> And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion.
Bizarre to call trading volume "revenue". Last year, trading fees for Kalshi amounted to about $263 million[0], whereas Polymarket largely did not have fees in 2025 and is turning them on in a few days[1].
I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gambling is a thing but at least we are counting that as an addiction. But we seem to take polymarket more seriously.
With proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.
>With proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.
It's only gambling when you are betting of completely random events. If you know what the odds are of something happening, even with some approximation, then it is not gambling.
Of course, over 99% people placing bets on Polymarket are gamblers, but some aren't.
nothing about the US currently can be characterized as having proper constraints
generic "bet on anything" betting markets massively encourage corruption and market manipulation via shock events and insider trading. false flag attacks, etc
There's three kinds of players on Polymarket & others
* The insider trading ones that will never lose money
* The wallstreetbets degenerates with enough money that it's a fun game even if you lose money
* People that have seen every chance they have at becoming moderately wealthy disappear under the current economic state of their country, where overwhelming debt is likely. The era of making it wealthy from a job is gone, an enormous part of the population is stuck going from small job to ubering, while being showered with videos of wealth from social media. The only way to make it out is gambling. Whether that's polymarket, sports betting, etc.
When you're already in a shit situation with no hope, "it's a zero sum game" isn't a good counterargument.
There are also large trading/market making firms providing liquidity, especially on markets associated with up/down bets on crypto, stocks etc. They use all the options trading machinery they've already built for more 'respectable' venues like CME/Eurex etc, further squeezing the margins for retail traders.
They're active on bets that are even considered "meme" bets. Example: Jesus returning in 2026 - If you can get a loan at 4% as a big well respected trading firm and plonk it on Jesus not returning at 94 cents, you're making ca. 2% for 'free'. (Unless Jesus returns, in which case you have bigger problems than your portfolio pnl).
Note that #1 will get kicked off the platform immediately. Even non-inside traders who win significantly more than expected will be kicked off. If you’re on the platform, you’re losing.
This is true for traditional gambling platforms, because they bet directly against their users, and make money when their users lose those bets.
Polymarket has a different incentive. They profit when their users bet more money, through percentage fees. Insider trading helps them achieve this by bringing in more money to the platform--they won't kick insider traders off.
At the moment being, Polymarket has an enormous reputational incentive against behaving like a predatory gambling company. People rely on it as a kind of decentralized alternative to New York Times. Distorting this effect would be very short-sighted.
I believe they are incentivized to discourage insider bets and essentially "rigged" wins. I do not think they will ever be able to control the problem of insiders leveraging guaranteed knowledge to take money for the poor suckers who don't know the game they are playing. Maybe that's too pessimistic, but at this point I don't see how anything but a pessimistic view is warranted.
Putting bounties on insider knowledge is the ideological justification for these kinds of betting markets, so I doubt they’re going to stop this kind of thing
Rigged wins aren't a real problem. Everyone knows that sports betting apps are rigged, and it doesn't affect them at all. In fact, the latest explosion of customers has been accompanied by even more blatant rigging in the form of unwinnable multi-leg parlays. Hasn't slowed them down.
Aren't a problem for whom, exactly? I'm not commenting here with concern about the prediction market businesses, founders, or shareholders. I'm concerned for the suckers who are and will continue to be taken advantage of. Forgive me for not abandoning all empathy for those suckers just because they don't realize they're being mugged. These prediction markets are zero-sum, with the connected and resourced taking yet more from those with less.
That's like me complaining about Wall St. tampering with bond ratings on sub-prime mortgages, and you telling me "Don't worry, the banks will be fine." I don't care about the banks, they have enough people looking out for them, and their golden parachutes will catch them on the way down anyway.
Aren't a problem for the companies; I was responding to you saying they're incentivized to stop it.
Believe me, I am not on their side. Gambling companies are a financial weapon aimed at the working class and a just society would shut them down. I don't blame you for assuming, though, given where we are.
That's true for now. A part of me hopes that one day prediction markets will have the same set of technical constraints, norms and laws that make the stock market mostly work. Let's wait and see.
That was my initial opinion, but more recently it's been established that there's quite a bit of a cat and mouse game here – people have come up with elaborate workarounds to avoid getting booted or limited by the platform, while the platforms come up with increasingly sophisticated monitoring to catch them before they win too much.
Though to your point I think these big winners are not representative of most users, who in my experience often think they're beating the system but in reality just don't log their losses very well. The house always wins etc etc.
Also, I really feel like so many of the people defending prediction markets don't understand the very basics of economy and behavioral science: incentives.
You're creating a legalized system with the incentives to influence events to make terrible stuff happen.
We've already seen huge bets on the deadline of US attack to Venezuela spike few hours/days before the actual aggression.
Which means that insiders not only hold information, but have the incentives to make stuff happen.
And naysayers (which seem to be dropping from the same basket of NFT/crypto cultists) will tell you that this is about probability and information discovery.
And the naysayers would be right. They come from two approaches:
- Property rights: bettors are waging using their own property at their own direct risk. To prohitbit such a thing is to violate their property rights, plain and simple;
- Information aggregation: prediction markets originally appeared to help make informed decisions about an event by proof-of-stake. If I'm not mistaken, this idea was originally developed by NSA/CIA/FBI for this purpose.
You mentioned misincentives like hold information (which isn't actually related to prediction markets, but more so to NDAs and similar) and "making stuff happen". The latter is functionally the same as policemen/judges/prosecutors/prisons having an incentive to create more criminals. Really, most goals people have may be achieved via criminal means. We don't outlaw free will because people have an incentive to achieve their goals via criminal means, we increase punishments (increasing potential loses), improve tracking/prevention (reducing success chances), etc.
I feel like we are skipping a lot implicit things that shouldn't be left implicit. How are you paying for the bad gamblers' losses? Are you deliberately lending to gamblers without due check? Probably not, that would be very imprudent.
If you aren't the creditor, then I suggest that you make it explicit how you are losing wealth with this. Good chance the issue might be somewhere along the way.
Have them have a prediction market on whether their house will be arsoned tomorrow or they will be hit by a car and instantly they will recognize the danger of the incentives and the bs of "information hedging based on price discovery".
Cause way worse events allow betting and profiting.
Give me a break, we're at the complete decadence of society and its intellect. Nobody can recognize right or wrong anymore let alone understand why insider trading, betting, etc, has been outlawed and prosecuted forever.
We live in the vilest era I remember since I was born, this is beyond disgusting.
I suggest that you think rationally about what you just said. Why wound anyone open a bet on "rando's house will be set on fire"? Why would they bet on "yes"? You can't present a generic case such as that without going into details about motivations and actual incentives.
Those way worse events also have a lot of extra political motivations behind it. If someone starts a war with the sole intention of winning a bet, there might worser problems than prediction markets.
The third paragraph might as well have been written by a consertive nutcase. Surely, if only you can recognize rights and wrongs, then you can objectively and undeniably prove them to this forum. On its own, it isn't much more than a appeal to tradition.
> I suggest that you think rationally about what you just said. Why wound anyone
That doesn't read like a good-faith response. Parent-poster brought up an archetypal scenario asserting that certain people are ignoring malice/harms because they are not personally affected, exhibiting a latent logical contradiction or double-standard.
Instead of addressing the actual point (the existence/seriousness of the harm category) you've begun nitpicking that there aren't enough irrelevant operational details about the hypothetical arsonist and hypothetical attack.
_______
"They are correct that rain is natural and normal, this isn't a big deal."
"If it was your house being flooded by neighbors' failure to control runoff flooding created by impermeable construction, you wouldn't say that, you would recognize the harm!"
"Pish tosh! I suggest you think rationally about the fact that my house is on a hill! For what possible reason would I put myself in such a situation?"
The existence and severity of the harm, as argued by OP, relies on incentives. But incentives don't exist on a vacuum, nor are they individually absolute over human behavior. Simply stating that something has a bad incentive and that'll result in evil, on its own, isn't much better than assuming spherical cows.
The reason I nitpicked on the arsonist example is to elaborate on that: the arsonist does indeed have an incentive to put fire onto someone's house due to the bet, but the bet itself increases the probability of the fire being prevented, the culprit being caught, etc., which are all disincentives that may negate the original misaligned incentive. When we escape from this particular scenario onto others, this pattern remains. If the disincentives didn't prevent said harm, there are only two causes:
- culprit is unreasonable beyond saving: this one is trivial - they are beyond saving. Banning gambling would simply cause them to commit crimes in a different way;
- the mechanisms behind the disincentives are malfunctioning or aren't enough: that warrants an investigation onto said mechanisms, not a ban on prediction markets.
Perhaps this has made it clearer that, at least from my perspective, these "irrelevant details" aren't irrelevant.
So, you are telling me this "impoverished arsonist" opened a bet on "will this rando's house be burned?", wagered on "yes" (with what money?), other people (who?) bet on "no" and no one found it suspicious? I hope you do realize that making it a public bet exposes information, and the very subject of the bet can be used to prove intentions.
Nevermind the fact about what would happen after the crime, should it even happen. It seems this hypothetical arsonist isn't just immoral, but also incredibly stupid (and that also begs more questions, like how do they have access to prediction markets like this).
For something so "breathtakingly obvious", it seems poorly thought through.
Sure, but regardless your perception about my motivations, I'm genuinely curious as to what prompted the "breathtakingly obvious" comment, because I'm ain't seeing it. Preferebably in a less snarky fashion, should we proceed with respect to one another.
Ay, didn't see your nickname, and your other posts.
Thanks for confirming what I said.
> And naysayers (which seem to be dropping from the same basket of NFT/crypto cultists) will tell you that this is about probability and information discovery.
Also, I ain't conservative, prediction markets, in their actual scope provide no benefits and plenty of wrong incentives.
The rest of your post makes no sense.
Plenty of world events have been impacted by people with misaligned interests, including by spies and double agents. Hell, wars in recent years have been started as distractions from internal political affairs.
And you want to argue to me that there's no people in position of power that may want to influence events they can bet on?
There's a reason why we prevent people in sport from betting: it's a matter of incentives. Give people incentives they will bend everything.
The fact that you can bet on a country attacking another is a tragedy.
Edit: since posting this, the comment has been edited (at least the version I saw, which ended before the quote). I will write a full response later. For what's worth, I'm grateful for the longer post.
Then don't argue like one. Rather than making a shallow statement about "how people forgot about the evils of something" and leaving at that, get into more detail about the history. Mention specific events.
> The rest of your post makes no sense.
Can you specify what doesn't? I'd gladly do my best to clarify.
> And you want to argue to me that there's no people in position of power that may want to influence events they can bet on?
No, I'm asking why are there such people? How did they get into such positions? What can be reasonably done to prevent such people from rising into them? From what I've gathered, your point is that the mere existence of prediction markets create enough incentives for well-behaved people to misbehave. My position is that they were never well-behaved.
> There's a reason why we prevent people in sports from betting: it's a matter of incentives.
Sure, we can leave it at that. If we ignore everything else. The problem with sports betting is that it tends to convert the practice from a compention of ability into another form of gambling. This does more than create incentives, it creates a negative feedback loop that undermines the point of the practice. Neither prediction markets nor gambling are about preserving the sanctity of fair play, though. Also, for what's worth, betting about outcomes in sports seems to be legal in the US, just that athletes and other involved are prohibited from betting in their games. If your proposal is to ban people in power from being able to bet and implementing systems to prevent them from doing so, then I suppose we are in agreement. But do note that this is less about incentives, and more about trust (you can trust more that agents won't abuse their role and, if they do, it'll be harder to get away with it).
This segways into main issue with your post. Incentives are highly subjective. For all intents and purposes, they always exist. They are the product of people having goals and desires. The incentive to murder always exists. The reason people generally don't "bend everything" for it is that few will satisfy their goals with that, and even less have it as their goal. For the few that do, there's another tool: disincentives. I don't think I need to explain why murdering someone might result in a terrible outcome for most. For the even fewer that murder as their sole and primary goal, they will bend everything to accomplish it, regardless of incentives/disincentives. Personally, I don't find it even worth discussing. This, perhaps, made it clearer why simply saying "there are incentives to do evil" doesn't cut it. A deeper, more contextual analysis is needed.
Unless you can show there are only criminal uses, or even that there are no set of disincentives we can employ to dissuade potentially bad actors from doing evil, a blanket ban is not warranted, specially when it comes at the cost of a human right.
> bettors are waging using their own property [...] To prohitbit such a thing is to violate their property rights
This is technically true but doesn't deserve top-billing. Any fraudster or embezzler (or mugger or drunk-driver) will incidentally be risking some of their own property while exercising their right to control it.
> informed decisions about an event by proof-of-stake
A large chunk of the problem here occurs when people (politicians, judges, police, CEOs, etc.) are wagering assets and outcomes that aren't actually theirs, but things they control in (violated) trust. In other words, the personal "stake" of their overt bet is actually far too small.
> The latter is functionally the same as policemen/judges/prosecutors/prisons having an incentive to create more criminals. [...] we increase punishments
So... repercussions like "is is a crime for those people to possess a private account on the anonymous bribery website"?
In regards to first point, I might not have made it clear, but betting, on its own, does not harm others, contrary to mugging or hitting a car. Property rights come with the associated duty of respecting others' properties afterall. Failure to do will result in the duty to repair and pay to restore the "correct" state to best of their abilities.
Onto the second, I don't think the people you mentioned actually wager stuff that they don't own. To be more precise, the problem is that they use criminal means to "rig" the bet in their favor. That, at least, seems to be what OP is talking about with incentives.
Finally, regarding the last, I agree that roles that require trust should have more norms and rules to enforce that trust. In case of strictly private roles, I personally believe they should be done via contracts and cultural pressures. For governmental roles, they should be enforce by laws (such as the one you suggested). Since this is a top-level, abstract, description, we can get into more about more specific cases (such as CEOs).
The often-repeated "wisdom of the crowds" justification is misapplied to online betting markets. Like people, crowds can either be wise or unwise depending on the situation. Famous experiments like guessing how many gumballs are in a jar work because each person who can see the jar has a source of valid information, and in aggregate that can be surprisingly accurate.
You can't assume that the majority of individuals participating in betting markets have a source of valid information. Given the destructiveness of these markets to both individuals and society, the aggregate wisdom of the individuals participating in these markets is highly doubtful. Any meager value above more traditional forecasting does not justify the cost, corruption and a loss of trust in institutions.
Please show the dollar/realized benefit to society VS (in response to OPs statement) the results don't "justify the cost, corruption and a loss of trust in institutions" along with a breakdown of the cost/negatives to society that result from those factors.
This isn't big oil (yet) you can't just externalize all the downside and say the product is a net benefit.
Pish tosh, my dear sir, it's simply common-sense that there are oodles of people out there with secrets that would be completely ethical to distribute and would undeniably better all humankind, but they're sitting on them purely because they haven't figured out how to make a profit from it. /s
In other words, the overlap between these is too small to justify the idea that prediction markets are a net-benefit by default:
1. Is valuable
2. Not already known
3. No current reward mechanism exists (e.g. patents)
There is definitely value in that, but that value is outweighed - dominated, even - by the incentive produced to fix outcomes, incentivized by that money put on the line.
It would be useful to predict things like earthquakes and tornados. Gambling on what politicians and celebrities will do is not science it's degenerate court gossip.
Game theory can be applied to these problem, and if you can correctly model reward, cost and motives, you can predict decisions of politicians more often than not.
Even granting the idea that game theory can be applied successfully here; that does not really help with one-off events. Consider, knowing the odds of a coin flip does not grant you any real help in knowing what the next coin flip will be.
This is also ignoring that game theory of partisan games breaks if any of the participants knows what the other will do. Is one of the more famous ideas.
To that end, if you want to predict what someone will do, more often than not you are best looking at their experience doing said thing.
> you can predict decisions of politicians more often than not
What makes you believe this? The performance of economist/sociology experts using game theory to make predictions has been worse than a coin-flip up to this point. It also has done enormous damage.
I don't think Nash envisioned politicians and their aides being able to profit from making decisions. Do you launch an attack on Eastasia? Well the market right now says there's a 40% chance, so I guess it's a good idea to grab your crypto keys and make some bets before you call the Joint Chiefs.
I think you're right broadly, but when that wisdom is applied to e.g. how many dildos will be thrown at WNBA players, I don't know how much actual value is created.
There's value in that only if assessments made by people using the prediction for something aren't better than crowd wisdom. I would guess that a large part of prediction market participants are simple gamblers whose assessment is worse than the prediction of someone doing it because they need the information for something.
So if people who need predictions for decision-making start relying on prediction markets with a lot of low value gambler predictions and opinion manipulators (wealthy participants can use the platform to mislead people as well) the value of these things might be negative.
Or if decision makers start using the gambling markets to drive their decisions, the value of these things will go extremely negative.
The headline bet in Polymarket right now is on when US troops will invade Iran. If some unscrupulous official can pull some strings to get boots in the ground in the next few days, they stand to win a significant amount of money.
My understanding of the world is enhanced immensely because suckers can bet on how many times the president will reference the lips of his press secretary in a speech.
Buy a movie ticket and that money is gone. Throw $20 on a parlay for the weekend sportsball and thats actually interesting, something off script might happen. And that money might not actually be gone.
For example if you're a European farmer it might be rational to protect yourself from fertiliser price swings by buying/shorting natural gas futures, derivates or long dated delivery contracts. Polymarket bets on specific geopolitical events are just another option for this, which can be attractive depending on the price.
Prediction markets have a pretty unique benefit in terms of offering political protection. For example if you're a DEI NGO it might have been worth making bets on Trump winning so you have enough funds to ride out measures that target your traditional funding sources from gov/corps/edu.
There are a lot of baked in assumptions here. For instance, as an extreme example, betting on nuclear war or climate collapse happening and then "winning" doesn't really provide you anything of much use in the society you will be living in after such events.
Extreme events are always poorly priced in markets. For example, there's no point in making a trade for the S&P 500 falling by 90% because if it does we'll be in such a catastrophe that money doesn't matter any more.
Insurance / hedging is most useful in protecting you from realistic well defined risks that affect you personally but not the wider system.
Very astute observation. Might I even add, as humans we never know when our last day could be. So I find it silly to gamble, since I could easily die in a car accident on my way to pick up my winnings.
