Most of the world, including the places the US is currently deployed, can't even afford the armour being warn by US soldiers, let alone fancy robotic killing machines.
Exactly. Those "fancy robotic killing machines" won't have very many people to kill, because no one would be stupid enough to fight them. Even a suicide bomber wants to have "helped the cause" when he blows himself up. If a robot is destroyed, we simply field a new one. What good does fighting do, if you can't possibly win?
With no one fighting back, these robots won't have to kill anyone.
Instead of fighting a head on war against the kill bots they would use guerrilla and terrorist tactics like the IRA did against the British.
That (sorta) worked for the IRA. But England and Ireland are neighbors. The difficulty in mounting and sustaining a terrorist campaign half a world away is much more difficult; as evidenced by the fact that we aren't experiencing terrorist attacks here. Terrorism can work, but usually only when you're on your home turf.
Your people sitting in bunkers operating drones may not be killed or injured, but their kids at the shopping mall will die just as easily as ever when the bomb goes off.
For every 1 American who dies in Iraq, at least 100 Iraqis die. That's about as lopsided a casualty count as you can get in a war (without robots). Where are these shopping mall bombings in the US today? And, why do you think there will be any more when the ratio improves to 100:0?
And yet despite all the years of claims that some non-western country that supposedly has no taboos about using nukes, not a single of them have actually used them.
That's because there's no such thing as a taboo against using certain weapons. Countries simply recognize that it would not be in their best interest to use them.
While it would take soldiers out of the line of fire and reduce casualties, it would also make pointless, bloody wars a lot more palatable to the populace, and far easier to justify...
With robot soldiers, there wouldn't be quite so many "bloody wars" though, would there?
To me, it feels wrong to take the personal aspect out of war. If you are going to fight a war, the least you can do is actually do the fighting.
No, the point of fighting a war is to win. You do everything you have to, in order to assure victory. If that means fighting with remote controlled robots, that's what you do to gain the advantage. You use the means at your disposal to fight, because that's what the other guy is doing.
The mentality behind it seems to be:"I believe in this enough to kill others, but I don't want to sacrifice my own life for it."
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." --George S. Patton
Not so good to be on the human victims side if the aggressor side has absolutely no chance of injury or death.
If the "aggressor" has no chance of injury or death, what's the point in resisting?
In the face of overwhelming military superiority (a virtually unlimited supply of kill-bots, operated by people safely located thousands of miles away), there is no fight. And, with no fight, there are no casualties on either side.
Now, I haven't really figured out who decides what is ethical or not, but I'm pretty sure it's not you.
Well... Yeah, I do decide what is ethical, for me. So does everyone else. Even if there were some sort of oracle which could tell me the ethical thing to do, I'd have to make the choice to act upon it, which would require some sort of meta-ethics. Those meta-ethics couldn't come from the oracle (because I'm still trying to decide if I should listen to it at all); they are internal to myself. So, yeah, ultimately, I decide what is ethical, for me. And, you for you.
Any forms? So, according to you, I'm unethical for using apt-p2p for my Ubuntu updates?
I'm pretty sure that's not what he's saying, at all. He's simply pointing out that just because something is legal, does not necessarily make it ethical. Basically, whether or not something is legal, has little, if anything, to do with whether it is ethical.
Try integrating drawings in your text with Word or OO, it is awful. Word 2003 plants a giant drawing canvas in the middle of the page. Laying out text with graphs and getting anything sensible looking is worse. Ask a typeface geek about typefaces. Ask Edward Tufte if default page layouts are anything approaching decent.
I'm not exactly saying that there isn't room for improvement in word processing. There is. But, for the vast majority of people, the benefit they receive from the network effect of having a widely-compatible word processor outweighs the benefits they would get from the improvements you mention.
If we could start over from scratch, and disregard all the network effect value in the current system, we could design, implement, and deploy a vastly improved word processor. But, as we can't just disregard all that network value, we're probably stuck with what we've got until a set of killer-features become so attractive, that people are willing to trade the network value for those features.
You can't easily force that change on people, as can be seen from Vista and DTV.
When have we seen any real innovation? It is like we got to Word and everything stopped.
We haven't seen real innovation in a while. But, there's a good reason for that: First, there isn't a whole lot that a modern word processor can't do already. And second, major changes would, most likely, bring additional incompatibility, lowering the value added by the network effect.
In short, people just don't value many new features highly enough to give up the huge value that interoperability brings. It's pretty much the same reason it took so long to improve upon analog color TV. Sometimes "good enough" is good enough.
Kind of sad how few Word processors there are these days. Even on your list at least four of them are based on the same code and two of them are Office.
I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing. Word processors have a pretty big network effect, especially in business. So long as the same document format is rendered differently on different word processors (no matter how small that difference), there will be an incentive to standardize on a handful.
Given the percentage of Chinese coders in comparison to US, they still did roughly twice as good.
