'Dict Picks

Prediction Casinos, Jury Does Its Duty

I believe the increasing popularity of prediction markets will cause a gambling addiction scourge the likes of which we’ve never seen. I’m so sure of it, I might go to one of the prediction markets and lay down a bet. Because these days, you can bet on anything. “Prediction markets entice enterprising nerds to make and lose fortunes by wagering on everything from politics to the weather. Here’s why they’re unstoppable—and only getting more powerful.” Zoë Bernard in Vanity Fair: The CEOs of Kalshi and Polymarket Are Betting On the Most Hated Experiment in Business. (Alt link.) At a happy hour for one of the leading platforms, Kalshi, a group of mostly young men, in their 20s, were swapping tips and stories about their experiences in “a marketplace that, until recently, had existed in a legal gray zone. Many were making thousands a week speculating on highly specific fixations: whether the temperature would tick up by a single degree in Colorado next weekend, who would win the Coney Island hot dog eating contest, the gender of celebrity babies.” ... Yet only one person there mentioned the dirty word that everyone else had so carefully avoided ... ‘You’re writing about this, but you have no idea what this meeting is, do you?’ ‘What is it?’ I asked, leaning back to avoid his spittle. ‘This,’ he said, taking in the barroom of traders, ‘is just the latest Gamblers Anonymous meeting.’”

+ The data from these prediction markets can be valuable, as it taps into the wisdom of the crowd. NYT (Gift Article): Thousands of Amateur Gamblers Are Beating Wall Street Ph.D.s. But people aren’t just predicting, they’re betting. And they’re betting on in-pocket slot machines that deploy all the most addicting techniques from casinos, social media apps, and online games. Think of it as a ‘Dict-a-phone.

+ These prediction apps fall under a different federal jurisdiction from gambling apps. And they largely avoided sports betting (which is legal in some states, but not others). But something changed, and all bets were off. “Until early last year, Kalshi, the leading US prediction market startup, was using its status as a federally regulated financial exchange to offer niche financial contracts tied to pop culture events and elections. The agency overseeing all this, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, had indicated that so-called event contracts tied to sports were off limits. Then Donald Trump won the election. Kalshi tested the waters by offering its first wagers on the Super Bowl in early 2025 and the CFTC did not step in to stop them. Those first contracts were little more than an experiment, but sports have since come to account for more than 90% of the trading volume on Kalshi.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Gambling Stocks Sag as Prediction Markets Steal Super Bowl Bets.

+ If you’re predicting that the Trump administration will step in and slow the prediction market roll toward being full-on casinos and sportsbooks, you might want to first consider the involvement of a notable ‘Dicthead. NYT (Gift Article): Leading Prediction Firms Share a Commonality: Donald Trump Jr. “At the intersection of the prediction market industry and Trump world is Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. He is both an investor in and an unpaid adviser to Polymarket, and a paid adviser to Kalshi, the two biggest prediction markets. And he is a director of the Trump family’s social media company, which recently announced it would start its own platform called Truth Predict.” (These days, laying some money against Truth may be one safe bet you can make.)

2

Citizen Can

We’ve all been pretty disappointed at the lack of pushback on corruption and lawlessness from political officials and what we thought were our strongest institutions. But from the streets of Minneapolis to the courtrooms of Washington, we may be finally finding out who will save us: Citizens. NYT (Gift Article): Grand Jury Rebuffs Justice Dept. Attempt to Indict 6 Democrats in Congress. “It was remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington — led by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s — authorized prosecutors to go into a grand jury and ask for an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies. But it was even more remarkable that a group of ordinary citizens sitting on the grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.” This gives new meaning to Jury Duty.