Typo. It's obvious it can't be a revenue. Previous paragraph is dealing with the size of online gambling industry, next paragraph is about the same but for prediction market.
Well, the previous paragraph compares how much people bet online with how much people spend on airfare, which also isn't quite right. It assumes 100% of what people bet is lost. For sure, the house always wins, but the amount lost is probably closer to 50-60% of what is quoted.
It's market size. It shows the interest in some activity. Laundry and airfare are for sure necessary & valuable activities, whereas the interest of betting (for a society) is questionable.
The question is what do you do with your money. If you are a pharaon, and pay a good salary to build pyramids, is that good? People get paid, pharaon gets his pyramid. However, as a society, the loss is all the efforts that could have been spent on something much more useful, like hospitals, schools, roads... For the betting industry, no money is lost, it goes to the winner or the house. But how will these people use their money next?
"A reservist suspected of using classified information to place bets on the Polymarket prediction site served as a major in the Israeli Air Force, a Tel Aviv Court reveals.
The defendant was indicted alongside his alleged accomplice last month on severe security offenses, as well as bribery and obstruction of justice, after they allegedly bet on the timing of Israel’s opening strikes that kicked off the 12-day war with Iran last June.
The case was subject to a court-issued gag order, which was partially lifted this evening following a petition from several Hebrew-language outlets. The details of the case were cleared for publication, but the defendants’ names are still under wraps.
According to the indictment, the soldier was briefed on the June operation in a confidential meeting a day before it was carried out, then notified his civilian accomplice about the offensive. When Israeli warplanes were on their way to attack Iran, the reservist let the civilian know, and the latter placed a bet on the war’s timing.
The pair allegedly made $162,663 after winning the bet, which they agreed to split evenly between themselves."
In addition to this article, I've recently read this one [1], where the reported received numerous violence and death threats from people who wanted him to change the a story he published to match what they bet on Polymarket.
Yeah this is a much more likely outcome of unregulated gambling... I expect to hear a LOT more of this. Also plan for a swift, complete erosion of trust in sports officiating.
I’d love to read about their Opsec failures. It seems like an offline conversation or Signal chat with disappearing messages could’ve saved these two. Any links to details on the case?
The final conclusion about the evolving and rising focus on "money" as a core value is interesting, and one that seems to make sense to me.
I think most people before the age of information found meaning in life in these non-monetary "beliefs"... religion, community engagement, etc. Mostly to the benefit of the wealthy class.
I think people are finally waking up to the fact that the wealthy (parasite) class have been using these non-monetary values as a smokescreen for generations to extract more and more wealth out of the lower classes, and the internet has allowed this zeitgeist to forment.
Anecdotally, I've experienced this in the company i work at. For years and years and years, we would complain about low salaries, with respect to peer companies. And they would always throw distractions at us instead of just... raising salaries. "More happy hours, more team building activites, more company benefits that didnt actually cost anything". Anything but raise salaries.
I assure you that poor people have always been focused on money. Every time the rent is due, they are very aware. It's the wealthier folks who have historically had the privilege of being Bogleheads and ignore having to think about the financial implications of every decision they make.
Lower-income families have traditionally had community institutions to support them. You could be a church member for free, hang out at the union hall, or participate in any number of IRL activities that let you quit thinking about cashflow for a few blessed hours.
Replacing community engagement with an obsession over cash isn't healthy, either for individuals or communities.
Yeah everyone likes to throw a stupid little comment at Robinhood but come on. My parents did not invest outside their 401k. My grandparents actually stuffed 20k in their mattress, must have been pretty good money when they put it under there.
We are approaching the first couple years of this country where investing knowledge has actually proliferated out of the country club. It is a huge shift in the tide but no one wants to talk about it, if only to make a jab at robinhood perhaps.
The rise of low/no fee brokers is a fantastic advancement for the reasons you cite. Robinhood gets grief because it tries to drive people to trade often and take riskier bets when the long-known wisdom is that accumulating wealth requires patience and diversification.
> Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.
Here's one story about gambling in the UK: the TV advertising is relentless and out of control after 9pm due to legislation passed in the early 00s. Gambling can quite literally lose you your house, friends and family. But apparently it's totally fine to advertise as long as HMRC get ££££. On some TV channels, every second advert, or worse, most adverts, are gambling. Bingo? Slots? Poker? Sports? All of the above.
The biggest UK tax payer for several years was Denise Coates.
Tobacco advertising, on the other hand, is totally banned in the UK, but won't lose you your house or family and friends (unless of course you die).
My local highstreet also had several betting shops where none previously existed. It's quite depressing really, and gambling invariably targets the poorest in the community.
> Do you need advertising to tell you about bread, vegetables, meat?
Looking around at the world, yes?
Less-heathy takeaway chains do advertise constantly, and concepts like the food pyramid are there to literally "tell you about bread, vegetables, meat" as an advertisement for a better alternative.
People aren't born knowing this - if they don't learn it from parents, they will either learn it from someone else, or not know it and have a poor diet out of ignorance.
How much of this is fixed if a person is only able to bet token amounts on each outcome? Let's get crazy and make it $20. A few crazy people might run Sybil attacks but it'll be a lot more limited and obvious. Not that I'm opposed to consigning all these gambling apps back to the fiery depths from which they came, but if you do want to preserve the ability of healthy people to have a little bit of fun, limiting the bet size has almost no effect on that while drastically reducing the damage. It seems like a good compromise, if anyone is looking for one of those.
PredictIt operated with $850 limits for years, and overall this seemed fine. Limits of various sizes might make sense depending on the subject, where the risk of penalty greater outweighs the potential profits.
You sound like the people proposing how a social network could operate without making people addicted to doomscrolling. Anyone can make a worse service like that but it won't stop the superior service from operating, which is the problem.
I guess I wasn't clear that I'm proposing a statutory limit on gambling amounts, not a voluntary limit by the service, as an alternative to banning it entirely.
Part of the argument of prediction markets is that it incentivizes good forecasting. Theoretically if you wanted to concoct a novel political polling technique or rent some compute for a new hyper local weather model, you could recoup your costs via the prediction market.
I think in practice the volume of sharp money in the prediction markets is a small fraction and the majority would be better served with the limits you’re proposing
We're seeing high bets the day before, such that the bet goes through without too many people noticing and adjusting. Maybe forbidding bets X days before deadline would help to reduce chance of insider trading?
Or just shut down the whole thing. Bets on bombing is truly immoral and downright despicable.
There is a class of prediction markets that are useful and seem immune to most of these problems : play money prediction markets. I've been enjoying them for years; I feel they provide a useful service to understand what is going on in the world, and they don't seem to provide the perverse incentives that we are seeing here. Oh, and they seem to work just as well.
Indeed. I also want to give a recommendation in favour of forecast aggregation platforms like Metaculus and GJOpen. Aggregating forecasts works well even without phrasing it as gambling, because you can still have users compete to be the most accurate.
The benefit I see to prediction markets is that you don't have to constantly update your predictions, and yet they still provide useful results. Metaculus and friends are just too much work for me.
Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading and perverse incentives. This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act).
Every new financial medium gets its moment in the sun when all the crooks extract everything they can, before eventually market governance steps in. Crypto's been in scammer phase for a while. It needs decentralized governance to solve it this time though, since obviously classic governance is a dumpster fire and couldn't enforce anything on crypto even if it tried.
> Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading
Why?
If a prediction market is supposed to predict it makes no sense to exclude the best informed people. If I want to know the risk of a Boeing airliner crashing this year, Boeing insiders have much more to contribute than armchair observers.
And if a Boeing insider sabotages a plane to profit on a prediction market - that's illegal. If they're willing to break the law on sabotaging planes, they're surely also willing to break the law on insider trading at the same time. If we think this is a realistic risk, prediction markets should be banned entirely.
Only reason to exclude insiders is if the real purpose of a prediction market is recreational gambling.
But do require KYC on all customers and require their profiles and wagers to be public. The societal values of prediction market data would be an order of magnitude more valuable this way.
> This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act).
Just because a rule was created after something bad happened doesn't mean that the rule is effective to prevent it from happening again. The most common result when they try to ban something without removing the incentive for it to happen is to cause it to happen less obviously. Then the rule (and all its unfortunate costs) gets credited with not observing the bad thing anymore, even though that's not the same as actually preventing it.
Notice that you can use the stock market in the same way as a prediction market. After that healthcare CEO got murdered the company's stock took a hit, as anyone could reasonably have predicted it would. That's a perverse incentive in line with betting that someone will kill the CEO. We don't really have a great way of preventing stock trading from creating that incentive, we mostly just rely on the fact that if you do the murder then murder is very illegal. But if that works for the stock market then why doesn't it work for prediction markets?
> Notice that you can use the stock market in the same way as a prediction market. After that healthcare CEO got murdered the company's stock took a hit, as anyone could reasonably have predicted it would. That's a perverse incentive in line with betting that someone will kill the CEO. We don't really have a great way of preventing stock trading from creating that incentive, we mostly just rely on the fact that if you do the murder then murder is very illegal. But if that works for the stock market then why doesn't it work for prediction markets?
This is true in theory, but in practice the impact of any regular individual's actions on a company is probably going to be small and uncertain enough that it's difficult to make a healthy and reliable profit from. Even the very extreme example of murdering the United Healthcare CEO seems to have caused the stock to drop ~16.5% (assuming the drop is entirely due to the murder). That's like placing a bet with ~1/6 odds. You'd need to short a lot of stock to make that worth the risk of murdering someone (leaving aside any moral issues obviously). You could use leverage to juice those returns but that is expensive and risky, too. If you can afford to deploy enough leverage to make it worth it, you can probably find ways to make money that don't carry a risk of the death penalty.
I guess viewed in this way a bet on a prediction market is like a very cheap, highly leveraged bet on a specific outcome. So the incentives are much stronger as the potential reward for the risk taken is greater.
> You'd need to short a lot of stock to make that worth the risk of murdering someone (leaving aside any moral issues obviously).
When they know exactly when something is going to happen, buying put options that are cheap because they're slightly out of the money seems like it would be pretty effective.
> I guess viewed in this way a bet on a prediction market is like a very cheap, highly leveraged bet on a specific outcome. So the incentives are much stronger as the potential reward for the risk taken is greater.
You seem to be trying to make this about leverage as if that's a thing that isn't available anywhere else.
Let's try another example. Some group breaks into the systems of some publicly traded company and gets access to everything. Now they're in a position to publicly disclose their trade secrets to competitors, publish internal documents that will cause scandals for the company, vaporize the primary and backup systems at the same time, etc. Anything that allows them to place a bet against the company gives them the incentive to do this; the disincentive is that the thing itself is illegal. Leverage gives them a larger incentive, but there are plenty of wages to place a leveraged bet in the stock market.
> When they know exactly when something is going to happen, buying put options that are cheap because they're slightly out of the money seems like it would be pretty effective.
But you don't know exactly what would happen. You know what you will do, but not how it will affect the company's stock price. Maybe it will go down a little, maybe it will go down a lot. Maybe you kill the CEO on the same day as good news is published about the company, which offsets the drop. Or maybe the market just decides the guy wasn't that good a CEO anyway. So you bought a bunch of cheap puts with a strike price of 100, but the stock only drops to 101, and you lose everything. You can buy puts with a higher strike but they will be more expensive.
> Leverage gives them a larger incentive, but there are plenty of wages to place a leveraged bet in the stock market.
Yes, but they are expensive, is my point.
Generally, the disincentive outweighs the incentive. You can increase the incentive through leverage. But that also increases the costs, which increases the disincentive.
There may well be situations where the incentive outweighs the disincentive. But in the context of traditional financial markets I think those situations are likely very rare due to the risks and costs, whereas with a predictions market the risks and costs could be reduced, so it is more likely to happen.
> But you don't know exactly what would happen. You know what you will do, but not how it will affect the company's stock price. Maybe it will go down a little, maybe it will go down a lot. Maybe you kill the CEO on the same day as good news is published about the company, which offsets the drop.
You never know exactly what would happen. You know what you will do, but not if the CEO is going to catch the flu and not show up that day, or have better security than you were expecting, or have a great surgeon, or a spouse who is willing to keep them on life support until after your prediction market contract expires.
> Yes, but they are expensive, is my point.
Only they're not. There are many ways to bet all or nothing on something people generally expect to have a <1% chance of happening, so that you either lose $1000 or make $100,000. Under normal circumstances you could make that bet 100 times in a row and lose $100,000 and the counterparty is happy to take all your money, but if you're able to do something to change the outcome yourself then it's different, which is why it's the same.
There literally are drugs vastly less addictive and harmful than others. So some designation of some as "soft" and others as "hard" is not unwarranted (though we can argue where that cutoff is) and anything that paints all drugs the same is a false equivalence that suspiciously appears more ideologically anti-drug driven rather than impartial evidence-driven.
Same goes for anyone saying all gambling is the same.
Just game-theoretically, suppose you bet $100 on some disaster.
That disaster causes $10,000,000 of harm, but only causes you $90 of harm individually.
You've gained $10, but your $10 gain is a millionth of the harm caused.
Generally-speaking, there's an enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy. So now we have a mechanism by which individuals have a financial incentive to cause harm...
Don't these markets create a mechanism for society to race to self-destruction?
Search for "assassination markets", which is a longish treatment of this idea. Specifically, people collectively can bet large sums of money that X will not be killed Thursday at 5pm. And anyone can take the other side at insanely good odds...
Prediction markets advertise insider trading as a feature, and enforcement of financial crimes is a racket anyway. If you know the right people, make the right campaign contributions, laws just don't apply to you.
Pessimistically, i imagine that's what they meant by "enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy". Like its a lot easier to destroy an art piece in a museum than to create one.
Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan[1]:
“When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near the bomb shelter; we look at it every day’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really that popular over there?’” he added. “That’s very powerful. That’s an undeniable value proposition that did not exist before.”
I'm with Matt Levine here[2]:
"There is something particularly dystopian about the idea that:
a) Some countries will bomb other countries.
b) The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets.
c) This will cause the prediction markets to correctly reflect the probability of bombing, allowing the people getting bombed to avoid being bombed."
This is naive. The people deciding about the bombing will profit most by taking a very large and unlikely position against the market’s predictions and then carrying it out immediately.
Anonymous trading on prediction markets leads to unpredictable chaos in the end. And as destruction is easier than creation that’s what we will see more of.
Example: a fake German market for train punctuality was announced to make a point recently. If it had been real, train staff and passengers could trivially have profited by betting against any expected punctual train and blocking a door for a few minutes. Or betting against many trains and throwing a hopefully fake body onto a busy line.
Having nice things in society is fragile and not a given. They mostly exist through mutual consent and mild disincentives to destroy the common good. Allow people to profit by destroying them and enough of them will.
An adding bonus would be nations tilting prediction odds to get people sleeping in vulnerable places and then bomb those place - ideally the nation also reversing their deceptive bets at the last minute.
I think the other side of the argument goes that (a) the bombings would happen anyway, and (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading. (The bombs "only" get marginally cheaper.) Thus the only actual effect is the early warning, which is a good thing in this case.
Like if someone managed to figure out a way to make slightly cheaper bombs but with the tradeoff that the cheaper bombs gave a few hours of eary warning to the people being bombed, I think I would prefer you used those bombs.
(There are many other cases where insiders may change the outcome to align with their bet. That is bad if the outcome is bad.)
We're just in a bleak time. It seems that many people are scrambling to do the most harm possible. Everyone's building the torment nexus. I'm not sure what else to do but attempt to insulate my family from it.
I'm hoping that someday more people will appreciate the humor in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. ..."
Whenever I think to myself "how did things get this bad?", I also force myself to think, "how did they get good, in the first place?"
Today, we are building the Torment Nexus. But yesterday, we were building the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, etc. etc. Things can get worse, but they can also get better - we just have to do our small part in making them better.
The left is focused not on the correct thing (albeit a thing worthy of support), and the right refuse to acknowledge the benefit of regulation / legislation and are totally disenchanted with the possibility of politics while they just just blame the left for all their problems.
The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'.
I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity. I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city.
It’s always been bad, but in my eyes it’s so much worse now that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas or something to bet (and lose) big.
Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.
Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source of a large part of their revenue?
It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in somehow.
Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol - one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives against putting this cat back in the bag.
>Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
Explain this more? Let's assume you're Nate Silver and predict the 50 state outcome perfectly - you have a 50% in the class, so failing? Then the only way to "win" is to wager 50 points on the stock market (doesn't matter which way it goes). Wagering less makes no sense, because you start at 50 and so going "up" 25 to 75% protects nothing as the downside is still way below failing.
It sounds like a game theory question - you should be able to get 40 points on the states easy enough even if you get the toss-up ones wrong, and then gamble the full total on the stock market (which in general should go up, the market loves certainty and hates uncertainty).
It was exactly a game theory question, and a perfect exercise in real world betting markets. You’ll never have the most information and you’ll never be the biggest fish.
I learned the lesson that day, and I’d argue that even Obama with 365 electoral votes and control of the legislature learned it soon afterwards. Being a naïve hopeful Obama supporter, I bet 50 points on up and lost my ass.
Nate Silver came into the national spotlight after his analysis that year. There were other polling prediction models out of Princeton, but I heavily relied on Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight. I remember predicting every state correctly except North Carolina.
Interestingly in the context of this post, the University of Iowa has been hosting a market for real monetary binary options on US political outcomes for 30 years now. [1] It’s probably some small stakes fun for Midwest market makers looking for some action during off season corn futures.
Other things we learned:
- The players club at Harrah’s marked the beginning of the rewards points programs available at nearly every single seller of goods today.
- Casinos, in cracking down on card sharp teams playing blackjack with a mathematical edge and who had been 86’d but often returned in disguise, developed software to identify people from security camera footage by their stride. This was in 2008.
- Bet the pass line, and stack the odds behind your number. It’s the best odds in the casino and nobody likes the guy betting Don’t.
My friend's idiot loser husband got addicted to sports betting and day trading and lost their life savings and even spent kids college funds. She found out because he had started to apply for a home equity loan to catch up on some of his debts and they called her to verify some paperwork.
The only reason I found out was because she had a HUGE obnoxious gorgeous flower arrangement delivered to her at work and I asked her what they were for and she started crying and then told me they were his apology flowers - that he put on her credit card!