That might be true, if the coders participating in the competition were a representative sampling of the whole population of coders from each country. But, I don't think there's any reason to think that is the case.
It's like arguing that South Korea, as a nation, is better at baseball than the US, just because they won the gold in Beijing.
Yes, you're absolutely right. I'm not defending his actions.
But, I think this issue is much more complex than a simple (*snicker*) philosophical one. These kinds of things lie at the intersection of philosophy, brain chemistry, and evolutionary and social pressures.
Most people do look outside themselves to evaluate the accuracy of their internal self-image, because, most of the time, it works. It's a valuable feedback mechanism. If you just got fired from your job because you're chronically late or very lazy, you may want to reevaluate the parts of your self-image that relate to your work-ethic or punctuality. If you get a raise, it's most likely that you're pretty good at your job. Most of the time, reality is a powerful and accurate feedback mechanism.
But, sometimes a person's feedback mechanism can backfire. A bunch of bad stuff can happen to you all at once. Normally, you'd be able to cope with any of it individually, but, as it all happens in a short span of time, you look for a common cause, almost by reflex. Sometimes, a person incorrectly judges the cause of those events to be himself, simply because of the weight of circumstantial evidence: it all happened to him.
At this point, a healthy person will most likely take a closer look at the circumstances of these painful events, and upon conscious consideration, come to the conclusion that they weren't all his fault (even if they actually were). But, someone who's depressed or prone to depression, may reach the exact opposite conclusion.
Eventually, that person may decide that the only way to prevent himself from causing any more harm, is to end his life. You can't lay the blame at the feet of his philosophy alone. It only makes sense, in a limited way, when you look at it as the result of a combination of influences and a complex chain of causation.
You get too hung up on that material bullshit, to the point where you take your own life rather than alter your social circumstances? That's pathetic.
If you think that most job-related suicides have anything to do with material possessions, you're mistaken. Often, a person's job is the only thing in his life that is working at all. For most people, a job is more than a simple paycheck, it's a source of self-esteem, and feelings of potency, competence, and respect.
If every facet of your personal life takes a huge dump on you, you might start feeling powerless. But, if you have a job where you can feel powerful and in control, it's easy to recognize that those feelings of powerlessness are a result of those circumstances, that you are not intrinsically powerless.
But, take away that job, and the emotional support it brings, and you may just have removed the last thing standing between healthily handling life's disappointments, and believing that you are fundamentally powerless to affect change for the better, in your life.
It's very easy, at that point, to stop seeing yourself as a resilient victim of circumstance, and begin to recognize that perhaps the only common thread in all your life's problems is you. For some people, that's when the line is crossed, and suicide is contemplated. It has nothing to do with material possessions, just feelings of guilt and powerlessness.
But if you really are/that/ stressed about your job [...]
It might not have anything to do with on-the-job stress. It seems that there were some other things going on in his life at the time. Lots of people, when their personal lives go to shit, begin to define themselves, more and more, by their jobs. When the rest of their life sucks, their job is where they are valuable, potent, skilled, respected, and needed.
If you lose that, and you begin to think that your job performance is just as terrible as your performance in the rest of your life, That's when you find people at risk for suicide; they've just had their last leg kicked out from underneath them.
For some people, a job is the only good thing in their life. Failing at that, as they perceive they've failed at every other aspect of life, is sometimes enough to drive someone over the edge. And no, a job at McDonald's won't mitigate that feeling.
There is a difference though, in that the bid/ask spread can be negligibly low compared to the stock price, while the bookmaker will make sure that the odds he gives allow him a certain minimum profit.
I think that has more to do with the structure and size of the betting market vs. the stock market, than it does with the nature of the instrument itself. If the betting market was as active, liquid, and large as the stock market, competition between bookmakers would bring the vig down to levels comparable to the bid/ask spread in the stock market.
To illustrate this, take a look at the spread on a low-volume, low-market cap stock, compared to a high-volume, high-market cap one. There are some stocks (at some times) which make a bookie's 10% vig look like a bargain. It's all dependent upon the trading activity of the stock. I would imagine that you'd find that the large Vegas sports books collect a smaller vig than your neighborhood bookie for exactly the same reason.
My problem is that the label gambling generally carries a negative moral connotation, which most certainly shouldn't be applied to a game where you make money in the long run (that goes double for people who say that the stock market is just gambling).
I certainly agree that the type of gambling you're talking about should not have a negative moral connotation.
But, if you look closely at the situation, every bet has someone on the other side. If you know the odds are stacked so heavily in your favor, aren't you really taking advantage of the other guy's ignorance? In fact, some people may consider taking advantage of another human being in such a fashion more morally reprehensible than simply making a -EV bet.
Not that I actually feel that way. I think a sucker deserves to lose his money. But, it's an interesting perspective which muddies the entire moral issue.
What I was trying to do way up there was limit the definition of gambling so that games which any rational person would play would not be included.
