service members making bets? In this case, any potential military target of the US would really want this insider info.
I think the problem is similar to insider sports betting, which is that once someone has made a bet, they will try to influence policy decisions in order to profit from that bet.
It's not so much insider knowledge that's a problem, but insider influence. You're paying people to make bad decisions.
I think the problem is similar to insider sports betting, which is that once someone has made a bet, they will try to influence policy decisions in order to profit from that bet.
It's not so much insider knowledge that's a problem, but insider influence. You're paying people to make bad decisions.
Although, it would be amusing to create a sports league where the athletes are expressly permitted to wager on the outcome of their games.
> So wouldn't we want more military service members making bets
Who is the "we" in this sentence?
Yes, insider knowledge makes the prediction market more accurate (albeit at the cost of being less "fair"). However US government doesn't want prediction markets to accurately predict the timing of their secret military operations. Hence the arrest.
Corruption means something legitimate is happening that can be corrupted.
Maduro was president of a sovereign country. A bunch of kidnappers and murderers invaded the building he was in in Caracas, murdered everyone in the room, then kidnapped him and his wife.
What's the "mission"? To pop up in some room and slaughter everyone in it, then kidnap his wife and him? In order to help steal the resources, billions of dollars in oil, for already wealthy people?
Same thing happening in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria. Israel with US help slaughtering people to steal their land and resources.
There's no mission except theft and murder. There's no corruption because the entire enterprise is rotten to begin with.
It's funny how we accept the importance given to that statement. when he's just some dude who took control of a country and gave himself that title. As if the social construction means anything in this situation.
Declaring yourself president means nothing. I’m the president of planet earth and nothing changes. Similarly he could go by grand pimp and it would be just as meaningful.
Legitimacy comes from all the people backing up his claim to control of the country. Further governments care about legitimacy because it’s way easier to assassinate leaders than win wars and leaders don’t want to be at risk. It’s pure self interest protecting each other.
The idea of sovereignty is a cornerstone of how we organize our global society. This was an overt statement that the US controls South America, and that South America doesn't rule itself. Previously, we were relaying on covert methods for influence.
The relationship with SA has materially changed.
1. The United States is willing to violate South American sovereignty.
2. South America has offered little resistance to this incident.
That's correct that sovereignty is a cornerstone, but since the founding of the UN that doesn't mean you have a blank check to do whatever you want within the sovereignty of a country.
Things like genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, violating other countries sovereignty with no strong justification, development of nuclear weapons, etc.
So there's a bunch of red lines that clearly some countries will step over the sovereignty line, thankfully so!
I'm not saying the US was right about what they did in Venezuela, but clearly Maduro wasn't recognized as the president of Venezuela by venezuelans and many countries.
Only genocide has a 'duty to prevent and punish'; with UN Security Council approval of course.
Restrictions on building nuclear bombs are defined in the voluntary Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is not applicaple to non-parties (India, Israel, Pakistan, South Sudan).
Every foreign intervention done by US / NATO through-out has backfired, and worsened the problem it tried to solve.
Case in point: CIA covertly arms Afghan Mujahideen fighters to wage war against the Soviet Union by proxy in the 80s - 90s. But David Hasselhoff did a song, so the Soviet Union fell apart, and Afghan fighters pivoted to civil warfare as Taliban.
Sadam Hussein was a rogue US puppet-dictatorship gone wrong. But 'freeing' Iraq from Hussein entailed destroying their entire civilisation. Just the mayhem caused a million deaths through starvation, sectorial violence, collapsed healthcare, terrorists roaming the streets, etc.
We also destroyed Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Libya, Yemen, Guatemala, Chile, etc. (At least for a while)
Somehow they forgot to include when a member of the Security Council is commiting genocide - like what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
The UN has a body that regulates nuclear energy, called IAEA, and they can definitely bring violations to the Security Council.
> Every foreign intervention done by US / NATO through-out has backfired, and worsened the problem it tried to solve.
That's quite a bold claim:
- first by focusing only in the US / NATO, and leaving out interventions of the UN. Why is that?
- would you say that the people in Kosovo are worse than they were before NATO intervention? Or South Korea with the intervention of the UN? Or even Ukraine today with the help of NATO?
- it's funny you blame the CIA for the consequences of the Afghanistan war, yet you don't blame the USSR who invaded Afghanistan in the first place!
It's like for you, the USSR losing the Afghanistan war was a bad thing, and the collapse of the USSR as well, and the CIA was to blame for all of that? What's going on there?
As for Saddam, he shouldn't have invaded Kuwait, let alone the other atrocities.
You seem to have a lot of grievances towards US / NATO, and very little against USSR and Russia "interventions".
Like what they did in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and the other atrocities in Africa, and Asia with their neo-nazi paramilitary group.
Anyway, I don't defend everything the US / NATO / UN did - but one thing is sure (up until today), none of them expanded their borders and attempted to annex land.
> The idea of sovereignty is a cornerstone of how we organize our global society.
It is, but it's kind of a thin lie.
How's sovereignty going for ukraine? Hong kong? Chechnya, South ossetia, and abkhazia? Puerto Rico? Western Sahara? Parts of Sudan? Border regions of bhutan? South american fisheries? People trying to set up micronations?
My read on the GP comment was that it's intentionally juxtaposing the weight and importance normally given to being president alongside the anarchy that goes along with kidnapping and murder to point out the irony. If you want to believe in things like sovereignty and government, you can't simultaneously say that these governments can kidnap, invade, and murder just because they can. It undermines the very legitimacy of the social contract. After all, it's not much of a contract if it can be broken at will.
I found it hard to figure out which side the GP came down on, but perhaps it's not taking a side and merely pointing out the irony and the death of legitimacy. Maybe there is no such thing as government anymore, and it all comes down to goons with guns.
I had the same interpretation - Maduro was a bad guy, but when the approach taken is akin to the "Wild West," its hard to claim moral superiority - it devolves to different factions of goons with guns stealing from each other and murdering with impunity, "might makes right."
This stands in contrast to the ideals of a society based on laws and rules, where corruption is a notable exception.
We stand on the precipice of abandoning what the world worked so hard for decades to build...
Honest question: Would you feel similarly if the shoe were on the other foot? If we had a hostile presidential takeover and another country, for reasons completely unrelated to that, showed up at the WH and executed this kind of “mission”?
Maduro was a piece of…let’s keep this polite and say “work.” Everyone agrees. Does that mean what the US did was acceptable? There’s a lot of nuance and context being glossed over here.
It’s like with Iran. “Their government was horrible.”
Ok, but that’s not why we attacked them. The Trump admin has explicitly said that wasn’t the motivation, but they randomly bring it up whenever they need to shift tactics. It’s a moral appeal supporters use to paper over the political realities and actual motivations.
In this scenario, is the person in the Oval Office a rapist, child molester, serial fraudster, corruptly manipulating stock markets, steering government money to his children’s own weapons companies, assassinating other world leaders, committing the war crime of declaring no quarter, committing the war crime of threatening to destroy all significant civilian infrastructure in another sovereign nation, committing the war crime of threatening genocide, and threatening the use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive military action?
The longer I am alive the more I realize that power is all that matters, and that rules are nice but only for the peons. "Acceptable" in this case means pretty much nothing and is a word that is philosophic in its meaning. You can yell into the clouds that something is unacceptable or unfair and it may be true in some ethical/moral sense, but it matters none. Power will always win out and if someone came to the WH and did the same thing, then there would only be one reason for it -- that there is somebody more powerful than the US and is able to get away with things like this. The masses would scream, cry and maybe some would be happy, but it wouldn't matter whatsoever. Maduro might have been bad (a great excuse for the masses to avoid revolts) but ultimately, the government made a decision to do it and that's that.
I am not a fan of "well what can ya do?" That's not how we got the 40 hour work week or civil rights legislation. That's not how women got the right to vote. You have to fight and fight and fight for a better world. I mean that.
It's literally how you got those things. Without leverage to get them, they would have just been complaints. You ask what you can do, and then you do it.
I meant more in the sarcastic/defeatist sense. A linguistic shrug not to be taken in the literal sense. That's on me though, I should've picked better wording.
It's not up for debate. Don't play Trump's games. It legitimizes his nonsense take on 2020.
Trump lost in 2020. Harris lost in 2024. We have all sorts of external influence and nonsense happening in our social/political lives and yes many states are messing with people's ability to actually vote, but when it comes to what happens in the voting booth, US elections are incredibly secure and fraud/ballot tampering is so rare that calling it "rare" doesn't properly emphasize reality.
The vote count was accurate, Trump won, and we are all paying a horrible price for the self-inflicted chaos and regression that has ensued.
>Not that anyone would challenge it
If there were legitimate grounds to question it there is no way we wouldn't see action on it
> Maduro was a piece of…let’s keep this polite and say “work.” Everyone agrees. Does that mean what the US did was acceptable?
Maduro was replaced by his equally unelected second. It is not as if Venezuela became democracy or something. Instead, a bunch of leaders got promotion including the main torturer.
I find it mind boggling that it is called regime change. Regime remained in place.
I know this is tangential to your overall point, but did really they murder everyone in the room? I was under the impression that a few Venezuelan generals kidnapped Maduro themselves, left him at a predetermined point for US forces to pick up, and had their soldiers fire some small arms into the air to make a token show of resistance. There's no way the US would have flown a slow-moving convoy of helicopters into a hostile city unless they knew a priori that Venezuelan air defense missile batteries would be ordered to stand down.
Who knows what's true, but the official US narrative is that they entered his bunker, slaughtered the (mostly Cuban) security guards, and stopped Maduro just before he could hide behind a reinforced door. So the official narrative is indeed that US forces slaughtered a bunch of people and took Maduro.
Whether there was also cooperation from the Venezuelan military, failure to shoot down helicopters, etc, is a different matter.
I agree there was almost certainly some collaboration with some factions in Maduro's military standing down for the mission to go so smoothly, but its pretty well-established that a number of soldiers were killed, with some US soldiers coming back with the wounds to show for it. The entire bodyguard being killed is something the US and Cuba actually agree on!
I don't think there's any question that he legitimately won his first election. Which is more than we can say for US allies on the Arabian peninsula. When are we going to send the choppers for them?
How much a particular head of state fits into the modern, western conception of liberalism and democracy should have no bearing on the matter; Kidnapping that head of state and putting him on trial in a different country for crimes he is, at best, peripherally involved in is untenable. Especially when the very obvious motivation is self-enrichment rather than bringing any of that liberal democracy to the populace.
The social construct at play is 'International Law' by agreeing on mutually binding agreements. More specifically the 'prohibition against the use of force'. This is slightly different from the 'rules-based international order' often used in the US, which isn't specifically defined and can thus be used for whatever.
Whether Maduro is a baddie or not, taking military action requires buy-in from the UN Security Council. Specifically: nine affirmative votes from the 15-member council, provided that none of the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, UK, US) cast a veto. And it's only allowed to 'maintain or enforce international peace and security'. The charter contrasts this to building
The US should've consider how their war-plans 'maintain or enforce international peace and security' before commencing. Or even fabricate' sexed up Dossiers' on weapons of mass destruction like when the US invaded Iraq.
Self-defence is the only valid excuse for using arms without prior security council approval and acting without a plan for peace and security.
If you think Hamas, the Islamic Republic, and Maduro are/were peace-loving good guys, I have a bridge to sell you. Whatever you think about the US, anyone who isn’t drowning in propaganda must know that those guys are at best no better, and they don’t have even a facade of a justice system that people wronged by those governments can turn to for relief.
For instance, the moment the Gaza ceasefire allowed Hamas to continue to operate, we all witnessed them dragging their own citizens into the street and summarily executing them for supposed “collaboration.”
But regardless of your opinion of the relative morality of the various parties, the days of the civilized world just sitting around and allowing things like October 7th to happen with no consequences appear to be over.
Nobody is saying that they are peace loving guys.
But the zionists aren't any better, there is nothing that can justify the rapes and the genocide the US and particularly the zionists do.
"we all witnessed them dragging their own citizens into the street and summarily executing them for supposed “collaboration.” "
No we did not because most of us try not to consume Mossad propaganda.
If you think that starving children, and settlers killing kids is a "justice system",
If you think that stealing and destroying Lebanon is what the "civilized world" does,
If you do not think that October 7 was the clear reaction to being starved to death,
Then your definitions of civilization and justice are just fucked up.
> For instance, the moment the Gaza ceasefire allowed Hamas to continue to operate, we all witnessed them dragging their own citizens into the street and summarily executing them for supposed “collaboration.”
wouldn't be the first time people from a group aided in the genocide of that group. what do you expect will happen to such people?
it's easy to put quotes around the word "collaboration", but go on, tell us what you know about these people, make your case that they weren't actually collaborators.
The moment the allies liberated France, the collaborators were stripped, shaved, and hung from a lamp post.
Yes hamas is a messed up organisation, but that's come about as a result of Israeli actions. You can the lack of law and order as a reason to continue preventing that law and order, just the same as you can't use what the french did as an argument for giving France back to the Nazis.
there's two takes. either the US are the 'good guys' in which case they should be aiming to reduce the impact on the innocent civilian population and escalate the situation, bring the 'bad guys' to trail, and kill them if necessary. with the ultimate goal of bringing real peace.
or the US are the 'bad guys', only out to set the world in a way in which most favors them, and screw the consequences. if the US is really operating this way, then questions of morality and who did what to whom are completely irrelevant. it doesn't matter if someone oppresses someone over there, or kills a bunch of people, not of any concern unless the situation can be exploited.
as far as I can tell, the US has been acting in the latter mode for quite a while, and any pretense that they really are the 'good guys' is wearing quite thin.
personally, I agreed with Trumps stated policy, that we should stop trying to claim some worldwide jurisdiction and wading into these situations unilaterally. Where I didn't is that I think its in everyone's interest to have diplomatic discussions and form international coalitions about matters of mutual interest. but of course all that is completely academic at this point.
“Good guys” vs “bad guys” is a mirage. No one, specially not nation states fit neatly into the labels goo or bad. Every country is firstly motivated by their self interest, dos that make them all bad?
I also disagree with the monochrome framing of good and bad, I should have made is clearer that if the person I was replying to want to really talk about 'bad guys', then you end up in kind of contradiction.
I guess thats one way to look at it. But thats morality for you.
I'd just suggest maybe get less involved with the internet and as the kids say these days 'go touch some grass'.
Because, frankly, I don't think the average, or even marginal Venezuelan would agree with you at all, as, they have actually had to deal with this dictator.
The dictator is labeled the ”dictator” because they’re under fire by US not because they’re an actual dictator. Look at gulf countries and the other dictators that US is partnered with like Al-Sisi in Egypt and the King of Jordan.
Besides the regime did not change. It’s the same regime, the only difference is that US benefits (or some individual people or companies in the US) from this version.
> Because, frankly, I don't think the average, or even marginal Venezuelan would agree with you at all, as, they have actually had to deal with this dictator.
why do you think that? when was the last time you were in venezuela? first you tell someone to get off the internet for a bit and touch grass, then you gesture vaguely at what you think... which came from where exactly? different parts of the internet? cable news? where?
Immense majority of the country wanted him out. This is not even an argument at this point. You could argue Chavez was very popular for the most part, but Maduro? Even the communist party of Venezuela wanted him out.
an immense majority wanted him kidnapped by america? either you've inadvertantly shifted the goalpost or i'll need something to back that up, because i find that hard to believe.
I can speak just for myself and all my relatives and friends who wanted him out. I’d hoped it could be through other means but I’ll take this. Hopefully this leads to a transition and we get back to having a normal country like we’ve been yearning for so many years now.
Go ask a Venezuelan if you know one. We tried everything and only received violence. Personally Maduro got what he deserved. The regime is still there I know but it’s a bit of justice.
> Because, frankly, I don't think the average, or even marginal Venezuelan would agree with you at all, as, they have actually had to deal with this dictator.
They still have to deal with a dictator. Just one that is willing to pay extortion money to America. Venezuela did not had elections and has still the same regime in the same power.
Basically Madura and his regime, along with Gaza, West Bank and others are the victims because they're less powerful and therefore above reproach? However US and Israel are currently powerful and therefore they are the only ones worthy of criticism and scorn?
Second the west likes to take the moral high ground. That involves holding them to a higher standard.
Third, in cases such as Gaza, and the west bank, they don't have stable governments because of actions by Israel. You can't expect them to behave like a nation state in those circumstances, so yes I do expect more of Israel.
Fwiw I'm British, I remember the troubles on Northern Ireland. I don't condone what the IRA did, but I would still expect my govt to behave better, even though I agree with them.
> Third, in cases such as Gaza, and the west bank, they don't have stable governments because of actions by Israel. You can't expect them to behave like a nation state in those circumstances, so yes I do expect more of Israel.
Exactly. They are oppressed so are incapable of wrong. You can't expect them to not kidnap and murder people at a concert.
I didn't say they are incapable of wrong. I'm saying you can't hold a group that doesn't have law and order, and therefore control to the same standard as a group that does have control.
If protesters throw rocks at police, would you hold the entire group responsible? Even though most were there to protest peacefully? Would you take the same view if it was the police throwing rocks?
It's a pretty low standard. But even worse it denies them autonomy and control of their own actions. They're victims, mere observers. You deny that group self determination, you do not view them as equals. It's like I get upset if my child bites someone, but not if my cat bites someone, because it's a cat. That's why that oppressor / oppressed mentality is so dehumanizing to the people it purports to empathize with
Why is it dehumanising? I'm not talking on the level of humans, I'm talking on the level of nation states.
Plus I'm not even saying it's oppressor and oppressed, it's that one group has organisation and one doesn't.
I go back to my police and protestor example? Do you apply the same rules to each? Do you think the leader of the police is more or less culpable than the leader of the protestors?
It isn't dehumanising the protestors. If anything it's the opposite, it's dehumanising the police, they are supposed not to have agency. And that's the point.
Seems pretty organized that an open air prison that has severe restrictions on travel and trade can plan something like Oct 7.
Yeah to say say protestor can't control himself from throwing rocks is pretty offensive to the protestor. Put another way, if my son was at a protest and started throwing rocks at police I wouldn't excuse that behavior like he had no choice. You always have a choice.
I'm not saying the protestor can't control himself. I'm saying the organisers of the protest has less control over that individuals actions so has less culpability.
Whereas the police should have a culture of not throwing rocks, so serious questions should be asked of the leadership.
If you have a failed state such that large areas aren't under government control. And some warlord attacked your country, would you say that was a declaration of war from that entire country? Or would you accept the government didn't have control?
Gaza is a messed up place. You wouldn't necessarily expect all the groups to hold to a cease fire, like you would a nation with a single unified command structure.
A breach of a cease fire by Gaza says something different than a breach of a cease fire by Israel.
I'm not saying anything about individuals, I'm saying different group structures have different amounts of control over individuals in that group, so it isn't reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
To go back to your last example. Should you be held responsible for your son throwing rocks? Should that not depend upon the level of control? Or should we treat a dad handing his 5 year old a rock and instructing him to throw the rock at the police, differently to the 25 year old son that went there by him self?
Primarily - the issue at hand is the legality of 'insider information' with in institutions.
But the bigger issue is how shameful it is that people can't see the absolute horror beyond their little local ideologies or political beliefs.
Maduro is one of the worst tyrants in the world, responsible for murder and imprisonment of any number of innocents and political dissidents, and the direct cause of millions of people displaced.
Venezuela is truly a horrible place, the country has fallen apart, Chavizmo has no popular legitimacy, he lost the election and remained in power.
It's impossible to speak of 'sovereignty' in that context.
What happened to Maduro was a 'net positive' - it was in fact, a crude form of 'net justice'.
It has nothing to do with Gaze, Syria, Iran etc..
And it has little to do with the cronyism of the Trump regime.
It's fair to question legality of actions, but the fact that people could see Maduro is anything but a criminal in the most common sense, is beyond pale. That's the real issue here actually, the inability for people to contextualize complex issues especially in light of basic moral concerns.
The violence against all hose people in Gaza is bad.
So it's ok for a cop to demand payment from random people because his bosses are corrupt?
If the entire enterprise is rotten, it's because it is corrupted. Unless you're an anarchist you have to accept that a democratic nation state is a legitimate enterprise that is corruptable. I don't think you can say some sub level enterprise X layers down isn't corrupt because the levels above are corrupting that legitimate core.
He was the illegitimate president, he stole the last elections. Plenty of evidence of it. Add to that all the human rights crimes they committed (national guard death squads who killed in the thousands on the poorest areas of the country just to name one). This was investigated by the UN, led by Michelle Bachelet (former president of Chile).
But we did not depose his regime, we just stole him. Not like the US could reliably depose a foreign regime anyway, but this shouldn't be accepted as an excuse.
He indeed was an illegitimate ruler, but that is completely unrelated to what we did.
I’m not debating that. But as Venezuelan I’d like to put that in context. Because it’s important as well. For us even if you think it’s weird it is a glimmer of hope. A bit of justice even if the regime is still in power.
I want to reject such complicated feelings because I don't want the mild support of what our Administration did, and the intrinsic violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, but real life is complicated and things are complicated.
I just want better. But we so rarely get that.
Good Luck. Hopefully we are done with our meddling for now.
Since 2013, Venezuela has been suffering a socioeconomic crisis under Maduro. He stole the last two elections and remained in power even though he had not legitimately won.