She doesn't want to divorce because their kids but I'm encouraging her to think about protecting herself and I sent her some attorney recommendation links. He's never had a decent job it's majority her income so divorcing isn't even that favorable for her now afaik. Sad situation.
> He's never had a decent job it's majority her income so divorcing isn't even that favorable for her now afaik
It is totally favorable, because he is going to make more debt. And if she does not divorce, she will be responsible for that debt. Moreover, money she earns after divorce are her except for the part of debt she is already responsible for. Right now, they are theirs, he has equal access to them and she is half responsible for his current and future debts.
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
Can't say I agree with that specific take (and find it a bit naive to be honest), unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has.
I think the difference between the two is Amazon and Meta do provide some utility to balance it out, whereas gambling is purely a net negative on society. You can be young and naive enough to believe you're "making the world a better place" in big tech. You can't work on pure gambling products without being a scammer at heart; you know what you signed up for.
You can, because the definition of gambling is loose. Magic The Gathering is gambling. You by a pack and hope you get a valuable card, no different than buying a lottery ticket and hope you win. Pokemon Go is also gambling. You pay to hatch eggs and hope you get a rare pokemon. I'm pretty confident the people who made these games don't consider their design to be evil or wrong. In fact, I'm sure they see themselves has having provided millions of people with fun entertainment.
If we end up losing Magic The Gathering when we ban gambling, I will somehow find a way to sleep at night. Yes, all of these card games that are targeted at kids and young people are somewhat exploitative and are a pipeline into more conventional gambling games + whatever esoteric online pay-to-play stuff comes next.
I'd be slightly more specific with those assertions, and point them at the gambling mechanics themselves, although I do agree. The games are not inseparable from those mechanics, and are quite fun on their own.
I just got into magic, and am sadly watching my more gambling prone friends fall down that rabit hole. They keep asking me what cards I've bought or whatever and the answer is none, aside from a starter deck. I have literally zero interest in engaging with any game in that way, despite enjoying the booster pack gamble as kid with pokemon.
If I were to gamble, I'd much rather throw a couple bucks on who wins a game rather than what cards I'll get.
One of the only good things I got from MtG is Card Forge (https://card-forge.github.io/forge/), an open-source unofficial rule engine that also contains a desktop and a mobile app.
They allow playing a game similar to the old Shandalar from Microprose, in which you wander around a world dueling enemies (playing MtG against them), getting money and resources, and improving your deck until you can beat the big bosses.
It's one of the best ways to play the game: single-player, offline, and unofficial. Therefore you can have almost any card in existence without having to gamble with real-world money. It lets you enjoy the strategic part of the game and its meta, including deck building. The only downside is that the single-player game robs you of part of the charm, that is playing with other people.
Xmage is basically an unofficial variant of MTGO that does support actual multiplayer. All the cards are free, you don’t even have to grind to get them.
I think Richard Garfield would not be a fan of the "gambling" or "speculation" parts of MTG. To the extent that they exist I do not think they contribute to the quality of the games or the amount of entertainment.
Nothing Meta has done comes remotely close to paying for the damage they've done to individuals and to society as a whole. I think the metamates know exactly what they're doing. There are innumerable documents with people at all levels admitting to literal crimes and how best to cover them up or minimize them. These are the types of people you wouldn't let into your home for fear of things going missing.
This comment would make more sense if it were before the new wave of prediction markets, which are high-profile gambling products clearly largely made and popularized by true believers who think they are making the world a better place.
> clearly largely made and popularized by true believers who think they are making the world a better place.
Is it clear? To a lot of people they come off as “true believers” in the same way as Kenneth Copeland and all the prosperity gospel hustlers. A lot of people thought Elizabeth Holmes was a true believer too. Easy to believe in something when it’s making you rich. Maybe VCs are just suckers for a bit of charisma.
Thinking gambling in any way or form makes the world a better place or just leaves it as it is, is utterly delusional and any contact (or support) with that person should be avoided like the plague.
Sounds like there's a good chance your company is one of the few I'd want to work for then. I don't think I'd meet your standards though, having worked in decentralized finance in the past
For us it just turned out that their experience and mindset wasn't really applicable or appreciated, and most of our peers felt the same way after the first round of ex-faang people washed through.
Wow. Glad i wont ever work for/with you. Not because i worked at any of those “bad bad” companies but because your take is a horrible sign of what to expect.
Like, if it was a pm or leadership person i can kinda understand it. They are the ones pushing direction. But what, some call center support guy is sol because his resume has kelshi on it? Not everyone is in a position to have luxury beliefs.
I definitely think there's a middle ground here, that the commenter to which you are replying may also be alluding. If a human is scanning resumes, job titles tend to be more important than the company, although both are obviously relevant.
So yes, if one is "Senior VP - Engagement Optimization" at e.g. Draft Kings, that would imply a level of culpability for "gambling experience = do not hire".
But if the title is "call center support - kelshi - 6 mo. contract"? Sure. I don't think the policy needs to be as stringent as all that.
Not necessarily disagreeing with either perspective, since they don't seem incompatible to me.
So my friend works for a sports betting app and I personally do judge him from a philosophical point of view. I would never! Same with Meta, I would never!
But since I never once thought to de-friend him, I thought more about it. I leaned in. And TLDR: we are all part of this machine. Literally, everyone's work output gets bundled up into public retirement funds invested in these baddie public companies.
What's really the difference? Guy earns his paycheck directly, must be worse than all of us complicit to make money on stock market go up? Yes stock-market metaphor is intentional. The original gambler's paradise.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes. You really think someone who took a job at Google as a bright-eyed young graduate is forever tainted and could never be worth hiring?
If it is your company then this is fine, it is your money afterall, and can do as you see fit. If you are employed or have co-shareholders, you are managing someone elses money. And you are not supposed to act within your morals, but those of the company. It would be kind of hipocritical to act on your own morals using someone elses money - up to the point where it could be illegal misapropriation. And then taking the moral highground and being judgemental about people because they worked in gambling is probably something one should reconsider.
> It would be kind of hipocritical to act on your own morals using someone elses money - up to the point where it could be illegal misapropriation
This is hyperbole. Refusing to hire anyone out of any of the big tech companies is an own goal. But being silly in management is absolutely legal. The only legal obligation I can think of revolves around disclosure, i.e. you should be open with investors and the company about the fact that you're putting up these moral guardrails, rails which may have effects on the company's competitiveness.
It is not black/white. If you have a qualified candidate that asks less money and reject them over a less-qualified candidate on the sole grounds they worked for a prediction marked, it could be called silly. If the discprancy in qualification and salary demends is high enough and you do this repeatedly, it can be gross misconduct and not only a reason to be fired, but to be held financially liable for the damage.
> If the discprancy in qualification and salary demends is high enough and you do this repeatedly, it can be gross misconduct and not only a reason to be fired, but to be held financially liable for the damage
Again, major caveat, if you do it without disclosing your reasons, possibly. And unless you're personally profiting from it in some way, highly doubtful on financial liability. (Disclaier: not a lawyer.)
Just put it at top of values or some kinda culture fit or hiring policy document, and youre fine.
PS: Not absolutely every company has to let go of all morals and focus purely on profit. Thats the beauty of companies, you can open and lead them for different reasons.
Im from Germany and there are many companies like that, there the Values (or a Mission) that are actually taken into account when decision making and sometimes you lose money but that's expected and normal.
Acting within your morals is not incompatible with serving the company's interests. Especially if it means your team is very much still competent while maintaining a culture that is healthy. That leads to better delivery.
Avoiding working in deeply unethical areas also shields the company from legal or PR liability.
It is compatible if you align your actions with the morals of the company. A big sign that you are not aligned with the values of the company, if you do not want anybody within that company (especially your boss) to know on what moral grounds you make your decision and justify your actions.
Gross! There is no arena of life in which I can ethically abstain from adhering to my own morals.
I am acting on my own morals when I work, shop, flirt, cook, shit, and ride my bicycle! My morals do not get to recuse themselves just because a paycheck is involved! What sort of evil cope is this??
> unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has
It depends on the role. If you were doing something deeply technical, or facing customers who loved your work, I think you get a pass. If you were building features nobody outside your company is thankful for, you need to do a convincing repentance act. If you worked on Instagram for Kids or whale optimization, fuck off.
I remember a company during the interview asked me are things I do not work with or don't like, especially since they had a very diverse team culturally where e.g. some folks couldn't work on any kinda gambling resembling platform due to their religious beliefs.
I told them that TBH didn't think much before about it, appreciate the question and to answer: I could never see myself working on weapons used for war, products used by countries to repress their population (relevant due to my upbringing) or any kinda of mass surveillance system. The HR just noted them down but I saw every technical person smiled and understood truly what I'm talking about and they insured me that they so and so don't ever work on those kinda projects.
PS: before someone comes now and says "BUT DO U USE IG?!" No I don't use most social platforms but also if I did just because I'm flawed and the system isnt perfect, doesn't mean I'm gonna give up on all my morals right away and not choose better when I have the option.
Building part of a killing machine isn't really something you can defend, even if you weren't working on the part of the machine that does the killing.
> Building part of a killing machine isn't really something you can defend
Of course it is. I don't personally have an issue with folks who worked on weapons of war. Particularly if they're honest with themselves about the work they did. Doubly particularly if they felt a sense of mission in it.
And in an integrated culture and economy, the difference between a person who happens to work at a company with an evil project in a random division and a person who grows complacent about politics with their non-problematic job is thin to the point of vanishing.
What part? If you work on the manufacturing line for bolts, and one of the ten thousand bolts your company makes is sometimes used in cruise missiles, are you a munitions worker?
I think you're likely trying to say "the guy who wrote the positioning code" is as much a killing machine maker as the guy who loaded the explosives.
Do me a favor. Go to Ukraine with someone who worked on the Javelin anti-tank missile and tell them that. I bet the guy who worked on the Javelin will be considered a hero. You will likely receive a kick in the balls for ever daring to criticize him or repeating your post. Your take is naive in the extreme.
Or the young person who needs a job and doesn't yet have OP's fully formed understanding of exactly where the line is - apparently gambling bad/ ad tech OK.
If they got a job at one of those companies, they could've gotten a job elsewhere. It's a specific choice, and "but I'm only 25, how could I possibly be expected to know right from wrong" isn't really an excuse.
Morals start and stop somewhere, please don't attack people when they actually show some proper morals on this forum despite the employment of many members here.
It depends, if the morals cause more harm than they prevent, then no, the people espousing those "morals" don't deserve respect. They should be treated as naive which is what they are. Also, this is why we have the phrase, "virtual signaling" which specifically means a "moral" which causes more harm than good and seems to exist mostly to make the speaker seem more ethical than they actually are. Ignorance isn't a virtue and it shouldn't be treated as such.
Naive? I think it shows a higher than average level of awareness. Gambling is rent-seeking that targets vulnerable individuals. It's really only a small step away from dealing in addicting drugs; and is in some ways worse, because it addicts not just individuals, but also cities and countries who get used to the tax output.
this is a false equivalence. Amazon and Meta have caused plenty of damage, companies in our capitalist economies are bad etc. But shipping you books or connecting you to other people isn't inherently evil. There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is. It's been a vice in virtually every culture for thousands of years. It's akin to peddling drugs. The practice itself is corrosive and destroys people.
It's one thing to acknowledge that any for profit company in some way behaves badly, but you can't change the world. You can choose not to sell poison.
> There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is.
I think this is waaaay too black and white. Gambling can be fun, and there isn't anything wrong with enjoying gambling in a healthy manner. It is very comparable to drinking, I think. I refuse to apologize for enjoying the occasional drink or the occasional game of poker.
I like a poker game with friends, I enjoy sitting at a blackjack table for a few hours sometimes. I have even enjoyed entering a few poker tournaments.
There is a line between a poker game with friends, or even a professional poker industry, and a sophisticated tech company operating a nationwide low-friction gambling app, incentivized to optimize harming its users as much as possible. This line was enshrined into law until recently.
I have no problem with gambling as long we are absolutely sure its not done by children and teens, heavily regulated, strong limits (e.g. one play per day), required training or community memberships at addiction groups and things like that.
I didn't finish the full registration but Polymarket basically didn't ask about anything besides email and new pass. Maybe later when someone wants to bet but it should be harder and take a week at least like a cooldown effect, and never more than 100 EUR at a time.
There are many ways to heavily regulate it so that a few people can enjoy it at times occasionally but help those people who need it and make it very hard for them to come back. But then the income iwould be so small it wouldnt land on the news anymore.
PS: Not an expert in gambling and addiction, my concrete examples might not work but still I haven't seen other efforts so that was my point.
Between these I think Amazon is less bad. It's a monopoly & monopsony which causes a lack of innovation and (eventually) higher prices but it's also a much more efficient way to sell things and it doesn't destroy the fabric of society or anything. Meta though is just as bad if not worse than any gambling site out there. Its products are optimized to destroy your attention span, feed you polarizing content, destroy your mental health and waste hours of your time every day all while ironically making you less connected to other people because users won't get off their phones and have a conversation.
Amazon extracts a lot of the value of a purchase from the seller's take. Sellers risk sanctions if they sell a product cheaper thru their brand website.
Honestly, i think apple is worse wrt gambling then either meta or Amazon . Apple has been allowing and pushing “gamble-lite” products for years on the app store. So much gatcha game slop on there it is genuinely unusable for me. Even worse, they are now optimizing ad revenue for those that pay to push their crap into ads u cannot skip.
I seriously doubt mr jobs wouldnt take one look at the app store home screen and puke in disgust at how awful it is.
I don't like Amazon personally. But how is it like gambling or social media? I guess shopping can be an addiction but wouldn't that condemn the entire retail sector?
I'd be ok with the rule only if the candidate liked the field. I respect anyone who is willing to have a bad time in order to put food on the table, and be upfront about it. There's plenty of psychopathic candidates where I won't get that datapoint simply because they were luckier with the job market.
> I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity
This triggers thoughts. I don't like people being taken advantage of. At the same time, I like my personal liberties.
It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics. That sucks and you could spin this has the liquor companies taking advantage, but I have tons of friends that enjoy drinking and tons of good experiences drinking with them (wine/beer/cocktails) in all kinds of situations (bars/sports-bars/pubs/parties/bbqs). I don't want that taken away because some people can't control their intake.
Similarly the USA is obese so you could spin every company making fattening foods (chips/dips/bacon/cheese/cookies/sodas/...) as taking advantage (most of my family is obese (T_T)) but at the same time, I enjoy all of those things in moderation and I don't want them taken away because some people can't handle them.
You can try to claim gambling is different, but it is? Should Magic the Gathering be banned (and Yugioh Card,Pokemon Cards, etc..)? Baseball cards? I don't like that video games like Candy Crush apparently make money on "whales" but I also don't want people that can control their spending and have some fun to be banned from having that fun because a few people can't control themselves.
I don't have a solution, but at the moment I'd choose personal liberties over nannying everyone.
> It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics.
I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme societal harm.
Would you be opening to banning just this one thing and then calling it a day and opening the floor back up to such arguments? I think modern politics is too caught up in the bureaucracies of maybe to let good ideas be carried out - honestly, this thought line could easily be written up into an argument that parallels strong-towns. Local bureaucracy is rarely created for a downright malicious reason - here we have a change that could cause an outsized positive outcome so why should we get caught up in philosophical debates about how similar decisions might be less positive and let that cast doubt on our original problem?
> I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme societal harm.
I am pretty sure anyone without a vested interest will also realize that alcoholism has caused extreme societal harm as well. I would say with pretty strong certainty that alcohol has caused more damage, and is currently causing more damage, than gambling. I would be VERY curious to hear someone try to make an argument that more damage is caused by gambling than drinking. Drunk driving kills about 13,000 people in the US every year. Drunk driving accounts for 30% of all traffic fatalities. THIRTY PERCENT! I am sure we all know alcoholics, and so many people have been abused by angry drunks. The raging abusive alcoholic parent is a trope for a reason.
So clearly, we should not get too 'caught up in the bureacracies of maybe' and go ahead and banning just this one thing. Surely banning alcohol will make the world a better place!
Well, we tried that. It was a horrible failure. It lead to the rise of organized crime, and that fact is STILL harming us to this day, almost 100 years after we reversed the decision to ban alcohol.
In fact, when we legalized alcohol, a lot of the organized crime moved into gambling, and have used the fact that it is illegal to fund crime for decades.
I also hate how sports gambling and now prop gambling has taken over. I don't think we should just sit here and do nothing, but there are a lot of things we can do that isn't outright banning, which I think is bad for a lot of reasons.
We should outlaw gambling advertising, just like we did with tobacco. I am fine with adding other restrictions, and placing more responsibility to identify and protect problem gamblers onto the gambling companies. I am open to hearing other ideas, too.
My biggest problem with your comment is the idea that we should stop thinking about the consequences of an outright ban and just go ahead and ban it now. This isn't a 'philosophical debate', it is trying to make sure your action doesn't cause more harm than good. I think looking at other vices, seeing how we deal with those and what has happened when we have tried things like banning in the past, to inform us about how we can mitigate the harm gambling does to our society is a good thing.
I agree, to a point, but it seems like this is the false dilemma that comes up every time, meanwhile there are achohol, fast food, and gambling ads imbued in nearly all popular entertainment and everywhere in public.
Is severely restricting the marketing of those things not a valid step in between having or not having liberties? For an adult to be free to engage in gambling, does insidious advertising also need to be permitted everywhere? If say 25% of people engaging with a highly addictive activity can't responsibly regulate their behavior with it, is it important that we allow a contingent of everyone else to abuse them?
I think about it like property rights and others. If we want everyone to respect the idea of private property ownership, then policy should act to contain abuse of those rights and somewhat fairly distribute access to them. If only an older richer generation benefits, and everyone else pays rent and effectively has to give up those rights, then eventually opposition to them should accumulate. I'm much more interested now in seeing bans on the ownership of multiple residential properties within the same municipality at present, and sympathizing with people seeking a market crash, than I am to actually try and buy a house, because the ratio is so wildly in favor of one group over another.
If only 25% of people didn't know someone who ruined their life gambling—and it's only a matter of time—then it would be potentially acted upon much more severely.
