And if LLMs can do it, then the information is freely available out there with a single google search. Time would be better spent on making infrastructure more resilient.
That doesn't follow. I can't google search, "are there any vulnerabilities in auth.go in this directory?" I can ask an LLM. And, if they find something, I can review it, and fix it, thus making infrastructure more resilient.
Local school districts know where they need more or fewer schools. This sort of thing isn't any business or responsibilty of the federal government at all.
>And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.
There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.
The last thing people should support is creating of profiles of individuals by combining data from different government agencies. This is why the census is so important as a data collection mechanism.
> There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.
This is an excellent point. In my opinion, such laws are a good idea. Most of the time, policy decisions should not require IRS data. (Or other personal data.)
But to get around such laws, the government asks citizens to provide that data a second time (in the census). And sometimes it's asked yet again on other forms. This seems to defeat the purpose of those laws.
I can see that federal disaster aid might need to know if some area needs more or less aid, depending on the wealth of the area receiving aid. If aid is given to individuals, the have a need to know the individuals' income.
When there is a reasonable need to know, I would prefer the government use the much more accurate IRS data, rather than ask for people's income multiple times. The laws preventing merging federal datasets could be rethought, given what is now known about preserving privacy mathematically. I would like to see specific exemptions made, with the provided data properly anonymized to preserve privacy while serving the legitimate purpose for which the data was requested. The use of such data should require a request to congress for it.
>Kalshi and Polymarket are mainly just sportsbooks.
How? They sell contracts between two users. One side each. Completely different from a sportsbook where users are betting that the lines they set are not correct.
If they sell contracts on market prediction, then any person doing for example insider trading on corporations, fixing outcomes of sport events, directly paying out others to force event outcome, blackmailing people, or just directly adjusting some result like the CDG weather guy are completely in line with the platform rules and all that is perfectly legal. But since Poly and Kalshi themselves admit that those things are "unfair" and forbidden they have themselves removed their "just a contract" status and transitioned to a gambling status, where indeed fixing matches is bad.
90% of the betting volume on Kalshi is betting on sports. I know how prediction markets work and how they're different that traditional sportsbooks, but they ultimately allow customers to do the same things.
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.
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 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.
Revenue is still growing faster than costs and gross margins have continued to improve.
The real question is when they can start spending less on R&D and still compete.
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