The fact that I can have a skill that is just general guidance on front end design best practices that an agent can call upon whenever they feel, and another that is essentially a run book of steps that need to be followed exactly only when explicitly triggered, and a third that is basically just instructions on how to use a specific tool and all of those are acceptable just feels wrong to me. I get why it caught on and why the flexibility is attractive when the entire world is collectively learning a new tool, but skills have come to feel like the junk drawer in the kitchen where you just throw random shit when you don't want to think about a better place to put it.

I would love to see the world standardize on something like:

- Agents: Essentially personalities for a model to take on. This becomes the new place for skills like "front end expert" where you're not telling an agent to do a specific thing, just to think in a certain way about a task.

- Prompts: Repeatable instructions for specific tasks that an agent should follow when prompted. This could be something like a checklist style run book on how to resolve a certain error that an agent needs to follow exactly or it could be something like here's an idea I have for a new feature please poke holes in it.

- Tools: Tools (like CLIs, MCPs, or scripts) and instructions on how and when to use them. I'm purposefully not calling this skills because I think the term is overloaded, but that's kind of what this is.

Polymarket is now two separate entities. Last year they were banned from the US and stopped taking on new US customers and made their site withdrawal only for anyone based in the US. You could bypass it with a VPN, but they did enough to at least look like they were complying.

They've now created a separate company that I believe is called Polymarket US which has it's own version of the site/app which they are using to re-enter the US market. This switched from invite only beta to open sign ups a few months ago.

Polymarket US is mainly just sports betting with a small number of crypto, commodities, and political election based markets, although they have said they plan to expand their market options. Their US based site almost certainly doesn't violate those rules. The version that is used outside the US is the one that has markets that violate that, but since they're not in the US, there's not much that can be done.

If (big if) I'm remembering that correctly, I don't get why we just go after the problem directly and do something like treat putting down collateral for these type of loans as a taxable event. I'm sure it's not as straight forward as it sounds, but I can't imagine it'd be more convoluted that needing to track the wealth of every high net worth individual.

Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I actually don't care if Jeff Bezos' net worth went up by $5 billion because Amazon had a good day in the market. If the shares are just sitting in an account doing nothing other than proving ownership it's all kind of just numbers in a computer, IMO. A painting is probably a better example than stock, but if I have a painting on my wall that was worth $1 million dollars yesterday and today it's worth $10 million that change in valuation is essentially meaningless as long as the only thing the painting is doing is hanging on my wall.

What I do care about is when he's able to access the cash value of that $5 billion of Amazon stock without paying the taxes that would come along with selling the stock. If he wants to leave $5 billion in Amazon stock just sitting in his account doing nothing until the day he dies, that's totally fine, but the second he puts it up for collateral we should tax that. I think this has the added benefit of simplifying things by avoiding a lot of questions around fair valuation of assets. If I have a $10 million dollar one of a kind painting on my wall that I'm never planning on selling, it's kind of hard to put a valuation on that and it can be easily manipulated by finding the right appraiser. If I put a painting up as collateral for a $10 million loan it becomes a lot harder for the owner to argue that it's actually worthless or the IRS to argue that it's actually worth $1 billion.

> Mathematically sound.

Don't most wealth taxes that have been proposed have a certain level of wealth that you pay no taxes on? If so, doesn't that make this at least partially incorrect?

Maybe I'm missing something, but if I have $100 and have to pay a 1% wealth tax on it then sure that's roughly 20%. If I have $100, but I only have to pay a 1% wealth tax on everything over $90 that's more like a 2% income tax.

To give an example, I wagered on a market a while ago that Trump would say "Mamdani" before the end of the week. He responded to a question Mamdani where the reporter asked about the mayor by name and Trump said "Mandami" instead of "Mamdani" (switched the m and n). Kalshi ruled that that didn't count as Trump having said the word.

Trump ultimately said Mamdani correctly the next day so it ended up not mattering and I think the rules have since been updated to accept obvious mispronunciations, but I think it's a good example of how much gray area some of these markets can have.

Someone calculates what they think the odds of an outcome happening are and then they allow people to take positions on either side at worse odds than what they think the real odds are. As long as their prediction is correct, over time they make money. It's why putting $1 on a 50/50 bet on a sportsbook will usually only pay out around $1.91 instead of $2 if you win.

If you are saying Kalshi isn't a sportsbook because the house isn't on the other side of the bet, you might as well argue that DraftKings isn't a sportsbook because they don't actually track your wagers in a book.

Yes, What MrBeast says on his next video is easy to fix, but so is something like betting on a D3 basketball player to have less than 10 points or some English 5th league soccer player to have a yellow card.