Physical cards don't have the same 'whale' issue as electronic gambling/games on a phone that are designed to get you exactly to the point where you go 'ok, $20 more', that always is your pocket ready to feed that itch. No physical game/liquor store is using that kind of psychology or instant gratification (my understanding is addictiveness tied to action/reward length, with the most addictive things the ones with the most instant grattification?).
You also have an upper limit (which might be surprisingly high) with things like alcohol; nobody is drinking 200 gallons of whiskey a day, they'd be dead.
But nothing really limits how much you can burn gambling in a day. Even per app limits can be worked around with multiple accounts and multiple games.
Personal liberties are overrated, and a functioning society is underrated. OnlyFans, sports betting, and junk food appeal to some people with low impulse control and high time preference in the short term, but have massive negative consequences on everyone in the long run.
Personal liberties being overrated is a wild take. I feel like this is one of those things that is easy to say when it isn't something you are interested in being infringed upon. I would be curious if you would feel the same way if people were trying to ban something you want to do.
The idea that prioritizing the good of society, rather than one's personal desires, is considered a "wild take" is just a reflection of the culture of narcissism you live in.
We probably could both be more nuanced with our statements.
What I hear when you say “the good of society” is that this means we would allow the majority to choose what is “for the good of society” and then enforce that on others.
You might not mean that. You are probably thinking of obvious “good” like not dying and not going bankrupt. But that is just what you are thinking of.
There are a lot of people who think other things are what is meant by “the good of society”. Lots of people think keeping trans people from having gender affirming surgery is “for the good of society”. Lots of people think requiring teaching the 10 commandments in school is “for the good of society”.
There are views like this on all sides. Some people think owning guns are for the good of society while some people thinking banning them is for the good of society. Some people think allowing people to eat meat harms society. Some people think gay marriage harms society.
So, do we allow all personal freedoms to be voted on by the populace? Or do we make the burden higher to infringe on individual freedoms?
Now, I do think we can place some limits when the damage far outweighs the cost of denying the freedom, but it has to really be worth it, because yes, individual freedom is very, very important.
Again, it is kind of crazy to take polar opposite views on this.
We mostly all grow up starting off with very few personal liberties and gaining them as we get older. We routinely take them away from people of they show they cannot be trusted with those liberties.
At present that process is fairly blunt, but it could be more nuanced. And that doesn't have to mean micro judging every interaction like China's social credit system. It could mean to allow freedoms wherever possible, but curtail those freedoms, where it has a negative impact on the rest of us.
And I think the best way of doing this is to put responsibility on the person or group causing the negative impact. So the gambler who embezzles money due to the addiction is just as responsible as the company who enables their addiction. Why cant we send both to jail? Or if there is not enough cause to deprive them of liberty, divert them from jail under probation. For a company that could mean enforcing open books and monitored communications, to make sure they are on the straight and narrow..
What we need to do though is to value both society and personal liberty.
It's not polar opposite views, I'm just saying that personal liberties are overrated not that they're inherently bad.
There are entire political schools of thought that put maximizing personal liberty above everything, and the trend in America has been to allow more vices at the cost a functioning society. Sports betting just being a recent example.
> And I think the best way of doing this is to put responsibility on the person or group causing the negative impact.
Agreed. There are people profiteering at the cost of society and they should be punished for it.
> What we need to do though is to value both society and personal liberty.
Also agreed. We are not really that far off in conclusions I believe.
The market producing what people desire is a functioning society. All the concern about so called addiction is simply a displaced puritanism disguised as humanism.
So, adults who gamble a lot never steal from their parents, siblings and friends in order to keep on gambling?
A father who gambles a lot would never threaten his parents or his wife's parents to stop allowing those parents to visit their grandchildren unless those parents give the father money for gambling? (I.e., the father is making the threat not because he judges the grandparents to be a bad influence on the child, but rather to extract money from the grandparents that the grandparents would not otherwise choose to give because they know it will just go to gambling.)
In your opinion, it is displaced puritanism to want to do something about the fact that in our society such things happen frequently?
This ignores the fact that as a society there are certain desires that are agreed upon as harmful, such as CSAM. Everything must have its limits.
You use the words "so called addiction" as if addiction is not an extremely well-documented pyschological (and in some cases physical) phenomenon. Gambling preys on the fact that the variable reward rate method of reinforcement is the one that produces the most dopamine in our brains. Unless someone is acutely aware of how they are being manipulated it is very easy to become addicted to something that is financially dependent on your addiction.
Just try to entertain any alternatives. Any at all.
There could be public option to opt-in to have your specific “personal liberties” curtailed, like for alcohol. Doesn’t affect you at all. Completely opt-in. Only for those who want it.
It's just not going to be a clear hard line. Would it be ok for alcohol companies to sneak in an additive that makes those who consume their product ten times as likely to develop alcoholism? I think that's a different scenario than just selling a product, and I think that there is a lot of corporate activity just like the former.
What you're arguing for is more or less what the status quo has been for gambling. Like gambling? Cool! You can go to Vegas or a casino on native lands to do it. We have geofencing for mobile apps as well if you don't want to sit next to a smoker pulling a slot machine. Curbing it like this -- but not making it entirely unavailable -- acts as a buffer against the social malaise described in the article.
an added negative aspect of going further down the banning path is:
it lessens the need (or signal) to improve education, or does it not?
Not talking about the theory part of education, more the parts that are not handled well in schools like e.g. (!) habits and understanding better what is behind your daily actions (often “Glaubenssätze” are the reason). Many important parts of education is assumed to happen at home, and only very much later I saw through close friendships to what and what extent (!) some people have to go through… not having grown up in a household permitting learning essentially important life skills (or usually worse… grew up with mindsets that make it very much harder to tackle problems in a helpful way).
TLDR: More banning can result in a weaker signal to improve aforementioned (!) classical education weaknesses, which can spiral into more problems, more need and calling for banning/micro-managing adults, more resistance, more damaging/self-damaging adult actions, … spiral (and bigger threatening fights over the different approaches and the very real felt need to restrict others to feel safe).
That is a topic that I think AND care a lot (!!) about, so very happy for comments pros and cons (but please in a constructive manner). Also very happy about private messages/new insights/blindspots/…
This is definitely an aspect, but it's also a continuum - there are some people who will "never" be able to be educated out of addiction. Something needs to be done to protect them (or we just admit there's a subclass of human who exists to feed other parasitic ones).
25% is too low, I think it's more like 80% of alcohol sales to drinkers that consume unhealthy amounts (whether that makes you an "alcoholic" or not is rather subject).
Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"
It'd actually be quite easy to set certain sane limits on gambling like you can't gamble more than 1% of your annual income per year, but I bet gambling platforms would fight that like the plague because those are their whales, the true addicts.
I know 100s of people who've been to vegas and had a good time gambling, not one of them would say "I wish I'd never gambled in the first place". I personally know zero people who gambled so much they regret it. I'm not denying those people exist, but I suspect if you ask everyone, a very small percent have had a strong negative experience
Yes it's a very small % of the population, but it's actually a significant percent of the earnings of these platforms.
Just for illustration -- when I worked at Zynga they'd sell in-game purchases for over $10k USD for virtual items because there were people who just couldn't help themselves, and those "whales" were actually the bulk of the profit of the company.
That's why these platforms should have mandatory sane limits that can only be exempted with special circumstances.
> Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"
I don't think this is a fair comparison, because it is much easier to tie losing all your money to gambling than it is to tie your health issues to twinkies. For one, it isn't just twinkies, it is a bunch of different foods, and the consequences are temporally separated from the action; you don't eat a twinkie and immediately notice you are bigger and less healthy. Your heart attack will come years down the line, and there was no one action you took that you can regret, so the feeling is not the same. Gambling is very easy to feel the pain, you lose a bet and you lose the money, immediately.
I'm not sure my position on 2A but it seems you're making a pretty big leap to connect them.
Guns kill others. To me, that's a big difference. Gambling does not, only indirectly, you gamble your money away your family doesn't eat. But if you're going indirect than anything fits. Cars kill more than guns.
You could argue the similarity is that some people can be responsible with guns and others can't but you're back the previous point. Irresponsible gun use directly harms others. Irresponsible gambling at most indirectly harms others.
Just some context because gun violence studies are probably the most manipulated data sets in history. The two numbers (auto deaths and gun deaths) are pretty close to each other and different policies can and do push one above the other.
- Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.
- This wasn't true before about 2015 and the change (increase in non-suicide gun deaths) over the last decade is largely the consequence of 'defund the police' policies.
- 90+% of gun violence happens in about 4 urban zip codes, all of which have some of the strictest gun control laws in the US.
There is a reason you have never heard a criminologist rail about guns (its usually a sociologist). The data points to problems with other policies. Also gathering the data honestly is difficult; people stop reporting types of crimes when the police stop investigating those types of crimes.
PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.
Not to get into a gunfight in the gambling hall, but:
> Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.
Apparently any form of obstacle between a suicidal person and their gun greatly reduces successful suicides.
Things like the gun being in a safe that McSuicidepants owns, operates, and can get in with a fingerprint. Things like the bullets being on the other side of the room.
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
I appreciate your approach, but I wonder: would you hire somebody with a past in Meta, or ByteDance (to just name two)? They are at least as bad in pushing addiction to people, maybe worse if you think about the scale.
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
I do not like gambling or the prevalence of gambling products, but this is not a good thing for you to do.
You should not ban people from your job for reasons that are not relevant to the job you're hiring for. People take jobs for many reasons, including some times simply needing to take the first job they can get in order to pay the bills.
People also change their minds. Working for a gambling product company doesn't mean the person is still pro-gambling.
Do you really want your labor enriching someone you think is a bad person? Do you want someone whose values go against yours being in a position of power over you?
Not wanting to work for someone or not wanting to hire someone is not equivalent to wishing poverty on them.
My daughter thinks shrimp are adorable little animals and doesn't eat them. That's a moral choice she has every right to make. She is not saying anyone who eats shrimp is a terrible person or trying to outlaw it.
> and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
I encourage this concept but also to expand it further, including the ones who work on other evil schemes like the ones used to violate your privacy, sell your data, and participate in sketchy business and/or contracts. Just like how I don’t want to work with someone who develops a gambling platform, I don’t want to work with someone who’s building a cameras spying on public, an app that use facial recognition against strangers, an app that track people, an AI to automate killing, a cloud that host and process such systems. There should be an open source database that has lists of all people who worked/working in such companies, categorized by industry (gambling, privacy, etc.), where anyone can look up potential employees, getting the names is easy when you have the best OSINT goldmine out there (LinkedIn), plus manual submission. Some people have no morals or intrinsic values to prevent them from working in legal yet shady businesses, those however will double think their decision when they know there will be a consequences and they won’t be hired anywhere else.
Anyone who worked in it? Like someone who needed a salary took a job, and now due to your grandstanding they're locked in to keep working in that industry because they can't get a job elsewhere?
I'm not sure your virtue signalling has the effect you want it to have. In fact I think it has the exact opposite effect
The intended effect is to feel good about oneself, so I’m sure it’s working fine.
What this tends to largely accomplish is ensure that those who come from non-traditional backgrounds are further locked out of mainstream high-end tech jobs. If you grew up in a rough area with shitty parents, didn’t go to college, and came into the industry entirely self-taught there aren’t that may decently paying jobs in the field willing to hire you. The “vice industries” are some of the few typically willing to take a chance, while also allowing such a person to level up on relevant cutting edge tech. It’s generally that or working for a small company on 25 year old IT gear and often getting pigeon holed in those (low paying) roles.
And I’m not even saying that it justifies working for such places to many. That’s a personal choice of course. Just saying that it’s mostly a class signal vs moral one.
> have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
That's a bit cruel. Sometimes tech workers don't have the luxury of choosing their workplaces. Also companies pivot. So, say, a cryptocurrency startup might have later become a gambling website.
Or an AI company acting as a casino with offers, boosted usage and limits to get you addicted into spending more tokens + credits on their digital slot machine which accepts 'tokens' as an exchange for 'promises of productivity' and 'intelligence'.
If the output doesn't work, roll the dice again and spend more tokens.
> anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired
Respect for that. Everybody seems to give up to all-powerful corporations and greed for short term profits seem to blind many otherwise brilliant folks into amoral and/or outright stupid shortsighted behavior and moral 'flexibility'. Nice to see good reason to keep some hope for humanity.
I do myself just a sliver of this via purchasing choices for me and my family, its a drop in the ocean but ocean is formed by many drops, nothing more.
Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year) has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during live sports events.
It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
As for sportspeople throwing games, well that’s been happening for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless examples from football (soccer) and cricket.
AFAIK Australia is most gambling addicted western country, loosing the most money per capita at the pokies.
>It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
I remember how Henry Ford was giving his employee great benefits to attract the best workers so the Dodge brothers bought Ford shares to become shareholders, then sued Henry Ford and won because he wasn't doing what's good for the shareholders.
Similarly, I feel like if you'd try to regulate these anti humane businesses and practices you'd get sued because you're doing something that hurts shareholders.
It has been going on in the US for years - even when it was illegal, there was still illegal gambling and more then one person has been caught throwing games. Sports beet was always legal in Law Vegas though (at least from what I can tell), but most states banned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose#Betting_scandal,_per...
Yep. Gambling is Australia's version of America's gun problem. We've recently banned kids from social media, yet we're apparently unable to ban gambling ads from kids content. Every time the (various levels of) government here talk about even the tiniest new gambling related regulation, somehow - definitely totally without any brown paper bags whatsoever going into any back pockets - it doesn't seem to actually happen. Magic!
what do you mean legal "for many years"? it was never illegal. we have had telephone betting for decades, gambling for centuries...the reason online gambling was banned in the US was because the biggest donors to both parties requested it...there is no other reason because banning is a proven way to maximise harm (and even overly restrictive regulation has been proven to be very poor, as in Hong Kong).
thanks for telling everyone you are in senior leadership
Super surprised to see Ireland mentioned at the top comment here. I've always thought it catastrophic that betting companies could advertise on TV here, but never really considered how other countries compared to us. Is it really the case that we're outliers? Would love to see laws change here.
i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid, both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.
The real nail in the coffin was watching the Sears in the mall turn into a casino about a decade ago. Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures, politicians turn to the last grift in their arsenal and roll out legalized gambling before packing up and leaving town or retiring.
having failed the digital future, ransacked it for every last penny, politicians again in 2025 turned to the supreme court to legalize online gambling and in doing so obliterate a generation of young adults. in another decade i expect a political movement to "hold these scoundrels to account" similar to Facebook, long after any meaningful reform or regulation could have been made and the industry itself is on the decline. just one last grift for the government that enabled it in the first place.
Doesn't mean it is wise to do so either. I promise you, 5 lines of your political beliefs and I can make you look like a hypocritical and ignorant a55hole to the world. And I can do so purely with data and various ethical guidelines.
I doubt you have though through most of your "beliefs" or learned of the policy consequences of many of your political positions. If you had, you wouldn't be such an absolutist. You still think you should be judge, jury and executioner over others? What are you, 6?
PS Your type of absolutist moralism has been the basis for most of humanities worst atrocities, stop it...you aren't more moral than other people.
Prediction markets are far, far more slippery. Anyone working at one of these places had other options & chose to sell their morals so I think it's perfectly reasonable to not hire them.
Here in the Netherlands we have a big building housing a pro gambling lobbyist organization. Their sole goal is to bribe politicians and spread misinformation on public tv channels. A typical example of rottenness inside the western society.
Gambling is the only vice where the store doesn't close. Even the prostitutes go to sleep for a while. But you can drive to the casino and gamble it all away anytime.
It’s even worse on the phone.. there’s a running gag on IG with a lot of truth about “you might be at the bar with your friends at 12am but I’m locked in on German object splitting in half / other obscure betable ‘sports’“. It’s insane we let people do this to themselves and their families.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct. It's exactly the same problem.
You can ban drugs/gambling, but some people are unfortunately just wired to seek them out and will do so regardless. So a ban results in fewer people using them in total, but all of the revenue going to the black market.
In an extreme scenario (for example, you ban a drug used by a large % of the population), that black market revenue becomes a real problem and you get Al Capone driving around Chicago with a Tommy gun shooting at people, massive corruption etc.
I wouldn't put gambling in that bracket but a significant minority of people are wired to enjoy it and historically when it was illegal it was a significant fraction of the revenue stream of organised crime, so completely banning it is not cost free - you will get a slice of violence and political corruption to go with it.
Having said that I agree there should be restrictions on advertising especially anywhere kids might be exposed to it
Care to disclose the company you work for? Is that the stakeholders stance too, or just your own? Did you disclose this policy to your bosses if any?
EDIT: Due to the downvotes without comments, here is my point: As an employee, you manage someone elses money in that position. As such, you have to holdup morals of the company and follow the companies interest, not your own - unless you are the 100% owner of that company. If you are not, and impose your own morals using someone elses money, you shouldn't be taking the moral highground here.
It's tough, because I think outlawing 'vices' like gambling is an infringement on your individual freedom - but when it's done with an enterprise it's so much more problematic. Thinking about for instance tobacco companies vs locally grown in the backyard.
We also outlaw vices like physical violence and property theft.
Society is fundamentally counter to individual freedom, and the degree determines the nature of that society and the degree of cooperation possible within it.
I got into weather betting markets earlier this year since I figured those can't possibly be rigged, it is automated weather station data yet some groups in the market know the truth a few minutes before everyone else based on the way the markets move.
BUT, I stopped on the day that the PHL airport preliminary report said the low of the day was 17 and then later than day the low was raised to 18. The way the market was behaving, insiders knew the low would be retracted because normally the markets clear out a tranche of bets that are no longer possible and that wasn't happening that day.
So I don't do that. The whole game seems to be based on a group of insiders that know when and what temperature reports will say seconds or minutes before the general public and they have the capacity to play with validation on the back-end (I suspect).
I built a few models to predict weather 6+ hours out using blended model forecast data, but that didn't do better than break-even.
I don't know my point. It is the wild west, caveat emptor, you need thick skin and ridiculous attention to detail to beat the game, and even then the deck is probably stacked against you.
I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was looking at weather underground map of stations around central park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running in the US) and see how it added features and new reporting values over its long 100+ year life. It was a fun winter side quest.
