> It's a real problem at this point. People still say "nobody went to jail for the GFC" even though over 200 people did in the US; it's just it took a decade and nobody actually paid attention a decade later when they went to jail.
Did over 200 people in the US go to jail for the GFC? I just tried looking and I only see 1 person in the US. Iceland had about 25.
You seem to think you’ve found some sort of gotcha. There were plenty of crimes committed in the MBS world. See GS, Credit Suisse, and others. However very few were prosecuted at the individual level.
It's a fair question that I used to ask, but it's a very answerable one. To pick one example (https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-59.htm), the SEC believes that one Fabrice Tourre was primarily responsible for the mortgage fraud committed at Goldman Sachs. But either they never referred him to the DOJ for prosecution or the DOJ declined to prosecute him.
I remember giving this task to a summer co-op 10-12 years ago. it was alot harder to scrape the edgar site then and gather all for form 4 filings without the new api call first interface and the XBML markup in 10-K and 10-Q filings.
I can't speak for all CC users, but I genuinely don't care about the downtime as long as it's resolved in an hour or so. It replaces a manual coding workflow that was also prone to random "downtime" when I got annoyed or had a headache, so it's still a net improvement.
Same with Reddit. A decade ago it felt like they were down more than they were up. And it didn't slow down their growth trajectory. Instead, as soon as it was back there would be a thousand shitposts about "How did you all survive the outage? Did you <gasp> work?"
Sad commentary on the modern world where my first thought was, well good for Orban to concede defeat. Not all current world heads of state have that much maturity.
This bodes well for the midterm state of the European union.
Pulling a Trump requires a polarized electorate where you are mostly going to have both parties in 48-52% range, with only real fights in few battleground states, and no absurd change in total vote %. Even Trump won't pull a Trump if other party was nearing 2/3rd majority. I am not even sure of what would happen to American politics if a party reaches 2/3rd majority in both houses, a list of long pending reforms might finally become possible.
It's worth noting that the party vote share here was 53% for Tisza vs. 44% for the even-more-right-wing parties. The fact that this results in a two thirds majority is because the electoral system inflates the strongest party. Orbán has previously achieved two thirds majorities multiple times while winning less than 50% of the party vote. Most seats are assigned not through party lists but in single-member constituencies with first-past-the-post voting, same as in America. So it's not "convince two thirds of the people to vote for you", it's "convince a very slim plurality in two thirds of the constituencies to vote for you".
I'd like that. But this system is very attractive for the strongest party, so it will be a real test of their commitment to actually representative, multi-party democracy. Also, the general system (a mix of single-member constituencies and party list seats, with more of the former than the latter) isn't a Fidesz invention, it has a long legal tradition in Hungary. So there might be a lot of resistance to a purer party-list system on those grounds too.
Obvious tweaks exist, of course: Even if you keep more individual constituencies than party list seats, they should use some sort of instant runoff/ranked choice/etc. system. But other first past the post countries are dragging their feet on this too, so... we'll see.
It's a bit like computer security: you have to get it right all of the time and the perps mostly only need one shot at being lucky and then it will takes many years to undo the damage.
We should approach democracy more with the kind of insight that go into making computers secure. Oh, wait...
I vaguely recall a man giving a speech to a large group of people, urging Congress to not certify the election, and then those people storming the capitol, and then those people going to jail and being subsequently pardoned from jail from the guy who gave the speech.
From the perspective of a Canadian, this feels like an absolutely mad-cap crazy comment. What did you live through?
EDIT: with as little judgement as I'm sincerely trying to have, I would strongly recommend reviewing your information diet and neurotypical predispositions to investigate why you might believe this. (E.g. I am predisposed to support an underdog, and need to gutcheck myself on that regularly)
Sure. Just like Hitler offing himself; just an expression of trust in the system! "Oh no, I lost in the marketplace of ideas, time to make the ultimate concession!"
> I’ve never said that just because you’re invoking the Nazis you’re losing the argument. If you’re going to compare somebody to Hitler or the Nazis or raise the specter of the Holocaust, be sure you’ve got your facts right. But there’s nothing categorically wrong with Biden’s — or anyone else’s — comparison of Trump calling people vermin or talking about blood poisoning to Hitler.
Trump went because House/Senate Republicans at the time hadn't yet done the 180 they have since; the support wasn't there. It has nothing to do with his faith in the democratic process.
But in the end he went. The system worked exactly like it was supposed to. There is room to challenge results, that keeps the system honest. When he lost the challenges, he willingly stepped down.
This is exactly how the system is designed to work.
I understand the visceral hatred of Trump, but I don't know why every conversation about him has to degrade the same way this one has, with people using emotional-manipulation like evoking Hitler.
He tried for a redo of the Brooks Brothers Riot in the US Capitol. He demanded the Georgia governor change their result. He recruited a slate of fake electors.
In no world was his transition of power lawful and orderly.
Yeah, Trump is not normal, not playing normal politics. He's the worst form of opportunist.
