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| This week’s world-famous news haiku competition™ is about how high energy prices are driving Europeans towards solar power in record numbers. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers. | Now: News! | Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor | | News You Need2Know | | | What’s the stock market up to, eh? | $SPX ( ▲ 0.58% ) $DJI ( ▼ 0.14% ) $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% ) | | Companies mentioned in today’s newsletter | $AMZN ( ▲ 1.62% ) $DPZ ( ▼ 0.54% ) $POLYMARKET ( 0.0% ) | | Amazon expands its 30-minute delivery push | | Urgently need mouthwash before your next Zoom call? Well, modern society has found another way to feed your impatience. Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 1.62% ) is expanding "Amazon Now," a 30-minute delivery service for when you absolutely, positively need a toilet plunger and a lime right this very second but you don’t want to go downstairs to the bodega. | Amazon’s head of transportation, Beryl “Today” Tomay, dropped this absolute bombshell of an insight to the Associated Press: “We know that customers love speed and always have.” | Reminds me of my brother, actually, that quote. She also gleefully noted, “What we see customers doing, when we offer faster speeds, are they purchase more from Amazon.” | So, that’s the reason behind the whole affair. Prime members only have to fork over an extra $3.99 for this magic trick, while non-members pay $13.99 a pop. Tomay assures us, “There’s no rushing either in our building workers or the gig workers.” Although I’d be interested to hear from the workers themselves whether that’s true, in due course. | Domino’s $DPZ ( ▼ 0.54% ) in 1984 pushed a guarantee that customers would receive their pizzas for free if they weren’t delivered in under a half-hour. The company amended the “30 minutes or it’s free” policy after two years, providing only a $3 discount for late deliveries. The promotion helped Domino’s win market share, but it ended up tarnishing the company’s reputation. It dropped the guarantee in December 1993 after a string of crashes and lawsuits involving drivers racing to meet the deadline. | | | Quote of the Day | | ❝ | | | What’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market. | | | | —The boss of Polymarket |
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| | 80+ users made suspicious Polymarket bets |  | (Polymarket) |
| A new New York Times investigation reveals more than 80 users who placed suspiciously well-timed Polymarket $POLYMARKET ( 0.0% ) bets. In one glaring case, a user pocketed over $400,000 after betting that Nicolás Maduro would be ousted just days before U.S. forces arrested him. A U.S. Army Special Forces soldier was later charged with using classified intel for that wager. | In another wild coincidence, 13 users wagered $140,000 that Israel would strike Iran right before it happened, hauling in over $600,000. Someone even won $200,000 betting on a preemptive pardon for Joe Biden’s brother, Jim, less than 40 minutes before the White House announced it. | How is the platform responding? A Polymarket spokeswoman insists the firm “continuously monitors its markets for suspicious activity and regularly engages with relevant authorities when appropriate.” Yet, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan previously called insider trading “an inevitability” with “a lot of benefits,” arguing, “What’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market.” | With $25 billion in monthly trading volume, it seems the site has become exactly what Donald Trump recently lamented: "somewhat of a casino." Although Trump’s son, Donald Jr., holds a significant financial and advisory stake in the company through his venture capital firm, 1789 Capital. The investment, reportedly in the double-digit millions, coincided with a shift in the regulatory environment where the Trump-era Commodity Futures Trading Commission dropped investigations into the firm. |
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