allhumanknowledge

How much would we have to donate to get an election night live stream?

Jon, can you give us the basic math on the PredictIt 5% cut? Like, is it only worth entering a market if you anticipate earning MORE than a 5% return because of that withdrawal cut? (I ask because of markets like the clearly blue states that are at like 94 cents to buy Dem...I’m guessing that price sits there rather than 99/100 cents because of how the fees work?)

As a non-host but a person who is very aware of all these things, I recommend this order:

1. Mystery Show
2. Going Deep w/Kid Midas
3. Starlee on This American Life (and her other stuff) ... probably start with the TAL episode "Break-Up"
4. Dicktown
5. Jon's LinkedIn (be sure to give him a lot of those weird story-awards about how he helped you fill up the coffee that one time and is a team player)

Bonus points if you consume this media while riding in the back of Helicopter Tony's chopper

Thanks, this makes sense. I’m basically thinking of wave riding this election and then getting out of PI afterward (fine if it’s months to settle, but still). So I’m gonna focus on the slightly bigger wins that still seem extremely safe (like would do popular vote if it weren’t full).

I can comment on that first question (I'm a frequent contributor). I write for The Magazine in Markdown using BBEdit on a Mac. Some of the more complex articles (ones with many footnotes, like my Tetris piece in January) were first written in Scrivener (which is where I try to write anything of real length/complexity), then converted into Markdown via export. The reason I use Scrivener is to keep track of footnotes, interview transcripts, and citations -- basically, making sure I keep my factual ducks in a row and have all the pieces together in one place.

I do this largely because because I know that Markdown is the native language of The Magazine's CMS -- so I assume there's less friction in popping the article into the CMS. (It also makes revision diffs easy for me to view when I get back edits. I use Kaleidoscope for that, though anything would work.) I presume that an author who is not fluent in Markdown could use something else (your canonical Word document, for instance), but I'll leave that to Glenn.

FWIW, in my other freelancing work, I have never seen a publication accept (much less encourage) Markdown nor any sort of plain text format. Usually it's Word, or in the case of a blog, "put it in the CMS yourself."