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A political junkie, a Canadian, a science nerd.
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ratel

Net worth: H$18,619

Predictions made: 310

from Canada. Member since Mon 28th Jan

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ratel left these comments.

I'm still not sure I'm in favour of this, its a very interesting idea though.

I would think its only worhwhile if it allows people to get ahead that started later. The millionaires give you a loan because it will get them more money than a safe 90% bet say, but you would take more risky investments with it and potentially make more money than that. I agree, some amount of time passing would be important before people are allowed to borrow, and maybe you can only borrow a certain multiple of your money. If you are borrowing more than twice as much as you have then its less likely you'll be able to pay it back.

That brings to mind another problem, if loans are given out by individual rich hubdubbers, then how do they know you don't already have many loans out from other rich people? We'd need a credit rating system, or at least make all loans you have out public knowledge on your account (as brackets in your net worth for example.)

The question hubdub has to consider is, does this provide the motivation to make the markets more accurate? But if they only care about it being fun, then I think it sounds like a lot of fun.
posted 8 weeks ago
you could only loan money you earned, not your startup money.
Having said taht I'm not sure its a good idea. The loan shark could set the interest rate they want back I guess? And they take the risk of not getting it back if the player can't pay up? Would you need to be able to declare bakruptcy?
It depends what the point of the system is, I think they want to predict news accurately using incentives, but it seems a waste not to be able to do anything with the money except make outrageuous bets.
posted 8 weeks ago
no way, almost all the women who wanted Hillary to win would really have to hold their nose as they vote for sarah and whatisname, she goes against everything hillary believes in
Can we have a discussion of why the conservatives or do not appeal to city-folk?
wow, hope springs eternal. I'm not saying its impossible, really, just not yet...at all.
polls.... I think we need some time for the campaign to sink in, it could change significantly once people astart paying attention.
I think people still underestimate the fear of NDP voters and voters in Ontario causing strategic voting that favours the liberals. But it all depends how the campagin goes, the liberals have to look confident and the conesrvatives have to mke some gaffs, otherwise the results will be likely as your pre campaign polls suggest.
I don't know, its definetly talked about but I don't think most people get nervous about it. The fact they are threatening us this way shows they really don't understand us, it will only make us less likely to leave I think.
have to say I'm a bit surprised at this one, we'll have to see how it progresses, minority either seems to most likely, do people really expect a Liberal collapse?
you say election debates are exlcuded
but if the debate has other topics its is not voided. very constrained question
hey, at least its a good place to park your money
the budget comes out tomorrow, so this will be decided before the original settlement date, but still don't know when
thats good, I'm glad you can be flexible with your rules.

And remember, the question says mentioned by anyone so John Stewart saying Obama's name in the opening monologue counts too!
Ratel
well, good discussion there...right...
about the question, since everyone else has condemned and it says "some but not all" doesn't that mean we are just waiting to see if anyone that can be agreed to represent the EU condemns it in some way?
an interesting question. I can understand they might want to reset but I would argue strongly against it. They would disallusion many users and punish though who joined up early. While I don't think they should ever reset people's actual total wealth they may want to consider different ways of ranking users. The quarterly gains for example are quite a long time. Perhaps the main ranking should be of monthly gains. They should also provide more criteria for ranking, the topic specific rank lists are a good start. They could improve it by showing us all the users and their ranks, not just hte top 20, then people could compete locally.
perhaps they could even let us find our rank relative to arbitrary sets of keywords, that shouldn't be too hard to set up.