Numerous international bodies and human rights organizations have found that Nicolás Maduro and his government committed extensive human rights violations. These violations have been ongoing since at least 2014 as part of a systematic plan to repress dissent. State security forces and allied armed groups (colectivos) have been implicated in thousands of unlawful or politically motivated killings and arbitrary arrests of protesters, opposition leaders, and perceived critics.
Immediately after the latest presidential election, at least 24 people died as a result of the government’s repression of protests against the appointment of Nicolás Maduro. Most of these killings could amount to extrajudicial executions. Two of the victims were children.
While I understand your sentiment, it doesn't justify what happened.
Think back to January 6 - Imagine if every foreign government assumed it was stolen and decided they should take matters into their own hands. Would it help, or hurt America?
Now I've learned that he tells the truth through parody. It's really hard, emotionally, to read, but important stuff.
The corruption starts at the head of the snake. We've proven to be just as corrupt as Russia, and Trump's war of choice is going to do more damage to the US than Putin's mistake invading Ukraine.
> “When we identified a user trading on classified government information, we referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation. Insider trading has no place on Polymarket. Today’s arrest is proof the system works.”
Today's arrest is proof that Polymarket may have incentivized a key decision maker in this operation to make decisions in a way that would let him profit. This is peak levels of head up ass arrogance.
This isn’t actually the case. Congress members and their employees have been banned from insider trading since the 2012 STOCK Act. That’s why they do it through family members now
There are a lot of (rightly) critical comments here about the imbalance between prosecutions of high-ups taking bets and the grunts (in this case though, a senior-ranking soldier).
But it seems to me that the closer to the frontline you go, the betrayal is even worse; if the story is true, then these are his friends and comrades he is endangering for financial gain - its not just an abstract risk argued away by simple high-level corruption.
People with a lot of money have certainly been making bets (plenty of recent news items on that), but I think the point being raised by others is that it's suspicious that only the lower orders have so far apparently been pursued.
special forces culture also is corrupt and in need of reform; every officer who is not part of SOCOM and has to deal with their antics and bullshit and fallout thereof knows this.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
I don't think I have anything meaningful to add here. This is extremely disappointing, especially at a time when there seems to be so little cultural cohesion. Everyone is just out for themselves.
I'll also admit I've never liked gambling (or fraud) so it's really hard for me to understand what is so appealing about something like polymarket or kalshi. (I have the same gaps with regard to casinos, they just seem like hell on earth -- not a positive aspect to them whatsoever) At least from my outsider's perspective it seems clear that these sorts of gambling are not good for society whatsoever.
It’s arguable that opening the doors for greedy soldiers to do a little insider trading and inadvertently expose the illegal covert violent raid that they’re party to might be one of the few positive outcomes in a society gamified by Polymarket
Nice. I'm against polymarket allowing bets on war precisely because of this. But I think we can all agree that perpetrators hold more liability than the platforms, they are the true cuplrits of warcrimes/treason.
In France, in the 80s-80s, a comedian trio did a sketch on rural hunters, and the final was about the difference between the good hunter and the bad hunter, the whole sketch was like 6-7min and 1min was about the good and bad hunter.
I keep remembering this sketch each time I read about the differences in prosecution in the US between social classes.
It's parody of French rural hunters, and in this section, it's about the mental gymnastics they have about differencing themselves from the "bad" ones, while the rest of the sketch you see them shooting at any movements, littering the forest, explaining multiple hunting "accidents".
Unsurprisingly, Trump is downplaying the situation, comparing it to Pete Rose betting on his own team. And, naturally, conservatives are falling in line, excusing the situation because Congress does this all the time.
So crypto fraud gets deprioritized, with cases like the one against Nader Al-Naji dropped entirely, while Trump and his family profit massively from crypto and corruption themselves.
Yet prediction market fraud is made an enforcement priority, except to say that nobody close to Trump's own cabinet will be prosecuted - the little guys will be made an example of to make it seem like those at the top are taking the moral high-ground. "Every accusation is a confession."
He screwed himself by taking steps to show how much of an amateur he was, by trying to delete his polymarket account and change the email address on his crypto exchange account
He should have just cashed out and donated 20% of it to Mar-a-Lago saying exactly what he did and a thank you. It's a little too low for a club membership but since the President's family is a shareholder of Polymarket I think it would have been seen as attracting liquidity
AG would have been instructed to stamp out the investigation, no charges would have been filed
Prime example showing lack of more of any kind of soldiers and us army. They illegally kidnapped the president of the sovereign country - they should be all in jail!
USA is a rogue state at this point. NATO is at risk because of that.
His op-sec probably wasn't sufficient to hide his gains via multiple small bets, no-log VPN, and cycling through Monnero both ways. The next prediction market to directly use Monero and no-log will be untraceable.
Does polymarket have trial markets? Maybe 12% chance of being a mistrial - oh wait just shot up to 99%; new user called the_judge88 just bet $100K on that?
Really disheartening to see this and it brings up so many thoughts and feelings I have over the current state of the US, politically, popularly, and how everyone is thinking about morality personally.
If this had happened during, say, the Osama bin Laden raid I think it would have been one of those "damaging the American psyche" stories that would have run for months with a giant trial and a lot of public shame. Trump coming onto the scene and his first term broke a lot of people's capacity for caring about those sorts of events.
Now we have an operation the public didn't ask for, initiated by people with no clear moral codes of their own and very unclear objectives, ones that we can largely assume are for their own personal gain as well, and all of that trickling down to blatantly illegal use of confidential data for personal gain by someone the public would typically respect. And I'm sure a subset of people will try to make this into a big story, but with everything else that's gone on recently I think it probably fades after a few days (except for the prosecutors involved of course).
If you destroy the integrity of the professional military corps through destructive and despotic behaviour that drives out those who hold to their principles, soldiers like this are the result of Hegseth’s cultification.
Nobody should be surprised.
Hegseth thinks loyalists + AI as brains can replace decades of actual real-world experience and keeping the highest ethics and morality standards with a bunch of AI-driven baboons with stars on their shoulders.
Everyone can already feel the ripples of what he is doing. There is an exodus in excellence in the upper echelons of the us military never seen before.
The US is getting less safe by the day. You can also see it on tourism data and forecasts. A lot of people don’t feel safe to travel to the US any longer.
Soccer World Cup in the US and 250th anniversary of the USA would have caused a tourism boom with past administrations. But people rather go to China instead.
so they catched this guy,
yet pelosi and 300 others ate making millions every month, and nothing..
really
people who has woken up, there is no words for this,
yet the 80% are still asleep
The more surprising thing is that the common invasion soldier also benefits financially. So far we only knew that the oligarch system that is currently controlling the USA, also benefits massively - the stock market changes with regards to Iran showed this already, but also see the more recent comments made in regards not just to the orange king himself, but his family dynasty and their involvement; in particular orange king jr. is involved a LOT here, also with regards to that mentioned soldier (see the companies that were involved, crypto-stuff and so forth). This reminds me a bit of Epstein, in a way - so far the US justice system claims that only two people (the dead Epstain and his wife) organised all those naughty parties. Well, that is logistically simply impossible, aside from the question how they had all that money. How deep do these networks used by the superrich go? You have more and more victims who claimed not only to have been underage, but also service-sold to other rich people. Why are these latter people not in court? How corrupt is that system? Evidently we now know that these invasion soldiers also bet on their own invasions - I guess when they claim "we are doing work for Good" here they mean this with regards to their own pockets.
Just as Smedley D. Butler once stated, many many years ago: "War is a racket"
What was his rank? What was his job? What was his clearance? How did he have access?
The canadians have the info. He was special forces. He was enlisted (not an officer). He was involved, or at least privy to, the planning of the Venezuela thing.
Feds waited no time to drop the indictment and make arrest. 3 months is lightning fast for a white collar crime. Wall St. ppl who commit insider trading pay a fine and admit no wrongdoing, discouraging the profits, and only after many years and trades have passed. Goes to show how elites play by a different set of rules. His mistake was not knowing he was not in that club. Have no idea why this was downvoted. I see so many other people who make this argument about privileged elites and always get upvoted.
Trumps first campaign promise was drain the swamp. The center of power in america has never been more swamp like than now. In fact swamp is not accurate, more like gigantic pile of steaming stinking trash.
In desperate times in the age of AI, one needs to grift in order to survive. This soldier was just doing that to maybe...enrich themselves like the politicians also breaking insider trading laws?
This is why no-one at the top institutions, politicians (Pelosi), presidents (Trump) and everyone else in proximity gets arrested or charged for insider trading in all forms. It doesn't apply to them.
This is a reminder that the rule makers are allowed to grift and break their own rules, but will arrest you for copying them or doing the same thing because this soldier was not part of their club.
He wasn't invited to their private insider group chat. So this solider was arrested and charged instead.
lol no SEC lawsuit or civil complaint: strait to the indictment and arrest. Goes to show how elites are truly a privileged class. They get to admit "no guilt" and forfeit profits, avoiding prosecution. Have no idea why this was downvoted. I see so many other people who make this argument about privileged elites and always get upvoted. I never have the right opinion on anything.
The suspect didn't trade securities. SEC doesn't have jurisdiction. The curiosity–to me as a layman–is that this is being prosecuted by the DoJ versus under the UCMJ.
"Van Dyke was indicted on charges that included unlawful use of confidential information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, and wire fraud."
Polymarket isn't doing anything about it. It's the US government because obviously while I suppose this info made a more accurate "prediction" it also yk, leaked confidential state military secrets which is something the government can prosecute. They're not being prosecuted for insider trading on Polymarket
Insider bets distort the probabilities, creating a conflict of interest and causing market manipulation. We don't let athletes bet on their own games, because some will deliberately lose. They will do this when the odds are good and they will make more money. So you don't get accurate predictions, because the more probable something is, the better the odds and the more money to be made by someone manipulating the odds.
End result is you place bets against things you want to happen. eg. USA invading Iran. If you win the bet, you make money. If you lose the bet, you still win because the USA invaded Iran. And maybe that happened because people in power took your bet and influenced the odds in their favor. A fully deniable market for bribes. Same reason you can't bet on unnatural death, because it crowdsources assassination.
It's rather obviously illegal to leak classified intel by taking public actions based off of it... that's practically the meaning of the word "classified".
So had this not involved presumed military secrets, it would have been legal? So it was the classified info that made it a crime, and then the insider trading aspect was later tacked on? It's crazy how the government adds so many charges. This guy is screwed.
That's part of the Chesterton's Fence nature of why these markets are bad. We know insider trading is a bad thing for the stock market, so it's policed. These markets, being a post-regulation internet free for all, aren't.
Many people here are talking about how more powerful people are also corrupt and are getting away with it. All corruption is bad. This soldier put the life of everyone on the mission in danger by doing this.
All corruption is bad. Selective enforcement of the law is worse. It increases corruption by giving a strong incentive to win favors from powerful people.
At least they're still pretending to not be corrupt.
Inequality codified into the law, literal separate rules, is worse still.
Do you think this guy's chances of getting away with it would have increased if he solicited favors from powerful people?
A pardon costs ~1M, just need to still more than that and you're golden.
The sentiment is not that this man shouldn't be prosecuted it is that the blatant double standard and growing endemic societal cancer that is corruption is being allowed to blossom while leaders target scape goats for the same behavior. What this administration is trying to signal with going after this guy is that the problem is not with them, it's someone else, that they're on the up and up. It is why scapegoating is an effective tactic
it's a blatant double standard if you have evidence of people "doing it and getting away with it", but you don't, you just suspect it. and it's scapegoating if blame is centered on a person or group to explain away the totality of a widespread (or made up) problem, and that is also not happening here, instead "a person did something" and got arrested.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/us-senato...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/08/polymarket-...
I don’t understand the point of denying reality when it unfolds in front of you. Plenty of evidence for these things. Denial of obvious truth is an American epidemic and cultural export
The point is that none of the congressional cases would end in a conviction. So unless you want to suspend rule of law theres not really much we can do without some hard evidence.
relevant: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
These things aren't mutually exclusive. I don't see what is wrong with rightfully complaining about how insider trading is very rampant.
This soldier deserves his punishment. I just wish they would enforce these laws on our congressmen.
Unfortunately enforcing any laws on congressmen is very difficult.
In all decent democracies elected politicians have immunity or similar safeguards, since the separation of powers (as theorized by Montesquieu in the middle of illuminism) which represents the foundation of democracy demands that both the legislative and executive power be separated from the judicial one.
“Making the politicians pay for their crimes” is often just a populist argument, while there are ways to incriminate them, expecting that they can be prosecuted like us normal citizens is not compatible with democracy.
You may not like what I said but I said it. Go read the original works by Montesquieu, he understood it first.
What one theorycrafter says does not make it right; nobody should be above the law in a democracy. We should have no kings in a democracy.
You said SHOULD. Yes, I absolutely agree that politicians (and I very intentionally do not call any names) should be criminally punished most harshly for abusing their position for personal enrichment or for some other egoistical goals. On the other hand, these are the people we, as totality of all voters, chose for their function. The main punishment for a politician in democracy should be the threat of losing next elections, not criminal prosecution. And of course, per definition, in every democracy every politician has a majority of citizens, who considers him stupid and in the hysterical environment of the current political life (hysterical for many more or less good reasons) such politician is not only opponent, but an enemy if not a traitor. There is an unfortunate tendency to convert this adversarial feeling into full blown hate and accusations of criminal misconduct.
I would argue the opposite, that having members of government who CANNOT be prosecuted like normal citizens is not compatible with democracy. I would think arguments to the contrary would have to assume other impediments to a properly functioning justice system, such as politically motivated prosecutions, widespread selective enforcement, etc.
The mechanism is that voters should vote out corrupt congressmen.
This is a classic “who will guard the guards themselves?” dilemma.
Exactly. And the same is true of the judicial system btw, who must stay separate from other powers, meaning that it also has to police itself, which can create its own issues.
These are just the (little) costs of democracy. If you aren’t ready to pay them, you haven’t really considered the alternatives.
The issue is that the people enforcing this have made a huge amount of money doing the same thing, but with a full on war!
They didn't make the bet until after the raid - but before the announcement. Surely they endangered people, perhaps more and different people than simply those on the mission
Can you provide a reference? From a Reuters article:
> prosecutors said Van Dyke bet more than $33,000 on Polymarket between December 27, 2025, and January 2, 2026, that Maduro would soon be out of office and that U.S. forces would soon enter Venezuela
Maduro was taken on January 3.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-soldier-charged-...
Unless someone knows the bets are placed by an insider how does this create any sort of risk?
Incentivizes him to take on more risk to ensure mission success.
When someone bets 32k that a political opponent of the US is going to be kidnapped I think its fair to say some will assume it was placed by an insider.
he was more incentivized for the mission to succeed? how horrible!
He was incentivized to win the bet. The military does not want people to have outside loyalties because that creates problems any time they’re not perfectly aligned – for example, if they had orders to minimize team or civilian casualties you don’t want this guy starting a messy firefight because he’s thinking the target is getting away and willing to risk someone else’s lives for half a million dollars.
You also have to think about leaning information: if people do this, bodyguards around the world are going to monitor betting markets looking for unexplained changes. The military doesn’t like anything which can leak timing information since that increases the risk of a mission failing.
What exactly would that look like from the position of an individual low rank unit? What would $32k of risk look like on a foreign battle field? I'm struggling to understand this prerogative.
What would be far larger source of risk is if they bet _against_ the operation and then personally sabotaged it. That's far more understandable but it's not what happened here.
It apparently and sadly needs to be said on Hacker News, I'm not defending him, and he should be punished, but I genuinely can't apprehend the risk assessment logic here.
Easy to think of a scenario where he should stand down but instead continues with the mission, risking the lives of his team mates, or maybe civilians.
He's a master sergeant, once of the highest enlisted ranks, involved in planning the mission. Not low rank at all.
A lot of people were involved with the mission that were not themselves directly endangered but could still stand to profit.
I mean just the fact that bets are being placed could have tipped off the target and made them prepared.
Thank you, this was my first thought as well. He essentially leaked classified mission info for the purpose of scoring some cash on it. Insider trading in congress is a big problem too, but there are some real differences here.
Such as that Congress can legally do insider trading since they won’t pass a law outlawing it.
Yes, absolutely. It's truly grotesque what they've done (exempting themselves from laws that apply to everyone else).
They literally did pass a law outlawing it in 2012. Enforcement has been very poor, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
Yes, those real differences are that the soldier was not the chair of any powerful legislative committees.
Both are true. No sympathy for this guy if he’s guilty as charged.
But also don’t forget that this guy’s trades are a drop in the ocean compared to the rest of the likely insider trading that’s visible in the Polymarket logs. (Eg on timing of Iran attacks, Trump tariff announcements, etc)
> All corruption is bad.
This is true, just like "all lives matter" is true, and it misses the point in the exact same way.
Those people you are replying to are not saying that this soldier should get away with his corruption because more powerful people are getting away with theirs. They are saying that those who abuse greater power are doing greater harm, and that their corruption should be punished with greater urgency.
On top of the harm the powerful people inflict directly through their corrupt actions, there's a secondary effect on the society at large. Unlike trickle-down economics, trickle-down corruption is a real thing. People see those in power get away with corruption and say "Why should I do the right thing?"
Of course, the usual answer from those in power ends up being "because we have the power to punish you and you don't have the power to punish us". And that's how you end up with the arrest and prosecution of a US soldier on the same 5 counts that the top politicians and their cronies are getting away with on a daily basis, aided by the president himself.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Legitimizing small time corruption because bigger corruption exists just legitimizes corrupt behavior in general. It should be offensive no matter who does it.
I have to ask: did you read what I wrote before you replied to me? I know the question might come across as an attack, but it's not. I'm genuinely curious about what process lead to your comment being a reply to mine, when mine explicitly states the following:
> Those people you are replying to are not saying that this soldier should get away with his corruption because more powerful people are getting away with theirs. They are saying that those who abuse greater power are doing greater harm, and that their corruption should be punished with greater urgency.
I did read it. Your point is effectively irrelevant. It means the same thing. Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.
It's like saying "we shouldn't worry about enforcing traffic laws because we need to use our resources to bring war criminals to justice" when the reason where not bringing war criminals to justice isn't for lack of concern, it's just that we have no coercive power.
Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.
> It's like saying "we shouldn't worry about enforcing traffic laws because we need to use our resources to bring war criminals to justice"
It most definitely isn't. At no point did anyone in this discussion say "we shouldn't worry about small time corruption". In fact, I explicitly said the opposite. And then I highlighted it after you essentially accused me of doing so, as you're doing again.
> Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.
No, it's not. No one is "creating" an "urgency chain". Justice isn't binary. Things can be more or less just, they're not either perfectly just or completely unjust with nothing in between. Similarly, different people have different levels of impact. That's the definition of power in this context: the level of impact your actions have. No one is "creating" these concepts out of thin air.
What is happening here is that people are complaining about injustice and other people -- like you and the person I initially replied to -- are trying to delegitimize those complaints by stating that "all corruption is bad".
Let me repeat this, in case it got lost despite earlier repetitions: yes, we all know that "all corruption is bad". Just like we all know that "all lives matter", but pointing out that banality only got popular after the "black lives matter" slogan surfaced in response to a systemic injustice against African Americans.
You're doing the same kind of thing here.
> Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.
On the contrary. If you always give up on caring because you don't have coercive power, you will never rectify injustices caused by imbalance of coercive power.
I want you to know that you are making sense, and I appreciate how calmly and constructively you're engaging. :)
> Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.
What ? we SHOULD ABSOLUTELY create an urgency chain
How is this comment on hacker news? Do we not understand basic principles of scale?
40 billion of corruption is way more corrupt than 400k.
And what’s more is penalizing the 400k without penalizing the 400b means the people getting the 400b look better.
*He's a terrorist that put the life of other terrorists in danger.
It's posturing. And a very predictable narrative. Of course the DOJ did the right thing here. But how can we frame it so that the DOJ=bad?
> This soldier put the life of everyone on the mission in danger by doing this.
Good. Unfortunately, they succeeded. If there was any moral justice in this world, every single US soldier involved with this would have died a horrible death. Fuck them. This was just another in a long string of global terroristic events that the US was involved in.
Being a member of the US military is morally wrong. And yes, I include you(now or in the past) and all of your family members in that equation. There is no doubt about the immorality of the US military apparatus.
Man, you've been on a streak of these purely vitriolic posts. Maybe take a break from the internet for a bit? These posts read like someone who needs help.
I didn't realize that acknowledging the enormous amount of bad blood the US has sowed was sign of mental illness.
Yes, and:
It's a short step from the Congress people taking advantage of foreknowledge, vs them MAKING self advantageous opportunities. And it's not guaranteed their "making" is in the public interest.
Since this is relevant to many HN comments, copy-pasted the charges from the pdf indictment in the linked page:
Count 1 - Unlawful Use of Confidential Government Information for Personal Gain
Count 2 - Theft of Nonpublic Government Information
Count 3 - Commodities Fraud
Count 4 - Wire Fraud
Count 5 - Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity
It's interesting they don't think they can get him for leaking classified information. To me that seems like the biggest issue--I mean sure, it's bad he made money on it, but it would have been really bad if he'd gotten someone killed by blabbing to the internet.
If that happened, could they retroactively classify it?
Maybe I'm making an incorrect assumption, but I assumed the information was already classified. He was betting on an outcome of a planned military operation based on his knowledge of those plans. My assumption is that information is super closely guarded, and likely classified at a high level. Telegraphing your invasion plans is generally not something you do unless you want disaster, right?
Yeah the DoJ proclaims,
“Our Office will continue to hold accountable those who misuse confidential or classified information in a way that undermines and exploits our national security.”