I don't think this needs regulated if the people involved are responsible and having fun. No chickens died for sure, which is probably why these articles focus on the more serious bets where people are dying (and not weather).
> if the people involved are responsible and having fun.
I think "please gamble responsibly" has the same power as "please drink responsibly." Which is to say, we regulate the ever loving hell out of alcohol sales, and that's probably where gambling should be headed as well.
There's a classic type of British bar-bet that is based on basically anything somewhat random. Wodehouse had lots of examples of it - betting on what hat the next lady to walk in would be wearing, things like that.
The key was they were local and person to person in person - not online.
You and I sitting at the bar get into an argument/bet about what the low today will be, and the bartender bookies the bet before he checks what the low actually was - that makes a certain amount of sense.
Putting it online and making it accessible over TCP/IP opens it up to all sorts of scams and manipulation.
Your question implies a sense of moral outrage about gambling so I don't if it was asked in good faith or not.
Kalshi was on my radar because of Tim Walz dropping out the Minnesota governor race and an article about who would replace him being wagered on prediction markets, coincidently this was during a boring part of January after a snow storm and so weather was on my mind.
You can wager on aggregate precipitation, high and low temp, etc. The price is a binary contract between two parties with the market taker paying a small percent fee, so the conclusion you make that it "seems like a roundabout way to lose money" was not the conclusion I drew then nor believe that conclusion to be true even now, being a market maker using a trivial model from one-day forecast data was break-even for me.
Data is released every minute, every five minutes, every hour, and then 6 hour high/low, and then mid-day preliminary reports, so there is no last-minute since any one of those reports could contain data (with various validation/rounding caveats) that could eliminate a market of temperatures, so there isn't really a last minute.
My conclusion was to focus on forecast and attempt to predict the temperature better than forecast vs. market implied probability rather than attempt to respond very quickly to published information. I learned (with my skills) the latter was a losing proposition, but the former isn't impossible (although also possibly beyond my skills it seems).
A lot of people assume insider trading in weather markets on data that's publicly available but they're unaware of.
It's also a massive whoosh that you only consider the insider trader aspect in choosing to play weather markets. No consideration of how you would get an edge in these markets against extremely powerful weather models used by meteorologists who understand the subject and how to apply the data. It seems much different than betting against political pundits.
It's also another whoosh not realizing that some of these stations are actually not that secure when you take a look at them in real life. Less insiders than betting on things that aren't tamper-resistant.
Also, a lot of people complain about insiders profiting from last minute data. One way to limit this would be requiring markets to close in advance of final data, but people love to gamble (read: bet without an edge) on things at the last minute across all prediction market subjects.
Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From what I've seen, the level of threats, abuse, etc. is just horrifying. The 30x increase in money bet, sadly, seems to be translating into a 30x increase in betters' hostile conduct.
I've seen a huge amount of videos of sports fans having melt downs when their team/player loses, to the point of destroying their own TVs and attacking their guests. I have to believe gambling is a factor in this behavior.
>I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.
After traditions and religion become less important, virtue wasn't replaced by money and market but by status seeking. We are all now comparatively rich to how we were 50 years ago or to people from third world countries. So money doesn't make a big difference, but status does. Followers, approvals, being highly viewed in a particular niche is much more valuable for many people than money.
And even money, when they are important, they aren't important because one can buy good and service, money are important because they can confer status.
So my conjecture is that it's status seeking what might be the end goal for many people in the West and what is provoking big issues for societies, like severely declining birth rates.
If you wager in a prediction market, isn't it expected that there will be some insider trading or thrown results? Because there are clearly people who know when and where bombs will land, and financial incentive to throw results.
Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
I think we got “lucky” for a while when prediction markets were a small niche interest and they provided a weird novel way of making predictions.
But once they get big enough to attract the attention of people that directly affect the outcomes they will eventually become useless because people will realize the only options are to have inside information or be willing to hand money over with inside info.
The only “fair” outcomes will be things outside human control, like betting on the weather.
Being good at predicting is a broad skill which is applicable widely, while insider information only works for the specific thing the information is about. Far from every market will have insiders with special information. E.g. on who will win an election.
Not really. I have a pretty solid 5+% edge over a long time period even on the competitive markets I bet in. On many markets I think it's closer to 10-20%. These are things that inside information can't really help as much as you'd think.
And even on markets where someone would benefit from inside information... insiders leak a lot more information than you'd think before it tends to hit the market. Even reading the news can tell you more than you'd think if you look at it right. The single biggest hint is "Why am I reading this, and why now?". News stories on geopolitics almost never arise naturally, and that question will get you to a LOT of information that was not explicitly stated.
> Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
Um, exactly?
You don't have a legal system to hold the companies accountable for any payout. You don't have published odds with a regulator ensuring those odds are enforced. You have zero transparency whatsoever. You have systems where if you start winning, they will effectively cut you off.
Everything about online betting screams "SCAM!" from the rooftops. Everything about online betting has always screamed "SCAM!" from the rooftops.
What part of this aren't people getting? The house always wins.
The real power in prediction markets is creating a market for what you want to occur - it's a tangible method to leverage hyperstition.
If you want Polymarket to no longer exist, then simply create a pool for "Polymarket will no longer exist by Jan 1st 2027" on Kalshi, pump the price, and wait for one of these whales to do the job of making it come true for you. When done right, you get the satisfaction of the thing happening, and all of the ROI for entering on the ground floor.
Rinse and repeat and you no longer have to sit by the sidelines and view world events as things that unfold without your input. You can be an active participant in making history the way you want it.
How? Some guy wants Polymarket gone so he bets $1 billion that it will be gone. Since this is absurd, everybody bets against him and makes a tidy profit. Whatever this is you’re proposing it doesn’t work.
Murder is definitionally killing that isn't okay. That makes your statement a bit strange, from a logical standpoint.
There are people that think killing is okay, you're almost definitely one of them. It's just, there's a very specific set of contexts where killing is considered okay. For example, a police sniper taking out an active shooter at a sports event would probably be nearly universally considered a justified killing. It isn't murder because there are reasons it's ok for the killing to have been done.
Just an interesting thing to think about. Using murder for examples like this is a bit loaded.
Murder is definitionally intentional killing that isn't okay.
Intent and justification both matter in common law; manslaughter covers killing that isn't okay that lacks intent to kill, and that often comes in degrees of severity.
MAGA gets rich on bombing Iran? The "Uno reverse card" of millions of dollar paid out if you assassinate Trump came into play recently. This one regime is not trying for plausible deniability, though, which is not quite a reverse of just using the prediction market tool, too.
The article conflates prediction markets with gambling but they serve different functions. Traditional sportsbooks take a 5-10% vig and are your counterparty - they need you to lose. Kalshi and Polymarket are exchanges where users trade against each other, more like a stock exchange than a casino. The real concern should be insider trading, not the existence of the markets themselves.
Assuming everything physical gets tokenized (as occasionally gets predicted), people could soon literally lose their house on a bet! Maybe even a bet placed by their swarm of agents. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!
Worse: It won't even be your own bet that does the damage.
It'll be bets collected (or "lost" bets which are actually payments) by other parties that have an interest in an outcome which involves whether you lose your house.
Hence why we drastically reduced the number of wagers/addictive risk taking because of its cost on society.
The libertarians here will say "oh yay, we've won". Then a few years later they'll cry about your mom losing her house to a gambling scam with no recourse. Then they'll cry again when the voters finally rid themselves of the gambling scourge years later.
'Predictions' market is the silliest loophole for gambling. Honestly, more surprised Fanduel, DraftKings and the like who have spent millions on lobbying and buying licenses, are not fighting tooth and nail on this.
If I made a platform like that, I'd be RICO'd after the FBI kicked down my door and confiscated everything I own.
If I had the connections Polymarket does, well, then we can just place bets on when people will die, everything will work out just fine and the President will invest in me.
If you don't mind not having US customers, it's easy enough to get an online gambling license in a few jurisdictions, maybe $20-50k all in (Nevis and Anjouan are a couple of the more notable ones), at which point you can serve a large portion of the world. This was basically the scenario polymarket was in for awhile until they started making inroads into US regulatory apparatus.
Especially when the "prediction" part isn't even part of the product, it is an accidental byproduct. No one pays for access to the predictions.
And they aren't predictions, they are more like "outcome-shaping" markets, since the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome, and at a certain point it will just always happen if it is billions of dollars.
The higher the liquidity involved, the less likely the real world outcome ends up being the same as it would have been if the prediction market had never existed. Very messy.
> the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome
This only works if there are enough people betting on the other side. It's not some kind of magical money multiplication machine. As more stuff like the one-day Iran bet or the 64:56 minute press conference happen, people will avoid taking bets on highly specific outcomes.
On more reasonable bets like "war with Iran in the next 6 months", if there is some kind of shadowy cabal putting billions of dollars on the yes side, they just aren't going to have much upside if there isn't the same amount on the no side.
> It's not some kind of magical money multiplication machine
Right, it's not even consistent, the manipulation can go either way, at random, but what is sure is the higher the liquidity, the higher the motivation becomes to tamper
Those predictions are just market data, market data is often very expensive (my data usage at work is probably about $100k a year and i'm not even a trader), I imagine polymarket will be too when they are more established.
It's inherently free data. You have to be able to trade against it, and to trade against it you need to see it _before_ you give them money, so they can basically never charge for it. When they sell it to people, it's just laziness, they could scrape it themselves.
edit: apparently they do, that's even more wild lol
Traders sometimes go to prison for insider trading. The wisdom of the crowd human when the crowd is following someone with insider information is deemed legal.
I have mixed feelings being a parent now. It can be fun to get a mystery box or pack. But it does feed on the anticipation and rush of surprise. Kids seem to lack the self control to stop. Video games seem the worst to me since they're so intangible it's easier to get carried away before others notice.
LEGO does it too, with "mystery minifigure" packages.
I watch kids squeezing the polybags trying to find an identifying bump or edge, hoping to either get the one they want, or at least not get one they already have.
And yeah, baseball cards are/were no different, going back decades.
But at least the financial loss here is constrained to a few dollars. I don't think these are the gateway drugs to gambling problems, but they are definitely exploitative.
I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market making which is preferable
In theory this should limit the damage insiders can do, since as the probability of encountering an insider rises the market makers will need to widen the spread.
Slots have odds which change throughout the day and are usually (on average) pretty bad. In Poker, you play against other players, not the house. There is a rake which is very minor when compared against the average returns against other players.
They are fundamentally different. In slots, you bet against the house, in poker you bet against other players. So slots are gambling in the traditional sense. Poker however is no different than buying a house. There is still a house fee in both cases and in both cases you are betting against other people. And in poker, new players can enter and inject capital just like the housing market. You going to ban buying houses next? You can't eliminate risk from life.
You are basically trying out outlaw luck and randomness at this point.
I'm not trying to outlaw anything. I'm trying to make gambling addicts stop delusionally coping when it comes to "predictions markets" and just admit that they're gambling.
poker and slots are two very different variants of gambling. Sure, there is plenty of chance/variance in poker but there is an undeniable skill component that is lacking in slots.
This has always been the case for most high-stakes gambling. The problem isn't winning big, the problem is getting the counterparty to pay. Skilled gamblers (when it comes to games with any skill component) throughout history have been adept at winning subtly and then moving on before anyone figures out they have an edge.
Where did I say it wasn't gambling. I said prediction markets are preferable to sports books like DraftKings. I don't like either personally but its an important distinction
Except there is still adverse selection, just like there is in the stock market. People who have inside information are going to bet more, and you will take the other side of that bet not realizing that has happened.
Insider trading does not (and should not) apply to prediction markets.
When gambling companies make markets on Oscars, for example, they make those markets knowing 100% that people who know the outcome will bet on it. It is inherent to the product, they put protections in place. Equally, with some sports markets (i.e. transfers), they put in place protections to identify activity that IS a legal breach of player's agreements with sports leagues.
But on prediction markets, there is inherent insider knowledge and people should have the sense not to trade on markets where you are trading with insiders. It should be obvious. Financial markets are different, they are supposed to be open. Prediction markets are not.
There has been a strong drive to apply the concept of insider trading. In the UK, people were actually charged under a law intended to protect bookmakers...to be clear, this is happening whilst people close to central bankers and Treasury civil servants are being paid 7 figure sums to leak information, and all the stuff that happens with transfer/TV show markets. As ever, it is only when politics appears that these rules get invented (and to be very clear, politics markets have always had insider action too...it is inherent to the market, bookmakers know this, they did not ask for these people to be charged).
Btw, the Gambling Act has also been used to prevent payments to gamblers who exploited casinos that failed to ensure their games were fair. If you told the people saying "insider trading" that there was a law whose only purpose was to protect casino's margins, they wouldn't lose their mind...these same laws are being used to prevent "insider trading".
I've heard people say this but it really only makes sense if you don't think about it for more than 10 or 20 seconds.
Prediction markets by definition always resolve to one side being completely wiped out and losing everything. Stocks going to zero happens pretty seldomly, in prediction markets it's guaranteed to happen every single time.
Prediction markets are not binary options. They are closer to a liquid equity option market (and most equity option markets aren't liquid at all). That means you can trade into and out of positions at any time and for different prices depending on where the market is. You can even do time spreads where you can't lose it all no matter what happens. Maybe your 10 or 20 seconds of thinking wasn't as perfect as you think since you don't seem to understand how prediction markets actually work.
That's only true if you leave your money in...which you don't have to do.
You can play prediction markets by betting on a swing. E.g. I made a few hundred dollars betting on Harris in 2024 when Trump was at ~65% odds and then selling before the election when it was closer to 50%.
> can play prediction markets by betting on a swing
The outcomes are still capped. In that respect, it's more like a derivative market than the stock market. You can trade in and out of options. But the value in the system is tightly defined and, after fees, a net negative-sum game.
There is a fee implicit in the market spread. It's formed out of the time value of money w.r.t. the cost of NOT trading as well as the adverse selection faced by those with standing offers.
Prediction markets are nothing like stock markets. Maybe they are more like binary options markets. In the UK for example, these were for a long time regulated as a gambling product, and for the past 7 years have been banned to retail consumers.
The problem is that these markets allow to translate political power directly to money. Worse destructive events are rare, need a lot less action (butterfly effect) and leave thus less traces and command high odds. Once committed the ones in power have a vested interest in causing destruction.
>A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.
That does not only explain gambling but explains many things. And it's not just about the US, it's about the whole West.
They really need to regulate this things. Like people could spoof markets and stuff so easily. Do things that would be traditionally illegal in regular markets but not predication markets.
> We give users a little bit of money each week to play with ($0.50 right now) and if they can run it up past a certain point we'll pay them out in cash. If they lose the money, we put another $0.50 in the next week. It's legal in the US since the users aren't allowed to deposit and mainly for entertainment purposes.
The big issue underlying gambling, betting, alcohol, tobacco, and other addictive stuff all the way to fentanyl, is that people may literally lose their mind over it, at least party. A heavy addict ceases to be a responsible adult who can act reasonably and autonomously, and becomes driven by impulses they cannot control, like a schizophrenic who cannot control the voices in their head.
Even more unpleasantly, this does not happen to everyone every time. Quite many people can have a glass of wine here and there without becoming alcoholics. A ton of people can play a game like Bejeweled out of boredom, and happily switch to more interesting activities, given a chance. Some people can voluntarily stop even taking heroin and subject themselves to therapy. Etc, etc.
But a relatively small minority gets hooked badly. They cannot quit. They do not want to stop. The addiction becomes a primary life activity. Many more who could be hooked to physiologically brutal addictions like nicotine or heroin are wise enough to never approach those, understanding how badly it might end. But again, a relative minority cannot resist the lure.
A less tolerant society would stigmatize such outcomes, adding strong social pressure that might keep potential addicts from getting into the habit. A society could also consider addiction a medical condition that requires intervention and treatment, like poisoning or a dangerous infection. Even modern Western societies are capable of that when sufficiently frightened, see COVID-19.
Another approach, which I'd call "extremist libertarian", would just let addictions form, proclaiming that this is what people do exercising their free will. It would not be different from a complete lack of civilization, and leaving the problem to the evolution to solve. In either case the addicts would suffer, in worst cases going destitute and die. That would remove the addicts from the gene pool, probably lowering the risk of addiction in future generations, slowly. Slowly, and painfully, often not only to addicts but also to people around them.
We struggle with addressing addictions because we struggle to admit that addictions exist, and that in bad cases they affect the sufferer's agency quite a bit. I'm afraid that without admitting this property of heavy addiction we won't be able to act in an efficacious way.
Gambling is flourishing not because we're in a low-trust world, as the article says, but because the living conditions of an increasingly large part of the population as such that they cannot hope of ever achieving a comfortable life. We're returning to the social dynamics that dominated much of history (if you consider how much gambling was a scourge, from ancient Rome to thousands of years of history in China).
Still, yes. I can trust that if I were in an accident, people passing by would be decent enough to try to help me. To see a place where you'd have the rational expectation of being robbed by passers-by, see Russia.
These prediction markets shouldn't be allowed for situations where humans can control the outcome.
They do have their place however - one I find particularly interesting is weather prediction markets, primary because they end up having a net benefit. Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models and are duking it out. Over time these models get better, and the rest of us benefit.
I think these markets could be a net good, but right now they're just enabling insider trading on a scale we've never seen before.
We already have an example of humans sabotaging the measurement of weather: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684440. Two ranchers sabotaged weather monitoring stations in order to fraudulently collect millions in drought insurance. One of the farmhands involved ended up dead.
I have a hard time believing weather prediction markets will be net beneficial. The incentive for sabotage & manipulation up and down the chain seems likely to lead to worse weather predictions overall.
In the same way that crypto has been speed running the history of banking scams, it seems prediction markets are going to speed run the history of gambling and insurance fraud.
Who is to say if it rained or not? Well now they are a target.
A NY Times reporter was the target of a pressure and threat campaign to change their reporting over whether a rocket in the middle east was intercepted or not before it hit the ground.
Prediction markets are not going to end well full stop IMHO.
That was a Times of Israel reporter Emanuel Fabian [1] but your point stands.
Prediction markets create incentives to predict the outcome of an event, which can be done in one of three ways: develop better models to predict the event, affect the event, or affect the reporting on the event.
