Personally, I have no notion of what it's like to have standards, which is why I never bothered to learn the difference between "it's" and "its", or to think about anything on a deeper level than Econ 101.

Do you believe that there is anything that is legal yet immoral? If an industry is legal, is it automatically good to dedicate your life to growing and spreading it to all corners of society, so long as it makes you money? Do you think this guy left the world a better place?

Less polemically...

> I do dislike the effect OnlyFans has had on society but I think it's a symptom, not a cause.

What do you think is the underlying cause or causes?

There is no such thing as a healthy or unhealthy society. Only money. This guy made a lot of it. What a hero. All of us here on the orange site should aspire to his level of genius. Ha ha ha funny songs, silly walks.

So your defense of OF only real works if you think that an explosion of commercialized sex has no negative effect on our culture, or if you (stupidly) believe that the rate of sex work is an immutable constant, impervious to laws, technology, or social contagion.

Libertarianism is willful ignorance, and taken this far, it's a brain disease.

> cutting out a whole industry of truly skeezy, immoral middlemen distributors

This argument only makes sense if you blindly model the amount of degrading dreck as a constant, unaffected by technology and opportunities. Again, brain disease.

Oh, and before OF, Radvinsky was facilitating child porn and bestiality. Were the children and animals being empowered, too? Should they have taken responsibility?

So here, your hypothetical already diverges from the story under discussion. As far as I can tell from TFA, it is not someone from Iran / Hamas / another adversary who is threatening this journalist, out of some war-related motivation. It's some clique of bettors on Polymarket, motivated by money. (In fact, they present themselves as Israeli: named Haim, speaking Hebrew. This could easily be an alias, but if they are able to threaten this guy's family, the implication is that they have at least one member on the ground in Israel, and are unlikely to be an "enemy combatant" as in your hypothetical.)

For most of us on here, we're able to set aside the wartime setting of this story, which is a fine topic for discussion in any number of other forums, and look at what is new and novelly concerning about the story at hand. Namely, this story shows an alarming new side effect of prediction markets, which are an exploding new industry with in tech. This is a tech forum, where we occasionally try to be critical about the downstream effects of what we're building.

We are also able to imagine other bets in the future, unrelated to any war, where resolution depends similarly on judgement calls from journalists, and where threats might be inspired. Thus, the war, tragic and important and concerning as it may be, is not the main focus of our discussion here. The journalist was threatened not by Iran, not by any analogue of the Viet Cong, but by bettors.

Now, what exactly do hersko and I mean when we say that you need to log off?

This is where it gets tricky and it might feel "ad hominem" as you say, but I hope that I've addressed your argument itself adequately above.

We're not talking so much about your specific news sources, as your mindset. "Log off" is less about the internet itself, and more a claim that we are seeing symptoms of a hyperfocused and closed mind. Something in your worldview has prevented you from reading this article critically, and understanding what is at stake beyond the issues that already had you animated. Something has mutated this story within your brain into one where the people making the threats were combatants, not bettors.

I also see some tinges of being unable to model any viewpoint that disagrees with your own. I can't see your original comment because somebody flagged it, but within this latest one you write, "Anyone who is even halfway educated already knows that it's an unjustified war". This is inaccurate. There were educated Americans who supported the Vietnam War. Do you understand what their reasons were? Their actual reasons, not just the ones passed down to us by boomer history? Are you even curious?

The world is not all black-and-white.

> you mean bury my head in the sand and stop following current events?

By no means. It is good to stay informed. But be wary that filter bubbles are not contained to the internet. A filter bubble can include mainstream news networks and sources.

Lastly, to throw you a bone:

Maybe there's an argument for how war factors into this story, in more than just an incidental way. Something like, "war generally increases the mood of tension and desperation". Or, "kinetic war is usually accompanied by information war, such that reporting starts to feel subjective among all the propaganda". Maybe this helped the bettors here get tied to their chosen version of events emotionally, not just economically, and feel justified in putting out these threats.

But this is not the argument that you made, IIRC. (FWIW, I don't think you should have been flagged. Flagging gets overused here. You didn't say anything offensive or inflammatory.)

As to your exact proposal, I do have some criticism (less hostile this time). I don't think it would be easy to get people to do trades when they can't see the price. It's not enough to just ask everybody for limit orders, and then only pair off the ones that cross, because you're asking people to tie up capital on a trade they don't even know the price of.

Basically, somebody does a trade on a prediction market not because he believes he knows the probability, but because he believe he knows it better than the market.

Is there a way in your proposal to get around this limitation?

― Chuck Norris

> At no point do I say the oracle target should be private

Yeah, that's why I said that Case 1 (the one where you actually read TFA) was unlikely. I included it out of charity, because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment.

Instead, your original said stuff like:

> they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity

> no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side

> where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"

These things are not at issue in TFA. You are talking about completely different news stories. So now, we're in Case 2, the more likely case, where your comment has nothing to do with the news story under discussion, and you're just injecting your irrelevant fixation.

In case you didn't notice, I was replying to a commenter who exposed your irrelevance:

"The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor."

Did you read... his comment? My comment? TFA?

(Nit: I believe that in venture contexts, LP = "limited partners". A "liquidity provider" usually means the same thing as a market maker, at which point you're talking about the secondary / listed / public markets.)

The people and venture funds that officially owned FTX were a narrower group, and I assume they were all qualified investors. But the thing about our disclosure regime is that protecting the official owners of the company is only one goal, the one that serves as the pretext. Informally, various regs on public companies are designed to bring sunlight more generally, and to prevent a wider array of crimes and shenanigans than just defrauding the company's owners. Public companies also have rules and norms around governance which, had FTX been been subject to them, would have made a difference.

> It seems the private/public split along the lines of "public companies should be more scrutinized" worked as intended.

Only if the intention was also, "...and public companies should be an ever-shrinking share of the economy". There are a number of reasons why one might not have intended that. Ordinary investors miss out on early growth, and the good side-effect of general sunshine and governance norms only covers a sliver of the economy, missing many of the most dynamic firms that could use some scrutiny.

Note that FTX, for example, was privately held. If it had been born in the nineties, the norm would be for it to go public, and have at least a modicum of disclosure; staying private would have been weird, a red flag. Instead, "our generation's Enron" had no public markets oversight whatsoever, SOX or otherwise.

So yeah, it's necessary to find a balance. You are choosing between a little regulation on a lot of companies, or a lot of regulation on a smaller and smaller chunk of the economy each year.