Word: wager
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...prices and ticket sales. The theory is simple: when people have something at stake, they act on their deepest convictions, which generates the most accurate information. The market is restricted to a few hundred experts with a modest investment limit. Allowing CIA, State Department and Pentagon authorities to wager their own money on a terrorist strike would quickly aggregate their wisdom and perhaps provide leads. Meanwhile, there's collateral damage. Sources tell TIME that a prototype market for health officials to wager on a SARS outbreak--to help pinpoint hot spots--lost funding in the process. --By Daniel Kadlec
...their bid to clinch further concessions, wager-crazy Hong Kongers now face very high odds. The swiftest way for Tung to ease public fury would be to shuffle his Cabinet, obscuring a handful of lieutenants who have become walking voodoo dolls around town. He's adamantly refused to take that step and is even less likely to retire himself. The loftiest aspiration of the marchers?speeding up democratic reforms to allow a directly elected Chief Executive and legislature by 2007 at the earliest?requires a big, generous and highly uncharacteristic nod from Beijing. In the Chinese-fire-drill events...
Simulcasting allows a race at one track to be seen over television sets at other tracks across the country. Bettors at these satellite locations can wager on horses at the home track, which means money flows into NYRA races even if the bettors aren’t in New York...
Thanks to a handful of entrepreneurial websites, however, gamblers need not restrict themselves to dull sporting events. At betonsports.com, it’s easy to wager on terrorism, war and even natural disasters. For those not fired up by a Blazers-Nuggets game, there’s a chance to bet on which hemisphere will host the next 7.5 magnitude earthquake (odds say the Eastern) or to wager on which month this year will see the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan destroyed by nuclear weapons. (At 15,000 to 1, the odds for March 2003 are the same as the odds...
...lead to you doing something important and also leads to those losing bets that so many lives end up as,” he says. “If you didn’t think that you were chosen in that way, you wouldn’t make the wager in the first place and nothing would happen...