But isn’t wire fraud harder to prove than leaking classified facts?
It seems strange, but that must be why I'm not a lawyer :p
Unless the prosecution can prove that the trades meaningfully moved the market prices, it's probably going to be really hard to use the term "leaking".
I can't shake the feeling that there may be political reasons to not even attempt that angle. What legal precedent would it set if a judge actually ruled on that and the prosecution won? Which entities within the government would be financially inconvenienced?
So in prediction markets I've heard a lot of times people will collaborate in order to make certain predictions pay off higher sums by having more people put money on a certain bet.
Is it true with these markets the more people bet on a specific day and time, the value will increase more, increasing the overall payout? If that is true, I wonder if they're looking at anybody else helping place the bets or a group of people trying to wager a higher amount of money to increase the return?
Well yes. Someone has the other side of the bet, and it’s not 1:1 long:short. That’s how folks could hypothetically hire somebody to kill me, by putting $5M on “floam will survive the month” - if I’m not killed conspirators get their money back, with interest. But if I am verifiably dead, whoever knew in advance a hit man will kill me, that man gets paid.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, because we're not talking about outright market manipulation. Absent any other information, the market makers always assume that they might be trading against a better informed counterparty - so absent any other signal, the prices at which executions happen are themselves a signal.
Think about it: you have N market makers offering both sides of the trade with a spread between them. When there is no other meaningful activity, the best prices are more or less stable. Now someone comes in and buys one side of the trade. Each marker maker will, individually, make the same two decisions:
The magnitude of the decisions made depends on various factors, but as a short-hand the size of the made trades in respect to the overall liquidity available near the midpoint directs how strongly the market makers react. A tiny trickle of insignificant trades does not move the price in any meaningful way (unless the sizes are so small that the execution commission starts to make a difference). A sustained directional flood of trades will cause the midpoint (and volume) to move to the direction where the market makers can sell at higher prices and avoid accumulating any further losses.
> But isn’t wire fraud harder to prove than leaking classified facts?
No. From the Justice Department's own criminal resource manual:
> the four essential elements of the crime of wire fraud are:
> (1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money;
> (2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud;
> (3) that it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and
> (4) that interstate wire communications were in fact used
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Generally, to be successfully prosecuted for a crime, the prosecutor has to show that each and every "element" of the crime has to have happened. On the above page, there were 3 different court precedents who ruled what elements that the prosecutor needed to prove were in those cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_(criminal_law)#
You’re just seeing, clearly, the priorities of the US.
Is it helping sick citizens? No. Is it feeding the hungry? No. Free education, housing the un housed or protecting the environment? No, no , no.
To be perfectly clear, it’s not giving vets the benefits they deserve or keeping soldiers safe either.
Money. The priority is money.
Getting it. And making sure those that don’t have it don’t get it.
The government is very big. They can have multiple priorities. The Dept of Justice does not provide medical care, education, or anything else you listed -- they prosecute crimes. And using classified military plans for personal gain while potentially putting fellow soldiers at risk seems like a crime that is worth prosecuting.
God money's not looking for the cure God money's not concerned about the sick among the pure God money, let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised God money's not one to choose No, you can't take it No, you can't take it No, you can't take that away from me
did he leak the information, or just speculate on it? is it leaking classified info when pentagon officials order lots of pizza and thus inform the world that a military operation is being planned?
"A military operation is being planned" is very different from "Maduro will be kidnapped in the next x hours".
"Pentagon planning a military operation" is not exactly classified information as it is safe to assume that Pentagon is always planning a military operation.
Yes, it seems in this case an adversary who was paying attention could have learned something very, very valuable.
Yes. Especially if the casino (or "prediction market") has access to the identities of players via id verification, fingerprinting, or other means.
You mean any non crypto payment system? :)
Going to guess that anyone in the U.S. military has their crypto wallet aggresively profiled by various spy agencies.
And literally every other thing they do on the internet.. remember that Strava shit? You have relatively technically unsophisticated people with high level access and not a lot of adult supervision. That seems like a juicy target. I assume there are a lot of well funded and staffed outifts around the world who have noticed the same thing.
There have been some cases where fitness tracker data shows where some military installations are located. Or when they're jogging on a ship that's taking them to deployment somewhere.
The Ukraine war has shown that cheap intelligence tricks can be used against the average recruit, like pretending to be a dating website and getting the GPS locations of horny enemy soldiers so your drones can drop grenades on them.
It doesn't need to be crypto wallet tracking. The amount of spyware being built into phone apps is where those agencies would be putting some effort into obtaining access to.
> "A military operation is being planned" is very different from "Maduro will be kidnapped in the next x hours".
IIRC, the bet was on "Nicolas Maduro out?":
> If Nicolás Maduro leaves office before February 1, 2026, then the market resolves to Yes.
So the bet wasn't specifically "Nicolas Maduro kidnapped?" or even "Nicolas Maduro out by January 3rd?" And IIRC there was a lot of Trump saber rattling about Venezuela in the days before, hence the creation of the bet. I could absolutely see a plausible way to link these publicly-available pieces of information into a winning bet:
* Trump talking tough about Venezuela
* Spike in DC pizza activity on January 2nd
did anyone have any reason to believe that was classified information that was leaked, instead of just a random person speculating? if not, then he had no intent to leak that information. If a random soldier told you, "iran will be nuked tomorrow" do you believe them? especially on a speculation platform, for all you know he's also guessing based on the same activites and events the public is observing. laws are all about intent and state of mind, what actually happened is irrelevant, what was intended is what matters. For example, killing a person is not a crime in and of itself, if it was all soldiers who kill someone in combat would be in prison, as would people who kill in self-defense. Matter of fact, if no classified information was actually leaked, but it could be proved that he intended to do something to leak classified info (which requires others to believe it is truthful information, instead of speculation) then that in itself is a crime.
Saying anything at all on a speculation platform, especially if others don't even know your identity (or you have no reason to believe they do), can only be treated as speculative intent, not intent to disclose classified information.
The site that he bought the crypto from to make a bet could trace it back to him, and many, if not all, crypto trading sites have shady ties with some governemnts around the world.
Well, a lot of people got killed this way, too.
But from the perspective of the US DoJ the right people got killed (assuming of course they've determined the operation was legal according to their own rules, e.g. US law). The issue here is this guy telegraphed operational plans to the entire world which could have gotten (from the DoJ's perspective) the wrong people killed.
Why would this be civilian versus the business of a JAG?
Because the JAG gets to prosecute stuff that violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That is their jurisdiction. They don't have the authority to prosecute state crimes, nor what naughty stuff you did at Disney.
Huh that’s interesting. The sycophants in DC seem to be able to do everything listed here with no repercussions.
> sycophants in DC
Who? Because if you have evidence of military secrets being leaked through prediction markets, we actually need that journalistic record maintained.
I don't know who, but there are a lot of news articles about high volume oil trading activities shortly before publicly military action.
I don't think the parent mentioned military secrets in particular? But the insider trading is already well documented e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge0grppe3po
> the insider trading
The suspect hasn't been charged with insider trading. (OP said those "in DC seem to be able to do everything listed.")
> The suspect hasn't been charged with insider trading.
I think that was the point GP was making.
Pretty sure Count 1 through 5 above cover insider trading by administration officials too.
The problem is "insider trading" has a definition and acting based on knowledge of government secrets isn't what it is.
IANAL but what you state seems to literally fall under the STOCK Act of 2012. It is one kind of insider trading.
And what I am saying is that the same articles of prosecution as in the soldier's case are applicable for their case too. Not going after them is a choice.
I think 3 and 4 are frauds on others in the prediction market agreement. As in, it’s fraud against the terms of the market.
You don’t think the Trump admin leaked any secrets at all? No chats on signal? Nothing like that?
There's plenty of evidence of it happening, if you consider the odds of surges of pre-market trading of oil futures 20 minutes before Trump tweets on Iran happening coincidentally. The actual finding of who's who has to be done by the U.S. law enforcement, who aren't really interested.
> plenty of evidence of it happening
There is circumstantial evidence. We need to collate that. But nothing trumps direct evidence. If someone has that I will bend over backwards to find a way to securely connect them with, at the very least, a reporter who can document it so it shows up in an internet search when an empowered staffer starts down this path.
The problem with this administration is that what you're saying will eventually happen. It will come out they were trading on this. And not a damned thing will happen.
> not a damned thing will happen
This is more lazy nihilism. Fortunately, it remains a minority view.
Hey hey now - the occasional $200? $250? fine is devastating enough on our selfless, dedicated, public servants!
> Count 5 - Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity
For a moment there I read this as the unlawful activity was Maduro's arrest, and someone made money on that fact.
Well, the supreme court has already given Trump full immunity for things like this, so they could easily label it a crime and start charging anyone involved they don't like. What you described sounds hilarious and crazy right now, but I fully expect something like this to happen eventually while the US further descends into fascism.
Maduro's kidnapping was unlawful.
Most kidnappings are...
Forgot the /s
As an aside, I thought the BBC telling it's "journalists" not to call it a kidnapping was the most hilarious thing to come from this:
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2026/01/05/bbc-maduro-v...
> “Kidnapping” is an uncomfortable word. It suggests force, illegality and wrongdoing. “Captured” sounds more respectable. It belongs to the language of war. “Seized” sounds calmer still — almost administrative, like someone found it on a supermarket shelf.
Reminds me of the far left calling rioting "unrest" when it's their guys doing the damage.
Be curious about what conservative and liberal media agree on, within that intersection are the only lies that actually matter.
> Count 4 - Wire Fraud
I almost always see this charge. Seems too strong as law
Wire fraud is simply the crime of committing a crime over wire. It just always doubles the counts and intensifies the punishment. Same goes for Count 5.
Wire fraud turns a state case into a federal case.
Yeah. And the penalties for wire fraud are steep. Up to 20 years in prison and $250k fine _per_ count.
Count 3, how is this a commodity?
Count 1, 4, and 5 are the crime of committing a crime. Crime 1 is commiting a crime for personal reasons. 4 is commiting a crime over the wire. 5 is commiting a crime using money.
The only real crime is Count 2: Theft of info.
I feel like if you followed the NBA scandal involving Chauncey Billups the wire fraud charge for insider prediction market trading was inevitable.
Damon Jones didn't work for the NBA and basically just told some people the status of an injury to LeBron because he hangs out with him (in exchange for money). His crime I guess is gambling illegally? But wire fraud (I think they even say "creating a fraudulent market") was thrown in there.
Seemed inevitable they were going to start charging prediction market insiders the same way.
For count 3, the prediction markets consider the "bets" to actually be futures contracts, and futures contracts are regulated together with commodities (in the U.S. by the CFTC). There is ongoing litigation about whether this is the proper designation, but that is the U.S. government's position. Insider trading rules are more lax for futures than other products, but I believe this case likely does violate existing rules.
It seems like it would be highly demoralizing to US soldiers that they are prosecuted for betting on the outcomes of the battles they are risking their lives for but those insider trading commanding them aren't.
Imagine doing an easy tour in your air conditioned Kuwaiti logistics office and then getting blown to bits by a ballistic missile because no one bothered to tell you about the war that was being initiated which would cause such missiles in retaliation. Yeah, that's demoralizing too.
They should have kept an eye on the prediction markets.
There will be derivative contracts of prediction markets to predict if an insider is indicted for betting on a specific prediction.
And those prediction markets will have derivative markets to predict if an insider in the prosecutor's office bet on that contract.
And those prediction markets will have derivative markets to predict if a special prosecutor will prosecute the other prosecutor.
And those prediction markets will have derivative markets to predict if an insider in the special prosecutor's office bet on the other contract.
(additional derivative markets will exist up to the divine wrath of god).
> derivative markets will exist up to the divine wrath of god
We already bet on the weather.
Which is totally up the gods — or a hairdryer:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
> additional derivative markets will exist up to the divine wrath of god
We already know that Jesus will come back in an election year
I mean, surely everyone in the middle east knew a war was on the horizon. Obviously not the exact plan or day, but it wasn't a secret that usa was gearing up for a war.
The war was surprised and host of people said so - goverments, expats living ij region, locals. And were pisssed
I imagine they were pissed. I dont think anyone likes being in the middle of a war. Nonetheless in the weeks leading up it was clear USA was moving massive amounts of naval assets into the region. It was on the news 24/7. I'm sure everyone in the military would have been able to read the tea leaves that something was going down soonish, even if they didn't know precisely what or when.
start charging congresspeople with insider trading first, before you charge any regular soldier
if rules dont apply universally, then screw these rules altogether
If you are in Kuwait you will find yourself under rockets whether you knew in advance or not
I think the worse aspect is if the news of an attack being leaked to the defender and you are being blown to bits as their ballistic missiles are not decimated in their preemptive strike.
They referred to soldiers that were killed by the start of the war. They thought the situation is normal, war was started without them knowing, got killed.
Not knowing in advance was an important factor
Soldiers can't catch a flight back home when war starts (or about to), and by the time the Iranians were able to attack back after the initial shock, all US soldiers knew there's a war going on
That's why I am having great difficulty following that argument
I would offer a small correction to your point: Instead of "ballistic missile", I would substitute "Shahed-type drones". It is much easier to detect (and shoot down) a ballistic missile than a Shahed-type drone.
I don't think this is true at all? A ballistic missile is way harder and more expensive to shutdown (they are flying at Mach 5-10 while you can outrun that type of drone with a mid tier car on the freeway)
Shahed is very primitive in general and not hard to shot down but because its extremely cheap it can be used to overwhelm any type of air defenses. Wasting $4 million to destroy a $50k drone doesn't scale at all.
The OP wrote:
The purpose of my response wasn't about cost effectiveness; rather, it was about the lethality of a ballistic missile vs Shahed-type drone.
A ballistic missile is easily detected by a network of outer space satellites owned and operated by the US Space Force. Whether or not you can defend against it is a different question. There is sufficient time from the detected of ballistic missile launch to move to a hardened underground bunker. All US bases in the Middle East will have these. Soldiers will regularly train for incoming ballistic missile attacks and when/how to move to underground bunkers. As a result, it is very unlikely that soldiers in an "air conditioned Kuwaiti logistics office" would be killed by an incoming ballistic missile.
On the other hand, a Shahed-type drone (similar to a cruise missile) is much harder to detect because they fly very low and difficult to catch on rader until close to base. As a result, soldiers on base will have much less time to move to underground bunkers.
Or, your brigade’s master sergeant needs the invasion to hit on the 28th rather than Mar 1st.
> would be highly demoralizing
Those people should quit. Sour grapes isn’t an excuse for putting others’ lives at risk.
I don't think active duty special forces can just "quit", can they?
Sort of. Not saying that I think anyone should do this but just explaining for the sake of general knowledge.
I'm simplifying things quite a bit, but almost all military contracts are 8-year (typically split into a 4-year active and 4-year reserve period). If you leave on your own volition during this period, you typically have to repay the cost to the government to train you. And any contract that you're on where you received a signing bonus you have to pay back.
The actual mechanism for doing this is a different between officers and enlisted and they're some paperwork but functionally you can leave if you're really motivated to and for the most part people won't stop you (outside of a few conversations where people advise you against it).
The type of discharge you receive depends on the circumstances but generally there's a way to still get an honorable discharge (hardship, education, family, conscientious objector).
There's also the more practical quitting special forces vs leaving the military entirely. Tier 1 units only want people who want to be there and if you don't you can get transferred to some other job in the military in like a day if you really wanted to.
They get transferred to a different unit - one that is not part of "special forces". A big part of the selection process is to find the soldiers who just won't quit.
One rather famous example is of a BUD/S (usually called SEAL) selectee who drowned himself. When pulled out of the pool and resuscitated, he apologized and thought he failed out of the selection process. The instructor replied something like "heck no, you passed. We can always teach you how to swim. No one can teach you to never give up".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_SEAL_select...
Is sarcasm banned where you live?
> It seems like it would be highly demoralizing to US soldiers that they are prosecuted for betting on the outcomes of the battles they are risking their lives for but those insider trading commanding them aren't.
Why? The enlisted military has never had any issue with similar double standards in the past. George 'AWOL' Bush handily swept the military vote, as did Donald 'Bone Spurs' Trump.
Likewise, veterans routinely and overwhelmingly vote for people who cut veteran support and benefits, over people who don't.
If they think those people are fit to lead them, who are we to tell them they aren't?
I actually completely agree with your last phrase. Who are you to tell them anything, particularly with such ironic condescension?
In a democracy the citizens decide who leads the military not the military.
Please study the venn diagram below:
((military) citizens)
Veterans generally don’t need additional support or benefits. Disability is basically a second pension at this point. SCD for veterans under 45 has risen from 16% in 2008 to 39% in 2022 [0]. If you know any young veterans, then anecdotally you will see this is true. You can (and should) get partial disability for all kinds of aches and pains that in a normal career would go ignored.
[0] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...
I just couldn't, in good conscience, keep bombing childrens schools under such demoralising conditions.
On the flip side: who if not me and my precision guided munitions, will protect America (and freedom) from the clear and present danger of 8 year old iranian girls.
truly so sad how the troops must feel
"America will bomb you and 15 years later make a movie about how sad the soldiers are based on autobiographies of completely unrepentant sadists" remains true for another decade.
I wonder who the american sniper of iran will be
In Nam they got you hooked on opium. In Iran they got you hooked on insider trading on prediction markets.
Troops are not homogeneous.
Some of them are into it.
I get your point, but at least he wasn't betting against it and his team!
What’s the point of prediction markets?
They are just ordinary gambling unless you allow insider trading and manipulation, because that’s the only way the market can acquire and represent novel useful information.
But if you allow those things, you run into a host of well-documented problems which are the reason why those things are forbidden in other markets.
As it stands, prediction markets seem like a tech-aligned rebranding of age-old rigged gambling products.
In theory no, because it provides financial incentive to perform a comprehensive analysis of available data or conduct thorough investigations. In practice, yep.
The original point is to use crowd wisdom. Crowds seem better than single individuals to predict outcomes of certain types of events.
I think this is visible in sports betting markets. Unless all games are rigged, games outcomes are fairly random events, and betting markets are pretty good at assessing the probabilities of a team winning. Same thing happens in finance. Option markets are really good at assessing the probabilities of asset movements.
The thing though is that these markets are only good in predicting recurring events like game results or financial asset movements. They are good _overall_, as in, if you take 100,000 sport games, the bettings odds are going to be overall in line with what actually happens.
Hence some people deduced that crowds with skin in the game were wise in predicting random stuff. And what happened then is that some of them thought this kind of predictive power could apply to any kind of event, and then predictive markets were created, with the idea that crowds could magically come up with odds for anything, and that would be fairly correct. But what works for recurring events don't hold for single events like Maduro's capture or the end of the Iran war. So the odds in these market is only the result of influence and insider information.
The result is that the odds are generally completely off, unless there is insider information. That's kind of what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. The bets there were on loans defaulting. These events are rare enough that it's impossible to assess their probability easily. And so banks relied on rating agencies (influence), to price the odds of these events happening. Rating agencies were wrong on a lot of these bets, meaning all the bets were placed at very very wrong prices, resulting in the crisis we saw.
The weird outcome of it all, is that those prediction markets have become insider information detectors. That's how they caught the guy. Whoever is winning big on these markets is necessarily cheating.
But I guess the main takeaway for me is that society is in such a state that a lot of people actually bet big on these things. Probably a combination of being fed dreams of fortune since childhood and the american dream not delivering. It's all very sad.
> They are just ordinary gambling unless you allow insider trading and manipulation, because that’s the only way the market can acquire and represent novel useful information.
Representing only public information without agenda is useful in itself. Words are cheap, and which words you get to see and which words you don't get to see is according to some non-truth incentive. Prediction markets say "you get to make money if you know what the truth actually is". Media says "you get to make money if you entertain people".
It's unfortunate there's also significant negative side effects to financialized prediction markets. I'm more favorable to non-financial prediction markets like Manifold, which say "you get to have social status if you know what the truth is". Seems as though that's the right balance, although you could see how such non-financial prediction markets can be more easily defeated by dedicated non-truth actors if it became prominent in the public conversation.
This is a legal battle currently going on. Arizona's Attorney General is suing the major platforms alleging that they are thinly disguised gambling.
They're addictive, highly engaging apps designed to take the money out of your pockets and put it into theirs.
Or its a highly lucrative method for people to profit off of insider trading.
It sure as hell isnt fair. It's just dressed up to seem fair.
The idea is that people will lie lie lie since words are free, but make real decisions when it’s their money at stake.
It’s not that different from the general concept of pricing. People will swear they want to buy American, support small business etc. but when it’s time for new jeans they go to Walmart and buy the pair on sale.
Why does the market need to acquire and represent novel/useful information?
It's ordinary gambling, but more in line with poker than with roulette. Theoretically there could be some skill that comes into play in predicting it, but there is also a large element of luck. This is just an entertainment product.
There would still be a point to encourage better predictions from the public information through better modeling. We aren't always using the optimal models to predict. One example: LLMs are "just" predicting the next token given the public information of the tokens that came before, but they work considerably better at making that prediction than the models that came before them.
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Prediction-Markets-...
There was a big push post-9/11 that depended on exactly this.
I am so happy to see that the US government will quickly and immediately prosecute and imprison someone for “insider trading” on Polymarket, while your average Congress member can “trade” with complete impunity.
This only the first and only arrest. There are countless instances of high volume bets being places before the Iran war strikes began. This white house is corrupt.