For the record, I'm actually a very active Kalshi user, but I cannot see how anyone can seriously argue that it's not sports betting.

It's like if someone killed my dog with 3d printed gun and so everyone started talking about banning or regulating 3d printers. It's like, yes, debating 3d printer regulation is probably a worthwhile debate to have, but regardless of where we end up on that it doesn't change the fact that that person killed my dog.

We should be having a debate as to whether there are certain things that are off limits to bet on, but regardless of where that debate goes, if a state has banned sports betting, it should be banned regardless of the platform.

On your second point, I don't disagree, but those issues aren't tied to prediction markets. Traditional online sportsbooks have allowed gambling on presidential and state elections for at least a decade now. Kalshi and Polymarket have taken this to the extreme, but they didn't start the fire.

We should be restricting what people can bet on regardless of the technology used. My concern with tying these two points together is that law makers will assume that solving problem one also solves problem two, when it doesn't. I'm worried that law makers will just outright ban prediction markets and go, "job done" leaving the door open to bring them back by creating some new gambling method that technically isn't a prediction market.

I don't want Polymarket allowing bets on whether we're going to war, but I also don't want DraftKings offering that bet. On the flip side, I frankly don't care if someone wants to bet on the Super Bowl, or the winner of Survivor, of how much rain New York will get tomorrow whether it's on Polymarket, or Kalshi, or DraftKings, or anywhere else. Prediction markets are how people are placing bets. I don't actually care how the bets are places, I care what is being bet on and I think most people would agree with that.

My guess would be that either A) that's tribal land and there's an exemption for that in the current laws or B) they have a casino, but don't offer sports betting or C) they only allow sports betting on the property by either requiring all bets to be placed in person or the app they offer is for sportsbetting is geo-fenced to their property (which is how states like WA do it)

Second, while yes, some of the markets available on prediction markets can push people to do awful things, there are plenty that are harmless. I'm cherry picking to make an extreme point, but I would so much rather have someone betting on what the temperature in Los Angeles is going to be tomorrow on Kalshi than betting on who will win the little league world series on DraftKings.

I support regulation saying certain things should not be allowed to be bet on, but allowing bets on morally questionable things isn't a quality unique to prediction markets.

Most major online sportsbooks have taken bets on the US presidential election for well over a decade. I can't imagine anyone really arguing that it's okay for DraftKings to offer that market, but not okay for Polymarket to offer it.

I put it somewhere else in this thread, but there are actually two different questions that need to be answered separately. Are prediction markets just sportsbooks by another name and are there certain things that we should not allow people to gamble on.

The argument around prediction markets always seems to squish those two into one which I think does people who want regulation a disservice. I think to most people, the answer to first question (are prediction markets just sportsbooks by another name) is a pretty resounding yes. The second question has a lot more room for debate though. Even if people agree that there should be things we don't allow people to bet on, there's still plenty to argue over where we draw the line. The problem is that as long as we mush these two together, people will use the disagreement over the second question to prevent action from being taken on the first.

That's kind of the point I was getting that. That's not really an argument about prediction markets, it's about what things should we be allowed to bet on.

I'm looking at FanDuel right now and I can bet on 1v1 eSports games of FIFA. The bets aren't even just who will win, but it's things like how many goals will a team score or who will score first. During the last Superbowl books were offering bets on things like what color tie the announcers would wear. I get that there's maybe a slight difference between that and betting on what words a sports announcer will say during the broadcast, but IMO, you're splitting hairs. They're both very easily to manipulate and very open to insider trading.

I think you probably agree with this, but IMO, there needs to be two separate conversations. One, are prediction markets sportsbooks by another name? Two, are there certain markets that we should not allow betting on?

Personally, I think the answer to both of those is yes, but I think if you smush them together into one conversation it makes things really messy.

There's the same upside as pretty much all other forms of gambling. Plenty of people enjoy it and it can be used to generate tax revenue for the state.

Don't get me wrong, there's tons of harm that can come from it, but the arguments to allow them are essentially the same arguments for allowing sports betting.

> EFFECTIVE DATE This section is effective August 1, 2026, and applies to crimes committed on or after that date.

We've seen a couple other states that allow sports betting go after prediction markets. Personally, I feel that any state that allows sports betting is going to struggle to argue a case to ban prediction markets because you're essentially arguing over implementation details. Even arguments that certain prediction markets are ripe for insider trading or morally wrong fall a bit flat when you realize that traditional sportsbooks let you bet on things like college basketball player props and the little league world series.

I'm still not sure Minnesota will win their case, but it feels like that detail gives them a lot better chance of winning compared to many other states.

538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible

I see you've never written any Go