This doesn't really have anything to do with constitutional "free speech". This is a government agency, not the personal research blog of a private citizen.
Government agencies don't have "free speech".
That said, it's a shame this is happening. Maybe a future administration will reopen it.
Trump tried to overturn an election and failed, he’s a moron but he won’t make the same mistake again. The next US elections will be rigged, if there are even elections.
It seems the poster is of the low probability belief that at some point before Nov 2028 elections will be suspended and we will move to some kind of imperial system instead.
The issue is that even if I win that bet, they’re paying me my winnings in USD, which is backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government, which has been irreparably destroyed.
If I can buy, say, low probability insurance that that will give me a squad of mercenaries and a jet to a bunker somewhere safe, I’d be far more apt to put my money where my mouth is.
It’s not a bad bet. It’s just a dumb bet. The payout doesn’t match the risk.
How big would the risk be in your view that you would loose the bet? In any risk-benefit situation, the first step is to define the probability of the risk.
The usual way for this to happen doesn’t involve suspending elections. And I’d not bet on a guy that old and infirm winning again in 2028 even if he could legally run.
We’ll see how ICE at select polling places and iffy federal-run voter role purges go in 2026. Should set the tone for how far they try to go in 2028.
I think that's a reasonable worry, but I'd encourage you to make sure you do remember this prediction, and update accordingly if they don't suppress votes or the voter suppression doesn't work. I was worried about Elon Musk's efforts to buy off a Wisconsin judicial election earlier this year and became a lot more confident in democracy when it didn't work at all.
One of the two things I mentioned is already happening, and it’ll be pretty surprising if the Republican army isn’t used for voter intimidation. Why even have it, if not for that kind of thing?
It’s not like they didn’t already use both covert and overt means to try to overturn an election, and get caught red-handed on both (I mean, one was televised live, so…) Much cleaner to put in the effort on Election Day itself.
Polling places closing early, terrible weather, computers off-line, etc., will of course drive people from voting. Seeing an ICE agent isn't going to deter a citizen from voting any more than deter people taking vacations overseas. I'd be more than happy to show ID to vote as the rest of the world does.
India can do it. They had a caste system and yet conduct fair and honest. We can do it too.
Long horizon events like this on Polymarket stabilize around a % odds corresponding to time value of money. You can get 4% buying risk free CDs for that horizon.
this is not true - if you know for certaint that trump will be president through winning an election in 2028 you can make over 20X your money.
at the end of the day people don't actually believe it, which is why trump is valued little. people who aren't willing to bet with their money on things they say so absolutely aren't serious people.
I am not sure that is a useful principle. I tend to keep an umbrella around in the car regardless whether the forecast calls for rain. Do these people similarly avoid stock markets, insurance, and similar products in the risk space?
your scenario here doesn't really make any sense. one you're conflating getting married with staying together. you could get married and then divorced. two, such a bet wouldn't make sense since it could easily be rigged (and indeed this is what happens with sports betting).
again, if someone says they know the winning lottery and they don't play, they're unserious. nearly impossible to rig, high payout - outcome is of interest to layperson.
The idea was that I figured you’d consider that some things are valuable in ways that don’t involve money. Unfortunately I think the conclusion here is that you actually truly believe that there is nothing that cannot be bet if a suitable market could be formed for it. Of course, I should have realized this, because by placing bets in general you are in fact taking a financial position in the concept of betting markets.
If Trump indeed manages to turn the country into a dictatorship I think winning money on polymarket is going to be the last thing you'll be thinking about
A more charitable explanation is that people believe in a larger set of nearly equivalent outcomes that are not captured in that market.
Some possible outcomes (I personally don't believe they are very probable), but...
There is no "call" or inaugurated at all, Trump stays on via some kind of "emergency". The market will fail to resolve to an outcome (based on what it says).
Somehow (via a normal election, or the outcome being decided in the House) one of Trumps sons becomes president.
This, I think, illustrates some of the problems with far out edge cases in prediction markets. Nailing down all of the possible outcomes exactly is hard.
My understanding is that, in many ways, government agencies are more constitutionally protected speech-wise than private entities, precisely because any hierarchical attempt to punish them for their speech would be coming from the government rather than private entities. IANAL (or even American) though so grain of salt.
In any case, a lot of the right-wing hypocrisy around free speech that was being called out by OP didn't have much to do with constitutionally protected freedom of speech either - it was complaining about things like private companies (e.g. Twitter) shadowbanning people.
This is incorrect. Government agencies have exactly zero free speech rights. They are part of the Executive Branch and as such are instrumentalities of the President. Full stop.
"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." U.S. Const., Art. II, Sec. 1, cl. 1.
Any discussion about the constitution and jurisprudence and rights should probably be assumed to be referring to the Before Times, when those things still mattered. Sigh.
The complaints about “free speech” I heard from conservatives over the past five years often had nothing to do with constitutional free speech, either. They were almost always directed at private companies and organizations moderating content; from time to time someone would try to claim a government nexus, but it was rare and always something like a request to take down some content (that often got rejected.) Given that we’ve spent years having a broad conversation about the principle of free speech, to suddenly demand that we restrict the conversation to one about pure First Amendment requirements seems a bit disingenuous.
Speech is important. Scientific speech more important. A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future. You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
> A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future.
This is the significant point. The govt is defunding yet another scientific research institute. To me it seems more productive to get more specific and more substantive from there: How much of the research presently carried out at NCAR will continue? Are there alternative institutes or sources of funding that might save some of it? What are the likely tangible implications? Is the whole place even closing down or just some of it?
Going in the other direction, less specific, more amorphous abstraction about whether or not this is a free speech issue risks derailing the conversation into semantics.
There are interesting questions about wider meaning of free speech than what's protected by the first amendment, but getting moralistic because someone doesn't consider this a free speech issue, while you both agree that it's government defunding a research institute, and that it's bad, seems unnecessarily fractious
You’re responding to is Matthew Green, who has done more for deployed cryptography and internet privacy than most people alive. He has absolutely “hit the pavement”
> They were almost always directed at private companies and organizations moderating content
Yes. They were motivated by private individuals losing their livelihood, rather than by organizations losing government funding that was not a priori owed to them.
> You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
This doesn't really have anything to do with constitutional "free speech". This is a government agency, not the personal research blog of a private citizen.
Government agencies don't have "free speech".
That said, it's a shame this is happening. Maybe a future administration will reopen it.