There will always be cases where everyone is surprised. If you have a useful predictor that means it incrementally helps improve your expectation. It doesn't eliminate surprises.

There are plenty of legit critiques of the prediction power of these markets, but they typically don't involve pointing at single observations. The overwhelming scholarly consensus is prediction markets are highly accurate relative to other forecasting methods, but have also significant biases. Such as long-shot bias, etc.

But those biases are small enough that they are only resolvable by looking at lots of independent at-bats. Real-world consensus was not that Abbott would get smoked to that extent, and so of course that consensus was exactly reflected in prices. If you read a lot of pre-election commentary (I was reading primarily Democrats) you would realize that people knew something was going to happen, but they really had no idea about the extent.

Furthermore, we don't learn a lot (anything really) about efficiency by looking at a large number of events that are highly correlated. And of course the whole blue wave was correlated events, so yes you will find a lot of "bad" prices, in terms of raw numbers. But taken together they are really one observation.

See this huge study on political bias: http://www.nber.org/papers/w35846.pdf (Spoiler alert, if there is one it's incredibly small.)

If you've somehow missed how these companies act then I'd say you're missing the table stakes to even discuss them: saying they're "everywhere" would not be an overstatement.

Also I don't get why you're clinging to morality as a loincloth: is there a logical reason to allow any of this? Even if you're a lover of all that is vice, we had gambling!

We don't need Kalshi to allow it: they represent a form of gambling that is less regulated, more susceptible to manipulation, more likely to cause unique adverse effects in the real world as people become incentivized manipulate arbitrary events it tracks.

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You're confusing amorality with objectivity. If you're our resident expert on what words mean, the broadly tolerated concept of moral objectivity shouldn't be foreign.

And it's less contentious to apply it when instead of saying "Gambling is bad", we're saying "Allowing a private company to turn any arbitrary event in the natural world into an always available, poorly regulated, aggressively advertised lottery tickets is bad".

Regardless of if one considers gambling moral, the latter is bad to most logical persons. Ironically the stubbornness with which you're ascribing personal morality to other people for saying that is by far the loudest attempt to signal personal morality in this comment section.

Libertarians are like house cats. They’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.

Because our regime is corrupt and bought [1]?

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/kalshi-re...

There's already causal inference evidence out there indicating that needle exchange programs reduce rates of HIV and other bloodborne infections, but increase the risk of fatal overdose. If simply making fresh needles more accessible increases overdose rates, I suspect legalizing heroin would have a much larger effect.

jfc this is just terminal contrarianism. do we really need to debate whether it's harmful for extremely addictive drugs to be widely available? the Chinese literally fought wars over this

Imagine there’s a law saying that regulating abortion is federal responsibility and the senate then uses this law as justification to ban demonstrations around abortion clinics. Would that mean that demonstrating next to an abortion clinic counts as abortion?

Its seems like there is literally nothing you will accept to show that this isn't settled yet.

The reference to bingo was something that New Jersey and the dissent brought up. Direct quote that covers both: 'Because Kalshi’s sports related event contracts are traded on a CFTC-licensed DCM and depend on event outcomes associated with economic consequences, they fit within the Act’s definition of “swaps” subject to the CFTC’s jurisdiction. See 7 U.S.C. §§ 2(a)(1)(A), 1a(47)(A)(ii).

New Jersey and the dissent “pile inference upon inference” and postulate that anything from bingo games to pingpong matches will fall under the CFTC’s jurisdiction.'

from: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/ka...

Then I won't ask you what the difference is between speculation and gambling. Instead I'll just declare myself the winner of this debate.

This is a matter of whether the state laws violate the constitution.

> place restrictions on gamblers within their borders

This is a matter of if state laws have been preempted by federal laws.

Again these two things are not like each other.