That's kind of my point: What rational person would take the other side of your bet? So, your game requires at least one irrational person to participate. That would make your hypothetical game gambling, by your definition.
Now you can say that these people are all gamblers, or all investors, but I find it hard to argue that the ones who traded options contracts (but not stock) are investors, while the ones who traded prediction contracts (but not stock) are gamblers.
I reluctantly agree. It seems that my own "intuitive understanding" of what separates gambling from investing was faulty, though not quite for the reasons you state. I can't really draw a distinction between gambling and investing at all.
Here's what changed my mind: life insurance. A life insurer goes to great lengths to make sure that, on average, it collects more in premiums than it pays out in benefits. That's how it makes a profit. So, it's a -EV activity for the insured, and by your definition, would qualify as gambling. And, nothing changes hands but money, so it's gambling by my definition. But, I don't think life insurance is gambling. My definition must be wrong, or there really is no distinction between gambling and "legitimate" economic activity.
Really, options are simply a form of insurance. There are two kinds of people in the options market: hedgers, and speculators. Hedgers are looking for protection from risk, like a person buying life insurance, and are willing to accept a -EV to get it. A speculator is looking to accept the EV from the hedger, just like an insurance company, in exchange for bearing the speculative risk which the hedger did not want. If life insurance is gambling, then so is the options market.
Now, as to the actual stock market, the same principle applies. A person who owns a stock is bearing some amount of risk as long as he holds that stock (assuming
It's my understanding that when you go to a bookie, you get different odds on each outcome, so you do not have the ability to bet for A and against A at the same odds.
Ah so, ah so... It seems I don't know as much about sports betting as I thought I did. That makes more sense, otherwise a bookie wouldn't really make any money. I think I had confused the procedure for odds betting, with that for betting with a line (where you basically pay the bookie a fixed vig off the top).
But, I think this only strengthens the similarity to the stock or prediction market. This disparity in the odds is exactly the same as the bid/ask spread in a market. Just as you cannot simultaneously bet for and against a particular outcome and come out even, you cannot simultaneously buy and sell a prediction market contract (or stock) and expect to be even. The mechanism may be different, but the result is the same.
They are all set so that the cost of the buying the options is higher than your intrinsic value.
They are all priced higher than their intrinsic value right now. I don't understand the difference you see between buying a share of stock which you believe the market has undervalued, and buying an undervalued option contract.
My main point is that, when investing, an actual thing (albeit an electronic "thing", in the case of options) changes hands. An option contract is the option to buy or sell a share of stock at a predefined price; money changes hands, along with the stock (potentially). There's nothing that is exchanged with a prediction market contract other than money.
Yet people still buy them because it is not the intrinsic value which drives the options market, but the speculative value, exactly as in the prediction market.
Not quite. The options market is driven by speculation on the future value of the underlying asset; in the prediction market, there is no underlying asset. It's just money changing hands. So, the options market doesn't fit my definition of gambling.
And yet it is far, far safer than putting your money in any investment, which clashes with the intuitive understanding that gambling is somehow riskier than investing.
I think the reason that a bet, like the one you described, doesn't fit into peoples' intuitive understanding of gambling, is because no one would ever offer a bet with that kind of pay-out. Anyone who did, wouldn't be doing so for long, as they would soon end up broke. Gambling is seen as necessarily risky, because risky bets are the kind most commonly offered.
A platypus doesn't fit into many peoples' "intuitive understanding" of a mammal, but that doesn't make it any less of one. It, and mammals like it, are simply uncommon. But, they're more common than bets like the one you describe.
The bookmaker, if he wants to make a profit, sets the odds at slightly worse than fair value (fair value being what an open market would set them at).
Of course that's true. But, the same principle is true of a stock or prediction market as well: the bid/ask spread. If I were to simultaneously buy and sell a share of stock, I would end up losing money, because I would have bought the stock for the ask price, and sold for the bid price (that's in addition to any commissions the broker charges).
The safest market 'bet' gives you 0 EV, while the safest bookie bet gives you negative EV.
Well, that's not true. Let's say a bookie is offering 20:1 odds that an event will happen (it doesn't matter what that event is, or even what the actual odds of that event happening are). I place a bet of $1 on that event happening, which would pay out $20 if it does. And, I place a bet of $20 on that event not happening, which would pay $1. If the event happens, I win $20 from the first bet, but lose $20 on the second. If it doesn't happen, I win $1 from the second bet, but lose $1 on the first. There's no way I can lose, or win money. The EV for that portfolio of bets is 0.
In the case of a bookie's odds, yes. I was mainly talking about odds for most casino games, which are fixed by the laws of probability and the profit margin the casino wishes to see.
Then, in that case, the house always sets the odds in its favor. But a casino isn't comparable to a prediction market at all, unless you're talking about the casino's sports book, or any other type of parimutuel wagering.
That's a fair definition, but I wonder in which bin you would put something like stock options.
