@Claudia and filistro

But the best thing about Texas men is you don’t need AAA (or CAA for filistro). If you ever have car trouble–most notably along I-35 or I-10–and your cellphone is dead, don’t start walking towards the nearest gas station five miles away. Instead, just stand by the side of the road looking helpless. Within about 30 minutes, a white pickup with 3 or 4 good ole boys will stop to fix you right up again. This was especially true around Fort Worth…

@Monotreme

The great thing about Intrade is the vari­ety of mar­kets. You can bet
on just about any­thing, and if there isn’t a mar­ket for it, they will
open one on request. For exam­ple, on Sen­ate and House races, they’re
the only game in town.

Absolutely!

Or, in the case of the Texas primary last night, you could even bet on the margin of victory between Cruz and Dewhurst. Early voting gave Cruz ~5 point lead, so most of the money was on 10 points or less until the election day votes started coming in. Anyone placing an early bet on 12+ came out golden when Cruz got 20+ in election day voting, which averaged out to the final 14 pt margin.

Like you said, you can get a market for just about anything! But sometimes, the volume is so low as to be pointless.

@filistro

My own (highly unin­formed) instinct would be that IEM gives a bet­ter
snap­shot of the actual state of affairs at a given moment, while
Intrade is less reli­able at show­ing the accu­rate “big pic­ture” but
is prob­a­bly more use­ful for spot­ting trend lines. Would you agree?

I would agree that IEM does a better job of capturing the projected longer-term likelihood–the big picture. Intrade seems to capture the mood of the moment with a dash of opportunism and wild speculation, so I wouldn’t consider it reliable, and certainly not for longer-term trend lines.

For market watchers, Intrade is a rough temperature check of the race. It’s like a political mood ring, only murkier. Though the comparison isn’t perfect, I’d liken it to Nate’s “Now Cast” and IEM to his projected November forecast.

If you want to make rational bets with rational outcomes, IEM is your market. If you want to engage in arbitrage and take advantage of mob lemmings to make money even on a “losing” position, then Intrade is your market.

And there were no Texans in the bunch! This was in ’95 well before Texas.

@Max… If you’ve never been to Sky Room, next trip to San Diego, go!

What… and spend 200 bucks to eat dinner next to bunch of hairy-legged, big bellied Texans in shorts?

No way!

I’ll be over at George’s, where sartorial decorum is strictly enforced

@Shiloh:  Thanks for that list!  You can bet they were all hopping in Texas yesterday.  For my money, given the calories, sodium, fat and cholesterol in the Chick-Fil-A offerings, that was Darwinism at its best.

Hey, George’s at the Cove in La Jolla (tab would have been on north side of $1500) wouldn’t let in 14 people simply because some were wearing shorts. In August. In Southern California.

So we went to the Whaling Bar & Grill at La Valencia and to the Sky Room the next night. (Total tab just over $2500)

Sorry George!

(If you’ve never been to Sky Room, next trip to San Diego, go! Classic, old fashioned continental service, great food, and the sunset view is priceless. But the dining isn’t! Take plenty of moola!)

Hahahaha, thanks for the good words Filistro!  I have a feeling the man you met in the Dairy Queen was wearing boots, because it was fixin’ to get real deep where he was. 

Your second encounter was much more typical.  The hostesses had everything going against them, being brown-skinned and female.  Men from Texas are a lawless bunch anyway, don’t care what women think, and they sure as heck don’t want to be told what to do by them.

@Shiloh:  Didn’t TX secede from the union?

There’s always hope.  They talk about it all the time.  Texans don’t call themselves the Lone Star state for nothing.