People with subject knowledge can make money, but no mechanism guarantees that the majority of people using the market are subject matter experts. If anything, most people using the prediction market are going to be people paying to make their chosen outcome look more preferable. They aren't trying to make a financial payoff on the bet, they're trying to make an emotional payoff and are willing to lose money doing so.
This is the best case scenario for prediction markets I think, as it means the odds more accurately reflect the outcome likelihood (e.g. people aren't betting against their favourite in an hedge against emotions).
At least then they would break even in an efficient market. But it isn't an efficient market due to fees and opportunity cost... So you're right, it is irrational to participate.
A category theory textbook opens the "motivation and use cases" section with the following poem:
There's a tiresome young man in Bayshore. / When his fiance cried 'I adore / the beautiful sea' / he replied 'I agree, / it's pretty, but what is it for?'
I'm European. I've lived in the US a couple of years.
The thing is.... you're NOT charged to file your taxes. Filing your taxes is free. People have the option to pay a company that helps them file their taxes.
The peculiarity of the US isn't that you're charged but that the government's own system is shit (which is why many people choose to pay). This isn't uniquely American. I'm sure there's other countries where filing your taxes is a pain - though maybe not in Europe (?).
the government's own system is shit, because Intuit has an interest in keeping it shitty. If it weren't, like other modern countries, you wouldn't pay them to help you with it. So they lobby heavily to keep the government from modernizing its system.
Germany's system doesn't penalize you for doing nothing if you're just a worker. That's very different from the US.
Last year I had an error on a form. The finanzamt sent me a letter (from a real person). My partner was able to call and ask some clarification questions. We filed the correction and it was no big deal. I wasn't in any risk of going to jail or being the target of a lawsuit.
Yes, getting a tax advisor (Steuerberater) here is very difficult, and sometimes necessary. But otherwise, the system is way less intrusive than the US's in my opinion.
> Last year I had an error on a form. The finanzamt sent me a letter (from a real person). My partner was able to call and ask some clarification questions. We filed the correction and it was no big deal. I wasn't in any risk of going to jail or being the target of a lawsuit.
This is almost verbatim what would occur in the US as well if the IRS believed there was a mistake on your tax filing. People just keep repeating false information about the IRS year after year, and nobody fact checks anything they read from random people on the internet, that now everyone thinks if you miss a zero on your tax filing you committed a felony or something.
Calling US tax filing unnecessarily annoying and in-need of improvement just isn't enough for some people. They need to make up stories and baseless claims to spread fear or something.
It's totally illegal in Germany to lie on tax forms. Whether you'll be sentenced for an honest mistake or not is a different matter, I don't think you would in either jurisdiction if it's something minor.
I would not say it is shit. Free fillable forms is pretty easy for 99% of people. You start filling it out, and there are pdfs of all the instructions available next to the form you are filling out.
The complexity of these forms combined with the fact that getting them wrong is a felony means that filling them out without any help is out of reach for the vast majority of the population.
Getting them wrong isn’t a felony. Refusing to pay after they inform you you were wrong might be a felony.
But they won’t tell you you were wrong for a few years, during which time interest accrues.
(Source, just paid 5k in taxes+interest for the 2021 year after IRS sent me a letter saying my stock selling profit calculations were off by 4.5k. I think they were wrong (I was certainly wrong too) but I can file an update and get a refund on my next taxes if so. Better to stop the interest accessing while I figure out my bases)
Why do people keep repeating this? It's so obviously wrong I can't believe that saying it can be anything other than bad faith. I have miscalculated my taxes twice now: in both cases, the IRS sent me a letter explaining the mistake and what I still owed, I wrote them a check for that amount, and that was it. No "felony" or even the faintest hint of one was in play. The letters even had an apologetic tone and suggestions for how to set up payment plans, as well as multiple ways to dispute the charges.
Because it satisfies their narrative that you're basically forced to use tax prep (human or machine) to file and therefore the fact that you can actually do so for free is a false choice.
It might be similar to the inverse of xkcd.com/1043 (Ten Thousand), in that something has been repeated so many times people believe it to be true. Thinking about this more I'd bet the myth that miscalculating your taxes was an exaggeration based on anti-tax rhetoric.
"Ads" was bought (DoubleClick) and in fact I've seen it referred to as the best acquisition in the internet era, as measured by what they paid for it vs the revenue directly attributed to it.
YouTube was bought as well.
Android was bought as well.
Ads, YouTube and Android are valuable tech. Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Calendar are all shitty apps. Not in the sense that they're bad, just in the sense that there's nothing innovative about them.
Of everything that you mentioned in your list, the only ones that are genuine Google innovations are Search and Maps.