A stock option is simply a contract between two parties. It's an asset which has some "intrinsic" value. The ability to purchase or sell a stock for a guaranteed price has real, measurable value: the difference between the spot price of the stock and the option's strike price. The speculation in stock options is only over how much that guarantee is worth. So, options aren't gambling.
I also have to point out that under your definition, a game with, say, a 70% chance of you winning 1$ and a 30% chance of you losing 1$ could be considered gambling. This makes little sense to me intuitively, since the chances of you losing money drop exponentially the longer you play, and thus do not fit the traditional notion of gambling.
Yes, of course that's gambling. There's nothing changing hands except for money. Just because it is a good bet, doesn't make it any less of a bet.
Yes, that's right, although there are fundamental differences between betting and Intrade in other aspects. See my reply to porges.
From your reply to porges:
It's because the contract's price is not random at all, but determined by market demand for the contract.
So are the odds which a bookmaker offers. Both the price of a contract and the odds on a bet are determined by supply/demand pressures from the traders/gamblers. If the contract price isn't "random", than neither are the odds. Odds are as much set by the market as the price of a prediction market contract.
In this instance, the difference is that you can research the subject of the contract to make a determination as to whether it is fairly valued.
You can do the exact same thing with a bookmaker's odds. That's what handicapping is. The job of a handicapper, looking for opportunities where the market has over- or under-estimated the odds of a particular event happening, is almost identical to a stock analyst, who looks for stocks which the market has mis-valued.
If you pressed me, I would say that you are only gambling if you play a game with a negative expected value (for example, all casino games), or a game where the odds are so low that, even with a positive expected value, you would have an almost 0% chance of winning within your lifetime (for example, lotteries).
Well, there's the problem: Most people consider betting on a horse race (which can have a positive expected value, like poker or betting on the capture of Osama, if the bettor has better insight or information than the market in general) to be gambling, while considering the purchase of stocks to be investing.
The real difference between investing and gambling is that an investment is considered to have some value apart from its speculative value. A share of stock is partial ownership of a corporation; gold--or any other physical commodity--is useful in industry regardless of its market price; and real-estate can be used for any type of development. Even though the market for any of these investments is made up, to a greater or lesser degree, of speculators who have no interest in owning the actual asset being traded, there is something of value being traded.
Contrast that with gambling. If you and I make a bet between ourselves about an upcoming event, there is no actual use for anything involved with our bet. An investor is speculating on the future price of an underlying asset; there is no such asset in our bet. Nothing changes hands except for money.
I think that definition is a lot closer to the intuitive distinction between gambling and investing. But, by that definition, both prediction markets and bookmakers are engaged in gambling. I think the only distinction between the two lies in the more flexible and efficient structure of a prediction market. Fundamentally, though, they are the same thing.
On the other hand, if I make a bet of 50 dollars at 20:1 odds that they find Osama by the end of May 2009, and they don't, then I lose that money.
With standard fixed-odds betting, you can set up an equivalent pay-out schedule to the prediction market contracts. You can lock in a profit from a favorable change in the odds, just as you can by selling a contract which has increased in value from when you bought it.
Take your example: If you bet $50 at 19:1 (equivalent to buying a contract for $0.05), if Osama is captured, you'll end up with $1000 total. Now, if the odds for that bet shorten to 3:1 (equivalent to a contract worth $0.25), because of some news which makes his capture seem more likely, you can place a bet of $750, at those odds, that he will not be captured.
That way, if Osama is captured, you end up with $1,000 from the 19:1 bet, and lose $750 from the 3:1 bet; leaving you with $250 total. If he's not captured, you lose the $50 from the 19:1 bet, but have a total of $1,000 from the 3:1 bet; leaving you with $250 (after the additional $750 (which was never at risk) is paid back). You can easily lock in the same profits as with the contract.
So really, there's no fundamental difference between the two, when it comes to how you can profit from fluctuations in the day-to-day perceived likelihood of Osama's capture.
So as to reiterate my point, it sure as hell better not be MPs on my property.
I suppose that depends upon how much your radio interference looks like an effort to purposefully disrupt military communications. If they believe your interference is an attack (or just one part of a larger attack) against US military operations, I would think that would qualify as part of the "military realm".
The National Radio Quiet Zone also protects the antennas and receivers of the U.S. Navy Information Operations Command (NIOC) at Sugar Grove, West Virginia.[1] The NIOC at Sugar Grove has long been the location of electronic intelligence gathering systems, and is today said to be a key station in the ECHELON system operated by the National Security Agency (NSA).[2]
If you start broadcasting in the Quiet Zone, it sounds like you may be dealing with something a little heavier than the FCC.
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Most of the world, including the places the US is currently deployed, can't even afford the armour being warn by US soldiers, let alone fancy robotic killing machines.
Exactly. Those "fancy robotic killing machines" won't have very many people to kill, because no one would be stupid enough to fight them. Even a suicide bomber wants to have "helped the cause" when he blows himself up. If a robot is destroyed, we simply field a new one. What good does fighting do, if you can't possibly win?