This looks like the wallet lol - https://polyintel.io/trader/0x31a56e9e690c621ed21de08cb559e9...
Greed is always the undoing of such criminals.
If he'd stuck to $500 - $1000 bets, he could have stayed under the radar. And, over the period of his career, earned well north of $400k.
Special forces in America are somewhat famous at this point for having side hustles.. Betting on themselves like this is at least better than being murderous drug dealers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fort_Bragg_Cartel
It would be hard not to when you can type in amounts and get instant feedback on what you would make. I imagine him sitting there, typing in $1000 and seeing $3000 payout. Then thinking "What if I just took my $32,000 savings and put it on this bet?". Type that in, see $400k and think "I can't not do this!"
Not that I am endorsing the behavior, but it is not a given how many high profile operations the soldier might glean in a time relevant manner. That might have been the one shot, one opportunity to hit big.
Apparently he did not belong to the social class who are allowed to do this.
Epstein class
Are prediction markets regulated? Is this about breaking the laws regarding prediction markets or is this about leaking classified information? I skimmed but not sure still.
Someone more cynical can say that this is about protecting Thiel’s investment(if people think it’s rigged may stop playing) or making sure that only big G makes money with classified information.
From the article:
unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.
So what law is broken exactly? Will an engineer with classified information on F-35 use that for fixing his car be also prosecuted? I guess no, so is this about leaking the Maduro operation?
Insider trading and outcome manipulation seems to be the norm on unregulated markets anyway. Whats the crime?
By the letter of the law the guy fixing his car should be prosecuted, but like nobody is going to know and it’s not going to happen. In this case it’s pretty obvious the law was broken.
People have been prosecuted several times for using classified information to win WarThunder forum arguments.
These two videos might be of some help
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A654vzQTGbQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN4njIQcSR4
Kalshi is regulated and trading in this way on Kalshi is explicitly illegal. PolyMarket does not operate under US laws and I don't know if the same insider trading rules are a separate violation on top of just participating.
Why would Polymarket not operate under US laws? It's based in New York, and has already been fined by the CFTC. It's all in the wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymarket
I don't know the exact legality of it all, but Polymarket wasn't operating in the US up until recently. Even though they are now, they maintain two separate markets. One that is somewhat regulated in the USA and a blockchain based market outside the US. For most of its existence it has very much been offering things that were illegal in the US even though they are based in NY.
All fungible markets are prediction markets. The idea that only some are is a mirage.
Sure, but in some you’re explicitly predicting the time someone gets black bagged, or an invasion happens - or you’re predicting next months oil price, which may be a defacto proxy, but has less moral hazard if you’re a random special ops guy.
Solving insider trading is fundamentally impossible due to the burden of proof.
However I am convinced that forcing people to keep their shares for even just one week would stabilize the markets enough to make insider trading much more obvious (and easier to prosecute). It would also force a shift on perspectives more on the long run, instead of focusing on immediate speculation.
This was a prediction market, not a proper market trade, and I am glad I live in a country where that is outlawed. This is untaxed, unregulated gambling.
It would do nothing. You'd get an increase in derivatives volume with the same underlying effect.
He is small fish. Yes, he was wrong and need to be punished, but still, an small fish on the deep ocean of government inside trading.
If you rob 100.000, you will have a problem with the police and will be arrested. If you rob 1 billion, the police will have a problem if they try to arrest you.
There was a story about a cop who pulled over a Walmart heir for drunk drinking(?). The cop lost their job.
Nabbing the little guy for show, very much like Henry Hill taking one for Paulie and the gang. The same gang that robbed the Lufthansa vault at JFK Airport, stealing six million dollars in cash and jewelry.
When the history of this administration is written, provided that history itself has not been completely rewritten a la "1984," Goodfellas will be required reading/watching.
And the highly profitable daily mood-induced oil price bets will just be forgotten.
Wilhoit's Law:
Wilhoit's law.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/
I made a similar argument and was downvoted. Yeah, the well-connected pay a fine when caught. This guy's mistake was not knowing he did not belong to that club. He amounted to no more than a fall guy.
They don't call 'em cannon fodder for nothin'!
Wilholt's essay is a nice one. But it amounts to defining the opposition in a way that's easy to tear apart followed by tearing it apart. It's a cute trick but isn't much of a basis for serious discussion.
Watch: Wilholt's essay consists of exactly and only one indefensible, rhetorical sleight of hand. Consequently, no one can honestly defend it. Attempts to do so are undeserving of serious scrutiny.
After tearing down a strawman, he claims high ground:
> The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
But you'll get a fair bit of support for Wilholt's so-called anti-conservative principle from a fair number of prominent conservative thinkers.
The modern US conservative party really does seem to believe only in that one principle and nothing else. They will pardon actual sex traffickers like Andrew Tate and worse as long as they're on their side. They will defend any action at all by Trump, no matter how vile or illegal or stupid or wrong. It's not a sleight of hand if its true.
Go read a few months worth of the National Review.
Many prominent conservative thinkers are not particularly big fans of Trump. They like portions of his initiatives and policies but not him as a standard bearer, because he does dumb, ill-principled stuff at odds with conservatism.
Peggy Noonan of the WSJ can't write two sentences without letting you know how much she disdains Trump, e.g.
I guess I should clarify it to the modern US conservative party. I know there are a few dissenters even there, but 95% of them vote the way he wants and of course we could have impeached Trump and many cabinet officials long ago if they voted that way. They unquestionably enable this administration. I think its fair to say they represent the conservatives broadly, certainly they are the people the nations conservative citizens elected and continue to support.
A few annecdotal voices dont change reality; american conservatism is poisoned, and must be rejected by all sane/moral humans for multiple generations.
>Peggy Noonan of the WSJ can't write two sentences without letting you know how much she disdains Trump, e.g.
This is the functional equivalent of a fictional character named Neggy Poonan saying "I really hate the Nazi's, but you know if I don't vote for Hitler the other guy will win"
Per Goodfellas, "Paulie and the gang" ended up in jail while Henry Hill received witness protection. So, it wasn't just for show
Authority-wise, a MSG in the army isn't exactly a little guy either. That's quite a senior role. In their battalion they likely head either operations, intelligence or supply.
This isn't joe schlub making side bets here. This is a senior late-career enlisted in an extremely sensitive position violating all of their trust and authority to cash out big.
That MSG works for a Captain or a Lieutenant. If said MSG is good, there might be a future of advising a commanding officer on uniforms and length of grass at increasingly higher echelons. The rank is not newsworthy.
Everything about this statement is completely wrong.
False, conspiratorial, dogmatic, juvenile.
The arrest and indictment of someone for betting on Polymarket - which has not yet been tested in court - is going to give huge attention and precedence to the likely illegal activities of some of Polymarket shenanigans coming out of the white house.
Edit: if this was political, it would be pushed in the other direction. This is the NY DOJ doing their jobs.
What? Military trials are not necessarily public.
This was charged by DOJ not under a military tribunal
It's by the Southern District of NY and the case will get national attention.
This is a hugely negative thing for the Administration, as District Attorneys, SEC staff, etc. are going to be actively seeking how this could parlay into investigations and indictments of the people in the White House making Polymarket and other speculative bets just before government actions.
There are 100's lawyers reading that right now getting inspired on how they can take action to turn their investigative powers onto whoever those actors are aka family members or associates of those in the White House / Cabinet.
An investigation could be done at the State Level, away from the control of the DoJ, and, if it yields evidence, it wouldn't have to even make it's way through the courts in order to be political destructive.
The suggestion by the OP this has anything to do with ideology or the ruling power throwing one under the bus is ridiculous. Note that the ruling regime isn't above such a thing, but that's not what is happening here because it definitely does not serve their interests - it's the total opposite.
This could turn into a political nightmare that crashes the party.
Edit: if we want to be 'hopefully cynical' - recognize that this could absolutely be the vector that takes the man down, or even many of them. Imagine how many WH, Cabinet Members, family members could get investigated for this and under purvue of state investigators where the investigation can't get shut down.
...
I don't think this is going to be Hacker News fascinating discourse, but the current USA administration is so openly, brazenly, continuously, gleefully corrupt; continuously fire people with ethics and competence and bring in the in-group of equally corrupt ; and have continuously been rewarded for that behaviour; that I feel the OP is merely observationally factual.
The current Executive is 'brazenly criminal', yes, but there is nothing much 'factual; about the OP's comment.
None of this remotely has to do with 'Conservatism', it's certainly not ideological, and it's likely not political either.
This indictment is going to cause a massive headache for White House as they have likely been involved in 'insider trading'.
This is actually regular Justice, finally seeing some movement, to cynically characterize it as otherwise, totally against common sense (aka it's bad for the WH) is just unsound. I think it demonstrates the kind of bubble a lot of people live in, which is maybe understandable in the current climate, where horrible behaviours have gone unpunished. But still. This is the story of a state doj doing their job.
> nabbing the little guy
Politics aside, he isn't a "little guy". He apparently holds the rank of master sergeant. That's a senior battalion-level role and somewhat political.
This isn't some random E-4 getting dragged.
Compared to a member of US Congress, or the senior executive branch, or the CEO class, they’re still nobody and the “little guy”.
Not that it’s defensible behavior.
Is he important enough to get a presidential pardon? That's how you know whether he's a "little guy".
To be fair, that bar is quite a bit lower these days, but still..
What's the going rate for pardons these days?
During the first Trump term, Giuliani said that the cost was $2,000,000 per pardon. Many went through him.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/giuliani-accu...
This might burst some bubbles but this is absolutely a little guy because anything below a field grade officer (or the CSM sidekick below brigade) is a little guy and a battalion is actually quite low on the food chain.
Yes, there are some hard working NCOs and junior Os out there that make shit happen, but they are not the decision makers and make for great fall guys when shit hits the fan.
He may be a little guy but that doesn't mean that he's a fall guy. The Special Forces at Fort Bragg are a law unto themselves. I've just finished reading The Fort Bragg Cartel and the things some of those guys have been up to, and the leniency of both their commanding officers and the local civilian police toward them, are shocking. Drug smuggling, murder, theft of arms, coming back from deployment with tens of thousands of dollars taped to their persons...not to mention the war crimes.
I read this as "why are they going after a soldier who made $30k when they could be going after guys who made seven figures off of expertly timed trades on going to war with Iran"
He profited $400K.
Pursuing this case doesn’t mean they’re excluding other cases. If you read the article this case was very clear because he made amateur moves and didn’t conceal his identity at all.
This was an easy nab. All leaks should be pursued regardless of who did it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Trump's insiders own't be investigated
He's actually too proud about it to hide it.
A 400 million plane "donation"
There is zero chance this escalates further off this guy.
Careful, you'll have Ka$hPatel wondering who to throw under a bus just for the giggles, the p0wn, and the extra $100 for his stripper lounge charity.
You could place a prediction bet probably.
Zero chance? What odds are you offering, because this bet looks very appealing?
I am guessing that you would not actually go all-in against a penny, and I’m curious to know what implied probability you actually offer. I will see your bet amount as an expression of your confidence level. If you say that you don’t bet, I’ll take that as an indication that you have no confidence, and believe the probability to be something above 50%
Initially I did set a number to be donated to a favorite charity but decided it was in poor taste/mean spirited and quickly edited it out. We don’t need to be petty just because we disagree.
The Trump admin will not be held accountable for the blatant market manipulation and betting on internal info they engage in. That’s the smart “bet” metaphorically speaking. It’s a self enriching circus.
A master sergeant is not remotely significant in the world of politics.
If he was "behind the fence", at most he would be a team sergeant or maybe even assistant team sergeant. Talking 4-6 members max.
According to Google Gemini, there are over 16,000 master sergeants. Might as well be some random, especially when it's literally the president himself, cabinet members, congress, and other cronies directly doing the same and even worse things.
Master sergeant is a respectable rank (first of senior NCO) but it’s not exactly a high ranking position. Speaking from AF experience, you’ll have a couple of them or higher in a 50 person squadron, and levels like group/wing command they’re oftentimes among the lowest ranking person in the room.
This is absolutely a low level soldier getting dragged.
> he isn’t a little guy
His salary this year was probably about $118k on standard pay scales. I’m not sure what your definition of little guy is, but to me that qualifies
(Not trying to be condescending to anybody here, that’s not far off my salary and I’d definitely call myself the little guy)
They fired 4-star generals on a whim. The military is expected to be as loyal as the rest.
Some of those generals were fired because they were women or minorities. Others because they spoke ill of Trump (meaning that they showed "insufficient loyalty").
As other comments said, this wasn’t exactly a “little guy” in rank.
He also made it all very obvious and traceable for them through the email addresses he used. From the report it doesn’t appear that he made any effort to conceal his identity or hide his tracks until afterward, by which time it was too late.
Well, if people in Congress, the Supreme Court, the administration, etc. don't have to conceal their "activities", why should this guy?
He wasn't a "little guy" but apparently his only mistake was not being high enough.
I don’t know why people are trying to defend this guy. We should be upset when anyone tries to use confidential information for personal gain. It’s also a security risk if anyone is incentivized to place bets based on confidential info.
I know you’re trying to make a separate point about Congress, but it’s silly to try to turn this into a class warfare thing. Congress didn’t even have this information at the time.
I haven't seen anyone defend his conduct, but it is natural to discuss his political clout because of this line on TFA:
> Today’s announcement makes clear no one is above the law
What others are saying, IIUC, is that no reasonable person believes an enlisted soldier (even a senior one) is above the law and that in fact there is a history of them being used as fall guys or scapegoats for people who do enjoy protection on the basis of their social class or government position.
Without this specific statement from the FBI director, then it would be "soldier gets caught doing bad thing" and the other part would be off topic. But the article itself introduces the idea of class and impunity.
Nobody is defending this person.
> ...but it’s silly to try to turn this into a class warfare thing.
You can ignore the class warfare but the class warfare isn't ignoring you/your country.
> don’t know why people are trying to defend this guy
It’s a hot take. It’s also a one off. You don’t have to strategize building the case law to then enable further investigations and prosecutions, a process which takes year and is beyond the internet’s attention span. (Silver lining: these takes are also mostly meaningless. Gears will grind on.)
Because the path to Rule of Law is not deleting/refusing to enforce all laws.
Rule of Law means no one is above the law. In practice this is an aspiration (in the U.S. and everywhere else) but giving up on that isn’t going to make the world better.
There seems to be a pattern that if someone who was not pre-selected by some elites ends up making their own money (I.e. real 'self-made') they are swiftly attacked by the system. On the other hand, look at Nancy Pelosi; she didn't get into any trouble.
Are people allowed to be self-made anymore?
For me personally, after years of planning and hard work, I once managed to secure myself about $40k of passive income from a blockchain in crypto; this lasted a few years but eventually the founders suspiciously abandoned the entire tech stack (for no reason) and switched to Ethereum; this destroyed the opportunity for me; literally lost that stream entirely. Now, recently, I was able to re-establish a passive income stream of about $10k per year from a non-crypto source; this is from an opportunity I took over 10 years ago... I'm worried about that being taken away somehow.
For everyone saying this isn't some little guy... compared to the administration which is engaging in the same thing, it's a little guy designed to be a distraction.
One soldier being arrested does not prevent others from being arrested. If anything, it sets a precedent.
Yesterday, people could justifiably say that betting on polymarket had essentially no consequences.
Today, we learned there can be consequences.
If in a year’s time this is the only person to ever be charged, that’s a different story.
When the history of this administration is written
I often think about how much we can trust history 20-30 years from now. It is hard to trust history from hundreds of years ago, either because it was written by victors or because there just isn't enough material in the first place. I suppose we have the opposite problem now (and in the future) - too much noise and junk, whole bunch of it generated by AI slop - where does one even start?
Oh, and let’s not forget the politicians like Pelosi, the Clintons and many other top Democratic Party politicians, repeatedly engaged in insider trading of stocks, often times using classified information, for multi million dollars profits. Almost never investigated. Practically never convicted.
Yes, please, by all means with full transparency and public trials.
Then clear the docket because you're going to need a lot of investigators to even begin on the Trump administration.
Here's a recent article from the American Bar Association on the rampant and on-going f*ckery.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...
We all know there were suspicious large bets on the stock and oil markets during the war.
If small potatoes are getting sued while the sharks swim freely. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the moral.
The special forces soldier bet on his team's success. He risked his life. His bet would not alter his behavior in anyway incongruous with mission objectives. Is that really that bad if the direction of the bet isn't unethical?
He could have died and this would be a non-story, just someone throwing 32k away before they were killed in action.
People are focusing on the use of confidential information and calling this insider trading, which is fair, he had knowledge that the trading public did not. But to lump him in with refs who call games wrong on purpose is ridiculous. In one example you are betting on something you want to happen anyway, it is not deception. In the other, you are profiting from deliberate fraud. I think there needs to be some sort of category difference between these two.
No, there doesn't need to be.
I think the bigger issue is that he effectively leaked the raid. Now intelligence agencies will be constantly watching the geopolitical questions on prediction markets for big bets. Of course the Trump administration seems to be leaking through prediction markets as well and I doubt they’ll face any consequences.
While it seems like an interesting point - a kind of 'doubling down' - its not clear cut at all.
Firstly, the dichotomy you presented for the individual is: succeed, live, and make loads of money vs fail, die, and lose a fair chunk. The argument you make with this dichotomy is that the gambling doesn't affect anything. However the reality is that there are many ways for the mission to end - fail, live, lose a fair chunk being notable because when the mission is going sideways the individual becomes incentivised to put themselves and others at greater risk to make a successful outcome more likely. Succeed, live, lose your squad mates, make loads of money becomes more likely as well as fail, live, lose your squad mates.
Secondly, insider trading is and always will be a signal for others. If you're only allowed to bet in one direction it becomes a form of information leak - monitor who is liquidating their assets to gamble on outcomes. For any project it becomes a signal to others - if your boss isn't remortgaging to gamble more then you know its time to jump ship. This will in turn have significant effects on outcomes.
I was under the impression that insider influence was the point of these systems? Want something to happen? Bet a lot of money that it won't, pulling the market forces towards the action you want.
It goes from "taking out a hit" to "betting that someone will live to next Thursday". It's such an obvious outcome of these systems that I was operating on the assumption that it was the actual point.
So maybe the thing this guy did wrong was to be so face-palmingly pants-on-head obvious about it that they had to shut it down?
“Super markets trade money for food. An obvious outcome is that someone without money will shoot the employees to steal food. Therefore the purpose of supermarkets is to facilitate murder”
Less so "supermarkets" specifically and moreso "capitalism" and the answers to your conclusion is obviously, yes.
This is why welfare systems exist. Because otherwise the system will push people to crime, especially so in our current implementation of Capitalism where it is possible to become unemployed/unemployable through no fault of one's own.
"I'm betting 10 million (fake) dollars that the HN user shusaku will not die between 9AM and 10AM CST on May 1st 2026."
Which is also horrifying if you think about it for more than a second.
"Want something to happen? Bet a lot of money that it won't" goes both ways. "Want to make money and have power over missile systems? Bet, and then make something happen."
Insiders bet a solider would be caught for betting on Maduro. They won.
In ancient times, war was a chance for the poor to become wealthy. Now it has been capitalistically optimized. Now it only makes the rich richer.
Just another example of Rules for thee but not for me...
Politicians are making winning bets too, at several orders of magnitude larger - https://www.independent.org/article/2026/02/16/congress-beat...
"The Rich Don't Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883033
Also I would argue that the claim this endangered lives is exaggerated and is clearly more about making examples than true impact.
How many people in congress made the exact same bet on the exact same information, and for them it's "legal?"
“Any clearance holders thinking of cashing in their access and knowledge for personal gain will be held accountable”
Yeah right.
It is legal and until we vote for people who will outlaw it we only have ourselves to blame.
Easy to say, hard to do, when your two "choices" at the ballot box represent slightly different groups of wealthy donors.
Ah enlightened centrism rears its head again. Remember folks: at all points both sides are exactly the same /s.
If you guilt me into voting, I'll probably vote for somebody you don't like.
Isn't it better that I don't vote?
No. It is better that you vote. For at the end of the day you can:
1. know you tried to express your wishes
2. know that the outcome is because people expressed their wishes
3. realise the balance between 1. and 2. whether the outcome is as you hoped, and especially if it is not as you hoped.
This is important because hanging back and saying "Well I didn't vote for them!" is by default not supporting democracy as your country views it.
There have been multiple times where the final vote count was the difference of a handful of votes. No one is guilting anyone to vote and some will say that neither party represents what they want and that sucks. But ultimately there has to be one side that even if you don't overall like them you would still rather they get elected. So vote for who you think might be best. And if they have policies you don't agree then contact your representative and say "I voted for you but do not want xyz policy". The more who speak up the better.
I'm not American. And surprise: regardless of your reasons you get judged by the government you put in power, since foreign policy is how the rest of us experience your choices.
And your choices are evidently you're completely okay with the current situation as well.
"better" for whom?
> Isn't it better that I don't vote?
Maybe. I'm not actually that invested in people voting. But that doesn't negate the hypocrisy of complaining when you're, through inaction, endorsing the status quo.
Everyone knows how the parties are different
Its valid to be more annoyed by the ways that they’re the same
your cause is not my cause, its better for the viability of your preferred party if you remember that
Its valid to say a lot of things. But it doesn't escape you from having to own those choices.
You are what you'll accept, and you looked at the choices given and said "I'm okay with either one".
Because the consequences of whatever mutual dissatisfaction you had still means one of them gained power and implemented their agenda anyway. And you were okay with that.
