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Picture selling your house to live on a cruise ship for the next 15 years. Two years in, the ship docks in Cambodia and the company tells everyone to get off. That just happened to about 200 people. And at today's fuel prices, the $120,000 they paid for a cabin covers as little as 15 months of fuel. The ship is the Villa Vie Odyssey. It was built in 1993, sat in storage through Covid, and a Florida startup bought it for about $13 million. Their pitch was simple. You buy your cabin up front, starting around $120,000, you pay a monthly fee starting at $1,750 a person, and the ship sails around the world nonstop for 15 years. The trouble started way before anything went wrong. The company says fuel was running about $1,800 per cabin per month before this year. So someone living alone in a cheap cabin was paying less each month than it cost just to fuel the average cabin, and that's before you feed anybody, pay 156 crew, or fix anything on a 33-year-old ship. Then the Iran war kicked off in February and fuel went through the roof. In parts of Asia the company says it's now $6,000 to $8,000 per cabin per month. And it gets worse, because a ship burns about the same fuel whether it's packed or half empty. The Odyssey can hold 650 passengers. It pulled into Cambodia with 203 on board, so the fuel for all those empty cabins was getting covered by the people who actually showed up. If you were on the ship, you could probably feel it coming. One resident told the AP they'd been hit up for fuel money every two to four weeks. When a company that sold you a fixed price starts passing the hat that often, it's usually running out of road. Now the company says it'll spend 60 days working on a "restructuring and recapitalization." If you paid six figures up front for years of service that just stopped, that phrase should worry you, because people who prepaid usually end up near the back of the line behind the lenders. Most of these folks were promised 15 years on that ship, and they got a little over two.

A company that owns 25 bars in LA bet $60,000 that the Dodgers would lose. The Dodgers got swept, and the bars nearly doubled their money. Whether that counts as gambling or insurance comes down to a 1774 British law written to stop people from betting on strangers dying. So why would a bar bet against its own team? A lot of these places are right by Dodger Stadium, and every extra playoff game means a packed house. When the Dodgers flame out early, a bar like that is stuck with a full staff schedule and a walk-in full of beer nobody's coming to drink. They were already betting on the Dodgers just by being open. The $60,000 on "No" was them buying the other side. Worst case, the Dodgers make the World Series, they lose the 60 grand, and they're too slammed to care. Instead Milwaukee swept the two-time defending champs, finished them off 6-4 in Game 4, and the contract paid out just under double. That payout also tells you what they paid. Getting back nearly 2x means they bought in around 50 cents a contract, so the market had the Dodgers' pennant chances right around a coin flip. Split roughly $115,000 across 25 locations and each bar got about $4,600 back for World Series nights that never happened. Now try getting that from your insurance company. Your normal business policy covers a fire or a flood. Call them and say the Dodgers lost and they'll laugh at you. Sports insurance does exist for teams, and it's pricey. Game Point Capital insures performance bonuses for pro teams, and earlier this year it hedged an NBA team's playoff bonus on Kalshi at 6%. Traditional reinsurers wanted 12 to 13% for the exact same risk. A second-round bonus went for 2% on the exchange and 7 to 8% the old way. The reason it's half price is kind of beautiful. A reinsurer has to set aside its own money against your risk, and it charges you for tying that money up. An exchange just finds whoever already wants the other side of the trade, and with the Dodgers that's a whole lot of people who'd hold a pennant ticket for the fun of it, plus trading firms like Susquehanna who do this all day. Somebody betting for fun doesn't need to get paid for taking risk. If anything, they're paying for the entertainment. Which means the cheapest insurance money in America is people who just want to gamble. That's also why Kalshi wants this story everywhere. It and Polymarket are fighting at least 20 lawsuits, most of them saying sports contracts are just gambling. Every detail of the bar story came from Kalshi, and the bar group still hasn't been named. And this is what makes those cases so hard. When the bar buys "No," it's canceling out a risk it already has. Some guy in Ohio with zero connection to LA nightlife can buy the exact same "No," and he's just creating risk out of thin air. You could stare at the contract all day and never tell which one you're looking at. The only way to know is to look at who's buying it and what else they own. Britain ran into this exact problem 250 years ago. In the 1700s, Londoners were taking out life insurance on strangers, old celebrities and people on trial for capital crimes, as a way to bet on who'd die next. Parliament finally stepped in in 1774, called it "a mischievous kind of gaming," and voided any policy where the buyer had no real stake in what happened. Lawyers call that insurable interest, and every policy you own still runs on it. Those LA bars clearly have a real stake in the Dodgers, so their trade looks a lot like insurance. Plenty of the trades on that same contract look a lot more like those London bets on strangers, and that 250-year-old line is pretty much what all these lawsuits are fighting over. And Kalshi is literally the Dodgers' official prediction market partner, with its name on a bar inside Dodger Stadium. Kind of funny that its best ad of the whole season came from the Dodgers getting swept.