With no one fighting back, these robots won't have to kill anyone.
Instead of fighting a head on war against the kill bots they would use guerrilla and terrorist tactics like the IRA did against the British.
That (sorta) worked for the IRA. But England and Ireland are neighbors. The difficulty in mounting and sustaining a terrorist campaign half a world away is much more difficult; as evidenced by the fact that we aren't experiencing terrorist attacks here. Terrorism can work, but usually only when you're on your home turf.
Your people sitting in bunkers operating drones may not be killed or injured, but their kids at the shopping mall will die just as easily as ever when the bomb goes off.
For every 1 American who dies in Iraq, at least 100 Iraqis die. That's about as lopsided a casualty count as you can get in a war (without robots). Where are these shopping mall bombings in the US today? And, why do you think there will be any more when the ratio improves to 100:0?
And yet despite all the years of claims that some non-western country that supposedly has no taboos about using nukes, not a single of them have actually used them.
That's because there's no such thing as a taboo against using certain weapons. Countries simply recognize that it would not be in their best interest to use them.
While it would take soldiers out of the line of fire and reduce casualties, it would also make pointless, bloody wars a lot more palatable to the populace, and far easier to justify...
With robot soldiers, there wouldn't be quite so many "bloody wars" though, would there?
To me, it feels wrong to take the personal aspect out of war. If you are going to fight a war, the least you can do is actually do the fighting.
No, the point of fighting a war is to win. You do everything you have to, in order to assure victory. If that means fighting with remote controlled robots, that's what you do to gain the advantage. You use the means at your disposal to fight, because that's what the other guy is doing.
The mentality behind it seems to be:"I believe in this enough to kill others, but I don't want to sacrifice my own life for it."
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
--George S. Patton
Not so good to be on the human victims side if the aggressor side has absolutely no chance of injury or death.
If the "aggressor" has no chance of injury or death, what's the point in resisting?
In the face of overwhelming military superiority (a virtually unlimited supply of kill-bots, operated by people safely located thousands of miles away), there is no fight. And, with no fight, there are no casualties on either side.
Ooh.. you're making a bold claim there.
Yeah. It is a little more broad than I intended.
Now, I haven't really figured out who decides what is ethical or not, but I'm pretty sure it's not you.
Well... Yeah, I do decide what is ethical, for me. So does everyone else. Even if there were some sort of oracle which could tell me the ethical thing to do, I'd have to make the choice to act upon it, which would require some sort of meta-ethics. Those meta-ethics couldn't come from the oracle (because I'm still trying to decide if I should listen to it at all); they are internal to myself. So, yeah, ultimately, I decide what is ethical, for me. And, you for you.
The web had it right from the beginning: it's not the rendering that counts, its the structure.
And that works great for the web.
But, so long as a good percentage of word processing documents end up on paper, we'll have a need for consistent rendering.
Any forms? So, according to you, I'm unethical for using apt-p2p for my Ubuntu updates?
I'm pretty sure that's not what he's saying, at all. He's simply pointing out that just because something is legal, does not necessarily make it ethical. Basically, whether or not something is legal, has little, if anything, to do with whether it is ethical.
apt-p2p'ing is ethical whether it's legal or not.
Try integrating drawings in your text with Word or OO, it is awful. Word 2003 plants a giant drawing canvas in the middle of the page. Laying out text with graphs and getting anything sensible looking is worse. Ask a typeface geek about typefaces. Ask Edward Tufte if default page layouts are anything approaching decent.
I'm not exactly saying that there isn't room for improvement in word processing. There is. But, for the vast majority of people, the benefit they receive from the network effect of having a widely-compatible word processor outweighs the benefits they would get from the improvements you mention.
If we could start over from scratch, and disregard all the network effect value in the current system, we could design, implement, and deploy a vastly improved word processor. But, as we can't just disregard all that network value, we're probably stuck with what we've got until a set of killer-features become so attractive, that people are willing to trade the network value for those features.
You can't easily force that change on people, as can be seen from Vista and DTV.
When have we seen any real innovation? It is like we got to Word and everything stopped.
We haven't seen real innovation in a while. But, there's a good reason for that: First, there isn't a whole lot that a modern word processor can't do already. And second, major changes would, most likely, bring additional incompatibility, lowering the value added by the network effect.
In short, people just don't value many new features highly enough to give up the huge value that interoperability brings. It's pretty much the same reason it took so long to improve upon analog color TV. Sometimes "good enough" is good enough.
Kind of sad how few Word processors there are these days.
Even on your list at least four of them are based on the same code and two of them are Office.
I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing. Word processors have a pretty big network effect, especially in business. So long as the same document format is rendered differently on different word processors (no matter how small that difference), there will be an incentive to standardize on a handful.