You don't get to not make a decision and then pretend you aren't culpable for your inaction.
the other person was talking about not making a decision, so you've transposed an idea not mentioned at all onto my comment
good luck out there
what to remember: the goal of the parties are to win friends and influence people, it's a weird meme that you aren't doing that and neither is the other party. time to re-evaluate the communication style yeah? proselytizing isn't working
The idea that nobody in American politics is trying to win friends nor influence people is indeed a very weird meme! As you say, that implies there's a big lane of persuasion that isn't being filled for some reason, even though everyone who's heard of Dale Carnegie knows it ought to be.
Have you considered the possibility that the meme might be false? That would explain neatly why it's so weird.
amusing.
parties are losing members and partisan’s methods are not effective
there is a big lane of persuasion that isn’t being filled
Vote in primaries. Also wealthy donors probably care less about whether a candidate can self-enrich with insider trading.
None, because Congress wasn't informed of the Maduro raid until afterwards?
We have finally figured out the purpose of the War Powers Act.
We aren’t talking about in official capacity
Usually there is this gang of 6 or gang of 8 who is still kept informed.
Weren’t they famously kept in the dark for this and Iran?
I think you misspelled “the White House”
People act like the pervasiveness of insider trading in Congress is an indisputable fact, when there have been only a few trades with suspicious timing, which is similar to what you would expect statistically from 535 wealthier people trading with no insider information. The only case where I feel like insider trading is likely was Richard Burr's sales before COVID.
Congress (plausibly) beats the market: https://www.ft.com/content/14339d5b-5a5f-4e4a-8293-ff3a2e25d...
Pelosi has made many suspicious trades: https://insider-trading.org/the-nancy-pelosi-insider-trading...
Suspicious trades before Trump's Iran announcements: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge0grppe3po
Beating the market isn't evidence of insider trading. Everyone invested deeply in tech beat the market, which is what Paul Pelosi did. If he did trade with insider information, he did it in a way that was subtle enough to look sufficiently like normal trading. This is nothing like the smoking gun of a 4x spike on oil futures 1 hour before a major announcement or a hyperspecific bet on Polymarket.
That’s hilarious … so he’s arrested and put on trial and all the senate and congress are doing the exact same and free? lol
Palpatine: I am the senate!
At this point insider trading issue has run away so hard I don't see how it can be tamed without revolutionary frameworks. If we look at crypto then I'm not sure we want to live in a world where insider trading is normalized either so we ought to start working on these new frameworks as soon as possible but nobody seems to care.
Speculation has historically been solved by a workers vanguard party.
> without revolutionary frameworks
I’d argue that the level of corruption we’re seeing, not just in the USA but all over the Western world, hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
> nobody seems to care
And it would seem that the masses tend to agree.
We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Sad that you have given up
Sad that you want a return to the Reign of Terror.
Yes we should just calmly ignore private insurance death panels, propped up by politicians, killing treatable people at scale rather than put the fear in a few thousand rich people physics didn't see fit to spare from eventual biological death anyway (since they love to trot out that argument).
To say nothing of the processed food and automobile industries.
You really need to read up on your history.
What's your alternative? The present situation is intollerable and even a bad solution is better than no solution.
The present situation is very tolerable, actually.
For you.
Dont defend accepting corruption, thats so lame
But, being more respectful to you and who i orignally replied to — yes actual revolution could/would be brutal and could/would create a much worse daily life for the non-elites.
Still, as I bet you could agree when not aguing semantics, its inexusable for people to declare we should accept corruption
> yes actual revolution would be brutal, and could/would create a much worse daily life for the non-elites.
50% of revolutions in the past 200 years have been non-violent, and the non-violent ones have a much higher success rate. Even for violent revolutions, most aren't brutal. When there is brutality, it's usually because the pre-existing conditions were already brutal.
I appreciate that info
That comes with the caveat that most revolutions happen against failed states. Those pretty much don't get the chance to be violent.
There's not much reason to replace good functioning governments. There are some examples, although typically they are foreign-backed regime changes masquerading as revolutions.
Good and functioning are not the same thing. Look at North Korea. It's definitely not a failed state, but it's also about as far away from a "good" government as you can get.
For most revolutions, the state needs to be unable to maintain control over it's populace. The ones where it can still maintain control is where it gets bloody.
Why do people assume revolutionary action must be violent? Emmeline Pankhurst will want to have words with them.
Have you seen people?
> You really need to read up on your history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47888542
The suffragette movement was hardly a revolution in the traditional sense.
Giving so many people the ability to vote was absolutely a fundamental shift in the social, political, or societal order, so is absolutely a traditional revolution. This is just the 'no true scotsman' argument.
Cowards like you would have a us a British colony to this day
Return? We never had a reign of terror. There have been hundreds of peaceful revolutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” ― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
I am familiar with the Reign of Terror, which gets capitalized because of it's singular uniqueness, but I am also not an 18th century French peasant, or a Frenchman at all for that matter. I doubt most of the people on this thread are either. When I say "we" I am referring to an immensely large group of people for whom "the revolution" refers to an event which did not include a reign of terror.
That’s until food and energy price increases become unbearable for the masses. While the first test is already here with gas prices, we’ll have the second test soon in the form of 50% price increases on food in developed Western countries.
Where is the evidence that petrol prices are unbearable, by the metric you’re proposing.
In some places, like the Philippines, gas/fuel prices are up 70-100% since the start of the Special Four Day Operation in Iran. It's easy to say "who cares doesn't affect me", which sounds nice. But the Philippines is a major manufacturing hub of stuff that keeps life artificially cheap in the west. The rest of SE Asia is undergoing similar rapid price increases. Thailand, Malaysia, etc make lots of electronic components which will be facing a huge squeeze very soon.
The reason for those price increases is those countries don't have massive fuel stockpiles. The west does have big stockpiles, and they're artificially suppressing the price of fuel by releasing those stockpiles and hoping the special operation is over before their stockpiles run out. Because if prices shoot up now, people will realize just how truly disastrous it all is and actual consequences for various governments may be had, so the only option is to kick the can down the road and hope it somehow resolves itself.
Asia is in a particularly bad situation, because even for countries that do have stockpiles, they get basically all of their oil from Iran, the UAE, east coast of Saudi Arabia, etc. Now they have no oil. America can pretend it's a 4D chess move and now those countries will buy American oil and make their economy great again. But the thing is America isn't selling any additional oil to Asia. But America is 100% dependent on cheap things made in Asia, things that are built with plastic made from middle eastern oil and powered by electricity generated from middle eastern oil and shipped on boats running on middle eastern oil. All these things take months to show any effects to Americans and Europeans, so until then, it's just a game of burying heads in the sand until the situation suddenly explodes.
For a lot of us this perturbation hurts portfolios, tightens the belt, and hurts business investments… But oil and food production are tied together in numerous ways.
We’re looking at fuel shocks, downstream the agricultural, fertilizer, and food shocks are gonna cost untold anguish and many lives. Farmer suicides and famines, as the start of a destabilizing wave.
1) for the second time in my adult life I have to ask aloud how shit Dick Cheney was saying on 60 minutes ca 1993 escaped the notice of the entire US military and its commander in chief
2) the obvious lack of a post-strike plan and confusion about how mountains and waterways work make it hard to pin down how elementary and remedial the eff-ups here really are, so incompetent and indifferent
Why don't Asian countries just ally with Iran for free passage of their ships?
How is inside training outside of US s thing? Please give dpurces
> Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Well, given that people are behaving more and more violently towards said fat cats I think it's clear we're starting to reach a breaking point and people are caring. It wasn't too long ago that I saw people cheering on LinkedIn when that healthcare CEO got got, so if people are willing to put their professional profiles at risk you have to imagine it's far worse behind closed doors.
Personally I really dislike living in interesting times and greatly prefer advocating against corruption rather than letting things slide until they get a lot worse.
So a slow decline is OK?
Nah, life would be better if a cleptocrat couldn’t find his way into power.
Slow?
It was slow for 30 years, the last couple of years have been insane.
I'd say that either way the population will not rebel. If the government is smart they'll just pay for the populations Netflix, burgers and beer. It's enough to keep people passive.
Weed is the ultimate double edged sword- it pacifies much better than beer, but also the GDP and standard of living plummets.
>We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
There is no we to prevent any revolution occurring once corruption or "mere" wealth distribution unsustainable discrepancy are passing some thresholds, after which it simply will feedbackloop exponentially.
Pauperization that allows some party to have chip exploitable labour too frightened to have strong collective claims is also building the social structure of bloody revolution as masses feel like rushing into brutality is the only viable left option.
Thresholds by themselves dont auto trigger some state change because the state is aware of them too.
The police and intelligence are well paid to keep an eye on all kinds of signals. Unless the situation reaches a point they cant pay the cops any voilence will be shut down fast, because over time they have become quite good at it. Just like we have become good at running gigantic boilers without them exploding. Even poor states are good at it. Because anyone running a farm, factory, depending on banks, telcos, ports, power grid etc are all very dependent on the state to keep the lights on. More efficent they get the more dependent they are on external structures staying in tact to stay afloat.
The world today is a much more complicated place, full of interdependcies(as covid showed us), than what it was when revolutions were seen as the solution to anything.
So Organizing and Voting still remains the easier way to cause change as tempratures rise. Thats the control and feedback mech.
Except that organizing and voting doesn't actually accomplish anything.
Protests have already been mitigated by tactics researched and documented among the most authoritarian think tanks.
Believe it or not, wealthy people plan ahead to protect their hoard and they have had several decades since Gandhi to figure out how to neuter peaceful protests that threaten their status.
> Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Worker's compensation in real terms has been almost flat for the last 50 years, 50 years which have seen the largest increase in productivity in recorded history by far. I'm surprised this is still not enough to you.
And that's using the fake, government approved definition of "real wages" where they pretend the existence of smartphones cancels out a 200% increase in rent, which it doesn't. Real real wages have declined.
> We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
We, today, are better not attempting revolution because revolutions are painful. But we are also on a downward slope which will eventually reach below a threshold where 2 things happen: their* life will be much worse off than any revolution, but also they will no longer be able to mount a revolution.
I've lived through a violent revolution. Not knowing what's happening, not knowing what tomorrow brings, while getting shot at are all terrifying. I can genuinely say that most of what came after was better. A few paid a high price for the several generations that came after to mostly have it better.
I am not advocating revolution, just doing what it takes to change course. Even voting appropriately could do it.
*I say they because it might not happen in our lifetime. But we are selling our kids' futures for our current comfort. They'll be the ones really paying our debt.
I think they meant revolutionary as in new and novel
> hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
A certain amount of corruption is normal - as Doctorow pointed out, all complex ecosystems evolve parasites. It's much better to have a democracy with some corruption than a police state that enforces its laws perfectly.
Now, when people realise the current state of their democracy and how it reflects the needs of the people, then they'll start considering bringing out the guillotines.
The general population's standard of living HAS gone backwards too fast.
Just look at something like Office Space. Just twenty seven years ago, it was a satire of the indignities and disrespect of work life. Today, the movie's work environment would be incredibly cushy.
> I’d argue that the level of corruption we’re seeing, not just in the USA but all over the Western world, hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
What level of corruption would warrant revolutionary action? How much more corrupt can you get than sending forces into combat in a war of choice that disrupts the global economy and kills thousands to win a bet on a crypto platform and shift the news cycle away from accusations of rampant pedophilia among the elite and the lack of prosecution thereof?
I doubt they did it for the purpose of crypto bets, that was just a side benefit. They did it because Israel owns our government, and this is the first time we've had a president far enough out of touch with reality to not push back.
Age limits (for Congress/Judiciary/Presidency) would be a much more targeted fix. Past ~75 you just don't have enough years left to be at risk of being affected by the things you're implementing. Dying in office of old age should be a deeply shameful way to go.
Israel owns out government? You have proof of this outlandish claim?
I'm trying to determine the causal basis for this and given the ubiquity of evidence, I can only conclude that it must be sea lioning.
> They did it because Israel owns our government
Yeah I don't really see how that is an argument that current corruption isn't too extreme.
> Age limits (for Congress/Judiciary/Presidency) would be a much more targeted fix.
Would it? There are plenty of corrupt people in office younger than 75, to say nothing of the countless unelected people in close proximity to power. Only 42 out of 535 members of congress are over 75. On the supreme court, Alito only turned 76 3 weeks ago, and the only other justice over that threshold is Thomas who is 77. Trump was under 75 for his entire first term. Biden, Trump, and Reagan are the only presidents who have ever been in office over the age of 75. Such an age limit would do basically nothing to change the composition of government. While there may be compelling reasons for such an age limit like ensuring mental acuity, it is not a remedy for corruption.
I wasn't saying that age limits would fix all, or even the most important problems. I'm just saying that we're only at war with Iran because Trump's dementia is leaving him disconnected from reality.
MAGA propaganda is so effective that it got those who never believed in the economic utility of the stock market to begin with to call for revolution to preserve the integrity of the market.
The cost of insider trading mostly get passed to the rich. The reason why insider trading is illegal isn't that it's particularly morally wrong as much as it disincentivizes participation in the markets.
> the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
Too late for that hypothetical.
You're wrong.
It's just that the problem is not the trading or betting side, the problem is the information producing side.
E.g. imagine he placed a bet that Maduro would get shot in is left eye and die.
Same goes for the congress. Them making money is by far a smaller issue compared to the havoc they can cause trying to make a few bucks on their crazy bets.
Interestingly enough, trading and gambling are things that a blockchain is a pretty good fit for. There is a public ledger and trace of ownership for the trades / lays. And depending on how it is set up, payout is autonomous, as long as no one party controls the network.
It can be solved by enforcing the laws already on the books. Insider trading is illegal.
If the laws are not enforced or selectively enforced you live in a nascent fascist state, not a democracy, what you need is a return to the rule of law, not the abolition of it.
I don't think anyone who has been paying attention over the last year could conclude that laws are not being selectively enforced. So I guess the next question is what options provide a realistic way of restoring justice.
Just ban gambling. That solves good part of it.
Then ENFORCE EXISTING LAWS. That solves good part of it.
Talking about any other solutions will have to wait for govt that's not crooked. It doesn't need revolution, it needs to not have criminals at helm
How would you define gambling? Would it make trading stocks illegal?
If it is based on chance, then it is gambling.
Until the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Collateral Debt Obligations were regulated differently in different states. Some said it was insurance, and thus regulated it like insurance. Some said it was gambling and banned it outright. Instead, regulation was handed to a toothless new agency who got little funding for enforcement and the rest of the world got the 2008 financial crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernizatio...
> If it is based on chance, then it is gambling.
Is there much difference between picking a horse at the track or a stock on an exchange?
Lots of countries have managed to legally define gambling and ban it without making stock trading illegal. Even the US. This isn't some gotcha.
That would require a functioning legislative branch that could pass laws. However a major political program of the past decades has been to gum up Congress and prevent its functioning. There's very limited bandwidth to accomplish legislation, and there's hundreds of good fixes that can't fit through, so I doubt the US will be able to fix this anytime soon, unless there's bigger scandal.
This would make sense if Congress never passed laws. They can and routinely do. That they don't limit their behavior is unsurprising.
The passage of some laws is completely consistent with my description of a dysfunctional system that can not get many good reforms through.
Getting some bills passed does not equate to adequate legislative capacity.
Ban gambling advertising. Ban online gambling. It will solve a lot of the issues without allowing criminals to profit from illegal gambling.
I'm a little confused by your comment.
Insider trading is already illegal (this case proves it). If the problem is under-enforcement, then I agree that better enforcement is the fix.
Banning gambling is a completely separate intervention addressing a different activity, and clearly wasn't required to bring charges in this case.
The tendency of governments to create new laws instead of enforcing existing ones is how we end up with absurdly complex legal systems and the loopholes that come with them.
> Just ban gambling. That solves good part of it.
does that include the stock exchange?
I think a good compromise there is to get rid of shorting.
And tax capital gains at a rate inversely proportional to how long the shares were held. E.g., 90% if held less than a second, 10% if held over 10 years.
what makes 'shorting' special? I understand what shorting is from a non-market-junkie point of view (essentially betting that a stock will go down).. is that just more 'gameable' than buying stock.. i guess i don't see the difference between 'i bet this will go up' and 'i bet this will go down' it's still a bet.
I assume it must be much easier to modify the market to make a stock price go down (e.g. hack the CEO account to say something silly/dangerous) vs trying to make the stock price go up.
You could hack the CEO account to say something positive, too though.
What if I’m a farmer who wants to short whatever commodity I grow as a hedge.
Rather than banning gambling I think you need to ban congress critters from trading. Polymarket is a quick and anonymize way of making long bets on your inside information.
But there are plenty of other stock-based bets they already do make to trade on confidential info.
They should be allowed to hold an ETF with fully locked contribution schedules. Anything more is corruptible.
(Also, if congress critters’ wealth was coupled to the index instead of specific interests, maybe we’d get less pork overall.)
> but nobody seems to care.
Very few people feel impacted by that. If you consider bombing Iran was going to happen anyway because distractions are needed, the money made by the whale that consistently predicts the movements of the current administration is a relatively small thing compared to starting a war for no good reason.
One possible solution is to make all trades public and traceable to the person who made the decision and the people who benefit from that.
It's not legal for him, but it is for them.
That’s not it.
It’s that there isn’t an Attorney General who would dare attempt raise a case against the hand that feeds them.
In theory the separation of powers should prevent this.
What does separation of powers mean when both houses, the president, and the Supreme Court are controlled by the same party?
At the moment the US is just Big Poland (PiS era).
I meant the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Maybe this is more of a thing in Europe, even if not perfect here.
There's no separation of powers when they're all run by the same party, is my point.
Think about it. He's stealing from the US military. The politicians are stealing from you. Who's laughing now?
Technically this is stealing from the people who bet against the Maduro raid happening; and it’s cheating because we assume those people taking that side of the bet weren’t privy to the planning.
He’s only stealing from the US military if the DoD is taking the other side of prop bets on US military operations on polymarket. Which… I mean maybe it’s a reasonable insurance strategy? US military bets that they’re gonna screw up a raid on Venezuela, then either everything goes well and they end up with a successful operation, or it all goes to hell and they wind up winning a consolation cash prize. Hedging operational success by taking the over on casualty estimates… dark.
Only aristocrats can play that game. The soldier is being punished for doing something not allowed for his class status.
This is how a caste system works. People is not judged based on their actions but their relationship to power.
> This is how a caste system works.
Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them.
Tulsa once had what was known as Black Wall Street. There were too many successful black men, so 1921 in the whites massacred everybody. They even brought in planes and dropped bombs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
That's the urban myth, yes.
Well documented historical events aren’t urban myths.
People died, yes. But there was no white supremacism. There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street. It was triggered by an attempted rape.
> there was no white supremacism
People were murdered and homes and businesses destroyed by a white mob because they were black. How is that anything but white supremacy?
> There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street.
It was one of the wealthiest black communities in america at a time. “Black wall street” was a nickname, not a literal description of a stock exchange.
> It was triggered by an attempted rape.
No, it was triggered by an attempted lynching of a black man. Or if you want to be more specific, because the community there stood up to protect the arrested man. It was triggered by a black community stopping a lynching.
Your assertions are an ahistorical revisionist fantasy.
Are we now not at all allowed to reference problems in other societies? We can complain about western society, and complaints from 100 years ago, when even my grandfather wasn't born yet, are valid criticism of America/Europe/... but things that happen today in India, Pakistan, Turkey are off limits?
Who complained about bringing up the foul stuff that goes on outside the US?
No one did of course, but it's a common tactic of distraction to try to focus the attention on something else. That way people don't have to experience the discomfort thinking about the negative thing going on in their own society.
You're almost right, but "class" and "caste" are not synonyms and cannot be used interchangeably.
Well, as social mobility between classes becomes increasingly difficult, they become more and more like castes...
OP is right. Status games take many shapes, distinct castes is one special shape.
You can already hear the pseudo-theories, justifying the differences for eternity. Blue blooded, of lazy blood, etc. Apply yourselfs and you will win.. adding insult to injury, when you can not win, you must in addition be lazy with only yourself to blame.
I don't think it's really as simple as that.
Source: lazybones
Being in Congress is very mobile, and they're the ones with the special exemption.
Sounds like people’s lot in life is becoming hereditary. Caste can be used.
Except in the United States it is true. Something like 80% of new military recruits come from military families (parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent).
Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
That gating on medical training has always been there (at least for 40 years, if not more). But the number of doctors from doctor families has increased.
And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.
Always been gated. But the slider has been dragged even further in the purity test direction. The intelligent un-pure now tend to become NP or PA, those programs still let you practice independently and slide more towards academics and less at whether a rich person set you up to be taken care of while you play mother Teresa until the switch flips the day you are accepted.
> Medical schools require a lot of volunteering
But...why? Why not just let in the applicants that have the best grades?
Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
> Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
So train more doctors.
That would increase competition and thus depress wages for existing doctors, who are the ones who make the decisions here. I heard, from a medical school attendee, that she overheard some doctors discussing whether it would be a good idea to require a fifth year of medical school to become a general practitioner (luckily, they were like, "Eh... nah"). It did not seem like it bothered them that this would make it even harder for civilians to get medical care.
I thought lawmakers made the decisions. Silly me! :-D
Theoretically yes. But I think at least part of the decision they've made is to delegate a chunk of the decisionmaking to doctors' guilds. Which—on the one hand, they are experts of a sort, but on the other hand, they have an obvious conflict of interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association#R...
