Next: Our Choice = Al Gore’s book on global warming and climate change

- In blue, our good friend Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons;

- In red, the Google guy in charge of open-source software;

- In grey, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.

So, my question to Mike:

- Do you sense that prediction markets could be a topic at the Singularity University, or do you think that they couldn’t care less?

UPDATE: See the comments by Mike and a guy at that University…

Creative Commons licenses (since 2004 and excluding non-license public domain tools) allow the licensor to require a linkback. I consider that the main feature of the ‘attribution’ term. See 4(b) of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode

The easiest way to specify is to fill in the ‘Attribute work to URL’ field in the Creative Commons license chooser.

Addendum: Mike Linksvayer’s little blog

Does one of your Creative Commons licenses tell people to link back? That’s all I need.

Video (Download this post if you don’t see the video):

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UPDATE:

Mike Linksvayer:

CC licenses (since 2004 and excluding non-license public domain tools) allow the licensor to require a linkback. I consider that the main feature of the ‘attribution’ term. See 4(b) of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode

The easiest way to specify is to fill in the ‘Attribute work to URL’ field in the CC license chooser.

Obviously, this guy has good taste. Here is a sample of the LinkedIn networking groups he belongs to:

Here are the links to the networking groups managed by Midas Oracle (“PMs” is the most popular, the others are to be developed):

Midas Oracle @ LinkedIn

Internet Strategy @ LinkedIn

Prediction Markets @ LinkedIn

Collective Forecasting @ LinkedIn

Chris F. Masse @ LinkedIn

Prior to the Wikipedia community vote on adopting CC BY-SA it crossed my mind to set up several play money prediction market contracts concerning the above outcomes conditioned on Wikipedia adopting CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009, for which I did set up a contract. It is just as well that I didn’t — or rather if I had, I would have had to heavily promote all of the contracts in order to stimulate any play trading — the basic adoption contract at this point hasn’t budged from 56% since the vote results were announced, which means nobody is paying attention to the contract on Hubdub.

Blame yourself, Mike. I blogged 10 times about the concept of “X group” —the symbiosis between a set of prediction markets and a set of bloggers.

- Another one bites the dust:

(Sorry for those who have a narrow screen and don’t see the right part of this big chart.)

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According to InTrade, here are the banks that could fail next:

- Bank United Financial

- Downey Financial

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External Links About The Big Bailout:

- Reason magazine have collected opinions from the leading free-market economists on the Bailout issue.

There is no reason to expect the correct solution from the same people who created the crisis in the first place and who until very recently thought the economy was strong and that there was little or no chance of recession. [Mark Thornton]

This is a financial coup d’etat, with the only limitation the $700 billion balance sheet figure. [Yves Smith]

- Mike Linksvayer has some additional good links… and some strong words, too.

- Arnold Kling:

- NYT:

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UPDATE: Paul Krugman

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UPDATE: The Manhattan Institute on financial crisis and the Bailout

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UPDATE:

John Salvatier,

Our good friend Bo Cowgill might have already re-created those prediction markets on Google’s internal prediction exchange at a marginal cost of zero US dollar. No need for him to “subsidize” external prediction markets.

[As an appendix, I precise that I am in favor of opening the enterprise prediction markets to external traders, for some questions.]

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Subsidizing prediction markets is an old Robin Hanson idea that carries quite a heavy price tag.

Conditional prediction markets is a great idea on the paper. Many people (e.g., Mike Linksvayer) like the idea. However, here is what the uncritical Robin Hanson fanboys blogging on Overcoming Whatever won’t tell you:

• The first problem is that nobody trades those things.

• The second problem is that subsidizing those conditional prediction markets costs an arm and a leg.

• The third problem is that no major news media outlet has ever quoted the prediction market prices / probabilities generated by those conditional prediction markets.

Peter McCluskey could have rent a French mistress (or a French gigolo) for a full year with all the money he is spending on Robin Hanson’s idea. Or vaccinated the whole African continent against Malaria. See Peter’s comment, at the middle of the webpage, here.

Philanthropy and prediction markets are not mixing well —yet.

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Mike Linksvayer, please take a look at that.

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