Given the percentage of Chinese coders in comparison to US, they still did roughly twice as good.
That might be true, if the coders participating in the competition were a representative sampling of the whole population of coders from each country. But, I don't think there's any reason to think that is the case.
It's like arguing that South Korea, as a nation, is better at baseball than the US, just because they won the gold in Beijing.
Yes, you're absolutely right. I'm not defending his actions.
But, I think this issue is much more complex than a simple (*snicker*) philosophical one. These kinds of things lie at the intersection of philosophy, brain chemistry, and evolutionary and social pressures.
Most people do look outside themselves to evaluate the accuracy of their internal self-image, because, most of the time, it works. It's a valuable feedback mechanism. If you just got fired from your job because you're chronically late or very lazy, you may want to reevaluate the parts of your self-image that relate to your work-ethic or punctuality. If you get a raise, it's most likely that you're pretty good at your job. Most of the time, reality is a powerful and accurate feedback mechanism.
But, sometimes a person's feedback mechanism can backfire. A bunch of bad stuff can happen to you all at once. Normally, you'd be able to cope with any of it individually, but, as it all happens in a short span of time, you look for a common cause, almost by reflex. Sometimes, a person incorrectly judges the cause of those events to be himself, simply because of the weight of circumstantial evidence: it all happened to him.
At this point, a healthy person will most likely take a closer look at the circumstances of these painful events, and upon conscious consideration, come to the conclusion that they weren't all his fault (even if they actually were). But, someone who's depressed or prone to depression, may reach the exact opposite conclusion.
Eventually, that person may decide that the only way to prevent himself from causing any more harm, is to end his life. You can't lay the blame at the feet of his philosophy alone. It only makes sense, in a limited way, when you look at it as the result of a combination of influences and a complex chain of causation.
You get too hung up on that material bullshit, to the point where you take your own life rather than alter your social circumstances? That's pathetic.
If you think that most job-related suicides have anything to do with material possessions, you're mistaken. Often, a person's job is the only thing in his life that is working at all. For most people, a job is more than a simple paycheck, it's a source of self-esteem, and feelings of potency, competence, and respect.
If every facet of your personal life takes a huge dump on you, you might start feeling powerless. But, if you have a job where you can feel powerful and in control, it's easy to recognize that those feelings of powerlessness are a result of those circumstances, that you are not intrinsically powerless.
But, take away that job, and the emotional support it brings, and you may just have removed the last thing standing between healthily handling life's disappointments, and believing that you are fundamentally powerless to affect change for the better, in your life.
It's very easy, at that point, to stop seeing yourself as a resilient victim of circumstance, and begin to recognize that perhaps the only common thread in all your life's problems is you. For some people, that's when the line is crossed, and suicide is contemplated. It has nothing to do with material possessions, just feelings of guilt and powerlessness.
But if you really are /that/ stressed about your job [...]
It might not have anything to do with on-the-job stress. It seems that there were some other things going on in his life at the time. Lots of people, when their personal lives go to shit, begin to define themselves, more and more, by their jobs. When the rest of their life sucks, their job is where they are valuable, potent, skilled, respected, and needed.
If you lose that, and you begin to think that your job performance is just as terrible as your performance in the rest of your life, That's when you find people at risk for suicide; they've just had their last leg kicked out from underneath them.
For some people, a job is the only good thing in their life. Failing at that, as they perceive they've failed at every other aspect of life, is sometimes enough to drive someone over the edge. And no, a job at McDonald's won't mitigate that feeling.
There is a difference though, in that the bid/ask spread can be negligibly low compared to the stock price, while the bookmaker will make sure that the odds he gives allow him a certain minimum profit.
I think that has more to do with the structure and size of the betting market vs. the stock market, than it does with the nature of the instrument itself. If the betting market was as active, liquid, and large as the stock market, competition between bookmakers would bring the vig down to levels comparable to the bid/ask spread in the stock market.
To illustrate this, take a look at the spread on a low-volume, low-market cap stock, compared to a high-volume, high-market cap one. There are some stocks (at some times) which make a bookie's 10% vig look like a bargain. It's all dependent upon the trading activity of the stock. I would imagine that you'd find that the large Vegas sports books collect a smaller vig than your neighborhood bookie for exactly the same reason.
My problem is that the label gambling generally carries a negative moral connotation, which most certainly shouldn't be applied to a game where you make money in the long run (that goes double for people who say that the stock market is just gambling).
I certainly agree that the type of gambling you're talking about should not have a negative moral connotation.
But, if you look closely at the situation, every bet has someone on the other side. If you know the odds are stacked so heavily in your favor, aren't you really taking advantage of the other guy's ignorance? In fact, some people may consider taking advantage of another human being in such a fashion more morally reprehensible than simply making a -EV bet.
Not that I actually feel that way. I think a sucker deserves to lose his money. But, it's an interesting perspective which muddies the entire moral issue.