This keeps it competitive while allowing people to not obsess about total weatlh. You may also want to set a cap on the max amount that can be bet on any question as a percentage of wealth. But maybe not.
I'm hedging my bets on the destruction of all life option. We'll all be gone but as the blackhole swallows us all in I will have the satifaction of knowing I got a really good return on some H$.
if they take a picture of the landing site with will be for historical documentation, not verification. No major news source will describe the photos as 'verifying' an event they all know actually occurred.
what if it isn't destroyed by a missle because they miss and don't try again?
right....well, I think most europeans would not consider one national leader complaining to represent the entire EU unless its someone representing the EU itself and they've cleared with all the other leaders first. And they would consider the US allies whether you like it or not, even if they disagree sometimes.
so is there still a concept of popular vote in a primary?
looking to strike a deal, not necessarily bid to buy them
posted 41 weeks ago on Who will buy Yahoo?
sorry that doesn't make sense, you are asking if she will pull out *after march5*
so how can it end *on* march 5. I think what you are really asking is will she pull out *by march 5*. Will she pull out sometime before March 5 midnight? Thats not what you said but from your comments and the end date it seems to be what you meant.
hmm, well maybe its just that no one is voting on it, I just put $60 in and it moved up to 6%, so its probably fine
how can it be zero? did somebody throw 100,000 into it?
this seems odd, do you guys have bug?
by the given end date, mar 31
is it really going up to 100% and then right back down?
Is somebody trying to manipulate this market?
I lost on the crying question last time but I'll try again.
Maybe I'm just a sucker, surely she won't cry again.....will she?
so is it being cancelled or not, its still open to new betting. I agree with cancelledbysbc, there doesn't seem anything wrong with this question, its clear, has clear end date and terms. And the idea of allowing people to 'cash out' of a market seems very strange to me. the people who happen to be up will cash out and the those who aren't do what? wait until its voided and they get their principle back?
any real market doesn't make announcements about closing 'soon' because that will affect buying, you either freeze all trades or close it and give people back their principle. there was never any mention of the option of pulling you money out of a market that will be closed 'soon'. A market with that kind of arbitrary behaviour won't function. Which leads back to the question of why this is being voided in the first place. Is it just because it was a duplicate? There are lots of those.

It really doesn't matter what decision you make as long as its completely consistent with all other decisions made by editors and is explained fully.
come people, this ones easy free money. there are three chances to trigger an election in just the next couple weeks
the staff seem to be getting their act together, some of them, like thedoctor, are regularly posting on the categories they manage and clearly stating their role and that they are no longer voting on questions in that category. It would have been nice if some staff had stepped in on this question and done a similar thing, at least confirm to us if we're right.

hopefully they add a tag soon that lets us tell by looking at the username if that user is an editor

I think he's making lots of little bets on stock market questions rather than general news items. If you are watching stocks and markets as part of your job anyways adding some very specific bets on their outcomes wouldn't be too hard.
I like meta questions but they should at least be about something, like a change hubdub will make. but you're trying to make a point. I think the system could deal with this without having to vett questions by the simple fact that no one will vote on questions like this and so they won't show up high on the list of questions.

I don't think pre vetting questions is feasible if they want to grow, even this whole system of on-staff category editors is probably going to get unwieldy if hubdub gets popular. I agree with end_in_sight but I would suggest letting people create as many questions as they like but judging their reputation based on how many people answer their questions as well as considering voids and reviews from users.
I'm assuming that would fall under "Still independent..." if its just a deal with Google and they're not bought.
posted 43 weeks ago on Who will buy Yahoo?
you can look at his blog, its a he.
I love meta-questions, this is a cool one. though this is prob not what hubdub was thinking when they created this system. there is the problem that blueseamiami can bet a lot of money on this and actually contrl the outcome, thus giving him more money. makes it very hard for anyone else to predict . I'm not betting on this.
ya that would be cool to know, as well as letting us know how many people have voted on each question
why not find out what hubdub insiders think? they're people too
nigeleccles indicated that they plan in the future to let normal users volunteer to be editors for categories of questions. Would these people then be hubdub insiders?
It seems the consensus is becoming that anyone who decides the fate of a question should not vote on it, this seems fair and allows them to expand to large scale community editing in the future. Just an idea, perhaps users who have passed some threshold of trustworthiness could get access to a an editing area where they could claim new questions. To encourage participation they could be given a flat fee in H$ for successfully editing the question (maybe if the users complain about the decision too much they don't get the points and it hurts their trustworthiness). This user/editor would then not be able to vote on that question of course.
This way you don't even have to assign people to entire categories, you just let them to any individual questions they like.

Idea for trustworthiness measure:
if has been a hubdub user for > 1 months and
voided questions/total questions < .05 and
num of created question > 20
num of posted comments > 20 and
net worth > 4000


as I've said before, I have no problem with this (and my rank would go up a lot if they were all kicked off!)
as long as they clearly indicate who is staff beside each user name
i'd agree with nigeleccles
if A then B is FALSE when A is FALSE regardless of the value of B
in this case though it seems the writer was just asking if Gore would run by wednesday
i think option 2 is the most fair
posted 43 weeks ago on Who will buy Yahoo?
i think option 2 is the most fair
posted 43 weeks ago on Who will buy Yahoo?
the end date is june 30, so, thats what I'm betting on
why not just take people betting on a question as a sign that it is valid, and once 5 people bet the questioner can bet. This encourages good questions and removes the temptation to create asteroid question scams since a few other people would get much more benefit than you.

