Not to side track too much from this discussion, but I looked at that PolyMarket event: "US civil war before 2027?" Currently, it is priced at 91.3 USD cents for No. If you bet 100 USD, the payout for No will be 109.43. That is very good return -- ~9.5% for 12 months of lending (as PolyMarket required full payment at the time of trade). That is twice the (retail) risk free rate at the moment. I am actually tempted to buy a large part of the order book. Am I missing something obvious?
Also, if you enjoy troll humor, the comments section is very funny.
Considering reports like "Polymarket refuses to pay bets that US would 'invade' Venezuela" [1] one risk is poorly written small print, meaning you might not actually be betting on the thing you think you're betting on. This could also err in your favour, of course - but it's still a source of risk.
There's also the risks involved in cryptocurrency generally - it's the wild west, rife with scams, hacks, unexpected fees, and paperwork.
And thirdly, prediction markets often lack market depth, so if you want to invest a non-trivial amount the price can move a lot. You want to gamble $2,000 to win $190? No problem. You want to gamble $200,000 maybe no-one will take your bet. Can you be bothered to go through all the KYC paperwork rigmarole for $190 ?
To list a few: the risk of Polymarket going under, the risk of Polymarket mishandling your money, the risk of Polygon going under, the risk of Ethereum going under, the risk of USDC depegging, the risk of interests going up, and, most obvious of all, the risk of a civil war.
PolyMarket bets are becoming ever more problematic the wider it gets known, carrying the manipulation incentives from stock markets into every bettable aspect of society.
> Total garbage. Spread by a $9bn company with a 1m-follower account, a post viewed by 4.5m people. Pure disinformation for financial gain, with serious consequences for actual human lives.
Shashank Joshi - @shashj - Jan 12 - https://x.com/shashj/status/2010766014829478393
Not at all. Do you really think there is a risk of civil war in the United States in 2026? To me: It sounds like crazy people. I will make that be all day long!
If you haven't been paying attention to American politics, there are currently widespread protests due to a woman being shot by ICE last week. It looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections.
Not wrong, but don't forget there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here, though admittedly some parties have more affiliated with them than others. It's not a stretch to assume should fighting in the streets escalate beyond ICE shenanigans that larger armies would not quickly congeal from the pocket groups and individuals.
I am, under the right circumstance. I'm not a pacificist, at least not historically. Although, we can banter all day with tough words, but the reality is that none of us can really predict how we will react to a situation until we are in it.
> there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here
That’s still not a civil war in the conventional sense. If it gets entrenched and coördinated it could be come something we’ll debate, e.g. the Troubles. But insurgency != civil war.
Interesting - I found this quantitative historical study [0] showing that while a civil war does significantly increase the likelihood of inflation, only 36% of countries analyzed which had a civil war between 1975-1999 ended up in an inflationary crisis. And with the USD having such a strong foundation, I would expect the risk to be significantly lower.
I am speculating wildly but I would expect the exact opposite due to different actors trying to destabilize the US to the point of no recovery in such an event.
I love comments like this. You pop out of your (presumably New Zealand) prepper bomb shelter to get enough WiFi signal to make a post. I will bet against people like you all day long and make lots of money. How much are you willing to bet that there will be civil war in the US in 2026? Let's meet on PolyMarket!
There were large protests in the wake of a law enforcement officer killing someone in 2020 too. Notably, there was not a civil war, even though the Trump administration used the protests as cover for bad behavior then too
2020 was a single accidental case as the result of a poor system. Many people even from within the system on all levels agreed something went wrong and apologized. Today's situation is different, as the whole system is weaponized on purpose from one specific layer/group against the other layers/groups of the system. It's an internal conflict within the system itself, and a prime-example for justifying a civil war. And at the time Trump was still on the leash of his own adminstration.
There are a few like this. You can bet on Jesus not coming back in the calendar year for a little pocket money.
Funny, because a bit like the yes side of the civil war scenario, if JC comes back and someone is the sort of person to bet that he will, then do they really need the payout in those circumstances; and will the gambling website be in a position to pay out?
Polymarket and other prediction markets dont take risk on the trades. Two sides are needed to make a market so you’re likely to get your payout. So all the people taking the “safe” bet lose their collateral and the winners get the proceeds if the unlikely event happens.
802.11s with BATMAN routing works very well - you can have commercial quality links with tons of nodes.
The problem is transmitter power, residential Wifi radios are limited to a very low transmit power, like 0.1W, if you do more than that, you're breaking the law, and you're very easy to find if they come looking.
The point to any preparation for any adverse event is to prepare more than one solution to a problem, and to have a solid understanding of your actual adversary. By asking that question, you have already defeated yourself on the sake of whomever you have decided is the dominant force. This is the sort of nihilism that stops us from meaningful change, because we destroy ourselves in either sloth or despair.
Won't they get jammed? Yes, absolutely, on local levels. This is electronic warfare and happens in any actual battlespace.
Does that mean it is completely useless in emergency situations (of which civil war is one)? No.
Meshtastic works on commercial frequencies. If they block those then a good number of non-wifi/bluetooth devices will just stop working.
Including, but not limited to: garage door openers, some (older) car key fobs, some RC equipment, wireless weather sensors, remotely readable metering devices (electricity, water) and a crapton of other things.
All Semtech LoRa modems are wide-range modems. You can switch to basically every other frequency.
An idea would be to move to SX128x modems with work around 2.4GHz. You recycle Wifi-gear for directional stuff. This also enabled you to hide below Wifi traffic.
Nah. The citywide meshtastic grids that exist presently operate on one single frequency citywide.