What I was trying to do way up there was limit the definition of gambling so that games which any rational person would play would not be included.
That's kind of my point: What rational person would take the other side of your bet? So, your game requires at least one irrational person to participate. That would make your hypothetical game gambling, by your definition.
Now you can say that these people are all gamblers, or all investors, but I find it hard to argue that the ones who traded options contracts (but not stock) are investors, while the ones who traded prediction contracts (but not stock) are gamblers.
I reluctantly agree. It seems that my own "intuitive understanding" of what separates gambling from investing was faulty, though not quite for the reasons you state. I can't really draw a distinction between gambling and investing at all.
Here's what changed my mind: life insurance. A life insurer goes to great lengths to make sure that, on average, it collects more in premiums than it pays out in benefits. That's how it makes a profit. So, it's a -EV activity for the insured, and by your definition, would qualify as gambling. And, nothing changes hands but money, so it's gambling by my definition. But, I don't think life insurance is gambling. My definition must be wrong, or there really is no distinction between gambling and "legitimate" economic activity.
Really, options are simply a form of insurance. There are two kinds of people in the options market: hedgers, and speculators. Hedgers are looking for protection from risk, like a person buying life insurance, and are willing to accept a -EV to get it. A speculator is looking to accept the EV from the hedger, just like an insurance company, in exchange for bearing the speculative risk which the hedger did not want. If life insurance is gambling, then so is the options market.
Now, as to the actual stock market, the same principle applies. A person who owns a stock is bearing some amount of risk as long as he holds that stock (assuming
It's my understanding that when you go to a bookie, you get different odds on each outcome, so you do not have the ability to bet for A and against A at the same odds.
Ah so, ah so... It seems I don't know as much about sports betting as I thought I did. That makes more sense, otherwise a bookie wouldn't really make any money. I think I had confused the procedure for odds betting, with that for betting with a line (where you basically pay the bookie a fixed vig off the top).
But, I think this only strengthens the similarity to the stock or prediction market. This disparity in the odds is exactly the same as the bid/ask spread in a market. Just as you cannot simultaneously bet for and against a particular outcome and come out even, you cannot simultaneously buy and sell a prediction market contract (or stock) and expect to be even. The mechanism may be different, but the result is the same.
They are all set so that the cost of the buying the options is higher than your intrinsic value.
They are all priced higher than their intrinsic value right now. I don't understand the difference you see between buying a share of stock which you believe the market has undervalued, and buying an undervalued option contract.
My main point is that, when investing, an actual thing (albeit an electronic "thing", in the case of options) changes hands. An option contract is the option to buy or sell a share of stock at a predefined price; money changes hands, along with the stock (potentially). There's nothing that is exchanged with a prediction market contract other than money.
Yet people still buy them because it is not the intrinsic value which drives the options market, but the speculative value, exactly as in the prediction market.
Not quite. The options market is driven by speculation on the future value of the underlying asset; in the prediction market, there is no underlying asset. It's just money changing hands. So, the options market doesn't fit my definition of gambling.
And yet it is far, far safer than putting your money in any investment, which clashes with the intuitive understanding that gambling is somehow riskier than investing.
I think the reason that a bet, like the one you described, doesn't fit into peoples' intuitive understanding of gambling, is because no one would ever offer a bet with that kind of pay-out. Anyone who did, wouldn't be doing so for long, as they would soon end up broke. Gambling is seen as necessarily risky, because risky bets are the kind most commonly offered.
A platypus doesn't fit into many peoples' "intuitive understanding" of a mammal, but that doesn't make it any less of one. It, and mammals like it, are simply uncommon. But, they're more common than bets like the one you describe.
The bookmaker, if he wants to make a profit, sets the odds at slightly worse than fair value (fair value being what an open market would set them at).
Of course that's true. But, the same principle is true of a stock or prediction market as well: the bid/ask spread. If I were to simultaneously buy and sell a share of stock, I would end up losing money, because I would have bought the stock for the ask price, and sold for the bid price (that's in addition to any commissions the broker charges).
The safest market 'bet' gives you 0 EV, while the safest bookie bet gives you negative EV.
Well, that's not true. Let's say a bookie is offering 20:1 odds that an event will happen (it doesn't matter what that event is, or even what the actual odds of that event happening are). I place a bet of $1 on that event happening, which would pay out $20 if it does. And, I place a bet of $20 on that event not happening, which would pay $1. If the event happens, I win $20 from the first bet, but lose $20 on the second. If it doesn't happen, I win $1 from the second bet, but lose $1 on the first. There's no way I can lose, or win money. The EV for that portfolio of bets is 0.
In the case of a bookie's odds, yes. I was mainly talking about odds for most casino games, which are fixed by the laws of probability and the profit margin the casino wishes to see.
Then, in that case, the house always sets the odds in its favor. But a casino isn't comparable to a prediction market at all, unless you're talking about the casino's sports book, or any other type of parimutuel wagering.
