unfortunately the same oddsmakers have 50/50 on him winning two terms.
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Republicans are just A fucking ok with electing an accused pedophile. He’ll be in office full term.
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Here’s an optimistic scenario: with Flynn’s help Mueller brings down Pence. That triggers a mad rush to impeach Trump before midterms so they can have president Ryan instead of President Pelosi. That fractures the Republicans into two parties, the corporatist party and the populist party. The corporatist party makes natural allies with the democrats which in turn fractures the democrats into the part that merges with the corporatist party and the progressives.
The next election is a split with the progressives taking the presidency (I would have said Al Franken but 
) and a plurality (but not majority) of the house. They manage to work with the true believer populists on their common goals: building infrastructure and smashing banks/wall street; and the Senate is basically bullied into going along with it by their constituents.
By 2024 what we now think of as the Democrats and the Republicans are both largely defunct, merged into a party that no one really likes. Both the other parties, because of the situation they arose out of, are (for at least a couple decades) very committed to proving their worth by enacting policies that really make people’s lives better.
It took me quite a few tries to get there without a civil war.
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I hate Trump too, but I’d like to point out this just means 50% of people are betting for impeachment happening.
Bookies don’t have elaborate future prediction algorithms… they just adjust the odds so roughly 50% of their debts go for either outcome of a sports game (or special boy getting punished.)
If many people are betting one team will lose, they increase payout for the opposite until the liabilities are roughly equal.
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Either he will or he won’t: fifty fifty!
Agreed he’ll be in office as long as they have a say in whether or not he gets impeached.
That’s why we have to make sure they no longer have a say after 2018.
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Woah there, buddy. Lucky guess, aside, we are a long way away from that. If he manages to not be removed or forced to resign, we are not even sure if he will want to run.
Just a lot of variables before then.
And I think a lot of people who couldn’t make it to the polls, would be compelled to make it this time.
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I don’t think he’ll be brought down (he might be impeached, but so was Clinton and didn’t step down), and this might actually make the Democratic party examine its own policies and purge the Clintonites and get them to start going back to the abandoned working class base (ha). (Which will be now disillusioned by Trump because he will have failed to deliver on his promises. At the same time the demographic shift will actually kick in and the old Trump supporters (Tea Party types) will have slowly died off, the young millennials will actually start to vote (The last UK election was a good indicator of that) and the Democratic party will bring in someone with a visible record of success ie. Mark Dayton who turned around Minnesota. There might be a temporary helicopter drop (a la Iceland) to get people off the payday loans and stop them from using cheap credit to make up for lost wage growth of the past 30 years.
The Democratic Senate and House will now bring in a progressive tax regime (take your pick - 50s 60s or 70s) bring in single payer insurance, free university education (best bang for investment buck). At the same time the rentier capitalists will have to start paying for using government financed research such as GPS, Touch screen, and the half dozen other technologies in the smart phone. There will be a UN sponsored movement to shut down tax havens and collect outstanding funds. That will be used to start a sovereign wealth fund along the likes of Alaska or notably Norways (the largest in the world). That in turn will fund a universal minimum basic income which is not means tested and will be available to everybody (with partial funding from the new inheritance taxes - because if you are against giving someone something for nothing - that is essentially what inheritances are).
oh, and I’m Father Christmas.
I want a pony!
With cupholders!
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You are that optimistic that there will continue to be elections?[/s]
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I think it’s a lot more likely to be Melania…
Nixon resigned, allowing for a neat, drama-free exit - what if Trump refused to leave? Seems like he’s got the support of the more authoritarian elements of the federal government, willing to violate the law to back his play (e.g. what happened with customs and immigration, ignoring legislators and violating court orders to follow his executive order). I could easily see him trying to make use of what resources he can command to create chaos when things look bad for him, even starting a war out of spite (either a civil one or one with another country).
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42 didn’t step down because two of the impeachment charges failed in the House and he was acquitted of the remaining in the Senate. (c.f. 37 did step down before impeachment because he knew how it would end up.) Impeachment is just bringing charges, you get to defend yourself and the House and Senate members vote like a jury.
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Do you remember it being 5000-1 for Leicester City to win the 2015-16 Premier League title? The bookies were desperately trying to offer lower guaranteed payouts when it started to look like it could actually happen.
The fans who held on did very well from that unlikely bet.
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wikipedia’s page on Assassination Market
The organization set up to manage such a system could, presumably, make up a list of people who had seriously violated the NAP (Non-aggression Principle), but who would not see justice in our courts due to the fact that their actions were done at the behest of the government. Associated with each name would be a dollar figure, the total amount of money the organization has received as a contribution, which is the amount they would give for correctly “predicting” the person’s death, presumably naming the exact date. “Guessers” would formulate their “guess” into a file, encrypt it with the organization’s public key, then transmit it to the organization, possibly using methods as untraceable as putting a floppy disk in an envelope and tossing it into a mailbox, but more likely either a cascade of encrypted anonymous remailers, or possibly public-access Internet locations, such as terminals at a local library, etc.
In order to prevent such a system from becoming simply a random unpaid lottery, in which people can randomly guess a name and date (hoping that lightning would strike, as it occasionally does), it would be necessary to deter such random guessing by requiring the “guessers” to include with their “guess” encrypted and untraceable “digital cash,” in an amount sufficiently high to make random guessing impractical.
(edited to remove onebox, which is arguably anti-Semitic)
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Given the republican tax plan underway, that seems highly dependent on your bracket.
Exactly. Betting is a market, and the price of a bet is the price at which the market clears. Different people have (or believe they have) different amounts of relevant information, which they use to choose whether to bet at offered odds. If the market is sufficiently well capitalized, then the price aggregates all available information. It’s accurate for the same reason (and under the same conditions) that Google’s stock price is accurate: if it weren’t, someone would pick up the easy money. A well-capitalized market with enough reasonably smart participants is basically unbeatable, unless you have private information.
That said, I’m not sure how these oddsmakers get paid. Sure it is even money for “Trump gets impeached in 2018,” but is there an option to bet “No he doesn’t”? What odds are offered for that bet? Or are the odds the same either way, and there’s a separate fee for placing the bet? And if there isn’t a way to bet against the proposition, then all we know is that their estimate of the probability Trump gets impeached in 2018 is below 50%, with no clear lower bound.
Stuff like this is why I want to retire to Las Vegas. I’ll bet you could build a portfolio of longshot bets like this and make OK money. (Similar to the angel investing model prevalent in Silicon Valley)
if you win that bet then it’s a 50/50 chance taxes the next year are paid in geiger counters and canned beans.
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So, I was asking a friend of mine after the election how long it would take for Trump to be caught doing lines of coke off a hooker’s ass in the oval office.
His response was that he had a serious discussion with his wife about this very thing. His wife is 100% convinced he was using just before each debate. His wife, notably, has a weirdly high number of anecdotes about people using cocaine.
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