If you shut off the internet and jam that frequency, nobody can talk to anyone else to coordinate about a new frequency (which is then also just trivially jammed).
Jamming is a double-edged sword, there are common frequency bands used by everyones equipment like 2.4GHz, 5GHz or the ISM band. If you jam those indiscriminately, your own stuff stops working as well.
The US is huge — you can’t jam everything everywhere. Talking about just cities, you still can’t jam everything everywhere.
But yes, targeted suppression/oppression (depending on your allegiance) will almost certainly use jamming — in fact, I’ve spoken with some Antifa about how they jam EMS frequencies at their events.
This reminds me the way the software was distributed in eastern countries when there was no internet. People went to market to meet other people, and they were peddling/colporting (look up the term in French) cassettes with the software.
The same can happen now - people would walk down the streets to certain places, to become hubs of information, but with no physical contact. Of course those places would be were the jammers would head to.
Actually this sounds like a good theme for book... however as long as I live on this world, I've noticed that if I invent something, there are already two people on the internet who have invented it already, so... please give me the title :)
To save others the search: Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters"
Also, amusingly, France is most definitively in Western Europe, so I’m a bit confused about GP’s link between Eastern Europe and “go look up this French word”.
To prevent coordinated police response during their assaults on police with bricks, frozen water bottles, and fireworks during so-called “direct action” while dressed in paramilitary “black bloc”. You know, like any other violent militia.
Also, Antifa are against fascism the way the DPRK is for democracy.
Iran doesn't have the ability to control what you see online. If BigCorps play along, the US can largely do that, to much much greater extend. So they don't really need to bring the internet down, they can just have LLMs create custom "reddit pages" on the fly.
We won't have a Civil war. We need one for sure, but the problem is that most people lives are very comfortable right now, and the average person doesnt care enough to die over any of the stuff they believe in.
Its more likely that our economy will tank and you will have more civil unrest.
Insider trading on prediction markets is the whole point. They don't exist to provide a fair platform for normal people to make money, they exist to create accurate predictions by providing a monetary incentive for people to be correct. Whether "correct" means that you were just lucky, that you had insider knowledge, or that you were able to influence the result, is irrelevant.
All my life ive heard this, yelled at me by deeply anti democratic anti socials. People voted for trumps policies. Again, yes even after jan 6. Better luck next time, but for 4 years this is what they ordered.
ICE going after fraud and illegals. Voted for.
Closed borders. Voted for.
Isolationist imperialism and a end of the western free trade world order.Voted for.
A loose Canon. Voted for.
A screeching social priest caste driven ou the door. Voted for.
The people have spoken and the reject progressive policies (more accurately they dont care, but reject the package it comes in). Se la vi.
Trump has a ton of work todo before he reaches the starting point of the mullahs. 12000 dead in 3 days. Thats ice shooting 8 people trying to run them over every day. Politics has not platform here, including rejected by the masses cosplay revolutionaries hijacking real disasters. Do something good, help iranian civilization recover.
You are all sold this lie that "illegal immigrants take your jobs" or "bring drugs into the country", and you immediately adopt this as truth and don't even bother to fact check this because of your inherent racism.
In reality the vast amounts immigrants that are coming into US are putting 10 times back more into the economy than they are taking because they are all coming here to work. And they work at jobs that Americans don't want because they pay less. Not that there was even an unemployment crisis to begin with, so Americans had plenty of jobs.
The problem with immigration was the asylum process, where there were not enough staff to process all the requests and determine real ones from fake ones. This is why there was a border bill brought up in 2023-2024, authored by a Republican, that had bipartisan support. Trump killed that bill, saying on record that it would help his election chances. So in the end, more people would have been deported if the border bill would have passed than there are now, and there would have been way more filtering on who gets to stay and who doesnt.
All of this is true, none of this is debatable. No, your favorite right wing commentator opposing arguments are all bullshit.
And this is precisely why conservatives deserve no sympathy. Inherent racism is probably due to the shit job your parents did at raising you, which is at least excusable, but the stupidity of voting for someone who gives you the worse outcome compared to what you want, and then claiming its a better outcome, is not.
ICE is violating my fourth amendment rights as a full US citizen when they demand proof of citizenship on the sole basis of my skin tone and occupation. There is zero constitutional basis for that.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-approaching-people-...
All, no. But many, yeah. The Constitution and many of it's Amendments call out people or persons. The 14th Amendment even specifies what a citizen is, and in the next breath says persons cannot be denied due process by the States, not citizens.
New York and California have enough GDP, weapons factories and in-state fissile materials to make a civil war at least interesting. (They’re also both primed to land foreign armies on their shores and air strips).
In repression, guns and muscles count. In a civil war, they’re as effective as Maduro’s guard was.
I'm sure the ICE agents swapping head-shot porn on their phones find that hilarious.
In history mothers against authoritarian rule, against the draft, raising awareness, etc. have been suprisingly effective at slowing violence, attracting press coverage, kick starting civil rights, etc.
The officer that shot through the front window, stepped to the side, shot twice more through the side window while on two feet, and stomped away unharmed muttering "fucking bitch" .. that officer?
I don’t think that video proves anything definitively fwiw. It doesn’t capture any harm to the officer nor any heightened or escalating behaviors afterwards. Nor does it show an officer in a using force inappropriately.
If you think it does you are overlaying your own biases onto the video.
LoRa mesh networking seems like the runner-up, but vague reports indicate (Meshtastic) doesn't handle crowds well.
I think Bitchat can use Meshtastic, so a LoRa radio paired with a phone could be a base for not just texting individuals, but community messaging.
1: https://polymarket.com/event/us-civil-war-before-2027