That's only for futures that are easy to invent, for others it is way easier to just bribe or threaten a journalist (works on most journalists, YMMV) to say that you've invented it and then run off with the money before anyone can prove you wrong.
Humans can, and do, manipulate the weather. There's actually international treaties against doing it.
> Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models
Weather is chaotic. You don't run a model once and use the result. You run it hundreds of times and average the results. You also need really high quality real time data to be fed into the system to achieve any sort of accuracy, which, is not something any of these hundreds could do on their own.
> markets could be a net good
You can already sell weather predictions. You can just hang a shingle and do it directly. Why do we need a third party gambling apparatus involved?
> Why do we need a third party gambling apparatus involved?
Wisdom of crowds > wisdom of individual firms, also a market solution actually would work in this case imo. Manipulating the weather seems easy enough to detect and much more expensive than any benefit you'd get, and there aren't really any negative externalities.
I doubt the utility of this simple aphorism. Primarily "the crowd" has a strong bias and would only consist of people willing to take the time to put a financial stake on their position.
> Manipulating the weather seems easy enough to detect
What are you basing this off of?
> and much more expensive than any benefit you'd get
Cloud seeding is not particularly expensive. The problem is the people performing this work may never interact with your market. You're literally playing a rigged game without any clue.
> and there aren't really any negative externalities.
You can do this with some forms of trip insurance. I stared hard at arbitrage there a few years ago but it was too hard to get your money out if you were right.
"where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position"
To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to reveal war secretes to our enemies.
Or heck, with the amount of $$$ on the line, cash-strapped nation states could even finance their warfare this way. Like that $14M bet on when an attack would land in Israel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401044 -- that could buy a lot of drones!
Aww, conspiracy theories are no fun when they're so plausible.
Sure, and pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us. That's exactly the point of these things. Dangle money in front of people who know things we want to know.
> You don’t have any enemies. Nobody cares about you. Nobody is coming to hurt you or your family
Do you think the U.S. and Israeli militaries have personal vendettas against each and every civilian we've killed in Iran? Of course we don't. We can barely count them. Just because you aren't personally on your community's adversary's radar doesn't mean they aren't a threat.
(To be clear, I don't believe Iran was a threat. But there are threats to Americans, and it's absolutley not brainwashing to ascribe a threat to a group to oneself personally instead of waiting for it to be purely selfishly relevant before acting.)
> Nobody is going to attack the US if your government stopped trying to meddle in other countries affairs
How did that work out for Ukraine? The idea that we live in a just world where everyone who has chaos rain down on them deserves it is so simply refuted even by a cursory glance at just modern history.
p.s. No, this is is not because of the account's political views; I haven't tracked them and don't know what they are. We just care about preserving this forum as a place for curious, respectful conversation, whatever one's views.
You’re significantly worse off assuming your government is adversarial than cooperative, regardless of what reality may be, and the majority of us know that. It’s why the chaos psyops aren’t working. We’re not happy with our government but apes together strong
I think the worst part is carrying the two in your pocket at all times. Previously a gambler trying to quit could avoid specific locations. How the hell do you avoid the internet?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you also craft an Etherium contract to do the same thing as these prediction markets. So even without a company "framing all the markets" you could still have gambling based on base eth?
I like prediction markets because they offer much more diverse markets compared to stocks/options and sports betting, which are far more limited. The downsides are limited liquidity and fraud, but this is endemic to other markets too.
Well corporate stocks have the same dynamic. People are banding together and manipulating reality in unproductive ways to make their stocks go up.
Countries literally go to war so that weapon dealers can sell weapons and banks can later sell loans to rebuild the country.
The real problem is centralization of power.
Within the horrible context of the current situation, it's a good thing that at least there is a force to drive outcomes that seem random as opposed to just being around money. It democratizes the horrors a bit so that rich people who have money and live in corporate stock lala land can get a slight taste of the negatives of large-scale vested interests collaborating towards dystopian outcomes.
That said, a better solution would be to shut down all public markets and companies.
My view is that if a company is so well recognized that government officials can reference it by name in congress, then that company should be shut down automatically. We know it didn't get there by economic efficiency... It almost certainly got there by voting and sociopolitical manipulation.
You can't shut down betting markets without shutting down the public stock markets because they are betting markets themselves.
Obligatory: The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists.[1]
Today Integrity is merely means to score more views and likes
That’s how far we have fallen. We are all painfully aware how corrupted all sorts of people are but instead of actual action we give each other likes on social media under carefully crafted anger bait.
So much everything online is fake that it is tempting to just throw your phone away.
The genuineness is the highest luxury
I try to make sure to get truly downvoted to hell every other week on social media. It resets the addicted brain and stops hive mind progress bar for a little while at least. Also get banned - this is good for you too precisely because it feels slightly uncomfortable.
That’s how I try to survive online landscapes anyway.
Anyone with half a brain, or who doesn't stand to be personally enriched by the plague of parasitical gambling / prediction sites can see they are obviously a net negative for society, yet they stand to make some already very rich people even richer, so they will of course be allowed to run wild regardless of the harm they cause.
We do not live in a world where policy decisions are based on what's best for the people, we live in a world where policy decisions are almost exclusively made according to what will further enrich the wealthy elites, so there's effectively a 0% chance we will see any meaningful regulatory action here, as it doesn't' matter if gambling is destroying the fabric of society as long as some bastards are getting rich off of it, as that's literally all that matters these days.
Betting on sport is kind of what sports where made for.
It's something without any consequence or meaning.
The Author mixing that with the dictator and his cronies making buck from their position is offensive.
We have the 'official' stock (prediction) market regulated by the SEC, FINRA, CFTC, ... , yet (allegedly) insider trading isn't unheard of. We have the more recent crypto (prediction) markets with (allegedly) complete market manipulation where those same regulators stepped in after being woken up late to the party. Now we have these 'open range' prediction markets with the CFTC wrestling for getting a toe in without stepping on those of the casino, sports betting, Native American gaming, lotteries ... interests?
Yes, they have. They’ve made tons of great products and services that you use every day without even thinking about it, in contrast to Russia for example. It’s a shame you don’t see how much they've improved our quality of life.
You must be confused. Most of the products that end in your hands were made by hard working folks from the Global South. All Westerers do is own the companies, the labour and the politicians from those countries. But don't worry, sooner rather than later, even Westerners will have to relearn what working truly means.
I agree with Thompson about these kinds of prediction markets, but predicting horrible catastrophes is one of the prosocial early use cases of these things.
Agreed, as long as it's a catastrophe that the bettors can't cause, but for which advance warning can mitigate harms.
For instance, I'm in favor of bets that a certain astroid will strike the earth at a certain time and place. A signal from the prediction markets might cause somebody to evacuate in a scenario where they'd otherwise cry "fake news."
Let's not bet on whether the water will remain drinkable, because the last thing we need is for somebody to have an incentive to poison it.
> For instance, I'm in favor of bets that a certain astroid will strike the earth at a certain time and place. A signal from the prediction markets might cause somebody to evacuate in a scenario where they'd otherwise cry "fake news."
I understand the point you're making, but in this case, you're still incentivizing someone somewhere to not attempt to the best of their ability to intervene in that astroid. Bets that truly can't cause any change in behavior that might affect the outcome are a mostly theoretical category, in my opinion.
If the bet can't cause any change in behavior then the whole thing is useless. The whole point is to do some good with it. The constraint is that the bettor can't alter the outcome.
Another one would be discovering malware in a PR and betting loudly enough that it won't get merged. The bet is how you make your certainty rise above the bot noise and attract extra attention on the maintainers' part.
Granted that's also theoretical, but it's worth theorising about how we'll get things done in a world where the only way to be heard is to put your money where your mouth is.
> Another one would be discovering malware in a PR and betting loudly enough that it won't get merged. The bet is how you make your certainty rise above the bot noise and attract extra attention on the maintainers' part.
This example seems weaker than the asteroid example. Consider that if you're betting "loudly enough" it won't get merged, the less likely option becomes the malware actually being merged. Now you have a repo maintainer who can bet that it'll get merged (probably a more lucrative bet since it's less likely), and merge it to make money from that bet.
I think I see where you're coming from, but if we're using them to predict hurricanes, it's likely just meteorological data arbitrage. All else seems like random chance; hardly an example of an oracle.
Crazy, but, hear me out: mirrors in space warming the Atlantic, mirrors in Africa warming the atmosphere ("solar power"), Trump wanting to nuke a hurricane, etc.
Pandemic? Go harvest bats and put them in a cage with chickens. You don't even need a molecular bio lab.
Stock market crash? Bombs. Terrorist attacks.
Energy prices? Derail a train carrying fuel cars. Bonus points if it's in a major metro and has a blast radius. Or, I dunno, start a war with Iran.
Dynamite the fault? I presume you haven't seriously thought about how much dynamite it would take and how deeply you'd have to plant it.
Mirrors in space? Again, have you done the math? How many thousands of acres of mirrors would you need, how many rockets would it take, and how much would they cost? Could you make enough on the betting market to break even?
Not really commenting on the politics side, but do Americans realise sports betting has been legal in other countries for decades? (Since 1960 in the UK at least).
Yes, there were a few fixes when in-game betting and exchanges first came in in the UK, but by and large most problems are solved now.
Maybe a less parochial view would help them get a sense of proportion?
All this fearmongering about decision markets lately is really annoying. If you don't like gambling — just don't gamble and shut the fuck up. It's not for you to decide if gambling is good or bad for me. If I am stupid enough to bet anything on an outcome that clearly depends on a person who could, potentially, be betting as well — it's my problem, not yours.
I've been active and profitably trading in prediction markets for a long time now, but I think this perspective is also not helpful.
Prediction markets exist within the laws and institutions of society to be able to function, and the public should debate and discuss how they're regulated. Problem gamblers do present a negative externality where third parties can bear the cost, especially when they have dependents.
Gambling outside of equities and securities is a negative externality. (Investment in startups, goods, etc. makes the economy spin. Investing in what hoop a ball goes through does no good at all.)
This puts plenty of people who shouldn't gamble into debt and lowers their societal fitness.
The other side of the gamble is probably losing on average too. Only the house and infrequent insiders win.
These private companies are fleecing our economy's dynamicity without reinvesting it in aligned positive externalities.
It's a cancer.
At least the lottery goes to education, in theory. My college was subsidized by the lotto, so there's that.
Kalshi and PolyMarket aren't doing anything positive.
It is not for you to decide what one should or shouldn't do. Plenty of people want to gamble, and don't give a fuck of what you think they should or shouldn't do. And they are right: it's none of your fucking business.
Kalshi and PolyMarket are doing something absolutely wonderful for those people (i.e. the only people who should care about these "prediction markets" at all): they actually make betting fair, which was impossible before. It is not impossible now, because in fact there are much better decentralized markets than these (basically all you need to make a completely decentralized betting platform are Ethereum contracts), but they are handier to use and hence more popular. But it was impossible with traditional gambling, where a bookmaker can set any odds and reject any bets.
> It is not for you to decide what one should or shouldn't do.
What's the limit?
Murder? Taking fentanyl? Selling fentanyl? Shitting on the sidewalk? Taking photos of kids in public? Screaming fire in a theater? Defamation? Misleading poor people into thinking they can get ahead by spending their savings?
If there was no limit to what I should or should not do, I could just kill everyone I disagree with and take their money. But we know that's preposterous.
Here's the thing though: in aggregate, that's exactly what this is. Taking money from poor and undereducated people is like killing them. It's stealing their lives, indebting them, making them less fit, putting them on a lower trajectory for life. Killing their chances.
That's about the biggest fucking negative externality big tech has introduced to the world. And for what? To make a handful of people rich?
This does nothing for society. It's worse than crypto.
> Plenty of people want to gamble, and don't give a fuck of what you think they should or shouldn't do. And they are right: it's none of your fucking business.
Plenty of people want to rape kids, and it is our business to stop them. This argument is bunk.
A low level of gambling was okay because there was a controlled lever on it. Only a handful of casinos existed, and the government had the monopoly on the lottery program.
Now anyone can do it anytime. That is not good for our economy.
This is not a harmless activity. People are losing their financial well-being. Becoming addicted. Needing to fix their debt by becoming more in debt.
People getting exiting the workforce as productive members of society because they lose their shirt. That is not good for individuals or society.
We're damaging the robustness of our economy by allowing these entities to exist. They should be taxed at 100% of their gross revenue, and those funds should go to educating kids about statistics while they're young and impressionable.
It's also a bit overblown. If you could rig a war, you would stand to make a lot more money playing the stock market than small potatoes prediction markets. A lot of money has been on the line based on which party wins elections even before prediction markets existed (see fracking or pipeline project approval as obvious examples).
I agree that this is bad but the libertarian in me says "the market will resolve this because who in their right mind would be a counterparty to these bets knowing that there is so much insider trading?". But then again, many people are not in their right mind.
Prediction market creators making the case that their existing is some sort of a market efficiency play is the most laughable thing I have ever heard.
SC made a mistake in the Draft King/Fan duel saga and has unleashed the worst kind of market, takes up may too much money and time especially from young people.
While many of us try to stay true as possible to be Libertarian when we say we are, this, like smoking in public, are not hills I’m willing to die on if someone decides to restrict.
An argument not mentioned here and which I didn’t appreciate until I actually took part in these markets myself, is that you need a supply of stupid/uninformed people to take the other side of the informed people’s bets.(In economic terms, no-trade theorems apply.) That suggests to me that the dream of perfect information revelation isn’t going to come true. Instead, the liquid markets will be those with a large supply of marks, who bet for identity reasons or who are simply ignorant and naive. (Currently polymarket gives a 16% ish probability that Trump will lose office this year. Sounds like wishful thinking to me?)
Polymarket "odds" I think are just the price of the contract * 100 right?
That's not actually the predicted odds by the market because every single bet is also a bet on interest rates.
A contract that literally 100% always would resolve to "true" in 1 year would have a non-zero price for the "false" side because selling that option (and thus taking the "false" side means you get ~$97 today and then pay $100 in a year.
Polymarket's 4% chance of jesus returning by 2026 actually represents a market consensus of basically a 0% chance.
For trump losing office there might be some bets predicated on his losing office being correlated to a higher interest rate outcome, too.
If the odds are set correctly, you should have the same EV on either side of a bet.
That's why it's hard to beat Vegas at sports betting--they set the correct odds way too often.
When regular folks make up their own odds, they're not very good at it, but in theory the market just buys up any +EV position, even if it's a longshot.
I agree with you overall but I'm not sure the Trump bet is the best example.
He certainly isn't going to be thrown out of office (unfortunately) but those 16% of bettors also win if he dies this year, and he's 80, fat, still gobbling burgers and shows signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far.
On the other hand he has access to the best medical care, but even still a 16% chance he drops dead before the end of the year isn't that outrageous.
So for example "shows signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far" sounds like the kind of "information" that has not yet made it into a mainstream news outlet, probably for good reason. And indeed when I searched, I found it on The Daily Beast, whose reliability I doubt.
But maybe I'm wrong. If so, you could always take the opposite side of the bet. For sure, the correct probability is not zero!
Checks annuity tables for an 80 year old making it to 81...you giving 1:6 odds? Sure I will take that bet because the actual odds are only a small fraction. If I spread out the risk on multiple positions, I can make a very good return taking those types of bets.
People that place bets on the political outcomes on PolyMarket are from one of three groups: 1) Insiders who think they have an edge (but probably don't), 2) fools that believe what their media of choice tells them and 3) People who make money on the first 2 groups.
We both know that that the Trump market and people who believe everything they see on MSNBC (or whatever it is called now) have a big overlap. Its basically a way to print money because there are always people who are out of touch enough to believe their side is right 100% of the time and a <insert color here> wave is coming in the next election. Is this taking advantage of them? Maybe, but they are a walking negative externality in every other way in life so why not. Consider it a tax on political extremism and partisanship which I think it a good thing. Prove me wrong...
Attaching payouts to events skews the incentives. A baseball player gets the incentive to fuck up on purpose. Fortunately politicians are much more honest and would never make a decision to profit from a bet in a similar dishonest way.
Trump and his Tech Bros enable this to make money for themselves its like Trump is turning the whole of America into Alternate reality Hill Valley of 1985 in Back to the Future
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
I'm still reeling from the fact that the sitting president pumped some meme coin the day (iirc) he took office. And this largely passed by without any consequence, reckoning, or repercussions. It's just accepted now that even the highest office will scam their own supporters
The US government and private interests are clearly incentivized to keep the crypto industry subdued to a chaotic casino. Participants engage willingly. If crypto is legitimized, it threatens the US dollar, sanctions regime and the US’s ability to project power as the world leading reserve currency.
The president and any other shitcoin operator know this and are playing the game on the field.
Every country has the same challenge. Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
Hopefully that helps explain why there weren’t and wont be any consequences.
That's a fair point. But I'm not talking about the legitimacy (or not) of crypto. More that the president was (is?) running a pump and dump scheme. It should be profoundly embarrassing to supporters and it should be political suicide for the scammer. But it barely registered.
I feel like you missed the suggestions that the move (the shiiling and scamming) may have surved or been subborinate to an ulterior motive.
By taking relatively low risk public position (from the guy making wildly innapropriate comments and taking wildly irresponsible actions seemingly daily) they are able to effectively spread FUD with regard to crypto. And that could have been motivated by a perceived threat by crypto against USD and/or fiat in general.
Like...this dude took food from genuinely starving people because there was some abuse in the system and had no plans whatever to restore the food to the starving.
Scamming people that are typically seen (by his constituency) as elitist tech-mongers and coin-bros? How's that supposed to negatively impact his ratings anyay? At worst it confirms pre-existing favor both for and against him.
People who hate him for the coin shilling already hated him and were not likely to ever be convinced in his favor, people who fanaticize him will see it as stated above and will also not change their opinions in anything but degree.
Yeah I don't buy the ulterior motive. He just wants to enrich himself. That's the primary motivator for ~everything he does. Running a scam on your supporters is perfectly viable if you think nothing of them, and they think everything of you
> Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
This is worded like it's something negative, but I honestly fail to see what exactly. Tokens will be pushed to grey market, and? They are already fully utilizing grey and black markets, half of the worlds drug, arm and sanctioned oil trade is done in these shittokens. Cutting out the legal bridges and exchanges would reduce total amount of legal liquidity and on/off ramps and not not change grey and black markets much, since criminals are already operating there.