Wow. 1997: https://www.baltimoresun.com/1997/03/01/ama-seeks-limit-on-r...
> “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” the AMA and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. “The current rate of physician supply — the number of physicians entering the work force each year — is clearly excessive.”
> The groups, representing a large segment of the medical establishment, proposed limits on the number of doctors who become residents each year.
> The number of medical residents, now 25,000, should be much lower, the groups said. While they did not endorse a specific number, they suggested that 18,700 might be appropriate.
I've read about that before. I personally am of the belief that Medicare funding for residency slots should be eliminated over time. Also freely allow the opening and expansion of medical schools and teaching hospitals. Over time things should settle into a comfortable equilibrium of enough doctors making decent wages for everyone to be treated at a reasonable cost.
But maybe that's a free market fantasy. Who knows.
Or the alternative. Government-owned everything healthcare - facilities, hospitals, med schools, doctor practices. Doctors only work for the government.
The current system is neither here nor there and is designed for maximum profit.
No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades—unless there's a ceiling that the top m > n have all hit. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible.
MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam annually." So it should work fairly well for them to sort by MCAT and take however many they have (or expect to have) room for.
I think OP's point was that the governing boards don't want the people with the top n grades. They want certain people, and by making the admissions criteria fuzzy, they can pick and choose those certain people and then say "well, our admission criteria is subjective," and "we are looking for 'well rounded people," and all kinds of other vague weasely ways to let them legitimately shape the student body in the way they want.
See also: "Cultural fit" when hiring.
One of my roommates who was premed had a "hot car" poster as a motivational study aid. After a short term as a candy striper at a local hospital, he changed majors. The system works! ;-)
At a certain point, grades become arbitrary and won’t necessarily select for the best candidates. Obviously the current system doesn’t, either.
The actual solution is to increase the number of slots for training doctors to match the huge number of qualified applicants. It makes even more sense given that there is a shortage of doctors and health care costs are astronomical.
I want a doctor who was a strong student with diverse experiences, lots of soft skills and can handle the entire psychological spectrum of being a doctor, not the doctor who was solely the best at exams.
There are all kinds of doctors though? The ones who don't have soft skills or diverse experiences can go into pathology or other fields that don't involve as much patient interaction. Why lose out on their gifts altogether if they're genuinely interested in medicine.
> No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible.
I live in Ontario and we're there. 40% of Waterloo students had above a 95% average in high school. The average GPA to get into UofT med school is 3.94/4.00 GPA.
What has happened as a result is students killing themselves and each other. If you fail one test in any course, you cannot move to the next level.
So, if you go on the UofT subreddit there's endless stories of pre-med students sabotaging each other. Faking friendliness, destroying notes, etc etc. This is arguably rational because the pool is small and there's little to gain by studying harder if you already have a perfect GPA.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/1sbu811/had_no_idea_t...
You don't want this type of person as a doctor. They will sabotage others because that is how they got ahead in the past. In a medical environment that kills people.
Too many kids want to be doctors and have the grades for it? That's an opportunity, not a problem.
Training more doctors is just never an option for some reason.
Don't build systems that reward amoral psychopaths.
We've opened a new med school after a decade of planning. 1.5% acceptance rate.
> This is arguably rational because the pool is small and there's little to gain by studying harder if you already have a perfect GPA.
So there is a low ceiling, and if they instead used MCAT or something with a higher ceiling (where, apparently, the number of perfect scores is about 50 per year—in America, presumably lower in Canada due to population size), then studying harder would benefit them. That seems like a much better outlet for competitive urges.
But also, how small is the pool of qualified applicants? If there were something like "they're going to take n people from your school, at which there are 30 plausible candidates", then sabotaging one might conceivably be worthwhile. But if the pool is—well, Google says 3,000 medical students get accepted each year in Canada (and the qualified applicant pool is presumably at least somewhat larger), and sabotaging one person is extremely unlikely to help you personally. (This is one case where it's good that the expected-value "benefits", of sabotaging person X, are widely distributed among thousands of medical candidates, and thus it's a "free-rider problem" where no individual candidate has a strong motivation to do the work.)
Is there some multi-stage thing where they pick 10 people from each high school, or 30 from a town, or something? Or is there major grading on a curve, or a big benefit for being the top person in your classroom of 15? That seems like how you would get real incentives for this backstabbing behavior. Otherwise, I can't see how it's rational (even to a complete sociopath), and would have to chalk it up to individual miscreants and possibly some kind of culture that encourages it in other ways.
> Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
Sounds like we need more spots for these people to go
Because everybody has the same gamified, inflated high grades
Joining Military isn't really a "class" thing - unless you mean lower income people join the military more often to get started in life.
Military academies are more of a upper class thing though.
Military academies are not upper class at all, mostly middle class folks. Officers are generally of the same stock as any other white collar job in engineering, law, business, etc.
I've noticed the same trend with SWEs tbh. Many new grads from the top schools have parents who were SWEs or SWE adjaent
In the United States i suspect some portion of this is due to "legacy" admissions whereby some child is admitted to a competitive program or given very advantageous scholarships not because of their hard work and displayed competence, but because of their parents. I know that it will be very possible for my children to end up at ivy league if they take the legacy advantage I've given them, even though ivy league has been completely off the table for me my entire life. They'll start _much, much_ higher on the ladder than I could.
Legacy admission was removed in response to affirmative action being destroyed by the Trump administration.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. They were not "removed", they were made to be disallowed if and only if the school wanted to receive a certain kind of government funding. Some schools have enough money that they can ignore this. Notably, Stanford said they would give up the funding to keep their policy of legacy admissions.
So the richest, most prestigious schools where legacy admissions are a gateway to the upper classes, will keep the policy.
not necessarily SWE but definitely engineering / STEM pedigrees.
e.g. my buddy whose grandad was a lineman and later a telephone company manager, and dad was a mechanical engineer, and he ended up SRE / devops
I wonder how much of this has to do with seeing someone you are close to work as a doctor makes being a doctor (or military recruit, SWE, etc.) seem real and achievable to you. When I was little I wanted to be a firefighter purely because my father was a firefighter; it wouldn’t surprise me if the same goes for a lot of other people.
I can't prove it, but I've heard more than one story of those with relatives in the military managing to get someone to pull rank and put them on better and upwards promoting assignments.
>(parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent)
That's a pretty wide net. What percentage of the total population has a military connection in that many degrees?
Obv not a great sample, but within my peer group, none have parents or siblings. I have an uncle. Grandparent is a weird one - for anybody born in the 70s as I was, it’s almost a given to have a grandparent or four who served. Being European, all of mine served at the tail end of WWII or immediate aftermath.
class, cast, scum... the tokens are not really relevant, only the facts:
"‘Absurd Corruption’: Disgust as Eric Trump Brags About Scoring $24 Million Pentagon Deal" - https://www.commondreams.org/news/eric-trump-pentagon-contra...
The thing is, a LOT of people voted for this, knowing perfectly well what they were voting for.
Peace, cheap energy, release of the Epstein files, ..
caste and class reinforce each other.
As I read through the distinctions between "class" and "caste" helpfully provided by search engine AI, a sensation that formal caste systems are more honest than inexplicit "class" systems grew in my mind.
The claims are that different outcomes in income, occupation, education, marriage, etc can result in changes in a person's "class." But even in the statistically insignificant number of Horatio Alger stories, did the person's class really change? Did Eliza from Pygmalion change classes or just learn how to "code switch?"
They are synonyms as that includes "nearly the same."
The only difference I can detect is that "class" allows members to move between groups and "castes" do not; however, all the outcomes are identical. So they are absolutely synonymous in most peoples eyes.
Not so much class or caste, but a dual-state where an elite have a normative or lawless state, and specific or arbitrary others suffer a parallel prerogative or punitive state. This is the essence of corrupt authoritarianism.
Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal.
More like three. One class where you can do whatever you can pay for, another with a set of annoying but almost reasonable rules and the last one for whom any actions and their mere existence is illegal, but whose presence is very much relied upon to do things.
It's a simplified model to expose unseen hypocrisy and injustice that originated with the persecution of jews in the German Nazi justice system. In reality, 2 or 3 is too simplistic as the US values people differently in different contexts with numerous attribute privilege points. Don't be old, brown, short, homeless, and unattractive in America except to be constantly harassed.
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
> their relationship to power
The word "power" is so ironic in human cultures:
It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part.
Historically aristocracy was the military class. Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.
> Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.
See, e.g., Iran's IGRC. Counterexamples: China, Russia — and the U.S.?
A military coup in the U.S. is imaginable, which probably explains some of the top brass purges (until recently, where it's probably an attempt to deflect blame for the massive Iran fuck up).
Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.
I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked.
The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
>The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
What a poorly thought out and questionably motivated take. It will no doubt be well received here.
In any case, reconstructing out legislature to copy european stuff isn't gonna change anything if the legislature still sees fit to vest so much power in the executive.
Your main point is valid, but I'd argue it's less the power of the President and more the two-party system and the weakness of Congress that is the root of many American governance problems. Executive power has grown in the vacuum of Congressional impotence.
As far as reforms, we need more to be sure, but there's at least the 22nd Amendment, formalizing the two-term tradition that Washington initiated and FDR abrogated into a hard limit, that means Trump can't legally keep power past 2028.
I think, despite all the furor whipped up and attempts by high-ranking officials to foment a coup, the military is actually very unlikely to disobey Presidential orders; this is based on my frequent interactions with military officers over the last ten years. Do you perceive some other, more likely, coup scenario?
A coup from the same military that happily deployed foot soldiers into American cities to perform law enforcement duties they were not trained to perform? And is happily killing boat-people in the Caribbean? And ran a covert operation to kidnap a foreign head of state? And ran another covert operation to assassinate political leaders in another sovereign state and are now bombing that same state into rubble for no publicly disclosed reason?
Yeah, no coup is happening here. Our military is built around civilian control via the White House. That ain't changing any time soon. Ignoring the various uses of force above, when the generals were called before Hegseth to bend the knee, all but one of them did.
China dervies a ton of authority and Legitmacy from the PLA (peoples liberation army) and Russia is run by from Inteligence service members of the KGB low level ones to be sure but I don't see how China and Russia are counter examples. The US isn't their yet we will see if the backslide happens in the next two years but I think its of a different qualia than we see in the "typical" Authorithian State.
Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist
In fact, the current administration, not headed by someone from the military (and VP has military credibility but not leadership) is not at all aligned to the military except in that their base appreciates the imprimatur of honorable military service. In fact, Trump 1 was in many ways a huge refutation to Trump of the idea that the military guys were leaders he could count on. Their brain-trust positions had more left-alignment than he maybe imagined. His administration, in 2025, fired high-ranking officers in a way that suggested he entered with the reverse conclusion: not military leaders as high-competence straight-shooters, but as all being suspect for having risen unstoppably in a system pervaded by partisan platitudes and shibboleths. Fortunately, the administration didn't take the Soviet approach of purging all those under suspicion.
They just finally had to fire their SecNav because reality butted heads with their ideological conclusion was that business experience was more conducive to military success. Unfortunately for their very-much-not-military-led plan, SecNav probably needs a bit more user experience from time in Navy leadership to successfully work within that labrythine bureaucracy.
Which is why power is much more complex than brute force. Sheer physical or military power is not the be-all and end-all, just a facet of the total picture (and in fact, social creatures that humans are, even just adversarial aspects of power are a subset of power).
It's like that image of a horse tied to a little plastic chair and not daring to move away
> It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it.
This is true up until it isn't. Their security is through obscurity. Being able to deflect the masses. Manipulating the balance, if you will. But they are not special. They are still unprotected sacks of flesh. And we've recently seen just how vulnerable they are. If that desire spread, you will see more.
> This is true up until it isn't.
Indeed. Then, there’s a revolution and heads start rolling. But again, this does not happen when power disappears; it happens when the balance changes, e.g. when a significant chunk of the army sides with a part of the people.
> Their security is through obscurity
Not at all. They can be very blatant about it. Look at Iran for example. Or Russia. Everyone knows who controls what, there is nothing obscure about it.
“You can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half”
- someone
People with guns don't stand much of a chance against people with armies. Sure armies can turn on an individual, but that just means that particular individual has lost power, and that power has been transferred to whatever new individual commands the loyalty of the many. It's not imaginary, it's emergent.
People vastly overestimate the power of armies.
Trump has gotten shot once, almost twice.
Shinzo Abe got murked by some pipes from the hardware store.
And how are the people who shot these politicians doing now? How about the US and Japanese governments? Clearly shooting a politician doesn't mean either that you gain their power or that the power structure they led evaporates.
Exactly this. They live in houses with glass windows. We could take this world any time we choose.
Chill out brother. Life's good.
Don't worry nobody here said anything even remotely political, it wouldn't even occur to them, so your status quo is safe.
That is exactly the type of pacificity that plays into their hand. Life is good and bad at the same time. It is important to hold those two at the same time.
But the people almost never do, and that reason is power.
The reason is gambling.
The vast majority of people don't want to take the bet of a tiny chance of doubling their lot in life for the downside risk of literally being tortured and dying and probably ruining the life of any loved ones.
Most people aren't degenerate gamblers.
The workaround is organization. With sufficient organization, you can start to drag the tiny chance to a slightly bigger chance, and slightly reduce the downside risk maybe.
Some parts of American society are absurdly bad at organizing, and basically gave up 60 years ago.
But then you'd have to live in it, and it sounds like you'd have a world where people with nice things don't live long
Nah, nothing wrong with nice things. But if those nice things only exist because someone else on the planet had to suffer....
Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
Man, fuck season 8 tho
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Reminds me of the riddle[1][2] from Game of Thrones / A Clash of Kings:
Lord Varys: Three great men sit in a room: a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies? Tyrion Lannister: Depends on the sellsword. Lord Varys: Does it? He has neither crown, nor gold, nor favor with the gods. Tyrion Lannister: He has a sword, the power of life and death. Lord Varys: But if it's swordsmen who rule, why do we pretend kings hold all the power? When Ned Stark lost his head, who was truly responsible? Joffrey? The executioner? Or something else? Tyrion Lannister: I've decided I don't like riddles. [pause] Lord Varys: Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2070135/characters/nm0384152/ [2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/503606-oh-i-think-not-varys...
Obligatory Fuck Season 8
soldiers are disposable, they prolly threw him under the bus hoping that would be the end of the matter and they could walk away with the rest of the money.
Most Americans Can't Afford This Basic...Commodity?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zzwp_Ypsi9I
Very funny, thanks for adding that to my list of cynical ideas.
What, can't afford a Senator or two??
I think an important distinction is not really the class matter, it’s really more a jealousy and spite that the political and bureaucratic betters could not profit from it, not that he did so much.
If he had had the means of letting all or maybe just a relevant and important enough cadre of aristocrats know the inside information, he would have surely not been prosecuted. I know this from first hand knowledge.
It may seem the same or like a distinction without a difference to some, but that is really how things work and why he was prosecuted, not because he profited, but because he did not let others in on it and they really want to discourage that behavior, hence his flogging and his public flogging at that. And yes, if you get the sense that it’s like organized crime, then yes, that is and long has been how the US government and many other governments have functioned for a long time now. It’s what also makes them so easily controlled by the US. It could have easily also been swept under the rug while still sending a signal within the system, but it wasn’t and we were all told about it.
And that is how the ruling parasites really get rich, none of that hard work and smarts stuff; those are the stories told to keep the peasant cattle voting for the slaughterhouse, dreaming of the wide open pastures of also becoming rich by working hard.
Fraud, cheating, lying, manipulation … that’s the name of the American dream game.
I again apologize to anyone who feels what and how I say things is “flame bait” or a personal attack, it’s simply just how I speak and like to challenge people’s comfortable assumptions. Feel free to dismiss what I say of you disagree with me. No offense intended and no flaming or whatever necessary, it’s just people speaking to each other or not. We’ll all be fine if we keep talking, even if you don’t like what others have to say or want to control how they say things.
Its a big club and you ain't in it.
I like how when people talk about corruption they think about Nancy Pelosi or some other congressman/senator making couple million $ on the stock market over their entire careers due to insider trading. Just last week Trump made a bet of around $1B on the price of oil going down before doing a fake announcement.
Nancy pelosi’s net worth is around a quarter billion dollars, most of it attributable to insider trading.
> I like how when people talk about corruption they think about Nancy Pelosi or some other congressman/senator making couple million $ on the stock market over their entire careers due to insider trading
So, two things. First, she's made quite a bit more than a few million dollars. Second, she's been an example of being a "suspiciously good trader" for years and years and years. Has anything happened to her? Republicans talk about her and do nothing about it. Democrats say it's a conspiracy theory. The behavior has quite clearly been normalized.
I think corruption happens long ago before Trump. I’m thinking more on the inequality of wealth and how a smaller percentage of people takes a bigger share of the wealth since I don’t know when. Trump is in fact the symptom of that corruption and part of the reason people elected him. But he definitely makes it worse especially in his second presidency.
Nowadays super riches run the show and even the illusion of democracy is gone.
Another thought: many political elites are probably waiting and pushing for Trump to fail to take over. It is us who are going to suffer.
I too wonder why "Nancy Pelosi" has become basically synonymous with Congress insider trading when she's not even close to the top of the list among congresspeople.
Sexism will play a role, but a big part of the reason why Pelosi gets so much flak is that she did nothing to stop it when the democrats were in charge, thus directly paving the way to the current shitshow.
You really need to wonder?
The 10 best performing historical congress people stocks are all republican,a ll men, all funded by lobbys like heritage foundation...
But the face of insider trading becomes a democrat and a woman
Its sooo diffcult to guess why it happened
You’re going to make this a gender and party issue huh? Surprised skin color wasn’t brought up too. Yep, we deserve what we get.
What other reason is there for an otherwise unremarkable character to become the public face of the issue for years?
Chuck Schumer is the whip of the party, as mentioned she isnt even top 10 in performance, her party didnt legalise the activity, other members are aggresive in their pursuit of insider trading information (MTG was part of the most committees during her tenure, but she skipped almost all votes after that, she just wanted the scoop adn then bolted) ...
So why her?
The most common excuse is "well people demand more of dems because everyone knows republicans are crooks", which doesnt explain why more senior leaders, ex presidents etc are the ones hounded instead of her.
how ever surveys by lobbys like the ones owned by the Koch brothers show which politicians people find unlikeable. Unsurprsingly many are unremarkable women, just like Nancy, which makes them easy targets for public campaigns in favour or against.
If you name the most talked about politicans of the past 20 years, outside of the pres (Obama, Biden, Trump) you get mostly women (Sarah Palin, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, MTG, Kristi Noem, Laurent Bobert) that is not a coincidence and it explains why no one could pick Schumer, who is senior leadership, in a police line up but can tell you the many dogs Kristi killed
This are exactly the sort of facts the hn crowd hates but which they can't rebuke.
Because of the Nvidia trade just before the CHIPS act passed.
Which is ridiculous because the entire thing was largely fabricated by the media for those juicy clicks. It was a "half truth" story that hinged on the public's general ignorance of derivatives trading.
While she acquired Nvdia shares days before the bill passed, it was entirely coincidental, because she had put in for those shares over a year prior. Craziest of all, which the media would never fucking say, is that she lost money on the trade.
Nancy Pelosi's most infamous insider trade is one she lost money on. It's one of the core stories I use as an example of how shamelessly misleading the media is. Destroying the country for ad views.
>Destroying the country for ad views.
Not for ad views. Fox News does it demonstrably for political purposes, and the "Clinton News Network" has been bought and now joins them.
Bezos didn't buy a popular newspaper for a little extra money. Twitter doesn't work the way it does for profitability purposes.
There's absolutely zero evidence Trump was behind those oil trades.
Any evidence of that?
I actually don’t know the details of the specific crimes. Eg if you’re a soldier and you post on Facebook that you’re about to go on a raid to depose a head of state, that’s presumably a secrecy violation you would be punished severely for. The insider trading can be like this too in that you’re improperly using the information you are privy to due to your being an insider. If you’re a congressperson and you tweet that the government is about to do such a raid, I don’t know what the legality of that is – perhaps you have some kind of privilege to reveal these things and any censure must happen politically (eg impeachment, losing elections, etc) rather than legally. I don’t know what the rules for insider trading would then be – legislators are not insiders in the way that soldiers are.
Ignoring the moral argument, it isn’t all that clear to me that this would actually be a crime for a legislator under US securities law. It may be that new laws would be required to be able to punish legislators for this kind of behaviour.
He was charged with "unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of non-public government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.". Supposedly, unlawful use of government confidential information could also be applied to legislative and other people in the government
Congress sometimes includes an exemption for themselves from some crimes. Others are excused by the Constitution:
> The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
Explanation:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S6-C1-2/...
As for insider trading:
> The law prohibits the use of non-public information for private profit, including insider trading, by members of Congress and other government employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
Yes. This is Trump signaling that insider trading is for actual insiders only.
Some, and probably very few.
When the people feel everyone is corrupt without any evidence then the next step is getting actual corrupt leaders like Trump's government and soldiers like this that feel corruption is standard behavior
Which specific senate and congress members made Polymarket bets on the Maduro raid? Oh, none of them? So it's not "the exact same", then, is it?
Not in their own names, at least.
Were members of Senate and Congress even informed of the Maduro raid before it was executed?
The Congressional Gang of Eight said they were not informed (even though they're supposed to be).
Maybe that’s their resentment - that they could have profited from it and didn’t.
Already known to the classic Roman people:
"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi" [1]
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
Is there a specific case of someone in congress disclosing classified information by betting on it that we can link to?