That's a fair definition, but I wonder in which bin you would put something like stock options.
A stock option is simply a contract between two parties. It's an asset which has some "intrinsic" value. The ability to purchase or sell a stock for a guaranteed price has real, measurable value: the difference between the spot price of the stock and the option's strike price. The speculation in stock options is only over how much that guarantee is worth. So, options aren't gambling.
I also have to point out that under your definition, a game with, say, a 70% chance of you winning 1$ and a 30% chance of you losing 1$ could be considered gambling. This makes little sense to me intuitively, since the chances of you losing money drop exponentially the longer you play, and thus do not fit the traditional notion of gambling.
Yes, of course that's gambling. There's nothing changing hands except for money. Just because it is a good bet, doesn't make it any less of a bet.
Yes, that's right, although there are fundamental differences between betting and Intrade in other aspects. See my reply to porges.
From your reply to porges:
It's because the contract's price is not random at all, but determined by market demand for the contract.
So are the odds which a bookmaker offers. Both the price of a contract and the odds on a bet are determined by supply/demand pressures from the traders/gamblers. If the contract price isn't "random", than neither are the odds. Odds are as much set by the market as the price of a prediction market contract.
In this instance, the difference is that you can research the subject of the contract to make a determination as to whether it is fairly valued.
You can do the exact same thing with a bookmaker's odds. That's what handicapping is. The job of a handicapper, looking for opportunities where the market has over- or under-estimated the odds of a particular event happening, is almost identical to a stock analyst, who looks for stocks which the market has mis-valued.
If you pressed me, I would say that you are only gambling if you play a game with a negative expected value (for example, all casino games), or a game where the odds are so low that, even with a positive expected value, you would have an almost 0% chance of winning within your lifetime (for example, lotteries).
Well, there's the problem: Most people consider betting on a horse race (which can have a positive expected value, like poker or betting on the capture of Osama, if the bettor has better insight or information than the market in general) to be gambling, while considering the purchase of stocks to be investing.
The real difference between investing and gambling is that an investment is considered to have some value apart from its speculative value. A share of stock is partial ownership of a corporation; gold--or any other physical commodity--is useful in industry regardless of its market price; and real-estate can be used for any type of development. Even though the market for any of these investments is made up, to a greater or lesser degree, of speculators who have no interest in owning the actual asset being traded, there is something of value being traded.
Contrast that with gambling. If you and I make a bet between ourselves about an upcoming event, there is no actual use for anything involved with our bet. An investor is speculating on the future price of an underlying asset; there is no such asset in our bet. Nothing changes hands except for money.
I think that definition is a lot closer to the intuitive distinction between gambling and investing. But, by that definition, both prediction markets and bookmakers are engaged in gambling. I think the only distinction between the two lies in the more flexible and efficient structure of a prediction market. Fundamentally, though, they are the same thing.
On the other hand, if I make a bet of 50 dollars at 20:1 odds that they find Osama by the end of May 2009, and they don't, then I lose that money.
With standard fixed-odds betting, you can set up an equivalent pay-out schedule to the prediction market contracts. You can lock in a profit from a favorable change in the odds, just as you can by selling a contract which has increased in value from when you bought it.
Take your example: If you bet $50 at 19:1 (equivalent to buying a contract for $0.05), if Osama is captured, you'll end up with $1000 total. Now, if the odds for that bet shorten to 3:1 (equivalent to a contract worth $0.25), because of some news which makes his capture seem more likely, you can place a bet of $750, at those odds, that he will not be captured.
That way, if Osama is captured, you end up with $1,000 from the 19:1 bet, and lose $750 from the 3:1 bet; leaving you with $250 total. If he's not captured, you lose the $50 from the 19:1 bet, but have a total of $1,000 from the 3:1 bet; leaving you with $250 (after the additional $750 (which was never at risk) is paid back). You can easily lock in the same profits as with the contract.
So really, there's no fundamental difference between the two, when it comes to how you can profit from fluctuations in the day-to-day perceived likelihood of Osama's capture.
So as to reiterate my point, it sure as hell better not be MPs on my property.
I suppose that depends upon how much your radio interference looks like an effort to purposefully disrupt military communications. If they believe your interference is an attack (or just one part of a larger attack) against US military operations, I would think that would qualify as part of the "military realm".
What the hell kind of business do military police have with me (a private citizen) on my own property?!?
From Wikipedia
The National Radio Quiet Zone also protects the antennas and receivers of the U.S. Navy Information Operations Command (NIOC) at Sugar Grove, West Virginia.[1] The NIOC at Sugar Grove has long been the location of electronic intelligence gathering systems, and is today said to be a key station in the ECHELON system operated by the National Security Agency (NSA).[2]
If you start broadcasting in the Quiet Zone, it sounds like you may be dealing with something a little heavier than the FCC.
It works so fantastically well for drugs, guns and pirated music/movies.
Hasn't stopped people from trying though, has it?