The Birds of Speculation

 This is a consideration of speculation, hopefully not too ponderous. I’ll start it out on old memory lane.

As I started out in the copy editing dept, our editor-in-chief as an emotional hurricane – on par with those in a long line of tough-nosed editors in fast-talking films. Deadlines due this.

When the issue [a monthly] came out, there would be slow burn, then tirade of curses as magazines would go flying. He always saw something that could be done better. He always saw something that was one wrong. Let’s call him Perry White. We kept to our desks.

He’d come and shoot the shit once and a while after I made it into the product news writers’ den. He’d played jazz in his youth, and could regale. He found out I followed the horse racing stakes, and he chewed on that. 

I’ve been more careful since who I share my hobby with. Horse playing was still considered a sin in the inner sanctum of many minds at the time, and a reporter going out on their beat was suspect. Did anyone actually see them at the trade show? Did they go to Wonderland? Are they at a bar?

Perry mediated aloud as he measured my likelihood to stray East Boston way. He was a walking education for me -  he’d worked with McGraw Hill publications going back to the radio electronics day, and had a great eye for the inner politics of magazines and how competition happened. This time, he was not a volcano.

“In New York I knew some guys. They were golfers,” Perry told me. They were inveterate bettors, in his recall. He wasn’t too sure about them, you know?

“They would bet on anything. They’d bet on which bird would be the first to fly off a telephone line. It was really quite ridiculous, but I suppose that’s the way they were,” he said. 

This type of betting was a long yard away from my way of betting. I was all about analysis, plowing through racing books and the Daily Racing Form, and only betting “what I could lose” – usually $30 – which I did. 

I’d just say this vignette stayed with me, and eventually I folded Perry’s picture of the inveterate bettors randomly into a poem. 

The poem was about the facets of the city in summer. All of which hit me in about 15 minutes waiting in the heat for a trolley one day. The poem focused mostly on the women of the city in summer but included “heavenly speculators that “could bet on which bird first off the limb.”  Insert follows.

In the news this week Brian Armstrong Co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, dropped some special words in an earnings call. Why? The booked wager on the occurrence of words is a prediction market offering. This is a new thing here.

Coinbase and other fabulously technical financial disruptors are these days touting online prediction markets as a pseudo-regulated adjunct to advanced basketball, baseball football and other betting (which has purposely emptied the pockets of a speculative chunk of the population), and which needs a new gimmick, er, innovation.

 For example, the occurrence of “Web 3.0” a retired gem from the days first days of blockchain – is a word that could appear in an earnings call. That can be wagered on, until the prediction marketers figure out how to handle city dwellers’ predictions of when a bird will leave a Times Sq. ledge.

Perhaps, he was just taking an opportunity to plug an innovative product. He appeared untethered from his legal department. In effect, he showed how the game can be rigged. 

Telling, in a week after high-profile allegations of possible rigging of NBA scoring. Telling in the sense that the shiny scion of electronic coins seems capable of "a junior moment". Telling for the cunning ploy to seed further speculation.

Armstrong saying “Web 3.0” was a snot-nosed gambit. I guess people in all ages are capable of hubris unbridled – as well as mere mistakes. It just seems these days to creep out – nay, scale out – in any interesting technology innovation the laboratory can muster.