Yes, the military have fewer rights than civilians. That's a feature.
Did congress do it with classified ops data, or with their voting stuff?
The main difference between the two is that betting on the date of a classified op indirectly reveals classified data that can tip off an adversary and cost lives.
The only reason we know about the trades in Congress is because they're following the law and reporting them. I don't think there is any evidence that members of Congress: 1) have access to classified info like this, and 2) are betting on polymarket.
That's not to say the behavior isn't extremely slimey but they are acting within the law. Your comment doesn't mention the executive branch and the various crypto "ventures" going on, like the Whitehouse dinner for investors of $TRUMP coin of which we have no idea who invested or what they got from it.
> senate and congress
Senate and congress are both elected. Their re-election is effectively jury nullification.
The people do not care about the crimes.
Between citizens united, gerrymandering, the electoral college, winner take all elections, and voter supression, I don't think we can say that "elections" in America reflect the will of the people.
Also that only ~30-40 congressional districts of the 435 US House seats are competitive this cycle.
Classic Anacyclosis in action. The same things happened in Ancient Rome right before the Republic fell.
https://anacyclosis.info
Wilhoit Law; There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect
Original source of that quote:
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
rules for thee
America is fine with the rich and powerful doing that. Just not one of the normies. Just look who they elected to President. You cannot with a serious face suggest otherwise.
The Western corruption is called "lobbying" and is only allowed for the rich.
No. Lobbying is indeed legal for everyone.
But when's the last time you had $300 million in your personal budget to spend on advertising to a specific human being to improve your personal income?
When's the last time you got a call from an actual politician begging you for money and "support"?
US congress members spend the vast vast majority of their time on the phone begging a list of rich people for a piss of nickles to fund advertising for their next election. There's always a subtle threat of strings attached.
Both the prince and pauper are forbidden from sleeping under the bridge.
They have to put on a show to hide the fact that the corruption is coming from the top.
It’s abundantly clear to a uniformed soldier that they have a lot of rules to follow and “can a senator do it” couldn’t matter less.
My first thought as well, but you can imagine how dangerous it would be if special forces started tanking their performance due to betting market considerations.
Yeah, Republicans are always playing this game. They also get top tier, free healthcare while they gleefully cut veterans' benefits.
For life, too. Be a one or two term congress critter in your early 40s, free healthcare for you and your family for life.
If Nancy can get some stock for cheap prior to landing a big government contract, that's not the same as a solider possibly tipping the hand of a delicate military operation.
No one likes insider trading especially when it's done by politicians, but let's not pretend they're the same
Sounds exactly the same to me. Maybe it's you who's pretending?
No one is dying when Pelosi insider trades.
I thought prodiction markets benefit from insider knowledge. Isn't the whole point that insiders make bets, thereby surfacing knowledge and allowing for more accurate forecasts? So wouldn't we want more military service members making bets? In this case, any potential military target of the US would really want this insider info.
I think the problem is similar to insider sports betting, which is that once someone has made a bet, they will try to influence policy decisions in order to profit from that bet.
It's not so much insider knowledge that's a problem, but insider influence. You're paying people to make bad decisions.
Maybe we just don’t want prediction markets.
You spelled gambling platform wrong. This attempt to rename gambling websites is infuriating. I hope these people get meaningful prison time
I think the problem is similar to insider sports betting, which is that once someone has made a bet, they will try to influence policy decisions in order to profit from that bet.
It's not so much insider knowledge that's a problem, but insider influence. You're paying people to make bad decisions.
Although, it would be amusing to create a sports league where the athletes are expressly permitted to wager on the outcome of their games.
> So wouldn't we want more military service members making bets
Who is the "we" in this sentence?
Yes, insider knowledge makes the prediction market more accurate (albeit at the cost of being less "fair"). However US government doesn't want prediction markets to accurately predict the timing of their secret military operations. Hence the arrest.
Corruption means something legitimate is happening that can be corrupted.
Maduro was president of a sovereign country. A bunch of kidnappers and murderers invaded the building he was in in Caracas, murdered everyone in the room, then kidnapped him and his wife.
What's the "mission"? To pop up in some room and slaughter everyone in it, then kidnap his wife and him? In order to help steal the resources, billions of dollars in oil, for already wealthy people?
Same thing happening in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria. Israel with US help slaughtering people to steal their land and resources.
There's no mission except theft and murder. There's no corruption because the entire enterprise is rotten to begin with.
I get this sentiment, but I'll just make the classic "two wrongs don't make a right" rebuttal.
Problem is that only one kind of wrongs being chased. It is systemic and erodes trust
> Maduro was president of a sovereign country.
It's funny how we accept the importance given to that statement. when he's just some dude who took control of a country and gave himself that title. As if the social construction means anything in this situation.
> and gave himself that title
Declaring yourself president means nothing. I’m the president of planet earth and nothing changes. Similarly he could go by grand pimp and it would be just as meaningful.
Legitimacy comes from all the people backing up his claim to control of the country. Further governments care about legitimacy because it’s way easier to assassinate leaders than win wars and leaders don’t want to be at risk. It’s pure self interest protecting each other.
The idea of sovereignty is a cornerstone of how we organize our global society. This was an overt statement that the US controls South America, and that South America doesn't rule itself. Previously, we were relaying on covert methods for influence.
The relationship with SA has materially changed.
1. The United States is willing to violate South American sovereignty.
2. South America has offered little resistance to this incident.
That's correct that sovereignty is a cornerstone, but since the founding of the UN that doesn't mean you have a blank check to do whatever you want within the sovereignty of a country.
Things like genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, violating other countries sovereignty with no strong justification, development of nuclear weapons, etc.
So there's a bunch of red lines that clearly some countries will step over the sovereignty line, thankfully so!
I'm not saying the US was right about what they did in Venezuela, but clearly Maduro wasn't recognized as the president of Venezuela by venezuelans and many countries.
If you're going to invoke the UN, you should show the UN resolution calling for action in Venezuela.
UN actions or shortcomings are beyond the point that there was a global understanding after WW2 about sovereignty red lines.
Only genocide has a 'duty to prevent and punish'; with UN Security Council approval of course.
Restrictions on building nuclear bombs are defined in the voluntary Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is not applicaple to non-parties (India, Israel, Pakistan, South Sudan).
Every foreign intervention done by US / NATO through-out has backfired, and worsened the problem it tried to solve.
Case in point: CIA covertly arms Afghan Mujahideen fighters to wage war against the Soviet Union by proxy in the 80s - 90s. But David Hasselhoff did a song, so the Soviet Union fell apart, and Afghan fighters pivoted to civil warfare as Taliban.
Sadam Hussein was a rogue US puppet-dictatorship gone wrong. But 'freeing' Iraq from Hussein entailed destroying their entire civilisation. Just the mayhem caused a million deaths through starvation, sectorial violence, collapsed healthcare, terrorists roaming the streets, etc.
We also destroyed Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Libya, Yemen, Guatemala, Chile, etc. (At least for a while)
Somehow they forgot to include when a member of the Security Council is commiting genocide - like what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
The UN has a body that regulates nuclear energy, called IAEA, and they can definitely bring violations to the Security Council.
> Every foreign intervention done by US / NATO through-out has backfired, and worsened the problem it tried to solve.
That's quite a bold claim:
- first by focusing only in the US / NATO, and leaving out interventions of the UN. Why is that?
- would you say that the people in Kosovo are worse than they were before NATO intervention? Or South Korea with the intervention of the UN? Or even Ukraine today with the help of NATO?
- it's funny you blame the CIA for the consequences of the Afghanistan war, yet you don't blame the USSR who invaded Afghanistan in the first place!
It's like for you, the USSR losing the Afghanistan war was a bad thing, and the collapse of the USSR as well, and the CIA was to blame for all of that? What's going on there?
As for Saddam, he shouldn't have invaded Kuwait, let alone the other atrocities.
You seem to have a lot of grievances towards US / NATO, and very little against USSR and Russia "interventions".
Like what they did in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and the other atrocities in Africa, and Asia with their neo-nazi paramilitary group.
Anyway, I don't defend everything the US / NATO / UN did - but one thing is sure (up until today), none of them expanded their borders and attempted to annex land.
I'm anti-authoritarianism, and consider the UN as the better alternative. Not into some deep conspiracy lol. I'm sorry I confused you.
Regular remainder: NATO acted exactly once, in afghanistant after USA was attacked. NATO as such was not doing "early interventions".
NATO member states are free to pursue interventions, but they then do not get NATO protection.
> The idea of sovereignty is a cornerstone of how we organize our global society.
It is, but it's kind of a thin lie.
How's sovereignty going for ukraine? Hong kong? Chechnya, South ossetia, and abkhazia? Puerto Rico? Western Sahara? Parts of Sudan? Border regions of bhutan? South american fisheries? People trying to set up micronations?
Ukraine is still sovereign nation. And willing to sacrifice a lot to remain one.
My read on the GP comment was that it's intentionally juxtaposing the weight and importance normally given to being president alongside the anarchy that goes along with kidnapping and murder to point out the irony. If you want to believe in things like sovereignty and government, you can't simultaneously say that these governments can kidnap, invade, and murder just because they can. It undermines the very legitimacy of the social contract. After all, it's not much of a contract if it can be broken at will.
I found it hard to figure out which side the GP came down on, but perhaps it's not taking a side and merely pointing out the irony and the death of legitimacy. Maybe there is no such thing as government anymore, and it all comes down to goons with guns.
I had the same interpretation - Maduro was a bad guy, but when the approach taken is akin to the "Wild West," its hard to claim moral superiority - it devolves to different factions of goons with guns stealing from each other and murdering with impunity, "might makes right."
This stands in contrast to the ideals of a society based on laws and rules, where corruption is a notable exception.
We stand on the precipice of abandoning what the world worked so hard for decades to build...
Honest question: Would you feel similarly if the shoe were on the other foot? If we had a hostile presidential takeover and another country, for reasons completely unrelated to that, showed up at the WH and executed this kind of “mission”?
Maduro was a piece of…let’s keep this polite and say “work.” Everyone agrees. Does that mean what the US did was acceptable? There’s a lot of nuance and context being glossed over here.
It’s like with Iran. “Their government was horrible.” Ok, but that’s not why we attacked them. The Trump admin has explicitly said that wasn’t the motivation, but they randomly bring it up whenever they need to shift tactics. It’s a moral appeal supporters use to paper over the political realities and actual motivations.
Edit: toned down the intensity a bit.
In this scenario, is the person in the Oval Office a rapist, child molester, serial fraudster, corruptly manipulating stock markets, steering government money to his children’s own weapons companies, assassinating other world leaders, committing the war crime of declaring no quarter, committing the war crime of threatening to destroy all significant civilian infrastructure in another sovereign nation, committing the war crime of threatening genocide, and threatening the use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive military action?
Don't forget his incontinence, and that whole literal bulldozing of your democratic institutions.
Incontinence can happen to anyone. No need to pick on things that people can’t control. Especially when he has so many legitimate targets to hit.
> Does that mean what the US did was acceptable?
The longer I am alive the more I realize that power is all that matters, and that rules are nice but only for the peons. "Acceptable" in this case means pretty much nothing and is a word that is philosophic in its meaning. You can yell into the clouds that something is unacceptable or unfair and it may be true in some ethical/moral sense, but it matters none. Power will always win out and if someone came to the WH and did the same thing, then there would only be one reason for it -- that there is somebody more powerful than the US and is able to get away with things like this. The masses would scream, cry and maybe some would be happy, but it wouldn't matter whatsoever. Maduro might have been bad (a great excuse for the masses to avoid revolts) but ultimately, the government made a decision to do it and that's that.
I am not a fan of "well what can ya do?" That's not how we got the 40 hour work week or civil rights legislation. That's not how women got the right to vote. You have to fight and fight and fight for a better world. I mean that.
It's literally how you got those things. Without leverage to get them, they would have just been complaints. You ask what you can do, and then you do it.
I meant more in the sarcastic/defeatist sense. A linguistic shrug not to be taken in the literal sense. That's on me though, I should've picked better wording.
I thought that already happened in the US and that's how we ended up with this current mess..?
I dislike Trump with a passion that is very hard to over emphasize. However, he did win the 2016 and 2024 elections. Maduro stole his seat.
2024 is up for debate, last I checked, not that anyone would challenge it.
It's not up for debate. Don't play Trump's games. It legitimizes his nonsense take on 2020.
Trump lost in 2020. Harris lost in 2024. We have all sorts of external influence and nonsense happening in our social/political lives and yes many states are messing with people's ability to actually vote, but when it comes to what happens in the voting booth, US elections are incredibly secure and fraud/ballot tampering is so rare that calling it "rare" doesn't properly emphasize reality.
The vote count was accurate, Trump won, and we are all paying a horrible price for the self-inflicted chaos and regression that has ensued.
>Not that anyone would challenge it
If there were legitimate grounds to question it there is no way we wouldn't see action on it
> Maduro was a piece of…let’s keep this polite and say “work.” Everyone agrees. Does that mean what the US did was acceptable?
Maduro was replaced by his equally unelected second. It is not as if Venezuela became democracy or something. Instead, a bunch of leaders got promotion including the main torturer.
I find it mind boggling that it is called regime change. Regime remained in place.
I know this is tangential to your overall point, but did really they murder everyone in the room? I was under the impression that a few Venezuelan generals kidnapped Maduro themselves, left him at a predetermined point for US forces to pick up, and had their soldiers fire some small arms into the air to make a token show of resistance. There's no way the US would have flown a slow-moving convoy of helicopters into a hostile city unless they knew a priori that Venezuelan air defense missile batteries would be ordered to stand down.
Who knows what's true, but the official US narrative is that they entered his bunker, slaughtered the (mostly Cuban) security guards, and stopped Maduro just before he could hide behind a reinforced door. So the official narrative is indeed that US forces slaughtered a bunch of people and took Maduro.
Whether there was also cooperation from the Venezuelan military, failure to shoot down helicopters, etc, is a different matter.
I agree there was almost certainly some collaboration with some factions in Maduro's military standing down for the mission to go so smoothly, but its pretty well-established that a number of soldiers were killed, with some US soldiers coming back with the wounds to show for it. The entire bodyguard being killed is something the US and Cuba actually agree on!
They killed like 32 Cuban bodyguards.
> There's no way the US would have flown a slow-moving convoy of helicopters into a hostile city
Speaking like a man without access to a discombobulator.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ja0wzMtzw38
I don't think there's any question that he legitimately won his first election. Which is more than we can say for US allies on the Arabian peninsula. When are we going to send the choppers for them?
2029 I would imagine, I mean think of the profits. These datacenters clearly aren't going to pay for themselves.
How much a particular head of state fits into the modern, western conception of liberalism and democracy should have no bearing on the matter; Kidnapping that head of state and putting him on trial in a different country for crimes he is, at best, peripherally involved in is untenable. Especially when the very obvious motivation is self-enrichment rather than bringing any of that liberal democracy to the populace.
The social construct at play is 'International Law' by agreeing on mutually binding agreements. More specifically the 'prohibition against the use of force'. This is slightly different from the 'rules-based international order' often used in the US, which isn't specifically defined and can thus be used for whatever.
Whether Maduro is a baddie or not, taking military action requires buy-in from the UN Security Council. Specifically: nine affirmative votes from the 15-member council, provided that none of the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, UK, US) cast a veto. And it's only allowed to 'maintain or enforce international peace and security'. The charter contrasts this to building
The US should've consider how their war-plans 'maintain or enforce international peace and security' before commencing. Or even fabricate' sexed up Dossiers' on weapons of mass destruction like when the US invaded Iraq.
Self-defence is the only valid excuse for using arms without prior security council approval and acting without a plan for peace and security.
If you think Hamas, the Islamic Republic, and Maduro are/were peace-loving good guys, I have a bridge to sell you. Whatever you think about the US, anyone who isn’t drowning in propaganda must know that those guys are at best no better, and they don’t have even a facade of a justice system that people wronged by those governments can turn to for relief.
For instance, the moment the Gaza ceasefire allowed Hamas to continue to operate, we all witnessed them dragging their own citizens into the street and summarily executing them for supposed “collaboration.”
But regardless of your opinion of the relative morality of the various parties, the days of the civilized world just sitting around and allowing things like October 7th to happen with no consequences appear to be over.
Nobody is saying that they are peace loving guys. But the zionists aren't any better, there is nothing that can justify the rapes and the genocide the US and particularly the zionists do.
"we all witnessed them dragging their own citizens into the street and summarily executing them for supposed “collaboration.” "
No we did not because most of us try not to consume Mossad propaganda.
If you think that starving children, and settlers killing kids is a "justice system", If you think that stealing and destroying Lebanon is what the "civilized world" does, If you do not think that October 7 was the clear reaction to being starved to death, Then your definitions of civilization and justice are just fucked up.
> For instance, the moment the Gaza ceasefire allowed Hamas to continue to operate, we all witnessed them dragging their own citizens into the street and summarily executing them for supposed “collaboration.”
wouldn't be the first time people from a group aided in the genocide of that group. what do you expect will happen to such people?
it's easy to put quotes around the word "collaboration", but go on, tell us what you know about these people, make your case that they weren't actually collaborators.
The moment the allies liberated France, the collaborators were stripped, shaved, and hung from a lamp post.
Yes hamas is a messed up organisation, but that's come about as a result of Israeli actions. You can the lack of law and order as a reason to continue preventing that law and order, just the same as you can't use what the french did as an argument for giving France back to the Nazis.
> are/were peace-loving good guys,
And the US is?
there's two takes. either the US are the 'good guys' in which case they should be aiming to reduce the impact on the innocent civilian population and escalate the situation, bring the 'bad guys' to trail, and kill them if necessary. with the ultimate goal of bringing real peace.
or the US are the 'bad guys', only out to set the world in a way in which most favors them, and screw the consequences. if the US is really operating this way, then questions of morality and who did what to whom are completely irrelevant. it doesn't matter if someone oppresses someone over there, or kills a bunch of people, not of any concern unless the situation can be exploited.
as far as I can tell, the US has been acting in the latter mode for quite a while, and any pretense that they really are the 'good guys' is wearing quite thin.
personally, I agreed with Trumps stated policy, that we should stop trying to claim some worldwide jurisdiction and wading into these situations unilaterally. Where I didn't is that I think its in everyone's interest to have diplomatic discussions and form international coalitions about matters of mutual interest. but of course all that is completely academic at this point.
“Good guys” vs “bad guys” is a mirage. No one, specially not nation states fit neatly into the labels goo or bad. Every country is firstly motivated by their self interest, dos that make them all bad?
I also disagree with the monochrome framing of good and bad, I should have made is clearer that if the person I was replying to want to really talk about 'bad guys', then you end up in kind of contradiction.
Well, it was disputed if he really was a legitimate president, but now it is clear, that the US government does not care about that either.
These people only care about American lives, and fake to care when China or any other country they don't like attack anybody.
I guess thats one way to look at it. But thats morality for you.
I'd just suggest maybe get less involved with the internet and as the kids say these days 'go touch some grass'.
Because, frankly, I don't think the average, or even marginal Venezuelan would agree with you at all, as, they have actually had to deal with this dictator.
The dictator is labeled the ”dictator” because they’re under fire by US not because they’re an actual dictator. Look at gulf countries and the other dictators that US is partnered with like Al-Sisi in Egypt and the King of Jordan.
Besides the regime did not change. It’s the same regime, the only difference is that US benefits (or some individual people or companies in the US) from this version.
This is ridiculous cope. At least, I myself can provide some sources:
Human Rights Foundation: https://hrf.org/latest/hrf-condemns-fraudulent-election-resu...
Carter Center: https://www.cartercenter.org/stories/center-finds-democracy-...
CSIS: https://www.csis.org/analysis/can-maduro-pull-mother-all-ele...
Plenty of evidence of huge human rights crimes under the Maduro regime, investigations made by United Nations. He also stole the elections.
You can disagree with how he was removed but don’t give the guy legitimacy please, he’s a thug.
> Because, frankly, I don't think the average, or even marginal Venezuelan would agree with you at all, as, they have actually had to deal with this dictator.
why do you think that? when was the last time you were in venezuela? first you tell someone to get off the internet for a bit and touch grass, then you gesture vaguely at what you think... which came from where exactly? different parts of the internet? cable news? where?
Immense majority of the country wanted him out. This is not even an argument at this point. You could argue Chavez was very popular for the most part, but Maduro? Even the communist party of Venezuela wanted him out.
an immense majority wanted him kidnapped by america? either you've inadvertantly shifted the goalpost or i'll need something to back that up, because i find that hard to believe.
I can speak just for myself and all my relatives and friends who wanted him out. I’d hoped it could be through other means but I’ll take this. Hopefully this leads to a transition and we get back to having a normal country like we’ve been yearning for so many years now.
Go ask a Venezuelan if you know one. We tried everything and only received violence. Personally Maduro got what he deserved. The regime is still there I know but it’s a bit of justice.
> Because, frankly, I don't think the average, or even marginal Venezuelan would agree with you at all, as, they have actually had to deal with this dictator.
They still have to deal with a dictator. Just one that is willing to pay extortion money to America. Venezuela did not had elections and has still the same regime in the same power.
You're apply the oppressor–oppressed framework.
Basically Madura and his regime, along with Gaza, West Bank and others are the victims because they're less powerful and therefore above reproach? However US and Israel are currently powerful and therefore they are the only ones worthy of criticism and scorn?
Gaza, for instance, is famously anti kidnapping.
