There might not be that many of them, depending on how you count, but they're not rare in the slightest. For example, you have to use `is` in the common case where you want the default value of a function argument to be an empty list.
I assume you refer to the `is None` idiom. That happens often enough, but I count it as exactly one use case, and I think it's usually poorly considered anyway. Again, you probably don't actually want the default value to be an empty list, because it doesn't make a lot of sense to mutate something that the caller isn't actually required to provide (unless the caller never provides it and you're just abusing the default-argument behaviour for some kind of cache).
Using, for example, `()` as a default argument, and cleaning up your logic to not do those mutations, is commonly simpler and more expressive. A lot of the community has the idea that a tuple should represent heterogeneous fixed-length data and a list should be homogeneous; but I consider (im)mutability to be a much more interesting property of types.
> I mean it does generate clicks and views and user engagement so if one platform is doing it, doesn't that automatically mean that the other has to do it? Otherwise they will continuously lose market share.
Why? User engagement isn't the same thing as market share.
If McDonald's trained its cashiers to insult you while taking your order, engagement would go up, and market share would go down.
> What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
Polymarket opened a subbranch to handle US customers subject to US law. It's separate from Polymarket proper, which remains illegal for US citizens to use.
> and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue.
What did that change? Gambling legislation was a states' issue before. You might have noticed that different states had wildly different gambling regimes.
(...and all federal legislation is a states' rights issue?)
> Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this[,] is [the] de facto law of the land.
You're talking about a law that was invalidated eight years ago, and passed 24 years before that. Which position would have looked insane more of the time?
Fair point that PASPA was the exception, not the rule, and that the anti-commandeering / "states rights" argument isn't some novel theory. It does happen to be deployed often in cases where businesses don't want to be regulated. (and, the elephant in the room, more famously....never mind, let's not go there)
I overstated the court-packing angle, Murphy was 7-2, not a partisan split.
But my actual point is narrower than the constitutional question: in practice, sports betting was confined to Nevada and reservations for decades. Once that dam broke, the path from legal sports betting to VC-funded "that but for everything" prediction markets to the current situation happened really fast, and there's no regulatory apparatus keeping up with it. Whether the dam should have broken is a separate question from whether anyone's minding the flood.
They do. It's moot, though, because Polymarket isn't subject to US law.
There has been an ongoing controversy over the fact that Kalshi (which is subject to US law) chose to comply with the law over the market on Khomeini "leaving office", when the bettors assumed that it wouldn't.
You've identified a real issue with cost-plus pricing. But there's more to it than that. Commercial insurers have to pay more than Medicare, for the very simple reason that Medicare's pricing terms are that they get a discount beyond whatever the lowest price is that you charge anyone for the same thing.
(Is it a 60% discount? No; a 150% margin has to be explained in other ways. But the phenomenon is real and important.)
> We traded so much for the cheap convenience of fast shipping and a few dollars off.
There's more to it than that. The fast shipping and a few dollars off was a good deal.
But modern Amazon no longer offers fast shipping or a few dollars off. And, separately, they've stopped being willing to provide an amount of packaging that prevents your items from being damaged in transit. They're betting that having provided a good service in the past means they never have to bother in the future.
This is highly location specific, in the last 3 years at my current apartment my orders are received roughly 40% same day, 40% next day, 20% 2+ days shipping. And I've never had a return rejected (and I do a lot of returns) so damage in shipping is a minor inconvenience.
My main gripes are related to search being borderline unusable as it becomes more ad-dominated by the day, and overall trend of other Prime benefits becoming worthless, but not shipping speed or returns.
> And I've never had a return rejected (and I do a lot of returns) so damage in shipping is a minor inconvenience.
What? Every item arrives damaged. You can file several returns in a row, sure, but since you can't receive an undamaged item, this is not a "minor inconvenience". How does it help you to return the third damaged item and receive a fourth one?
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