+ “It’s exceedingly rare for a federal grand jury to reject prosecutors’ attempts to secure an indictment, since the process is stacked in the government’s favor.” But in this case, as a sign of just how insane this prosecution was, zero grand jurors found the Trump DOJ met low probable cause threshold

3

You’re On Candid Camera

“When Nancy Guthrie went missing, officials said she had a doorbell camera, but that it had been forcibly removed, and she did not have a subscription. This meant there were no videos stored in the cloud. Ten days later, the FBI released footage from the camera, which was revealed to be a Nest Doorbell, clearly showing the masked suspect. This is a huge break in the case and highlights the value of security cameras in solving crimes, even if their deterrent effect remains largely unproven. But it raises privacy concerns around how this supposedly ‘lost’ footage was recovered.” Why ‘deleted’ doesn’t mean gone: How police recovered Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell footage. This is like so many of today’s surveillance-related stories. It’s really good that Google was able to track down images that could help solve a crime. It’s really scary that everything we do is being recorded to that great hard drive in the sky, whether we opt in or not.

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It’ll All Come Out in the Wash

“Powered by encrypted messaging apps, anonymized platforms and a growing pool of people willing to move money for a cut, the system is agile, scalable and disturbingly hard to shut down. What began a decade ago as a fringe trend on dark-web bazaars is fast evolving into a sprawling global ecosystem of freelance money movers. Even the biggest criminal groups, long reliant on in-house laundering, are starting to tap it.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Drug Cartels Are Shifting Their Money Laundering to Crypto. Cops Can’t Keep Up. (I keep reading examples of how crypto is good for bad stuff, but what good is it for good stuff?)

5

Extra, Extra

B.C. Mass Shooting: “Nine people were killed and 27 more were injured after a mass shooting in the community of Tumbler Ridge, B.C.” Here’s the latest on the tragedy from CBC.

+ El Paso the Buck: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport. “Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, and officials from the White House and the Pentagon said Mexican cartel drones breached U.S. airspace, prompting the temporary closure of airspace over El Paso. But two people briefed by Trump administration officials said the shutdown was prompted by the Defense Department’s use of new counter-drone technology and concerns about the risks it could pose to other aircraft in the area.” (Weird not to be able to get a straight answer from these guys...)

+ Bridge Financing: “A Detroit billionaire met with Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, hours before President Trump said he would block the opening of a new bridge connecting Detroit to Canada, officials said.” NYT (Gift Article): Bridge Owner Lobbied Administration Before Trump Blasted Competing Span to Canada. (If you don’t think every decision and every post is driven by overt corruption, I’ve got a bridge that will never open to sell you...)

+ Five Ring Circus: The ex-girlfriend of the Olympian who expressed public regret for cheating isn’t ready to give the story a happy ending. “It’s hard to forgive. Even after a declaration of love in front of the whole world.” (This combination of Olympic sports with Love Island intrigue could actually work...) “The Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych has been warned that he faces disqualification from the Winter Olympics if he wears a ‘helmet of memory’ for his country’s war dead when the men’s competition starts on Thursday.” I wonder if there’s a lesson here: French biathlete guilty of fraud wins Olympic goldwhile scammed teammate comes 80th. This seems like a reasonable request: Olympic Photographers: Stop Doing The Lugers Dirty. And watching J.H. Klaebo ski uphill faster than many of us ski downhill is quite something.

+ External Revenue Service: “The Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, according to three people familiar with the situation, appearing to breach a legal fire wall intended to protect taxpayer data.” (The fire walls have been burned the ground.)

+ One Flu Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: “The vaccine maker Moderna said on Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration had notified the company that the agency would not review its mRNA flu vaccine, the latest sign of federal health policy that has become hostile to vaccine development.”

6

Bottom of the News

“More than 5,000 Stanford students have used Date Drop at a school with about 7,500 undergraduates ... The growth, fans say, reflects a reality about many college kids: They’re intimidated by real-life courtship and overwhelmed by the endless scroll of dating apps. Entrepreneurial students have found huge demand for alternate matchmaking tools.” A Stanford Experiment to Pair 5,000 Singles Has Taken Over Campus. “A student built a matchmaking algorithm that has consumed the school—and highlighted the challenges of finding love for high achievers.” (High achievers? Wait, I thought this was a story about Stanford, not Cal...)