They don’t need to keep a low profile, they have the president and his family using their services for enrichment. They are immune from consequence, might as well advertise at maximum and unleash hell for the most gain.

This is why principled ethical behavior MUST be a cornerstone of acceptable behavior above greed. Even if you are washing and selling greed as “financial obligations” “capital interests” or some other corporate bullshit.

They were already illegal! Why be careful, they know they’ve got the social trend and the regulatory bodies on their sides.

There are examples of people manipulating precipitation monitors to get crop insurance payouts: https://www.agweb.com/news/business/rain-robbers-how-four-fa...

The incentive was already there without prediction markets, just like the incentive to screw with drug trials has been around as long as biotech companies that are publicly traded have been making drugs. Wherever there is a measurement tied to a monetary payout, unscrupulous people will try to manipulate it.

This doesn’t change anything since the incentive already existed before prediction markets, people are getting unreasonably emotional about prediction markets due to headline overload.

Creating a new incentive where one does not exist can create moral hazards, an easy example is introducing wildfire prediction markets.

From a moral perspective I don't think it is. From a more practical perspective... It's only tiny biotechs where the share price exactly tracks a single clinical trial. This opens up ways to make more specific bets

Options trading is particularly bad example, because the buyer can choose whether they exercise it or not. You can just let the option expire.

But yes, there is portion of "investing" that is actually gambling. That is what Enron did and it threw down the economy. Those gamblers usually loose and we have quite a lot of regulations trying to restrict the impact of that gambling.

And yes, the usual suspect hate those regulations.

It’s not, anyone claiming otherwise is arguing from an emotional position, not a rational one.

If we bet on where fires will occur and I have empty pockets and a book of matches that's a little different than options trading.

As with most terrible behaviors when a few people do it the results to society aren't so bad. When it gains potential for mass application of the same behavior it becomes a crisis.

This is exactly the sort of bad incentives that lead to things like deliberately throwing drug trials. Very small amounts of money make people do horrible things every day, by what magic would this be an exception?

> A pharmacist, or one of their relatives, openly taking a large position against a trial's success would be far more likely to attract scrutiny than, say, a pharmacist being secretly paid by a competitor to interfere with the trial.

the later would not be affect by betting on clinical trials being allowed or prohibited, so I don't think the comparison proves that this would help

Will there be anyone hanging around to scrutinize though? The pharmacist patsy maybe, but whoever bribed them is already paid out and off doing their laundry