Like yesterday, does anyone actually think he thought he was posting a meme about being a doctor? No, he was faith testing whether he could LARP as Jesus, and he couldn't. He's the fucking worst form of liar, as he even deceives himself. He's a mentally sick man, and a society that excuses his behavior is sick as well.
With an individual tendency towards betting? No. But I think Capitalism absolutely is a huge part of the fanatical drive to financialize everything, and the broader regulatory environment that enables the creation of entities like Polymarket and Kalshi.
Is that censoring, or is that an LLM that doesn't actually know for sure and makes that clear, rather than making up something?
That response is exactly what I'd want from a LLM that was trained on data from the past and doesn't have upto date knowledge on something very specific in the future.
> so “what’s the weather lile in chicago today and forecast for tomorrow?” won’t work either?
I was able to make those queries work. I'm guessing hte difference is those are very common questions and openai has very specific workers to answer those queries with known oracles or sources of truth and the other is a local primary which is a query that is orders of magnitude less common and therefor has no specific oracle or worker specific to that query.
> There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passed
Ha, i'll take the other side of that bet. I'm not sure why you think they couldn't possibly IPO and you don't really specify why in your post.
Having been in the capital markets for 20 years, now is one of the better times to IPO and I'd bet that both OpenAI and Anthropic will IPO within 12 months.
There are lots of games you can play like releasing a small 10% float) if you are worried about not enough buyers.
I was in the capital markets during the COVID era, focusing on transactions for tech companies. I will take the bet that if OAI tries to IPO it will be WeWork 2.0 x100. Get ready for an even more creative version of “Community adjusted EBITDA”
On the real though, I am not sure how a 20yr veteran can say this is the best time for an IPO. Not only is a 10% float still absolutely massive, but the world is extremely unstable with the war in Iran and the US is in a recession when you factor out inflated growth driven by AI. Not to mention the Yen carry trade unwinding - there is so much loaded in the economy ready to blow up… I think the facade will collapse if OAI actually goes for it.
Umm the yen carry trade unwound in August of 2024. It hasn’t been a factor in the markets for over a year:)
> On the real though, I am not sure how a 20yr veteran can say this is the best time for an IPO.
The best time for an open AI and anthropic ipo. They are hot now, the macro environment doesn’t weigh into that calculus.
Also a 10% float isn’t massive, most companies ipo with anywhere from 20-40% of their total share count.
And being a 20 year veteran means you can cut through all the noise you mention and focuse in what matters. At all most all points in History there is doom and gloom, 20 years gives you the experience to know most of the doom and gloom never matters.
You go public when you get the chance.
I appreciate you comment and I hope I helped update your understanding of how things work!!
Oh, sorry I thought you meant the percentage would be huge.
Yes it’s a big ipo but early indications are that they’d be about 2x over subscribed if they ipo’d today from what the sell side is saying and I don’t doubt it from what other funds are saying.
Most fund managers have an IQ of 50. And they get paid by fees. They will put your pension money into OpenAI without a doubt, as it’s easier to participate, crash and shrug that stay out.
“Nobody got fired for hiring McKinsey” in the PE bros era.
There's a lot of reasons you don't want to IPO in the near- to mid-term, many based on energy suddenly being a lot more expensive than everybody thought and others based on money being a lot more expensive than everybody thought (and lenders being more risk-avers). All three of these things kind of go together.
Polymarket (for whatever it's worth) currently has OpenAI IPO at only 4% by end June and 40% by end December (and that's even for a small-float IPO as has become common).
The Venn diagram of people who have deep understanding of capital markets and people who like betting on stuff will have non-negligible overlap. Read some of the stories about Wall Street, especially from before it was all algorithms. Moreover, evidence of apparent insider trading on Polymarket, specifically for OpenAI, has already been shared on HN. Sounds pretty crazy to me to suggest that those odds can't tell us anything about the true probabilities. What's your reasoning?
Wisdom of the crowd, same as guessing jellybeans in a jar. The exact average is wrong, but it's still pretty damn close because the guesses are likely to follow a normal distribution.
If the hump of the normal distribution of these guesses is around 4% (or whatever) odds on, the actual answer is unlikely to be far from that.
> You can't reasonably draw any conclusion from betting without understanding who is betting and why.
Irrelevant; Polymarket is the reflection of the bettors view. When they place their bets, they don't care which way this goes, they only care to predict the direction correctly.
Unfortunately, it could be a case of the tail wagging the dog - even if the IPO would have been successful without polymarket existing, now that they have a signal from polymarket it is likely to be used as one of the weightings when they determine the correct time to IPO.
I checked Polymarket towards the end of February for the odds of US bombing Iran and they were vanishingly low. IIRC most bets were aiming for summer 2026. YMMV.
Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs.
- Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to.
- It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead. It seems to me that online prediction markets would be extremely prone to this as the bets of other people are all there in the market price.
- Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome.
In the case of an OpenAI IPO, it seems likely multiple of these would converge as people start to fall prey to groupthink because "everybody knows that they'll IPO soon" in their local media bubble.
The question isn't "will they IPO" the question is "when will they IPO" which is not a binary question. The rest of your point about Polymarket users now being mostly degenerate gamblers is true though.
