20% happens about 1 in 5 times. I know that's snarky wording but 20% shots come though constantly in daily life.
I think as humans we are really bad at intuition about probabilities, and it being an election only makes it much worse. I don't think anyone is consciously conflating these with poll numbers but percentages of voters are the numbers we see a lot more than prediction markets, and 80% is idunno an 80% chance of getting between 50% and 54% of the vote or something.
It's not a 'prediction market', it's a gambling market. It's far more accurate to say 80% of gamblers were convinced Bolsanaro would win than to say there's an 80% likelihood he would win. It's not measuring likelihood as it's untethered from things that impact the actual results. Obscuring it basic gambling with the word 'prediction' doesn't change the fact that's naked gambling at the end of the day.
It's extremely inaccurate to say 80% of the gamblers were convinced because that's not how it works at all. Each bet has someone on the other side of it - 50% of the people bet on Bolsanaro and 50% against.
If you bet on 20% chances and they happen 30% of the time you make money. The payoffs are such that you win by being a better predictor than the market. I'm fine criticizing it as a gambling blight (not to mention a corruption payoff) but it is also a prediction market.
The 80% is not the proportion of people who think he would win, that's not how these things work.
Every single factor was pointing towards Bolsonaro, Polymarket was just consistent with that.
He unexpectedly won the first round of the election. His lead was expected to grow since he'd likely get most of the votes of the other candidates. 17 out of 18 polls favored Bolsonaro. Market movements indicated a strong expectation of him winning. The Brazilian Real futures are already down 10% in the last couple hours.
But that's how democracy works, I think this election will be studied many times in the future.
If he has an 80% chance to win that means Polymarket will be "wrong" 20% of the time. And 80% seems fair given he was leading in the polls by a razor thin but consistent margin.
Polymarket isn't binary so you are understating how wrong they were. Polymaket gives outcomes as percentage odds and less than 12 hours ago they had Bolsonaro by 5-to-1.
They are good at some markets but they don’t understand latam and especially Brazilian politics in the least so whatever makes it into the US news drives the market although it is normally wrong
Google Maps isn't good for this one as it is off of a forest road. My understanding is that it is less than a mile from where you would park if you were to drive there.
I had a friend who got hooked on these and it really messed up his life. He had issues before but one he was hooked to those he became unbearable to even be around.
I have literally never heard anyone speak positively about an HOA. The city pools where I live is well liked and maintained. With the exception of the local YMCA, the public pools are considered better than the other options in the area.
Mine is also pretty good. It's a beautiful place with a guard gate. I don't even like hoas, it kind of pisses me off that I can't do ugly customizations, but it's not really a big issue. The neighborhood was nice enough that I chose to buy there. If there were no HOA it would look like the rest of town which is shoddy.
If my neighbor decides to start blasting music at 3am for some reason, I don't have to suck it up for the next decade, I can just get the HOA to deal with it. Very peaceful.
I feel like if you need a guard gate then whatever city you live in is basically a failed state.
If there is blasting music at 3am the police in my area would deal with that and every city I have lived in deals with those type of nuance issues quickly.
HOAs are not common where I live and they just sound like people privatizing what your local government should be doing.
> they just sound like people privatizing what your local government should be doing.
Yes, that is what they are. It's easier to agree to a covenant to follow some rules and do things than it is to change laws and then get them enforced. You can't think of one thing you wish would be enforced that isn't a law? "I wish my neighbor didn't paint his house an ugly hot pink and park a rusted tractor on the lawn." Well with a hoa you can all agree to not do that.
American cities are largely failed states where police would not respond to anything short of murder, so yeah be grateful for your place of living
American cities are not largely failed states and no I can’t think of anything like what you are suggesting. The laws we have in my very average city cover the issues I would have with my neighbors. Personally I appreciate people being creative and have housing designs I might not choose. People storing things on their property is fine as long as it isn’t a health and safety issue.
Also since my city is a democracy with vibrant civic engagement, if I thought a law needed changing I am pretty sure it would be fully debated and considered. What I have heard from friends who have lived in HOAs would suggest that I could not be confident the HOA board would give a crap.
I don't personally think that the existence of an HOA implies a failed city. But perhaps the utility of an HOA is even higher in such a city. I also will grant that bad HOAs can and do exist.
Targeting "entitlements" as a universal fix ignores both the fiscal math and the human costs. Healthcare makes up the lion's share of that spending; cutting it just shifts uncompensated care burdens onto hospitals and inflates private premiums. Cutting programs like SNAP and WIC means pulling food support from children, which causes long-term economic damage.
If the goal is deficit reduction through spending cuts, policy needs to evaluate actual economic ROI. Programs like nutritional and income supports have positive fiscal multipliers, which is why blunt austerity measures trigger negative feedback loops and contract growth.
Spending cuts have a place, but treating entitlements as a slush fund without accounting for the economic return or impact on people isn’t a productive policy proposal.
>Healthcare makes up the lion's share of that spending;
I heard US healthcare, rather famously, spends more per capita than any country in the world, despite still being rather terrible. Maybe the solution is actually reforming it in an European way (including universal free healthcare)? Your other points are very interesting to me, especially negative feedback loops of austerity - I never thought about that before.
The primary factor (in my view) is that we pay healthcare providers (doctors and nurses) 2x to 3x as much as other developed countries.
That creates knock-on effects throughout the healthcare system:
* Doctor time is worth $xxx/hour, so every second counts. We hire a bunch of support staff to make sure doctors aren't "wasting" time on paperwork, taking vitals or talking to patients. Now it costs more to run a practice.
* Doctor time is worth $xxx/hour, so we need to make sure that health insurance only pays for procedures that people truly need. That leads to insurance companies hiring a bunch of doctors and nurses to adjudicate claims (that's expensive, plus fewer doctors practice medicine). It also leads to denied care.
* Doctors have a lot of money, so if a procedure goes bad and you want to sue someone, they make a juicy target. Now you have higher malpractice insurance, so doctors bill even more.
* Doctors are afraid of being sued (see previous), so they often order more tests than necessary to prove they are providing adequate care. Those tests cost money.
The cause of high doctor salaries is an artificial shortage of doctors. Medical schools collude to limit the number of medical students who matriculate each year, which squeezes supply.
We could very easily fix the American healthcare system in about 10 years by simply allowing doctors and nurses trained in other developed countries to practice here, plus forcing medical schools to accept more students.
Regarding the latter, there is no shortage of qualified applicants:
1. Nearly everyone who starts medical school finishes. Matriculants are so statistically overqualified that hardly anyone washes out.
2. Medical schools have silly-stupid entrance requirements which have little to do with being a good doctor. Beyond GPA, you need many hours of volunteer work outside of class, extracurricular activities, and often research experience. These admissions requirements are imposed because there are simply too many qualified applicants for the number of slots and med schools need some "fair" way to cull the herd.
Yes the US could save a ton with a more efficient healthcare system. Additionally we have shockingly high costs for basic infrastructure as compared to other developed nations which could also provide savings if we could streamline that.
For the economic impact of austerity there has been a lot of good scholarship about this recently. Check out Austerity in Crisis?: A Narrative Review of Its Economic, Social, and Political Effects in Times of Crisis https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10449
It isn’t as hopeless as it looks. Places like Oregon have been long experimenting with things like coordinated care organizations to better manage healthcare. Also health system like Kaiser Permanente compare more favorably to national healthcare systems than you might think.
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