Hacker News: brainwad

New comment by brainwad in "Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114,000 Lives a Year, Yale Study"

brainwad — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:05:58 +0000

Presumably not; the same national income would just be redistributed from shareholders to insurees (or shareholders of companies that pay for employee health insurance).

New comment by brainwad in "Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114k Lives a Year, Yale Study"

brainwad — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:03:03 +0000

This could equally be explained by wanting to be perceived as more moderate/centrist. Which would make sense for someone in a leadership position.

New comment by brainwad in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

brainwad — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:29:03 +0000

The NV link doesn't work either. I suspect geoblocking.

That study is measuring the effect of the introduction of _any_ modern online betting to these jurisdictions; before it was legalised there was no equivalent other than going to a casino or racetrack. But that genie can't be put back in the bottle just by restricting sports betting to sports books, as NY is asking for, now that all sorts of other prop bets are available as substitutes (and also sports betting on state-licensed sites). IMO regulators should focus on forcing the market makers to offer tighter spreads so prediction markets (and options etc.) are less negative-expectation for retail punters.

New comment by brainwad in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

brainwad — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:32:55 +0000

I can't read your link (it 403s), but there's no fundamental line separating things that are clearly financial instruments but are nonetheless cash-settled derivatives on binary propositions (e.g. credit default swaps), ones that are clearly not financial but also not sports gambling (weather/political prediction markets) and things that are pretty obviously sports gambling (most of Kalshi). The form of these are all identical and so ought to be regulated identically.

I also don't see why _sports_ betting is so especially bad - even if New York were successful here, Kalshi would still be able to offer it's degenerate gamblers all sorts of stupid bets in culture, politics, weather, etc. When I grew up, the only thing you could bet on was horses and dogs... so the gamblers were really into form guides and horses. If the only thing they could gamble on was politics and news markets, they would just obsess over that instead.

New comment by brainwad in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

brainwad — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:09:47 +0000

There no requirement to be long the underlying before buying them though. And most people trading options aren't using them this way. Hedging is a legitimacy figleaf for options, everyone knows that most of the volume is in speculation, especially from retail.

New comment by brainwad in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

brainwad — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:06:06 +0000

If you consider not just money, but utility, then there is already a lot of pre-existing risk that sports derivatives could hedge. Theoretically, fans should short their team to be utility-neutral whether their team wins or loses. However in practice fans tend to double down by adding monetary risk to their pre-existing emotional risk...

New comment by brainwad in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

brainwad — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:58:31 +0000

It falls out of regulating OTC swaps as commodities derivatives, even when they are not actually derivative of a commodity (e.g. forex swaps or credit default swaps). If whether a set of bonds defaults by a certain date is a commodity, then any factual proposition is also a commodity if someone constructs a swap around it.

New comment by brainwad in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

brainwad — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:56:02 +0000

Everyone points to the gaming exemption, but is that not supposed to cover, well, games - the classic casino table games like blackjack, poker, craps, roulette, etc? I don't really see how horse or sports betting is gaming.

New comment by brainwad in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"

brainwad — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:45:06 +0000

But federal law preempts state law, and the federal regulator, the CFTC, has now decided that prediction market contracts are indeed swaps if you think about it, and thus under their regulation. If you believe the latter, then New York has no business trying to separately regulate Kalshi as a sports book.

New comment by brainwad in "Incentives are for losers"

brainwad — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:20:38 +0000

I wouldn't normally call a license key a resource. But to the extent I entertain the hypothetical: illegal windows unlocks aren't scarce, only the legal keys are, because the scarcity is purely legal. People pay for the legal keys to stay on the right side of the law.

> Oil is typically a good example as the Saudi could pump twice as much oil whenever they like (and still have oil when we phase out oil consumption as we move to EV).

A brave take when Saudi production is currently massively curtailed due to events out of their control. Sure _pumping_ is cheap, but that's only helpful if you want to consume the oil at the well head. Otherwise the true scarcity is in the whole supply chain. Resources are scarce because even if the reserves exist, extracting and distributing them is hard.

New comment by brainwad in "Incentives are for losers"

brainwad — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:34:21 +0000

Incentives are also for when a principal just doesn't care about the difference between two possible choices. But maybe other people indirectly do, and an incentive like price can weigh the scales so that people indifferent to the choice choose the right one.

New comment by brainwad in "Incentives are for losers"

brainwad — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:27:55 +0000

If resources are not scarce in industrial civilisation, why do you suppose people pay for them? Why is there a spot oil market, if oil is not scarce? And the same for all other commodities...

New comment by brainwad in "A Sick People"

brainwad — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:18:11 +0000

Well, for one, the world changes around us in ways that necessitate innovation. But even if it didn't, if life can be better, why wouldn't you want that?

New comment by brainwad in "EU enforces labeling AI generated content"

brainwad — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:55:53 +0000

Similar regulations requiring tagging of sponsorships didn't do anything; people just got used to publicly posted content having that warning.

New comment by brainwad in "Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner [video]"

brainwad — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:01:59 +0000

Train carriages, especially older ones, often have metallic windows so they are even worse than a typical plane. Even right up against the window, with the phone directly against it I have failed to get any lock on some trains.

New comment by brainwad in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

brainwad — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:10:42 +0000

The latest and greatest internally at Google is more or less just Antigravity 2.0 with the latest Gemini models.

New comment by brainwad in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

brainwad — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:08:56 +0000

I don't know about Chromium specifically, but in general Google requires 2 humans to have looked at every change (normally one is the author, but not necessarily for bot-authored changes).

New comment by brainwad in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

brainwad — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:00:56 +0000

It's called fraud because the ad host colludes with (or directly controls) the botnet to get lots of clicks on ads hosted on their sites, making them money at the expense of advertisers.

If you just want to spam clicks on ads you don't financially be edit from, go for it.

New comment by brainwad in "Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History"

brainwad — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:58:07 +0000

I would pay a premium for it. The direct flight is still better than being interrupted halfway through your "night", and then having to trudge through a huge transfer airport just to get on another plane for another 8-14h. Also, the direct flight will be able to set the cabin lights and meal schedule optimally for you, unlike the stopover flights. And it's several hours quicker.

The downside is that it doesn't scale beyond the biggest city pairs: you'd need N^2 direct flights vs 2N flights via a hub.

New comment by brainwad in "Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History"

brainwad — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:33:40 +0000

Yes they would. That's why we get massive queues for alpine crossings during European holidays – German and Dutch tourists trying to get to the beaches in Italy.