I think it's more a case of allies and enemies.
Second the west likes to take the moral high ground. That involves holding them to a higher standard.
Third, in cases such as Gaza, and the west bank, they don't have stable governments because of actions by Israel. You can't expect them to behave like a nation state in those circumstances, so yes I do expect more of Israel.
Fwiw I'm British, I remember the troubles on Northern Ireland. I don't condone what the IRA did, but I would still expect my govt to behave better, even though I agree with them.
> Third, in cases such as Gaza, and the west bank, they don't have stable governments because of actions by Israel. You can't expect them to behave like a nation state in those circumstances, so yes I do expect more of Israel.
Exactly. They are oppressed so are incapable of wrong. You can't expect them to not kidnap and murder people at a concert.
Exactly my point
I didn't say they are incapable of wrong. I'm saying you can't hold a group that doesn't have law and order, and therefore control to the same standard as a group that does have control.
If protesters throw rocks at police, would you hold the entire group responsible? Even though most were there to protest peacefully? Would you take the same view if it was the police throwing rocks?
It's a pretty low standard. But even worse it denies them autonomy and control of their own actions. They're victims, mere observers. You deny that group self determination, you do not view them as equals. It's like I get upset if my child bites someone, but not if my cat bites someone, because it's a cat. That's why that oppressor / oppressed mentality is so dehumanizing to the people it purports to empathize with
Why is it dehumanising? I'm not talking on the level of humans, I'm talking on the level of nation states.
Plus I'm not even saying it's oppressor and oppressed, it's that one group has organisation and one doesn't.
I go back to my police and protestor example? Do you apply the same rules to each? Do you think the leader of the police is more or less culpable than the leader of the protestors?
It isn't dehumanising the protestors. If anything it's the opposite, it's dehumanising the police, they are supposed not to have agency. And that's the point.
Seems pretty organized that an open air prison that has severe restrictions on travel and trade can plan something like Oct 7.
Yeah to say say protestor can't control himself from throwing rocks is pretty offensive to the protestor. Put another way, if my son was at a protest and started throwing rocks at police I wouldn't excuse that behavior like he had no choice. You always have a choice.
I'm not saying the protestor can't control himself. I'm saying the organisers of the protest has less control over that individuals actions so has less culpability.
Whereas the police should have a culture of not throwing rocks, so serious questions should be asked of the leadership.
If you have a failed state such that large areas aren't under government control. And some warlord attacked your country, would you say that was a declaration of war from that entire country? Or would you accept the government didn't have control?
Gaza is a messed up place. You wouldn't necessarily expect all the groups to hold to a cease fire, like you would a nation with a single unified command structure.
A breach of a cease fire by Gaza says something different than a breach of a cease fire by Israel.
I'm not saying anything about individuals, I'm saying different group structures have different amounts of control over individuals in that group, so it isn't reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
To go back to your last example. Should you be held responsible for your son throwing rocks? Should that not depend upon the level of control? Or should we treat a dad handing his 5 year old a rock and instructing him to throw the rock at the police, differently to the 25 year old son that went there by him self?
This is problematic on every account.
Primarily - the issue at hand is the legality of 'insider information' with in institutions.
But the bigger issue is how shameful it is that people can't see the absolute horror beyond their little local ideologies or political beliefs.
Maduro is one of the worst tyrants in the world, responsible for murder and imprisonment of any number of innocents and political dissidents, and the direct cause of millions of people displaced.
Venezuela is truly a horrible place, the country has fallen apart, Chavizmo has no popular legitimacy, he lost the election and remained in power.
It's impossible to speak of 'sovereignty' in that context.
What happened to Maduro was a 'net positive' - it was in fact, a crude form of 'net justice'.
It has nothing to do with Gaze, Syria, Iran etc..
And it has little to do with the cronyism of the Trump regime.
It's fair to question legality of actions, but the fact that people could see Maduro is anything but a criminal in the most common sense, is beyond pale. That's the real issue here actually, the inability for people to contextualize complex issues especially in light of basic moral concerns.
The violence against all hose people in Gaza is bad.
Maduro is bad.
Corruption in the White House is bad.
Selective Justice is bad.
Special forces placing bets on Polymarket is bad.
They are different things.
So it's ok for a cop to demand payment from random people because his bosses are corrupt?
If the entire enterprise is rotten, it's because it is corrupted. Unless you're an anarchist you have to accept that a democratic nation state is a legitimate enterprise that is corruptable. I don't think you can say some sub level enterprise X layers down isn't corrupt because the levels above are corrupting that legitimate core.
He was the illegitimate president, he stole the last elections. Plenty of evidence of it. Add to that all the human rights crimes they committed (national guard death squads who killed in the thousands on the poorest areas of the country just to name one). This was investigated by the UN, led by Michelle Bachelet (former president of Chile).
But we did not depose his regime, we just stole him. Not like the US could reliably depose a foreign regime anyway, but this shouldn't be accepted as an excuse.
He indeed was an illegitimate ruler, but that is completely unrelated to what we did.
I’m not debating that. But as Venezuelan I’d like to put that in context. Because it’s important as well. For us even if you think it’s weird it is a glimmer of hope. A bit of justice even if the regime is still in power.
I want to reject such complicated feelings because I don't want the mild support of what our Administration did, and the intrinsic violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, but real life is complicated and things are complicated.
I just want better. But we so rarely get that.
Good Luck. Hopefully we are done with our meddling for now.
that being said, if your method of removal is also illegitimate, it doesn't really help the situation
Where do attempts to steal the election land on the spectrum of
|not ok to kidnap - - - - - - - ok to kidnap|?
Ok to kidnap
> Maduro was president of a sovereign country.
Since 2013, Venezuela has been suffering a socioeconomic crisis under Maduro. He stole the last two elections and remained in power even though he had not legitimately won.
Numerous international bodies and human rights organizations have found that Nicolás Maduro and his government committed extensive human rights violations. These violations have been ongoing since at least 2014 as part of a systematic plan to repress dissent. State security forces and allied armed groups (colectivos) have been implicated in thousands of unlawful or politically motivated killings and arbitrary arrests of protesters, opposition leaders, and perceived critics.
Immediately after the latest presidential election, at least 24 people died as a result of the government’s repression of protests against the appointment of Nicolás Maduro. Most of these killings could amount to extrajudicial executions. Two of the victims were children.
While I understand your sentiment, it doesn't justify what happened.
Think back to January 6 - Imagine if every foreign government assumed it was stolen and decided they should take matters into their own hands. Would it help, or hurt America?
A sacrificial offering to the public, don’t look too closely at the $1B of Polymarket insider trading coming from higher ups in the admin.
he went too small, need to go bigger to roll with the big boys
Here's the relevant Peter Girnus post: https://x.com/gothburz/status/2047662736255955325
Now I've learned that he tells the truth through parody. It's really hard, emotionally, to read, but important stuff.
The corruption starts at the head of the snake. We've proven to be just as corrupt as Russia, and Trump's war of choice is going to do more damage to the US than Putin's mistake invading Ukraine.
> “When we identified a user trading on classified government information, we referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation. Insider trading has no place on Polymarket. Today’s arrest is proof the system works.”
Today's arrest is proof that Polymarket may have incentivized a key decision maker in this operation to make decisions in a way that would let him profit. This is peak levels of head up ass arrogance.
Congress is protected but soliders arent from profiting. Why are laws so biased?
The first group makes laws, the second group doesn't.
This isn’t actually the case. Congress members and their employees have been banned from insider trading since the 2012 STOCK Act. That’s why they do it through family members now
There’s 109 comments on this submission of the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883108
I’ve never understood why insider insight was forbidden, the point of prediction market is betting on the outcome based on information you have.
Is that ‘fair’ for everyone? No! Because no everyone has access to the same level of information. But no one forces you to bet either.
Knower. Thank you. The point of all markets is to aggregate information.
Maybe Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke can get to know Maduro better as cellmate.
There are a lot of (rightly) critical comments here about the imbalance between prosecutions of high-ups taking bets and the grunts (in this case though, a senior-ranking soldier).
But it seems to me that the closer to the frontline you go, the betrayal is even worse; if the story is true, then these are his friends and comrades he is endangering for financial gain - its not just an abstract risk argued away by simple high-level corruption.
Do we have any evidence of higher-ups making bets?
People with a lot of money have certainly been making bets (plenty of recent news items on that), but I think the point being raised by others is that it's suspicious that only the lower orders have so far apparently been pursued.
We don't have evidence of that either.
Therefore we should stop talking about it anywhere, ever. There is nothing to see here, peasant.
No, we just shouldnt be confusing speculation as fact.
special forces culture also is corrupt and in need of reform; every officer who is not part of SOCOM and has to deal with their antics and bullshit and fallout thereof knows this.
Wilhoit’s Law
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Albeit wrongly attributed. [1]
[1]: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
It's only illegal when you are not a politician apparently
I thought the names in the opening were the people being charged. Then I realized they were the prosecutors.
Hope he placed a bet on getting arrested.
Perfectly fine for the rich and powerful, but don't you average citizen dare do anything like it! The US law and justice system is a complete joke.
This is also illegal for any rich or powerful service members.
I guess the rest can now bet on whether he will:
1. Apply for a presidential pardon.
2. Get it.
I don't think I have anything meaningful to add here. This is extremely disappointing, especially at a time when there seems to be so little cultural cohesion. Everyone is just out for themselves.
I'll also admit I've never liked gambling (or fraud) so it's really hard for me to understand what is so appealing about something like polymarket or kalshi. (I have the same gaps with regard to casinos, they just seem like hell on earth -- not a positive aspect to them whatsoever) At least from my outsider's perspective it seems clear that these sorts of gambling are not good for society whatsoever.
It’s arguable that opening the doors for greedy soldiers to do a little insider trading and inadvertently expose the illegal covert violent raid that they’re party to might be one of the few positive outcomes in a society gamified by Polymarket
Nice. I'm against polymarket allowing bets on war precisely because of this. But I think we can all agree that perpetrators hold more liability than the platforms, they are the true cuplrits of warcrimes/treason.
Cha-Ching! I bet $2000 that this guy was going to get charged.
My respects to a real one, hope it turns out ok
He'll be pardoned shortly.
Some things do trickle down.
Prediction markets working as intended.
What about the rest of the Trump clan and their shady shit?
Donald Trump Jr. serves as an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket...it's just comical
In France, in the 80s-80s, a comedian trio did a sketch on rural hunters, and the final was about the difference between the good hunter and the bad hunter, the whole sketch was like 6-7min and 1min was about the good and bad hunter.
I keep remembering this sketch each time I read about the differences in prosecution in the US between social classes.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/FJCplaZBgg0
You have to switch your VPN to France to watch this video. Just FYI. I didn't get it at all btw.
From what I gathered:
What's the difference between a good hunter and bad hunter.
A bad hunter shoots anything that moves, a good hunter shoots anything that moves. Perhaps something was lost in translation.
It's parody of French rural hunters, and in this section, it's about the mental gymnastics they have about differencing themselves from the "bad" ones, while the rest of the sketch you see them shooting at any movements, littering the forest, explaining multiple hunting "accidents".
And the autosub doesn't do justice.
Unsurprisingly, Trump is downplaying the situation, comparing it to Pete Rose betting on his own team. And, naturally, conservatives are falling in line, excusing the situation because Congress does this all the time.
https://www.foxnews.com/outkick-sports/donald-trump-uses-pet...
What an idiot, don't input your real id and don't use own face in KYC. Omfg.
Morally it's ok to steal crypto from these types of markets, everybody is crooked there, client and market makers.
So crypto fraud gets deprioritized, with cases like the one against Nader Al-Naji dropped entirely, while Trump and his family profit massively from crypto and corruption themselves.
Yet prediction market fraud is made an enforcement priority, except to say that nobody close to Trump's own cabinet will be prosecuted - the little guys will be made an example of to make it seem like those at the top are taking the moral high-ground. "Every accusation is a confession."
I think we all can guess at the truth here.
Rules for thee but not for me.
Who is the "thee" and "me" in this scenario?
The guy who got arrested is “thee” the members of the White House admin and Congress making bets are the “me”
He screwed himself by taking steps to show how much of an amateur he was, by trying to delete his polymarket account and change the email address on his crypto exchange account
He should have just cashed out and donated 20% of it to Mar-a-Lago saying exactly what he did and a thank you. It's a little too low for a club membership but since the President's family is a shareholder of Polymarket I think it would have been seen as attracting liquidity
AG would have been instructed to stamp out the investigation, no charges would have been filed
Why's he being charged in federal court instead of a court martial?
A fish rots from the head down.
organizations are fractal
Revolution time.
Prime example showing lack of more of any kind of soldiers and us army. They illegally kidnapped the president of the sovereign country - they should be all in jail!
USA is a rogue state at this point. NATO is at risk because of that.
His op-sec probably wasn't sufficient to hide his gains via multiple small bets, no-log VPN, and cycling through Monnero both ways. The next prediction market to directly use Monero and no-log will be untraceable.
The entire corruption-as-service aspect of this is interesting.
I wonder when someone figures out vote-buying-as-service
Does polymarket have trial markets? Maybe 12% chance of being a mistrial - oh wait just shot up to 99%; new user called the_judge88 just bet $100K on that?
Seems like he needed more Op/InfoSec training...
Really disheartening to see this and it brings up so many thoughts and feelings I have over the current state of the US, politically, popularly, and how everyone is thinking about morality personally.
If this had happened during, say, the Osama bin Laden raid I think it would have been one of those "damaging the American psyche" stories that would have run for months with a giant trial and a lot of public shame. Trump coming onto the scene and his first term broke a lot of people's capacity for caring about those sorts of events.
Now we have an operation the public didn't ask for, initiated by people with no clear moral codes of their own and very unclear objectives, ones that we can largely assume are for their own personal gain as well, and all of that trickling down to blatantly illegal use of confidential data for personal gain by someone the public would typically respect. And I'm sure a subset of people will try to make this into a big story, but with everything else that's gone on recently I think it probably fades after a few days (except for the prosecutors involved of course).
Associated DOJ release: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-soldier-charged-usin...
what is that country
How dares he profit from insider trading when being only a mere soldier?
They should run for Congress
Silly prole, insider trading is a white collar crime reserved for your betters. Time to learn your place.
Bet your life, not your money on this mission please. Thankz.
His mistake was he bet alone, instead he should have gotten a billionaire friend(s) of the president or his kids involved and bet together.
I mean it’s a serious issue and obviously wrong to do.
Now do all the rest of them
Everyone's a grifter these days.
If you destroy the integrity of the professional military corps through destructive and despotic behaviour that drives out those who hold to their principles, soldiers like this are the result of Hegseth’s cultification.
Nobody should be surprised.
Hegseth thinks loyalists + AI as brains can replace decades of actual real-world experience and keeping the highest ethics and morality standards with a bunch of AI-driven baboons with stars on their shoulders.
Paul Krugman wrote a good piece about exactly this. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cultifying-the-us-militar...
Everyone can already feel the ripples of what he is doing. There is an exodus in excellence in the upper echelons of the us military never seen before.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/22/navy-secreta...
The US is getting less safe by the day. You can also see it on tourism data and forecasts. A lot of people don’t feel safe to travel to the US any longer.
Soccer World Cup in the US and 250th anniversary of the USA would have caused a tourism boom with past administrations. But people rather go to China instead.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/tourist...
so they catched this guy, yet pelosi and 300 others ate making millions every month, and nothing.. really people who has woken up, there is no words for this, yet the 80% are still asleep
Since citizens united it’s legal to pay unlimited amounts for political propaganda (lying to the public).
Obama called this out explicitly after the ruling and his analysis has been more or less accurate.
The more surprising thing is that the common invasion soldier also benefits financially. So far we only knew that the oligarch system that is currently controlling the USA, also benefits massively - the stock market changes with regards to Iran showed this already, but also see the more recent comments made in regards not just to the orange king himself, but his family dynasty and their involvement; in particular orange king jr. is involved a LOT here, also with regards to that mentioned soldier (see the companies that were involved, crypto-stuff and so forth). This reminds me a bit of Epstein, in a way - so far the US justice system claims that only two people (the dead Epstain and his wife) organised all those naughty parties. Well, that is logistically simply impossible, aside from the question how they had all that money. How deep do these networks used by the superrich go? You have more and more victims who claimed not only to have been underage, but also service-sold to other rich people. Why are these latter people not in court? How corrupt is that system? Evidently we now know that these invasion soldiers also bet on their own invasions - I guess when they claim "we are doing work for Good" here they mean this with regards to their own pockets.
Just as Smedley D. Butler once stated, many many years ago: "War is a racket"
What was his rank? What was his job? What was his clearance? How did he have access?
The canadians have the info. He was special forces. He was enlisted (not an officer). He was involved, or at least privy to, the planning of the Venezuela thing.
https://globalnews.ca/news/11814801/maduro-capture-polymarke...
Feds waited no time to drop the indictment and make arrest. 3 months is lightning fast for a white collar crime. Wall St. ppl who commit insider trading pay a fine and admit no wrongdoing, discouraging the profits, and only after many years and trades have passed. Goes to show how elites play by a different set of rules. His mistake was not knowing he was not in that club. Have no idea why this was downvoted. I see so many other people who make this argument about privileged elites and always get upvoted.
> Goes to show how elites play by a different set of rules.
Epstein said the same, and yet nobody went out to protest.
Rules for thee not for me
This doesn't seem like a simple white collar crime. If the military are betting on the operations they will carry it's virtually espionage.
Wouldn’t that make insider trading virtually corporate espionage?
What was the last corporate-espionage conviction in America?
Great question for google. 30 seconds of effort would indicate it’s within the last couple years
Trumps first campaign promise was drain the swamp. The center of power in america has never been more swamp like than now. In fact swamp is not accurate, more like gigantic pile of steaming stinking trash.
In desperate times in the age of AI, one needs to grift in order to survive. This soldier was just doing that to maybe...enrich themselves like the politicians also breaking insider trading laws?
This is why no-one at the top institutions, politicians (Pelosi), presidents (Trump) and everyone else in proximity gets arrested or charged for insider trading in all forms. It doesn't apply to them.
This is a reminder that the rule makers are allowed to grift and break their own rules, but will arrest you for copying them or doing the same thing because this soldier was not part of their club.
He wasn't invited to their private insider group chat. So this solider was arrested and charged instead.
lol no SEC lawsuit or civil complaint: strait to the indictment and arrest. Goes to show how elites are truly a privileged class. They get to admit "no guilt" and forfeit profits, avoiding prosecution. Have no idea why this was downvoted. I see so many other people who make this argument about privileged elites and always get upvoted. I never have the right opinion on anything.
> no SEC lawsuit or civil complaint
The suspect didn't trade securities. SEC doesn't have jurisdiction. The curiosity–to me as a layman–is that this is being prosecuted by the DoJ versus under the UCMJ.
Then what laws were broken if it is not insider trading?
Probably something related to leaking or unauthorized use of classified information.
> what laws were broken
"Van Dyke was indicted on charges that included unlawful use of confidential information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, and wire fraud."
How does this not apply to Trump and the rest of congress? Billions in market manipulation.
It’s a good question. I don’t know. Unfortunately, my circle is mostly in securities, and thus that is not.
Isn't this the purpose of Polymarket? To give a more accurate picture of what is going on/going to happen by giving insiders a financial incentive?
I thought so too. Giving people with insider info a chance to make a buck in ways they didn't have before.
Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote now applied.
Polymarket isn't doing anything about it. It's the US government because obviously while I suppose this info made a more accurate "prediction" it also yk, leaked confidential state military secrets which is something the government can prosecute. They're not being prosecuted for insider trading on Polymarket
Insider bets distort the probabilities, creating a conflict of interest and causing market manipulation. We don't let athletes bet on their own games, because some will deliberately lose. They will do this when the odds are good and they will make more money. So you don't get accurate predictions, because the more probable something is, the better the odds and the more money to be made by someone manipulating the odds.
End result is you place bets against things you want to happen. eg. USA invading Iran. If you win the bet, you make money. If you lose the bet, you still win because the USA invaded Iran. And maybe that happened because people in power took your bet and influenced the odds in their favor. A fully deniable market for bribes. Same reason you can't bet on unnatural death, because it crowdsources assassination.
Sure, but the purpose of the FBI is to go after people leaking classified military Intel.
Different people and organizations in this world have different goals. More news 10.
How is this illegal? Polymarket isn't a US-regulated market.
It's rather obviously illegal to leak classified intel by taking public actions based off of it... that's practically the meaning of the word "classified".
It is illegal to leak classified intel if you're just an average person.
If you're the Trump hand-picked Secretary of the War Department then it is not illegal and will never be punished.
Always remember which tier of justice you are on prior to committing a crime!
From the indictment, he's being charged with the following:
* Unlawful Use of Confidential Government Information for Personal Gain
* Theft of Nonpublic Government Information
* Commodities Fraud
* Wire Fraud
* Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1437781/dl
So had this not involved presumed military secrets, it would have been legal? So it was the classified info that made it a crime, and then the insider trading aspect was later tacked on? It's crazy how the government adds so many charges. This guy is screwed.
That's part of the Chesterton's Fence nature of why these markets are bad. We know insider trading is a bad thing for the stock market, so it's policed. These markets, being a post-regulation internet free for all, aren't.
Polymarket isn't being accused or charged with wrongdoing.
They directed the right size bri...consulting fee to Jr.
Not true, they lobbied very hard to be regulated under the CFTC because of its more relaxed rules