Elizabeth Lopatto

A former employee of an online sportsbook writes about their experience. It’s not gambling that has been legalized — “what has been legalized is extraction, and the new methods of extraction that are possible using the internet and mobile devices. ” Read the whole thing to find out what got them to quit.

Hey, remember that weird trade The Financial Times highlighted? The one about oil? Paul Krugman doesn’t like it — nor does he like the weird Venezuela trade or the one about death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I’ve written here about how ill-prepared the CFTC is for insider trading cases. Krugman has a solution: call some of it treason and let the FBI — well, the post-Kash Patel FBI — sort it out.

A Nevada judge has issued a temporary restraining order, saying the company can’t operate without first getting a gaming license. This is an escalation of a turf war between the states and the CFTC over who regulates prediction markets.

And the headline of the essay in which this happens asks if he should be burned at the stake. Father Paolo Benanti, the Papal AI advisor, doesn’t seem too pleased about Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, which Thiel has brazenly brought to Rome. “La Silicon Valley s’était lancée dans un coup d’État permanent.” I don’t think you need to know French to get the gist of that. one, but linked below is a summary of the essay. Make auto-da-fe great again??

I enjoyed this write-up of the Afroman defamation trial, which, by the way, he won. Mike Masnick cuts to the core: the police think they should be able to do whatever they want, including screwing up, without fear of embarrassment.

Ellis says he was offered money to use a prediction market’s odds to write “a couple of stories each week,” and it was enough money that it was hard to turn down.“Taking money from a Polymarket to hype their gambling odds on a TV show is ethically the same as taking money from a network to write positive things about their programming.,” he wrote.

For those of you not familiar, Afroman was raided by the police and then made two music videos (“Will You Help Me Repair My Door“ and ”Lemon Pound Cake”) about it. The officers sued him for using surveillance footage of their raid in the videos. On cross-examination during the trial, Afroman gave a stirring speech on the importance of the First Amendment. He’s also released another video, “Battle Hymn of the Police Whistleblower.”

According to the Arizona attorney general, Kalshi is illegally operating a gambling business. It’s the first criminal case against the prediction market, which told Reuters that “States like Arizona want to ​individually regulate a nationwide financial exchange, and are trying every trick in the book to ‌do ⁠it.” The case is part of an ongoing dispute between states and the CFTC about who has jurisdiction over Kalshi and similar companies.