The relative timing, valuations (and float sizes) of the expected SpaceX, Anthropic and then OpenAI IPOs would still be highly correlated. Even allowing for moral degeneracy among most of the gamblers on this particular Polymarket market.
It’s two binary questions about whether they will IPO by specific dates. It’s not obvious to me that this maps to a more granular “when will they IPO?” question.
> It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead.
This makes intuitive sense to me; is there a name for this phenomenon?
A prediction platform’s biggest value is publicising information from possible insiders, who at some point will work harder to maintain secrecy not to lose their informational advantage. So all that remains are people gambling on public info.
That said, greed from insiders looking to make a quick buck will always skew the price towards ‘truth’
> An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to.
Of course there is - they are betting on the "when".
> It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead.
I dunno how to reply to this - that is exactly my point, but it appears (to me, anyway) that you are saying this in disagreement?
Let me clarify - my point is that wisdom of the crowd converges on to a value that is quite near the actual value.
> In the case of an OpenAI IPO, it seems likely multiple of these would converge as people start to fall prey to groupthink because "everybody knows that they'll IPO soon" in their local media bubble.
Sure, if everyone is in the same local media bubble, that once again, that is unlikely, because these are people who don't make money from the result, they make money from correctly predicting it, hence they are exactly the demographic that will seek out more and more information outside of any bubble they may be in.
It's one thing when proponents of $FOO spend time boosting their PoV/wishes/hopes on a forum. It's quite another when they have to put their money where their mouth is: then they are open to new information!
> I dunno how to reply to this - that is exactly my point, but it appears (to me, anyway) that you are saying this in disagreement?
Yes. The research shows that they do (almost) always converge, but that they DON'T always converge to an accurate value. In particular, there can be behavioral biases at work that warp the perception of bettors in one direction or the other. A well documented case of this is when fans of a sports team pile in and bet for their favorite team, causing the price to shift too much towards the more popular team. Exposure to the predictions by other bettors then causes the total market to converge to the biased price. Interestingly enough, people still do this even though this phenomenon is well documented and they have to put their money on the line. People just don't care enough about their $10 bet to do thorough research.
In a similar way, I would not at all be surprised if some people are such fanboys of OpenAI that they start to display cultlike behavior. You can easily find such people online even on this very site. It's not such a weird thing to consider that people at the peak of a hype cycle don't always behave in rational ways, especially when they're just betting $10 when drunk on a Saturday evening.
if you can identify where and how prediction markets are wrong, why aren't you applying that and making millions?
> - Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome.
Citation? If your small population is high IQ, accurate predictors and you diversify to average IQ population, won't the accuracy go down not up?
That Polymarket traders believe an OpenAI IPO this quarter, or even this year, is unlikely (or else almost all of them are hedging, e.g. long on other AI stocks. Which seems unlikely.)
Anyone who thinks that position is wrong and it's >4% likely has a clear profit opportunity.
It only has $1m volume, so even that conclusion is a bit of a stretch. By comparison NCAA tournament has $15m, and US confirms aliens this year has $18m.
100% agreed. There's so much locked up appetite for IPOs, both from the tech crowd and the general public. There have been very few quality IPOs since COVID frankly.
I'll wager that the IPO market can actually absorb all three of these that yes, are the size of the last 10 years combined. The trading market itself is larger, as are values, and valuations.
I assume that to maximize value you see a standard lock and roll play here. The S-1 will declare the 10% release, with commentary about future (6 or 12 months) another 5%. Plus don't forget institutional. There's ample space here, even before the Nasdaq 100 changes that are probably coming into play. If those come into play then inflows accelerated, as did valuations.
THere's interest to hold it for diversification reasons but the reality is investors are not stupid. Look at the basket-case recent IPOs: Figma and Klarna.
Many are skeptical of LLMs and how large of an impact they will have in the long-term. Nvidia's stock performance YTD is an example of that, despite the good news being pushed forward.
People want to start seeing customers of OAI, Nvidia et al start generating incremental accounting profits from LLM-specific projects, let alone economic profits.
Agreed. This year around is the best time for OpenAI related firm to IPO. The stock market has been resilient reaching and hovering around ATH. Along with them, SpaceX plans to IPO and will force index fund to purchase their shares at trillion dollar evaluation.
OpenAI and SpaceX firms need exit liquidity - and markets are ready!
My advise for retails folks is to stay invested in the market since these trillion dollar companies cannot afford market to tank at all.
I hope that commenter was being hyperbolic. I have heard of headphones making visible impressions or “dents” in the soft tissue and msucle after long periods of use (Google Tyler1 headphone dent if you don’t believe me), but such a dent would disappear within minutes or hours. An actual deformation of the skull due to headphone-wearing would definitely be strange.
at no point should your skull be deforming. Maybe the skin and fat layer ontop but the skull itself should not be deforming after an hour of hearing a device on a healthy individual.
Did over 200 people in the US go to jail for the GFC? I just tried looking and I only see 1 person in the US. Iceland had about 25.
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