Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation’s first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state, the most far-reaching crackdown on massively popular services like Kalshi and Polymarket.
It comes as states confront a growing standoff with the Trump administration over how to regulate the industry, which allows people to bet on virtually anything.
The new state law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, which it defines as a system that lets consumers place a wager on a future outcome, like sports, elections, weather, live entertainment, someone’s word choice and world affairs.
The prohibition extends to services supporting prediction markets, like virtual private networks, that could allow consumers to disguise their location and get around the ban.
It would force prediction market sites like Kalshi and Polymarket to leave the state, or face possible felony charges. The law takes effect in August.
Just FYI, sufficiently liquid prediction markets are also assassin markets by their nature.
It’s a really easy way to facilitate payments for killings by “predicting” that someone will be dead by a certain date, and making a big bet against it
That isn’t really a new thing entirely, companies have our entire lives been able to take out life insurance on their employees without them knowing it. Which you know…
This was reported, so I looked it up. Apparently, it’s true. I also think it’s your opinion that corporations might use for their own financial gain, so I won’t remove it.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporate-ownership-of-life-insurance.asp
Oh right the dead peasants’ insurance thing this is like well after the fact, in like the 00s by walmart.
I guess I should have just looked it all up how hard could have been.
From what I understand they would take them out on technical employees fairly often as well, like scientists types that could not be easily replaced. But who knows what dirty dealings have gone on.
Is that why they hire elderly people as greeters? Wow, they’re pure evil.
Huh, I wonder if there’s a way we could subpoena the books of the life insurance companies they deal with. Or somehow obtain that information by whatever means.
Walmart was a very bad company, they still are but I think they were one of the first retail Giants to become totally morally bankrupt.
If a Walmart employee dies on Walmart property the family gets a $1,000,000 payout. Source: am spouse of Walmart manager. This applies to all employees as far as I know.
What does Walmart get if you die* on or off the property?
That I do not know. If they get anything, it isn’t handled at the store level.
His opinion? Walmart was notorious for taking out life insurance policies on its rank and file workers. It happened for decades, there were even lawsuits, settlements, the whole 9 yards…
This is the first I’m hearing anything about it. I meant it as a good thing, so he doesn’t have to provide proof and all that.
Sure?
Yeah that’s been common knowledge for decades and decades. Like Wall Street level they can sell life insurance policies on any of us without us knowing it, all they need is our social security number. It’s very unfair.
I don’t have any ready sources this is from like the 90s and 2000s I mean I could look but whatever.
It’s why we aren’t allowed to do “dead pools.”
Note that a dead pool can also mean when the water in a dam is so low that it can’t flow downhill through the outlet (because the outlet isn’t at the exact bottom).
It can also refer to a large room full of acid and hanging skeletal corpses
“Dats real acid…?”
Whaaaa?
Hey, I bet you a million dollars a guy I don’t like will still be alive tomorrow.
If you take that bet. You have a significant financial interest in ensuring that guy I don’t like isn’t still alive tomorrow
I know everyone else is pretending that they understood your original comment, but I actually really appreciate how much you clear it up with this response.
Like there is no downside for the person making the bet, they actually accrue interest until it happens if there is any market volume on the bet.
I get what you were saying, I just have never heard of this happening. Are there court cases or articles on it?
No confirmed cases, but sci fi novels and commentators have been talking about it since the 90s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
We are proud to announce that we have created the Torment Nexus from the famous SciFi show “Don’t create the Torment Nexus”!
No idea about court cases but my great grandfather had stories of soilders betting on which commanding officer would be killed next by his own men. He was in the German military. My grandfather had similar stories from Vietnam.
Dead pools or how ever you call them are a decently well known concept.
I’m pretty sure that legal wide scale prediction markets have been around for like 2 years so maybe give it time
I honestly wonder if there isn’t a deeper history. Gambling is a part of human culture and the only recent thing that’s happened is our society has become so corrupt that gambling is being allowed to legally flourish.
Like bank deposit insurance, vaccines, and clean water standards, anti-gambling laws are something society is reminded it needs only after they are gone.
Like laws against sex and drugs, gambling laws are in themselves a failure of government. We know criminalization is not needed, because societies that don’t criminalize imprison and murder less of their own people.
Kidnapping and murder is bad
You can’t legislate morality. If you make gambling and drugs illegal they just go underground and become worse problems and foster a criminal underclass/organized crime that becomes a much bigger problem.
Better to keep them legal and put sensible controls on them, emphasis on sensible obviously that’s not what we have going on here. Outside of our freedom on marijuana in some states now at least when you don’t consider how anybody that drives a car can be arrested for impaired driving even if they’re totally sober from the marijuana. If they have smoked in the past week or two. That’s another story though.
Well, the probably imprison less people because they are functioning much better as a society. The question is if imprisoning people is better than not imprisoning them in this fucked up society.
I’m in the US, but we generally lock up and/or deport way too many people; incarceration causes more problems than it solves, and serving white supremacy is the main social goal and outcoe.
But I think this is a separate conversation. The anti-gambling laws I’m talking about are the ones that would prevent constant Draft Kings advertisements and all the money that gets fed back into our political system. We’ve got so far away from acknowledging the damage that gambling causes, and gambling, as far as I’m concerned, is just a mugging with extra steps, yet paid propaganda has papered over the criminality.
White supremacy is not the goal of the ones calling the shots with the money and the power, the white supremacists are tools they use, because they’re dumb.
Yes, making insider trading easy, legal and profitable instead of risky, illegal and prosecuted, certainly does not fuel insider trading in whatever shape or form.
Fuck that guy, bro. No one likes him.
So kind of like in John Wick, but less direct
It’s basically, if there is a profit motive for something, it WILL happen. It’s a matter of when not if once these things are out there in the wild