Professional leagues basically need to suspend most prop betting (that is, betting on individual players's statistics) and in-game betting, but they won't, because those bets make far more money for betting companies than the topline game spreads. In-game and prop bets are more profitable for several reasons

1: Traditional sports bets take hours to resolve. In-game bets win or lose in seconds and facilitate loss-chasing.

2: Prop bets let the betting companies use their massive databases to set more favorable odds...

1/4: I increasingly think the crisis in American medicine is at the root of worsening societal cynicism and disgust on both left and right.

The US is the richest big nation by far, yet it has among the shortest life spans, and the gap is growing. Everyone sees this disaster... 2/4: Yet neither party has an answer. The left simply wants to pour in more government money for health-care "entrepreneurs" to take.

This dynamic blew up in the most toxic way possible with the opioid crisis, which showed Americans what we who covered Big Pharma already knew...

1/ No, I don't trust a Chinese company to produce "safe" AI.

But the DeepSeek breakthrough is fantastic for both practical and philosophical reasons.

Here's what I mean: we've never had a tech hype bubble bigger than AI - not even the early Internet... 2/ And a key element of the hype the huge complexity and expense of the systems these companies are building to produce AI.

We're gonna need a whole new electrical grid! But it'll be worth it, because reasons. We promise!

Hey, @eosnos, just for future reference, this is serenity…



And this is Parkinsonenity

1/ How can you not understand this?

There aren't just longitudinal studies, there are longitudinal studies examining both causation and reverse causation (looking at use and psychosis over multiple periods to see if psychosis in N is causative for cannabis in N+1. It's not)...

https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1782118212693524510

2/ The associational data is incredibly strong, with unadjusted ratios on the order of 10x.

There is clear biological/cellular level data showing that THC use dysregulates the cannabinoid system and that heavy users have changes in brain morphology...

How to lie under oath, a masterclass from Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the voice of Science itself

Part 1: Ralph Baric? Who dat? I barely even ever done heard of Ralph Baric, suh... Part 2: Ralph Baric? Know Ralph Baric? Why never, detective, our paths may done crossed at sometime or other, at one of the many revivals I have the pleasure of attending -

But I don't know him, detective, most certainly not...

1/ And @maiasz continues her heroic quest (with @nytimes help) to get US opioid prescriptions back to 2009 levels. In Maia’s fantasy land, deserving patients are being deprived of painkillers. Back in reality, the US is STILL a world leader in opioid dosing…



2/ Note that decades ago, all countries had the same and very low levels of prescription opioid use. Some still do. The pain “crisis” is fiction; aside from palliative, post-surgical care, and VERY short-term acute pain use, all opioids do is get people addicted to opioids…

1/ Am I the only one who thinks that Hamas has grossly, horrendously outplayed Israel? Hamas can dribble out hostages for a month, keeping the ceasefire going as it rearms - and publicizes civilian casualties, raising international pressure on Israel not to restart the attack... 2/ But the pressure won't only be international. Time will slowly corrode Israel's fury over the Oct. 7 attacks (impossible but true) and certainty that it must destroy Hamas completely; it will tell itself that slowly chasing down Hamas's leaders is an acceptable compromise.

Lol part two, the Brooklyn Karens were literally posting on Twitter how they had not left their apartments for X days...

https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1719552924508905698

https://x.com/rosie_ruin/status/1322215151848902658?s=20

1/ Back to flu jabs: In 1980, before the public health complex went nuts pushing vaccines for respiratory viruses, the US gave out 12.4MM jabs.

And had 19,000 flu deaths.

From 2016-2019 (before Covid), the US gave out about 160MM shots a year.

And averaged 35,000 flu deaths... 2/ This does NOT mean flu shots cause flu deaths; the US has aged since 1980, and age is a huge driver of flu risk (though not as much as Covid risk), and flu deaths move randomly year-to-year.

But if the shots worked AT ALL, you would expect SOME drop in deaths over time...

1/ It is crucial to keep saying this and not letting them rewrite history: mRNA fanatics promised the shots would end the epidemic.

That was the goal; their supposedly incredibly high rates of infection prevention was the reason they were superior to traditional vaccines...

https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1702694179380375752

2/ But they failed completely.

