Nate Silver Should Start the New Intrade

So many great buying opportunities.

Kevin Drum is skeptical that Nate Silver has anything to add on weather and economics.

But weather, economics, and education? I'm skeptical that you can just parachute into those fields and add a lot of value. They're far more complex, are already heavily populated with sophisticated statistical modeling, and generally require some serious subject matter expertise in addition to raw number-crunching skill.

I don't know what he wants to do on education, but weather and econ sound interesting. It sounds a lot like the Intrade markets I did so well in: climate, politics, and economics. What I want to see is Nate and some rich friends of his create a new Intrade, by taking advantage of the new state laws in NV and NJ for online gambling, which the DoJ said they weren't going to challenge.

This week, New Jersey became the third state, after Delaware and Nevada, to pass an online gambling bill. This came thanks to a complete reversal in policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. For years the agency had said online gambling was illegal—a violation of the Wire Act of 1961 that bans betting across state lines—and had prosecuted the owners of online gaming sites. Then late last year it told states wanting to start online lotteries that the Wire Act applied only to sports betting and not to other games. Industry observers were shocked. “The Justice Department came out 180 degrees opposite of where it was before,” says David Stewart, a lawyer specializing in gambling law at Ropes & Gray. “I’ve never seen that.”

So, I guess I should thank Eric Holder for the eventual return of my denier's tax revenues.

This Place Owes Me Some Degrees Again

Tonight it's going to be -5 degrees (F), or, as we call it up here, Bar-B-Que weather. The thing about BB-queing  in this kind of weather is that, even if you close the lid, the upside of the meat starts to freeze while the bottom side is cooking. So, you have to build a really big fire with lots of coals (I don't have a propane grill, yet) and throw some hickory in there for lots of smoke. Gives us a chance to smoke some cracked black pepper for the upcoming batch of grass-fed beef jerky.

I put little bits of hickory around the edges so there's a circle of extra hot around the outer edges, which then circulates up to the domed lid and keeps the top side of the meat hot, without burning the bottom. Minus five degrees means your charcoal fire barbeque skills are really put to the test.

If I had a hot tub, this would be hot tub and BBQ weather!