Instead it would cut a lot of the "legal" schemes by which country elites are laundering bribes and evade taxes. At least part of the schemes.
Forget pumping. He set free a high profile white collar criminal, who in return deposited 2 billion real dollars into Trump shitcoin exchange. And NO ONE bat the eye, not a single congressman or regulator body. Check and balances, my ass. More like cheeks and obeisances.
Yeah the whole thing is absolutely scandalous. The president being anywhere near crypto is such a huge, blaring warning. Even more so if people are "investing" as a quid pro quo. But ~nobody cares. Scam economy
No. Those are the abusers of freedom who like to pretend their freedom doesn't stop at the tip of our collective noses. They are also a minority regardless of how vocal that small minority and the psyop saboteurs are that egg them on and keep them company.
Maybe we should just abandon the concept of "freedom" and embrace material values. Or is that too 19th-century progressive? Must we always ignore all discourse that happened after the bill of rights was scribbled?
Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that, I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or gender self determination, obviously).
Insofar as there's some nuance to what individuals choose to do but we like to eschew that in debate and make blanket statements about what you should or should not be allowed to do?
When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid, people get more desperate to take any advantage that comes their (or their children's) way. In really bad situations, it stops being about improvement and starts being about avoidance of decline. The late Roman Republic is an example - wealth, land and influence concentrated in fewer hands, society just gets more vicious and corrupt as people look for any edge they can get. The reign of Æthelred Unread is another example.
I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
This sounds incredibly naive. Competition does not magically prevent monopolies -- once you have a dominant player they just buy or undercut the occasional competing startup.
Every market exists within a regulatory system, which exerts power over the participants in the market. Using wealth, you can acquire influence, and thereby direct the power of the regulatory system to inhibit your competition, or create a legal monopoly for yourself. A free market is not magic; people have to make it happen, and people have many motivations beyond the freedom of markets.
> In a free market, you get wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it.
Unregulated capitalism inevitably trends towards a mafia state with an oligarchic structure and concentrated monopolistic power. It’s just an empirical fact at this point.
The engine that really drives innovation and wealth creation is regulated capitalism that preserves competitive markets by restraining anticompetitive behavior.
If you’re ideologically attached to capitalism I have good news for you. That’s the approach that leads to its most effective implementation.
If you’re ideologically attached to “market fundamentalism” as I suspect, which is a reflexive opposition to regulation, then this concentrated market structure is what you’re advocating for.
> Unregulated capitalism inevitably trends towards a mafia state with an oligarchic structure and concentrated monopolistic power. It’s just an empirical fact at this point.
Has there ever been a jurisdiction with unregulated capitalism? I'm unaware of any.
Even the most laissez-faire economies have had bedrock legal infrastructure: property rights enforcement, contract law, courts, which is regulation.
Maybe you’re thinking of anarcho-capitalism? But that has never worked at scale.
Completely agree with this. I watch many commercials on television targeting elderly folks and I just cringe. They seem to be doing everything they can to separate the viewer from their money for a dubious product or service.
“There’s a sucker born every minute, and we’re gonna take ‘em for all they got” - Harry Wormwood in Matilda
At least in the book/movie(s) Harry Wormwood faces consequences. The enablement top down is the problem. The system is rotten and no one faces any real consequence only a slap on the wrist at a fraction of revenue many years later.
Watching over shoulders as elderly people watch YouTube with ads and engage with clips of deepfake celebrities selling fraudulent nonsense is both enlightening and painful.
I knew a couple of McArthur Genius grant recipients (they were students like me) when I was in college. I wouldn't put any of them among the top most intelligent students I went to school with. The way they are chosen isn't exactly bad but it doesn't end up with giving the grants to "geniuses". If you aren't in one of the top most competitive fields, its more about applying and getting the right recommendations. If you get one in math or CS, then yes...that's very impressive. Professor Cotton (sp?) isn't in one of those fields.
This sounds like everyone is not perfect therefore no one should be singled out as a bad guy, everyone is equally shady. Which is objectively not true. Even the shit IT practices like stealing private information or stealing copyrighted property can be "rationalized" to benefit better targeted advertisement or better LLM generators and so on. Gambling on the other hand is pure 100% social damage with zero redeeming qualities. Even drugs have some positive aspects to them, unlike gambling.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree.
Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college.
By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
And the last 10+ years has taken this further where we now have "side gigs" or "side hustles" or people who are desperate to be "influencers" or "Youtubers" or whatever. Any hobby you have needs to be monetized to get by. You have to sell something, even if it's advice on how to do the thing.
That's what's meant by "hobbies are a luxury". It means you're earning enough not to need to monetize some portion of your life. And the number of people who can do that is continually decreasing.
The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Every aspect of our lives is getting financialized so somebody else can get wealthier. Every second of your time and thing you do needs to be monetized and exploited.
Gambling isn't a net negative for society. It's just a negative. There are no positive aspects to it. Gambling addicts are incredibly likely to commit suicide. It's incredibly destructive.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
True, but somewhat misleading. This includes parents that work part-time. If we only include full-time work then it's never been over 50%. Largely this reflects the second wave of feminism and women being able to get jobs they want!
> Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
Employers tend to prefer full-time employees because they are more efficient. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee and you'd rather get the max number of hours out of them. It's actually quite hard to get a part-time job in many fields. It's true that part-time employment has gone up but again I think this is largely good! And in any case the ratio of part-time employees has barely changed since the 1960s: ~17% today vs ~13% back then. So it's hardly the typical case.
> The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Silly Marxist voodoo economics. Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
> Employers tend to prefer full-time employees ...
They don't [1][2].
> Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
Small businesses absolutely fit the model, specifically "petite bourgeoisie" [3]. The problem with small business owners is they think they're capital owners (or will be someday) so they vote for the interests of capital owners but most small businesses are just jobs you have to buy with typically less pay and less security.
This is a trite response that doesn't engage with what was originally stated.
The double edged brilliance/danger of capitalism is that it constantly opens up and moves into new markets. This is good, it means once the market determines a need, capital investment can accelerate production of the good that meets that need.
But the flip side is it is coming for everything. Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient. And there are genuine problems with that.
Regulation has been the historical response, but we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
This is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. One can be pro-capitalism or anti-capitalism and come to the same conclusion.
> we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
There are more and more regulations every day. Oil refineries are being abandoned in California due to regulations so heavy there's no way for them to operate anymore. A friend of mine pulled his business out of California due to stifling regulations.
> Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient.
I give my unwanted items to the thrift store rather than the landfill. Others sell it on eBay. This is monetizing/making things more efficient. And it's good.
but not universally. oil refineries were causing asthma and environmental degradation.
them moving to another state is a regulatory failure (they shouldn't have another jurisdiction to move to, they should just operate without imposing negative externalities on others, spelling of the refineries).
what value is clean air? what is the value of a human life? how much is your attention worth?
these are questions that capitalism should not answer, but will nevertheless try to.
Socialist economies are much more environmentally destructive, because they are so inefficient they cannot afford the luxury of being environmentally cleaner.
The problem isn't capitalism. That's just poor thinking from someone who has spent too much time thinking about political ideology. The problem is how we finance campaigns combined with gerrymandering. And if you want proof, look at corruption in communist and formerly communist countries. It makes the US look like a bunch of choir boys by contrast. Thinking that it is about capitalism is just an attempt to wedge in some political ideology into a practical problem of governance and a sign someone has never actually had to lead real humans before.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
This goes back to dying for your own country at scale for wars that had nothing to with risking your family, your land, your country. back then if you refused to fight for war that never risked anyting you care, they would literally killed you or made you slave labor.
If this is referring to the US, yes indeed. We're great at the whole free market, fiduciary duty to shareholder bit. We're terrible at using law to manage the negative externalities.
Reminds me of what Frank Sobotka says in The Wire: "We used to make shit in this country, build shit here. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
Really? Show me one society that wasn't ruled by a class of people that didn't, at some point, operate a monopoly on violence, often with basically nothing that would count as "due process" today.
eg. someone will bet $1M that Elon Musk will be assassinated in 2026.
But these don't themselves even have to be legal. Second order wagers will be placed on SpaceX and Tesla stock prices, bets that "a hundred billionaire will die in 2026", etc.
A bet that Putin will be assassinated could be encoded in, "there will be regime change in Russia."
In this scenario, that would be the people paying for the assassination. The people who want it to happen bet that it won't. The people who want to do it bet that it will. The net result is that if one of the people who bet on it happening makes it happen, they are being paid by the people betting against it, in a plausibly deniable way.
A country leader seeing someone suddenly take out a $50 million position on them not being assassinated is not the $50 million vote of confidence a naive read on the market might indicate, it's a $50 million payout to the assassin. Albeit inefficiently so, since others can take the other side of the bet and do nothing. But the deniability may be worth it.
What's even more interesting is when you consider that A) it doesn't have to be one person taking out a large position, it can be multiple people, over time, and B) the assassin doesn't have to be known or confirmed ahead of time, if someone decides their "reserve price" has been met, all they have to do to receive a payout is place the appropriate bet before performing the act.
The end result is a combination of Kickstarter and Doordash for targeted homicide.
> The end result is a combination of Kickstarter and Doordash for targeted homicide.
or kidnappers. Someone could take the opposite side, kidnap the individual and guarantee their survival for the year. When time is up they just dump them in the street and collect the bet.
I'm not sure there's any deniability in placing the "won't be assassinated" bet, when you could equally state it as "I will pay $1M to whoever accepts this bet and assassinated this person"
Anyways, how exactly is this assassin going to collect on their bet? I'm pretty sure law enforcement will be looking into the fact that somebody place that bet and then shortly after, the assassination happened.
Ah, you beat me to it. I learned about assassination markets in a previous post about the overall gambling/prediction markets topic a few weeks ago; the concept is so coherent that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
If someone want him dead, someone have to bet that million on the target being alive at a specific date. Unless someone plan to do the execution themselves, the bet must be lost for the target to be unalive !
I am not sure, but you don’t have to technically bet on assassination. You can bet on an event which would happen as a result of said assassination. X won’t get re-elected. Company Y CEO will change in 2027. This is artist Z last tour. Athlete K won’t participate in this event etc.
It's the inverse, here how you have to bet (unless you plan to be doing the hands on assassination works) :
X will get re-elected. Company Y CEO will not change in 2027. This is not artist Z last tour. Athlete K will participate in this event etc.
Like I said elsewhere in this thread the bet have to be lost if you want your target dead.
> Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries
People who write vacuous "America bad" comments online without understanding the topic may be shocked to learn that America has also had gambling for a long time.
The debate now is about the current changes to regulations and proliferation of apps and ads. Gambling now is objectively more accessible and less regulated than in the past.
Can't speak for everyone here, but I (as a US citizen) am way less bothered by sports gambling specifically than I am by generalized Kalshi-type gambling being abused by powerful insiders in the federal government (or other institutions). Like yeah I don't think it's great that we've enabled yet another route for young men to completely ruin their lives, but civil liberties, personal responsibility, etc. etc. etc.
What really is scaring me is how transparently the current US executive branch has been basically running a Black Sox scam for the last year or so. This is not something that I think is really happening with eg. Ladbrokes. Seems more like an even more insidious form of insider trading which is already disgustingly prevalent across the whole US political system; except now it's even less traceable, and even easier to exploit for things like military actions.
Well, we were able to observe in the impact of legalization of online betting in real time, watching every other ad slot during sports games turning into gambling app ads designed to hook 20 something men into lighting their paycheck on fire for a brief dopamine hit.
Plus, prediction markets going from a harmless novelty where people would bet a few bucks on an election into a massive offshoot of gambling industry incentivizing manipulating outcomes/insider trading, once again leaving the average gambler left holding the bag and poorer.
You honestly couldn't design a better experiment to test the theory of whether open and legal vs. banned but underground gambling leads to better outcomes. So I'm not sure why it matters that other countries have different laws (that likely were more thoughtfully designed than basically just saying "it's legal now" out of the blue).
"Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries."
You've had online gambling for centuries? With phones, and apps?
Wherever you are from should really have tried selling this technology. While the US was still rolling out steam engines, you could have really cornered the cell phone market.
Americans would definitely not be shocked at the idea of gambling being legal, and I don't know why you'd think they would be. The US has gambling tourist destinations.
A lot of gambling is Canada is privatized. Sports gambling, for example. Most of the money being made in the gambling industry is not in the lotto.
Edit: Also the liquor thing varies by province. Ontario has a crown corporation selling liquor, but in Alberta all liquor sales are by private entities.
> If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then don't.
Three of the "four ways to lose" described in the article are significant harms inflicted on parties besides the bettors themselves. One cannot avoid these harms by not directly gambling.
The issue is the combined risk of insider trading coupled with the bias of disaster-centric betting, or at least event-centric betting. This means if you have the means to create an “out of the ordinary” event you have a strong incentive to make it happen and to bet on it. These must be controllable events, so not natural or complex systems. On the gentler side it would be sports fixing, which has always existed. On the worse side it would be causing war, making economic decisions that will impact many, betting on people death and so on. These kind of things are seemingly already happening to a certain degree.
You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks, and quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it in a betting app. This isn't like the stock market which is a vehicle for wealth for hundreds of millions. Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
> Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
The stock market is 100% optional to participate in, and every broker tells you (is legally required to tell you, in fact) that you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose money. That didn't stop whatever forces have made them essentially required to plan for the normal life stage of retirement these days.
I don't use these platforms so I don't know how the bets are structured. If someone comes along and places a bet that looks very much like insider knowledge, can you only bet against or can you place bets with them like following the shooter in craps?
Betting against something that looks like an insider making the bet really is something willingly done. It's just a dumb bet.
> You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks, and quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it in a betting app
Absolutely garbage take, to be quite honest with you. War profiteering is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, and the last thing we need in this world is more opportunities for it. Regardless of whether the punters getting screwed consented to gambling or not, the problem is the perverse incentives it creates at the highest echelons of power. Abusing access to military intel for profit is foul behavior that will only degrade the quality of our governance and foreign policy, not to mention the literal lives that will be lost as a result.
Because there are societal costs to poverty, regardless of how people arrive there. Gambling can be as addictive and personally and societally destructive as any drug.
That seems to imply concern for the gambler, who at least has chosen to play.
A much bigger problem might be when these markets bet on a meatspace event and then a bunch go out and try to influence innocents in meatspace, to great detriment of society. Like this journalist https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-polymarket
Americans coming to the realisation that much of the rest of the world came to decades ago and acting like it’s a massive revelation is…absolutely par for the course for the US. Just hurry up and implode already.
> Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It's just bringing to public visibility exactly what happens across the stock market. Public companies do this all the time -- engineer their performance end earnings to influence <strike>shareholder</strike> gambler expectations on earnings day.
the implied suggestion that we should not seek to remedy anything that is not the worst thing that has ever happened to the species seems more like bait than the article
> I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
given that the crypto anarchist papers from the 90s that these markets are built on are very well thought out instruction manuals about how bad it could get, this title implies users are gullible idiots as opposed to the creators and power users
An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem. So I take issue with all the flippant comments about this being a "gambling loophole", like, who cares? I don't think any financial game should be seen as a different category than the other.
Even the "positive expected value" framework masquaraded as a distinction between trading and a casino game is completely false and entirely a cultural distinction. There are many equities and bond trades that have lower expected value than a casino game, even this forum is populated by people that receive shares and derivatives as compensation, who will earn nothing - even lose money - under positive outcomes. Exhibit A. Not everyone needs to care how a particular financial game is perceived. Not all cultures need any social segregation of gambling versus another way of making money from money. I'd rather be part of those cultures. And in the US/Western gambling regulatory frameworks and prohibitions, prediction markets don't fit, that isn't a loophole to me. They are structurally different and I'm not entirely sure what people want to happen and how it is supposed to be enforced. I don't get the impression they've looked at all, and are just operating on a feeling that I find irrelevant.
And on the insiders, yes, that's the point of prediction markets. They are intended to be distributed bounties with plausible deniability. That's literally what Jim Bell's 1995 crypto-anarchist paper was about.
In the natural course of finance, every asset, including information, should be tradable, as long as improvements in liquidity continue to come.
> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
Maybe if you're Tom Hanks in Castaway. In real life, people contract lung damage from secondhand smoke; homes are mortgaged to fund gambling habits; families are destroyed by drunk drivers.
That's not to say that people can't partake in their vices responsibly. But the idea that any harms are limited to the person with the problem is just not true.
Sure, there isn't a silver bullet that magically prevents all possible harm while also imposing no burden or inconvenience. The basis of my view is that the non-existence of such a framework is a terrible reason to have no protective framework at all.
1. Gives the person more opportunities to reconsider.
2. Gives loved ones more opportunities to notice what's happening and intervene.
There's a world of difference between refinancing your home by visiting a bank several times over a period of a few weeks and refinancing your home by tapping a few buttons on your phone.
The difference convenience makes to the rate of making errors in judgement is actually so obvious that even military equipment will have additional steps you have to take to enable lethal weapons/eject/etc.
You put your own case powerfully, but you don’t seem to have reacted to Derek Thompson‘s case, except to say that you’re not bothered about gambling addiction. (And why not? If people predictably do things that are bad for themselves, that damages the efficiency case for free markets and everything.)
I did read his article, and there are the geopolitical events and the sporting events he talks about.
I don't really understand why sports leagues require faith in their institution. Is the economy overleveraged on collateral debt swaps on league merchandise sells? Is our economy built on preteens in Nebraska believing their only way out of there is a worthwhile pursuit?
I'm not sure why I am supposed to care about the sanctity of that market, what are the consequences of it feeling rigged? and the FBI was on those insider trades instantly, so the sports side seems tightly regulated already whether I understand why a segment of that market needs certain assurances.
And the non-sporting trades I recognize the danger of, the liquidity in the market altering the outcome as someone in control of the outcome does something selfish. I say do what we can to avoid the death markets and the nuclear ones, but distributed bounties otherwise are very transparent and efficient wealth distribution mechanisms that fulfill other goals of compensating labor more correctly.
Surely a big point of sport is to get young people to do healthy, character-building team activities. That requires sporting heroes they can look up to, rather than cheats who will throw a game for money.
