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Comment by pluc

5 days ago

I'm not a gambler, but there should be a thing on those gambling sites on whether this is about extraterrestrial life or mexicans

According to Polymarket, there's a 16% chance US will confirm aliens exist: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-us-confirm-that-aliens...

  • It's because of the time value of money. Buying no is much like buying a bond.

    It doesn't mean there's a 16% chance.

    It's probably more attractive to gamblers when presented like this.

  • That's just gambling without any basis for reality though. Not sure if you're actually attributing any weight to random gamblers lol.

  • Taking the opposite side of this bet feels like a free 19% return on your money.

    • It's based on what Donald Trump (or any other US president, should it come to that) says, not on any evidence or ground truth beyond that.

      The are motives for lying on this - for a start, if a president knows definitively they're going to say it, it's a free 81% return. Secondly, it's a pretty big dead cat to throw on the table to distract from any scandal and/or to keep themselves in the news cycle on a different topic.

  • We know for a fact that the US government has no evidence of aliens existing, because there's a 0% chance Trump wouldn't have blabbed about it during his first term.