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as the article notes, prediction markets are regulated by the CFTC as a commodities futures contract, so I'm not sure how any state law survives a federal pre-emption challenge. On the other hand, it's a little unusual to see a federal agency suing to protect its turf. Would've expected a class action by a Minnesota user of the service to bring the challenge instead.


I'm curious to see how this works out, because sports betting is _not_ in the CFTC's remit, and Kalshi etc's argument that states can't regulate them because they're not technically sports betting is contrary to the spirit of the law


> because sports betting is _not_ in the CFTC's remit

Traditionally it has not been, but the current CFTC says that 'prediction bets on sports' ARE under their purview. This has not been fully challenged in court, though.


If Congress intended for the CFTC to regulate sports betting, it would have had that language in the act that originated the agency. It's telling that only recently the CFTC has discovered such authority. No previous leadership of the CFTC read the act to mean what the current leadership thinks it means.


This is 2026. We don’t need your stinking laws.


What if CFTC would start to claim they are allowed to regulate online casinos or online poker? I feel that would be about as non-sensical.


There’s no “house” or “book” aspect to Kalshi. They are nothing more than contracts that are bought and sold between individuals.


Lots of types of contracts bought and sold between individuals are prohibited by law.


They problem is the federal government considers these particular contracts are generally legal, and the states have no authority.


Have you heard of Betfair? A UK company which has done "prediction markets" since 2000. In the Europe it is called a betting exchange and regulated like sports betting. And betting pools is another form of betting which is way older than that and there are no house in them either.

And by your argument poker or backgammon would not be gambling either.


>And by your argument poker or backgammon would not be gambling either.

They aren't. A sportsbook explicitly sets lines and you are betting that the line they set is incorrect.


How do they make money?


Just like other exchanges.

They charge trading fees.


They also place their own bets within their own market. They don't just make money on trading fees.


A different entity provides liquidity.

There’s no house like in sportsbooks.


And there is no house in pool betting, poker or backgammon either. We still count all of them including betting exchanges (what has now been rebranded as prediction markets) are still normally regulated as gambling.


Not in the US.


Is there any state that allows organized poker tournaments, but not gambling or sports betting?


Sounds like a glaringly obvious conflict of interest?


Of course it is, people will do whatever they can get away with.


Be careful, the market makers always win. If you go against them, you make yourself a target.


Kalshi does not trade against its users.



Kalshi definitely does this

They just don't make any money off it.


What about the special partners that put up bets that are basically just methods to launder the fact that there's a house?


> it's a little unusual to see a federal agency suing to protect its turf.

This is Don Jr's consulting fee at work.


This should not be downvoted and is a legitimate criticism. Trump Jr. has a "special advisory role" in both Kalshi and polymarket. It would track with this administration to deploy a rapid defense of a corruption generation market where the current president's son is getting paid off by the two main competitors in the market.


Nevada was able to get it banned. The casino pull is huge.



Bizarre and baffling -- an entire post about AI agents for coding and not a single mention of OpenAI, Codex, or ChatGPT (any model). Not that I'm shilling for them in any way, but the consensus among Twitterati is that Codex is better and it's weird that it's not even mentioned as an option?


more than history -- early, massive investment in OpenAI by Microsoft and formerly their exclusive compute provider.

This stood out to me too, seems like a months-long project with heavy use of Claude


seems like "not yet" is the answer from other comments


the victim did have a choice of lawyers, far beyond a "luxury." Don't know if you live in the US or not, but it's hard to avoid personal injury attorney advertising in virtually every forum. More specifically, there are 426 PI lawyers listed in the Superlawyers directory for the Detroit area, and they claim to only list the top 5% of practicing attorneys. The plaintiff here could easily dump this guy and get someone else, for free, especially this early in the lawsuit when the complaint has just been filed.


This isn't a PI case and she couldn't "easily" get someone else for free. Maybe you're thinking she could get an attorney to take the case on a contingency basis, but that's not "free."


there is no court where I have ever practiced that would accept a watermark of any kind at whatever percentage or color. And he didn't need to ask, it's right there in the rules (state and local). Every court has extremely detailed requirements for font, size, line spacing, line numbering, color of cover for printed "chambers copies," size of margins, how the name of the court should be set out and where, and so on. Literally no excuse for this, he's lucky he didn't get sanctioned


What a fascinating cultural difference. In my corner of the world there's a Facebook page, the name of which translates to "Half-assed court documents" and it showcases badly made documents issued by courts.


you really have to try it. On a flight to Hawaii in October, I was getting speeds of 300+ mbps and latency that felt like my home wifi. It's just seamless and feels like an entirely different product than any other connectivity I've had in the air.


Bad analogy. Sam has no stock in OpenAI or any sort of formal controlling interest. His power is solely informal: his own talents and abilities and the loyalty of the other employees. Regardless of the truth of the matters, the episode is a perfect example of the limits of formal authority and how informal or "soft" power can be even more effective in shaping events


The point is that board coups are a concept that people are already familiar with, so its not surprising that they thought of it when this similar situation happened.


Did you read the article which points out specifically that he is financially incentivized?


Only in the innovation fund thing, not the company at large (going solely off the article)


Maybe it's because I'm American, but my first thought was ... there's a separate building and it's just the stairs? So if they sold it, how would the people in the building next door get up and down?

How does a structure that's just stairs have a separate title that can be sold? The entire premise of this is so incomprehensible to me.

Brits -- is this a common thing?


> How does a structure that's just stairs have a separate title that can be sold?

You can sell any subdivision of land. Happens all the time, e.g. a house on a large plot of land is demolished and the land divided into land for multiple new houses. Or two neighbours might exchange some land if the border is not convenient. Is this not a thing in the US?


In the US, at least in most places, you can’t subdivide your land at will. When you buy a piece of land, it’s worth more if it’s zoned such that it can legally be subdivided.


It certainly is.

What parent is asking is whether selling just the stairs in a building, or happenstances to that effect, are common in Britain.


It’s not common, that’s why there’s a news article about it.

But they aren’t buying the stairs. The stairs are worthless. They’re buying the land underneath.

As far as I understand the stairs are disconnected from the adjacent property and unused.

edit: here’s the first article when it was still up for sale: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/30/step-to-rich...


They aren’t buying the land either, it’s a leasehold.


> Brits -- is this a common thing?

No this is a London thing because London property prices are ridiculous. For the price of a London bedsite you'd be able to buy a detached house in most other places in the UK.


It's a "disused stairwell," so presumably, the building it serviced has a different stairwell now.

More about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/30/step-to-rich...


Agreed, it seems like the article is missing some background that most people won't have.


Amazon's investment in Alexa is a perfect example of why Apple didn't (and shouldn't have) invested all of their resources into Siri. The Alexa team is getting seriously gutted in these rounds of downsizing [1], or as CNBC puts it "the team behind the technology was a prime target of the largest layoffs in the company’s history."

What they have been invested heavily in is the Apple Neural Engine ("ANE"), special silicon right on the SoC to handle ML / AI code. Optimize on a server, then run the model on your iPhone or probably soon, your Apple Watch.

WWDC this year is going to be very, very important.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/06/amazon-fully-committed-to-al...


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