It doesn’t cost that much. i put some funds in polymarket and my total costs were around 18$, Use metamask and wait for a low=price time of day to send money. Alternately, use matic or something similar to get fees which are less than a dollar
Srdjan Miletic
Karma: 139
I think it’s worth noting that there are often both fixed and percentage fees associated with crypto which it’s important to be aware of/minimize in order for the trades you mentioned to be profitable. Specifically:
Most exchanges charge a hefty %fee on trades. To get around this you want to buy on the pro exchanges (coinbase pro, kraken etc...)
Polymarket charges a 2% fee
One argument is that the US stock market already contains a lot of global exposure as many/most large US firms are internationally diversified themselves. Buying global funds means you’re actually under-investing in the USA relative to the world as 40% of your “US companies” are actually global companies.
I don’t vouch for this argument, it’s just something I’ve heard which sounds somewhat plausible.
I think one thing to consider is that the two paths don’t have an equal % chance to succeed. Getting a tenure track position at a top 20 university is hard. Really hard. Getting a research scientist position is, based on my very uncertain and informal understanding, less hard.
That’s a good point. I’lll update the post to mention it. There is another trump market offering 5% (so 3% after the fees) but it’s far smaller. https://polymarket.com/market/will-donald-trump-be-president-of-the-usa-on-may-31-2021
1: Nuclear Power Currently we (the developed world except France) rely mostly on fossil fuels for energy with some usage of renewables. This has been the case since WW2. This is bad. It’s bad because global warming and other kinds of pollution. It’s bad because we rely either on coal, which is extra dirty, or oil and natural gas which largely comes from brutal autocracies and causes us to be needlessly involved in wars and influence battles. Renewables are coming but they’re too inconsistent to be useful. until we have better energy storage tech.
None of this was necessary. We’ve had nuclear energy since the 1960′s. It’s cheap, safe and essentially limitless. France generates 70% of its energy from nuclear power and has done so for decades. As a consequence it has energy independence, low emissions, low energy costs and is generally better off. The only reason it’s not mainstream in most nations is due to environmentalist movements campaigning against it and high profile nucler accidents leading to a public misconception of the risks of nuclear as compared to other power sources much the same way as people are more scared of terrorism than car crashes despite the latter being overwhelmingly more dangerous.
2: Immigration Canada and Australia do immigration well. They have points system. High skilled, probably beneficial to society immigrants can easily migrate with minimum paperwork.
In the Uk and USA, immigration is hell. Low skilled illegal migrants number in the millions. High skilled legal migrants have to fight through regulatory hurdle after hurdle to get into the country. This is bad.
It’s not clear why immigration is so bad. Massive majorities of the public support points based migration systems. Nevertheless we have terrible systems which tolerate massive illegal migration but make legal migration unnecessarily difficult.
3: Corruption Private individuals and businesses can give money to politicians and parties. They usually do this because it’s in their interest. This is colloquially known as corruption. There is massive support for ending this kind of practice. Almost everyone from elites to the public see it as bad. Still year after year it persists. In the US this may be because of the law imposing a barrier to reducing campaign contributions. In the UK or other european countries there’s no such problem yet still nothing is done.
4: Education A lot of education is signalling. This is even more true of lower tier education. One memory that sticks with me is on my first day of a graduate schema another person telling my they studied airport management. I asked them why. They said just to get a job and that they’d learn nothing practical over those years.
The problem with education is a collective action/externality one. Education is good for individuals but imposes costs on others by inflating the level of signalling needed. Many people would be better off if they collectively decided to not waste years on useless degrees so they can apply to unrelated graduate schemes. Still, it’s not possible to cordinate.
Just to point out that there are consequentialist arguments for first past the post, namely that it leads to stable majority governments and a small number of well-defined political parties.
20% over two months sounds extremely high to be close to risk free. I’d be very curious to hear more.
Are you sure you can do it with no fees? I know you can do it if you deposit USD but I don’t think it’s possible with other currencies.
That’s a good point. I’m used to the free withdrawals. Didn’t realize the costs until I looked at their blog just now.
Will update the article.
So I don’t really think it’s the price of risk. I think it’s just the markets being shallow and inefficient and most casual players being uninterested in a 4% return and unable to exploit one even if they were interested as their transaction fees would erase that margin.
Exploiting Crypto Prediction Markets for Fun and Profit
Why do you believe that proof-of-stake is a mirage? We know it’s possible as some existing blockchains already use it. Do you believe that:
It’s possible but has some serious flaw that most people don’t recognize
The main crypto’s of today (ETH + BTC) won’t transition to it
Something else
Instituting rule of law in foreign policy. In many countries foreign policy is essentially at the discretion of the executive. Insofar as it is controlled by the legislature, it’s controlled through committees and reporting requirements rather than actually courts and rules of conduct. Imagine if the prime minister could choose to kill whoever they wanted and was only contrainted by the threat of parliamentary sanction. That’s basically the status qou for foreign policy at the moment.
Make nuclear our main source of power. It’s green, safe, sustainable, cheap and reliable. We could have done this in the 60′s/70′s as France did but irrational fears of nuclear power and subsequent over-regulation and lack of gov support killed it in the US and UK.
I’d heard of cryonics quite a bit but never brain scanning or preservation. The story of the young man is particularly poignant. It’s is truly a tragedy that brain preservation is not more widely commercially available.
Fair enough. It’s good to know that inspections are no longer pre-announced..
I’ve read that blog too. It’s pretty interesting. Do you have any other sources to recommend?
Also, if you’re willing to share which country did you teach in?
My sample size is pretty small, limited to myself and a few people I knew, so I don’t have a high degree of confidence that my experiences generalize across the UK. Hearing about experiences like your daughters shifts me somewhat towards thinking that state schools are okayish on average. Still, I find it hard to convert the various good and bad stories I hear into any kind of high confidence conclusion without hard data, which I haven’t managed to find much of.
While I think there are some flaws with this proposal, my biggest question is “Why not do other things that are done abroad and we know work?”
The US system for deals is really strange. In the UK and many european countries there’s no such thing as a deal. The police can charge you with a crime. The earlier in the process you admit guilt, the bigger % a sentence reduction you get. This seems to solve the overcharging problem, a prosecutor can’t charge you with crime X and then give you a deal for crime Y, and aligns incentives better as prosecutors can’t fear people into taking plea deals as easily. It also preserves much of the benefit of plea bargaining by still allowing suspects to confess when the evidence is overwhelming and hence save lot’s of time and money.