I have no problem with them playing, and if you think they're NOT going to plug some google ads on here in a week or two your crazy. So they will be making money at some point. But I still think its ok for them to play because we're not making money on this game and they should value our happiness and addiction to their game more than getting high on the scoreboard. If they clearly tell us who is an editor and who isn't, then we'd know if they were dominating the leaderboard and we'd simply stop playing.

Its all about having the right incentives.
people are taking this all very seriously, its supposed to be fun. Thats the impression I get from the various category editors. They are trying to be relaxed about it and hope that the community policies fuzzy or scamming questions while they accept a bit of vagueness on some good questions. Since they aren't making real money off the H$ hopefully they aren't too impartial. If your being paid by this company you wouldn't try to piss off all your users by fraudulently deciding questions just so you can get points. Clearly they're ahead at this early stage because, by definition, category editors play a lot.

Having said all that...I think the nature of the editing system needs to be explained a bit more. We need to know who the editors are, there should be a flag or soemthing beside the id telling us which category they are responsible for. This may make the leaderboard look a bit tilted but it should also give normal users a better sense of achievement, if you're beating the sports editor on sport topics thats pretty good!
little open ended isn't it? when will we give up and say No? Would be better to bet on when they'll figure it out or list possible causes with an option for none/unknown by a certain date.
I agree with all but point 13, its better for us to write the questions, even if it does create a bit of chaos.

But my understanding of settlement is that is the date and time when the question and bets on it are 'settled'. Not when betting ends. You need to consider the opportunity cost when betting on something and I'm sure we've all looked at questions we like the odds for but are of the form "by the end of 2008" and either not bet or put less money. Settlement should be settlement, if people set the end time wrong then thats part of the game and the knack of creating good questions that end at the appropriate time. See the string of Dow Jones questions for similar discussion.

But I'm willing to let these hiccups go for now, hubdub's gotta figure out what its about.
And if they pick wrong, well, we'll just stop using it...no pressure :)
I don't think yahoo will go so easy, they'll look for someone to come back them up
posted 43 weeks ago on Who will buy Yahoo?
Dowq Jones, spelling error, no one sees it when they search for Dow
uh, isn't 2/4/08 a saturday, the markets are closed
posted 43 weeks ago on Will the Dow close up on 2/4/2008?
this one's win-win, I don't think they'll select him for running mate. But if they do and I lose my money at least the democrats will be guaranteed to win! Go Huckabee!
this is the internet, test is all we have, capitalization is one of the only inflections we can use without altering the meaning of our words, so its relevant. Just not particularly relevant.

you guys can cite polls all you want, I think Obama's got momemtum and the more people see him, even white people, the more they will vote for him. So I'm throwing more money in.
:) I think it has to be public, a good test would be Wolf Blitzer at any point saying "Hillary (something something) tears today."
at what interest rate?
why would edwards supporters go for hillary? Wouldn't Obama's message seem must closer to Edwards'? I don't understand that.
congratualations hubdub, this is officially the first piece of news I learned about on your site because of a question.
John edwards dropped out ?!
uhh, did McCain go above 100 at one point there? :)
this is why we vote for elected officials in a private ballot, when you can see everyone's beliefs the current trends are magnified. We'll be careful not to be reckless with our 'money' because we don't want to lose it, but if lots of people believe it then it encourages us to believe it.
The way I worded it 'yes' only wins if he does pull out and does it after super tuesday, not before.
But now I realize I made a mistake, I meant to say Florida, not Super Tuesday.
But it seems the vote is today so I guess that would be frozen.

This question can be deleted.
how can this be determined?
I should have said the US Presidential Election.
yet, they're still having the vote, so which way the people vote will be informative, how can people not discuss it. If its really suppossed to be that taboo then they shouldn't be voting at all.
ya, but you have to pay to respond on predictify? this is more fun and I'm trying to waste time, not time and money! :)
that could work, but you still need to deal with the problem of the initial estimate. How much weight does the initial creator of the question get , is it equivalent to one vote? If it is, then the next vote could make it jump a huge distance, if its not, then the creator has incentive to set it in one direction and vote the other way to get more profit. Its obvious when someone sets a likliehood of 99% on something that won't happen, like oh say, and asteroid impact, but you could game it over time with much smaller differences. And I don't see anyway to distinguish these 'shorts' from the case when you genuinely think its got a 30% chance and then everyone disagrees with you. You don't want to penalize people for gambling 'yes' on the off chance of an unlikely event either.

Its a tough problem I think.
wow, everyone seems really sure about that, guess its time to buy low. Anyone ever consider that the game can change, and that the polls haven't exactly been too accurate this year. I don't mind, just more money for me.
does "no" mean he won't announce he'll run before end of february or that he'll announce he won't run before the end of february?