It is not clear they work at all, much less better than inactivated virus vaccines, at stopping infection OR severe disease in the long run. But China's experience (even assuming 1-2 million Chinese died in the Omicron wave) suggests they don't...

1/ Upon further review I think the WaPo’s framing of the ruling may mark the beginning of a meaningful change in the way some smarter people on the left view the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts, a realization they really did go too far

https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1700466610291507618

2/ The story - and the people quoted - make an big distinction between the initial district court injunction against gov’t contact with social media companies, which was VERY broad, and the new, much narrower injunction the circuit court issued, which captures the worst conduct…

Hello Fifth Circuit!

"The dispositive question is whether the Individual Plaintiffs’ censorship can also be traced to government-coerced enforcement of those policies. We agree with the district court that it can be." "The Individual Plaintiffs adduced extensive evidence... that the government has engaged in a years-long pressure campaign designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints"

1/ @jordanbpeterson - fair question, but in fact we have very good data from both flu and Covid shots showing that "healthy vaccinee bias" makes the jabs seem to work much BETTER than they really do in observational data.

The reasons are slightly different for the two shots...

https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1699094627616272776

2/ Flu shots are preferentially taken by people who care more about health, have access to doctors, etc - this is the standard cause of healthy vaccinee bias.

Covid jabs are different. In wealthy countries, the first three mRNA shots were given to almost every elderly person...

1/ This is ridiculous and disgusting, though not quite for the reason all the wokester sport reporters admit.

What's really happening:

College football generates massive windfall profits for the top 50 schools - up to $100 million a year - because the players are not paid...

https://twitter.com/ClayTravis/status/1697596224394625242

2/ The RIGHT thing to do would be to privatize the programs, acknowledge they have nothing to do with amateur athletics, and pay the (predominantly black) players openly - as other professional athletes are played.

But that cash windfall has to go somewhere...

Wow. @aslavitt makes a stunning, novel claim in his motion to dismiss Berenson v Biden - as a Twitter USER, he has the right to censor content he doesn't like.

It's easy to see where this would go: hate a review of your store? Attack the reviewer, and claim Section 230 immunity. No joke. From the mpotion:

Section 230 Provides Immunity for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider OR USER considers to be . . objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

MEDICINE IN AMERICA IS BROKEN, BROKEN, BROKEN

nytimes.com/2023/07/15/hea… A tragedy in three acts

1) Medicare’s decision to reimburse doctors for procedures performed outside hospitals led to a proliferation of outpatient clinics...

Year after year after year:

2019: "Instagram The Worst As Social Media Slammed As 'A Gateway For Child Abuse'"

forbes.com/sites/zakdoffm… 2020: "Instagram most recorded platform used in child grooming crimes during lockdown"

nspcc.org.uk/about-us/news-…

This is a good and fair question that I promise to answer at length on a Stack. But I will say the choice to settle was very complicated for all kinds of reasons - including the prospect of Elon's takeover, which meant that ultimately I would have been suing him if I'd continued.

https://twitter.com/RxRegA/status/1664740509456146433

I will also say (not to jump on the Stack) that when you are in the middle of negotiating over a complex and unique lawsuit, you have to guess at lots of things - including why the other side might WANT to settle at all...

#TwitterFiles @elonmusk
1/ URGENT: Twitter's own lawyers believed the company could not successfully defend its Covid vaccine censorship policies against my lawsuit over its 2021 ban of my account. 2/ Twitter was likely to lose Berenson v Twitter, my federal lawsuit against the company for banning me over my mRNA vaccine reporting, Twitter’s lawyers concluded after reviewing internal documents related to the ban.

Everything wrong with looong Covid in one looong thread (how did @camidoma even have the energy to write it? It must have taken so many spoons!)

You want to know why the USA now spends $4 trillion a year on medical care, look no further. Imma share some highlights:

https://twitter.com/camidoma/status/1656535096608841730

"I’m 30, generally healthy aside from episodic migraines with aura and depression, 4 times vaxxed, and I took Paxlovid..."

That's a G, $400 for the jabs plus $800 for the cold medicine. (She's 30 and skinny, zero risk.)

"Migraines with aura and depression" is your next clue...