Representation is a powerful driver for a large swath of humans, there are many others who get inspired for other reasons, or inspired by fictional characters
I’m fine with those other traits being expressed more frequently
Is there a site which implements the ideas behind the file Indecent Proposal[1]?
It would be a site where folks could start auctions based on stuff they want from other folks. So Bob wants Janes jumper. He goes onto the site, creates an auction with an initial offer of $5. Jane is informed that Bob wants to buy her jumper. She turns down the offer. Bob raises his offer to $10. She declines the offer. Then Cane joins the auction and makes an offer for $15. Jane refuses that too.
One see where this is going. The point is that Jane cannot shutdown the auction and anyone can make a bid. The trajectory is that Jane will reach a point where she is forced to make a moral choice (much like in the film). Everyone has their price, even Jane in this case.
It is easy enough to imagine what besides jumpers will be placed on the site. It is an highly immoral idea and something akin to cyber mobbing or AI fake porn. So does the site exist already? Asking for a friend.
Why? I find Polymarket and these gambling sites just as bad. Is AI with it's fake porn is any better? And just yesterday, Meta and Google was found responsible for addiction[1].
How is this worse? I guess I forgot to say that a site like that would be simply be a poke in the eye of how stupid the internet has become. It's ridiculous to see folks not liking this idea yet finding the idea of betting on wars to be ok.
> And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion.
Bizarre to call trading volume "revenue". Last year, trading fees for Kalshi amounted to about $263 million[0], whereas Polymarket largely did not have fees in 2025 and is turning them on in a few days[1].
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kalshi-fee-revenue-2025-263-1...
[1]: https://gamingamerica.com/news/polymarket-free-ride-over-int...
I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gambling is a thing but at least we are counting that as an addiction. But we seem to take polymarket more seriously.
With proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.
It also creates a lot incentives for creating unpredictable chaos as an insider.
I explicitly accounted for this incentive with my first three words.
What constraints and how do you enforce them?
I'm curious what positive externalities you're thinking about? Being able to make plans for the future?
A male in a country that is about to enter a war could decide to leave to avoid conscription, depending on the odds
Doesn't take a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows
Again, as I said, "aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms".
That's vague enough to be more or less meaningless, where specifically do you see positive externalities outweighing the numerous negative ones?
If that strikes you as vague, I strongly recommend you to read at least an LLM summary of "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
Ah yes, vague non-solutions.
They will be uttered in response to criticism and then quietly ignored until the inevitable. Rinse and repeat. A true mark of a grifter.
>With proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.
It's only gambling when you are betting of completely random events. If you know what the odds are of something happening, even with some approximation, then it is not gambling.
Of course, over 99% people placing bets on Polymarket are gamblers, but some aren't.
Why does knowing the odds make it not gambling?
The odds are known in a game of roulette, is that not gambling?
You can calculate the odds in games like blackjack to attempt to gain an edge, is that not gambling?
Randomness does not imply the uniform distribution
> With proper constraints,
load bearing phrase there
nothing about the US currently can be characterized as having proper constraints
generic "bet on anything" betting markets massively encourage corruption and market manipulation via shock events and insider trading. false flag attacks, etc
v. edgelordy
There's three kinds of players on Polymarket & others
* The insider trading ones that will never lose money
* The wallstreetbets degenerates with enough money that it's a fun game even if you lose money
* People that have seen every chance they have at becoming moderately wealthy disappear under the current economic state of their country, where overwhelming debt is likely. The era of making it wealthy from a job is gone, an enormous part of the population is stuck going from small job to ubering, while being showered with videos of wealth from social media. The only way to make it out is gambling. Whether that's polymarket, sports betting, etc.
When you're already in a shit situation with no hope, "it's a zero sum game" isn't a good counterargument.
There are also large trading/market making firms providing liquidity, especially on markets associated with up/down bets on crypto, stocks etc. They use all the options trading machinery they've already built for more 'respectable' venues like CME/Eurex etc, further squeezing the margins for retail traders.
They're active on bets that are even considered "meme" bets. Example: Jesus returning in 2026 - If you can get a loan at 4% as a big well respected trading firm and plonk it on Jesus not returning at 94 cents, you're making ca. 2% for 'free'. (Unless Jesus returns, in which case you have bigger problems than your portfolio pnl).
Note that #1 will get kicked off the platform immediately. Even non-inside traders who win significantly more than expected will be kicked off. If you’re on the platform, you’re losing.
This is true for traditional gambling platforms, because they bet directly against their users, and make money when their users lose those bets.
Polymarket has a different incentive. They profit when their users bet more money, through percentage fees. Insider trading helps them achieve this by bringing in more money to the platform--they won't kick insider traders off.
At the moment being, Polymarket has an enormous reputational incentive against behaving like a predatory gambling company. People rely on it as a kind of decentralized alternative to New York Times. Distorting this effect would be very short-sighted.
I believe they are incentivized to discourage insider bets and essentially "rigged" wins. I do not think they will ever be able to control the problem of insiders leveraging guaranteed knowledge to take money for the poor suckers who don't know the game they are playing. Maybe that's too pessimistic, but at this point I don't see how anything but a pessimistic view is warranted.
Putting bounties on insider knowledge is the ideological justification for these kinds of betting markets, so I doubt they’re going to stop this kind of thing
Rigged wins aren't a real problem. Everyone knows that sports betting apps are rigged, and it doesn't affect them at all. In fact, the latest explosion of customers has been accompanied by even more blatant rigging in the form of unwinnable multi-leg parlays. Hasn't slowed them down.
> Rigged wins aren't a real problem.
Aren't a problem for whom, exactly? I'm not commenting here with concern about the prediction market businesses, founders, or shareholders. I'm concerned for the suckers who are and will continue to be taken advantage of. Forgive me for not abandoning all empathy for those suckers just because they don't realize they're being mugged. These prediction markets are zero-sum, with the connected and resourced taking yet more from those with less.
That's like me complaining about Wall St. tampering with bond ratings on sub-prime mortgages, and you telling me "Don't worry, the banks will be fine." I don't care about the banks, they have enough people looking out for them, and their golden parachutes will catch them on the way down anyway.
Aren't a problem for the companies; I was responding to you saying they're incentivized to stop it.
Believe me, I am not on their side. Gambling companies are a financial weapon aimed at the working class and a just society would shut them down. I don't blame you for assuming, though, given where we are.
Ah I hear you, makes sense
That's true for now. A part of me hopes that one day prediction markets will have the same set of technical constraints, norms and laws that make the stock market mostly work. Let's wait and see.
And online sports books have the same reputational incentives, but don't seem to be suffering any damage.
That was my initial opinion, but more recently it's been established that there's quite a bit of a cat and mouse game here – people have come up with elaborate workarounds to avoid getting booted or limited by the platform, while the platforms come up with increasingly sophisticated monitoring to catch them before they win too much.
Though to your point I think these big winners are not representative of most users, who in my experience often think they're beating the system but in reality just don't log their losses very well. The house always wins etc etc.
Do these platforms care since the insider traders aren’t taking money from the house?
[flagged]
Also, I really feel like so many of the people defending prediction markets don't understand the very basics of economy and behavioral science: incentives.
You're creating a legalized system with the incentives to influence events to make terrible stuff happen.
We've already seen huge bets on the deadline of US attack to Venezuela spike few hours/days before the actual aggression.
Which means that insiders not only hold information, but have the incentives to make stuff happen.
And naysayers (which seem to be dropping from the same basket of NFT/crypto cultists) will tell you that this is about probability and information discovery.
And the naysayers would be right. They come from two approaches:
- Property rights: bettors are waging using their own property at their own direct risk. To prohitbit such a thing is to violate their property rights, plain and simple; - Information aggregation: prediction markets originally appeared to help make informed decisions about an event by proof-of-stake. If I'm not mistaken, this idea was originally developed by NSA/CIA/FBI for this purpose.
You mentioned misincentives like hold information (which isn't actually related to prediction markets, but more so to NDAs and similar) and "making stuff happen". The latter is functionally the same as policemen/judges/prosecutors/prisons having an incentive to create more criminals. Really, most goals people have may be achieved via criminal means. We don't outlaw free will because people have an incentive to achieve their goals via criminal means, we increase punishments (increasing potential loses), improve tracking/prevention (reducing success chances), etc.
Gambling -> bad gamblers lose -> bankruptcy -> creditors eat losses
Technically, a lot of gamblers are gambling someone else’s money, they just havens lost enough yet for it to matter.
If you want to bring back debtors prison I guess I’d be fine with legalized gambling. If I’m stuck holding the coupon, I’ll pass.
I feel like we are skipping a lot implicit things that shouldn't be left implicit. How are you paying for the bad gamblers' losses? Are you deliberately lending to gamblers without due check? Probably not, that would be very imprudent.
If you aren't the creditor, then I suggest that you make it explicit how you are losing wealth with this. Good chance the issue might be somewhere along the way.
No, they would be wrong.
Have them have a prediction market on whether their house will be arsoned tomorrow or they will be hit by a car and instantly they will recognize the danger of the incentives and the bs of "information hedging based on price discovery".
Cause way worse events allow betting and profiting.
Give me a break, we're at the complete decadence of society and its intellect. Nobody can recognize right or wrong anymore let alone understand why insider trading, betting, etc, has been outlawed and prosecuted forever.
We live in the vilest era I remember since I was born, this is beyond disgusting.
I suggest that you think rationally about what you just said. Why wound anyone open a bet on "rando's house will be set on fire"? Why would they bet on "yes"? You can't present a generic case such as that without going into details about motivations and actual incentives.
Those way worse events also have a lot of extra political motivations behind it. If someone starts a war with the sole intention of winning a bet, there might worser problems than prediction markets.
The third paragraph might as well have been written by a consertive nutcase. Surely, if only you can recognize rights and wrongs, then you can objectively and undeniably prove them to this forum. On its own, it isn't much more than a appeal to tradition.
> I suggest that you think rationally about what you just said. Why wound anyone
That doesn't read like a good-faith response. Parent-poster brought up an archetypal scenario asserting that certain people are ignoring malice/harms because they are not personally affected, exhibiting a latent logical contradiction or double-standard.
Instead of addressing the actual point (the existence/seriousness of the harm category) you've begun nitpicking that there aren't enough irrelevant operational details about the hypothetical arsonist and hypothetical attack.
_______
"They are correct that rain is natural and normal, this isn't a big deal."
"If it was your house being flooded by neighbors' failure to control runoff flooding created by impermeable construction, you wouldn't say that, you would recognize the harm!"
"Pish tosh! I suggest you think rationally about the fact that my house is on a hill! For what possible reason would I put myself in such a situation?"
The existence and severity of the harm, as argued by OP, relies on incentives. But incentives don't exist on a vacuum, nor are they individually absolute over human behavior. Simply stating that something has a bad incentive and that'll result in evil, on its own, isn't much better than assuming spherical cows.
The reason I nitpicked on the arsonist example is to elaborate on that: the arsonist does indeed have an incentive to put fire onto someone's house due to the bet, but the bet itself increases the probability of the fire being prevented, the culprit being caught, etc., which are all disincentives that may negate the original misaligned incentive. When we escape from this particular scenario onto others, this pattern remains. If the disincentives didn't prevent said harm, there are only two causes:
- culprit is unreasonable beyond saving: this one is trivial - they are beyond saving. Banning gambling would simply cause them to commit crimes in a different way;
- the mechanisms behind the disincentives are malfunctioning or aren't enough: that warrants an investigation onto said mechanisms, not a ban on prediction markets.
Perhaps this has made it clearer that, at least from my perspective, these "irrelevant details" aren't irrelevant.
> Why wound anyone open a bet on "rando's house will be set on fire"? Why would they bet on "yes"?
Bettor is an impoverished arsonist with no morals and confidence in his anonymity.
Better question: why would a person ask a question with such a breathtakingly obvious answer?
So, you are telling me this "impoverished arsonist" opened a bet on "will this rando's house be burned?", wagered on "yes" (with what money?), other people (who?) bet on "no" and no one found it suspicious? I hope you do realize that making it a public bet exposes information, and the very subject of the bet can be used to prove intentions.
Nevermind the fact about what would happen after the crime, should it even happen. It seems this hypothetical arsonist isn't just immoral, but also incredibly stupid (and that also begs more questions, like how do they have access to prediction markets like this).
For something so "breathtakingly obvious", it seems poorly thought through.
Okay, now I understand why you’re asking questions like this.
Sure, but regardless your perception about my motivations, I'm genuinely curious as to what prompted the "breathtakingly obvious" comment, because I'm ain't seeing it. Preferebably in a less snarky fashion, should we proceed with respect to one another.
Ay, didn't see your nickname, and your other posts.
Thanks for confirming what I said.
> And naysayers (which seem to be dropping from the same basket of NFT/crypto cultists) will tell you that this is about probability and information discovery.
Also, I ain't conservative, prediction markets, in their actual scope provide no benefits and plenty of wrong incentives.
The rest of your post makes no sense.
Plenty of world events have been impacted by people with misaligned interests, including by spies and double agents. Hell, wars in recent years have been started as distractions from internal political affairs.
And you want to argue to me that there's no people in position of power that may want to influence events they can bet on?
There's a reason why we prevent people in sport from betting: it's a matter of incentives. Give people incentives they will bend everything.
The fact that you can bet on a country attacking another is a tragedy.
So all you have is name calling?
Regardless, from HN's guidelines:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
Edit: since posting this, the comment has been edited (at least the version I saw, which ended before the quote). I will write a full response later. For what's worth, I'm grateful for the longer post.
> Also, I ain't conservative, [...]
Then don't argue like one. Rather than making a shallow statement about "how people forgot about the evils of something" and leaving at that, get into more detail about the history. Mention specific events.
> The rest of your post makes no sense.
Can you specify what doesn't? I'd gladly do my best to clarify.
> And you want to argue to me that there's no people in position of power that may want to influence events they can bet on?
No, I'm asking why are there such people? How did they get into such positions? What can be reasonably done to prevent such people from rising into them? From what I've gathered, your point is that the mere existence of prediction markets create enough incentives for well-behaved people to misbehave. My position is that they were never well-behaved.
> There's a reason why we prevent people in sports from betting: it's a matter of incentives.
Sure, we can leave it at that. If we ignore everything else. The problem with sports betting is that it tends to convert the practice from a compention of ability into another form of gambling. This does more than create incentives, it creates a negative feedback loop that undermines the point of the practice. Neither prediction markets nor gambling are about preserving the sanctity of fair play, though. Also, for what's worth, betting about outcomes in sports seems to be legal in the US, just that athletes and other involved are prohibited from betting in their games. If your proposal is to ban people in power from being able to bet and implementing systems to prevent them from doing so, then I suppose we are in agreement. But do note that this is less about incentives, and more about trust (you can trust more that agents won't abuse their role and, if they do, it'll be harder to get away with it).
This segways into main issue with your post. Incentives are highly subjective. For all intents and purposes, they always exist. They are the product of people having goals and desires. The incentive to murder always exists. The reason people generally don't "bend everything" for it is that few will satisfy their goals with that, and even less have it as their goal. For the few that do, there's another tool: disincentives. I don't think I need to explain why murdering someone might result in a terrible outcome for most. For the even fewer that murder as their sole and primary goal, they will bend everything to accomplish it, regardless of incentives/disincentives. Personally, I don't find it even worth discussing. This, perhaps, made it clearer why simply saying "there are incentives to do evil" doesn't cut it. A deeper, more contextual analysis is needed.
Unless you can show there are only criminal uses, or even that there are no set of disincentives we can employ to dissuade potentially bad actors from doing evil, a blanket ban is not warranted, specially when it comes at the cost of a human right.
> bettors are waging using their own property [...] To prohitbit such a thing is to violate their property rights
This is technically true but doesn't deserve top-billing. Any fraudster or embezzler (or mugger or drunk-driver) will incidentally be risking some of their own property while exercising their right to control it.
> informed decisions about an event by proof-of-stake
A large chunk of the problem here occurs when people (politicians, judges, police, CEOs, etc.) are wagering assets and outcomes that aren't actually theirs, but things they control in (violated) trust. In other words, the personal "stake" of their overt bet is actually far too small.
> The latter is functionally the same as policemen/judges/prosecutors/prisons having an incentive to create more criminals. [...] we increase punishments
So... repercussions like "is is a crime for those people to possess a private account on the anonymous bribery website"?
In regards to first point, I might not have made it clear, but betting, on its own, does not harm others, contrary to mugging or hitting a car. Property rights come with the associated duty of respecting others' properties afterall. Failure to do will result in the duty to repair and pay to restore the "correct" state to best of their abilities.
Onto the second, I don't think the people you mentioned actually wager stuff that they don't own. To be more precise, the problem is that they use criminal means to "rig" the bet in their favor. That, at least, seems to be what OP is talking about with incentives.
Finally, regarding the last, I agree that roles that require trust should have more norms and rules to enforce that trust. In case of strictly private roles, I personally believe they should be done via contracts and cultural pressures. For governmental roles, they should be enforce by laws (such as the one you suggested). Since this is a top-level, abstract, description, we can get into more about more specific cases (such as CEOs).
There is genuine value in a wisdom of the crowds assessment of future events that is only sharpened up by the requirement to put money on the line.
The often-repeated "wisdom of the crowds" justification is misapplied to online betting markets. Like people, crowds can either be wise or unwise depending on the situation. Famous experiments like guessing how many gumballs are in a jar work because each person who can see the jar has a source of valid information, and in aggregate that can be surprisingly accurate.
You can't assume that the majority of individuals participating in betting markets have a source of valid information. Given the destructiveness of these markets to both individuals and society, the aggregate wisdom of the individuals participating in these markets is highly doubtful. Any meager value above more traditional forecasting does not justify the cost, corruption and a loss of trust in institutions.
Nobody says this on assumption. It's well-evidenced.
https://polymarket.com/accuracy
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/
Please show the dollar/realized benefit to society VS (in response to OPs statement) the results don't "justify the cost, corruption and a loss of trust in institutions" along with a breakdown of the cost/negatives to society that result from those factors.
This isn't big oil (yet) you can't just externalize all the downside and say the product is a net benefit.
Pish tosh, my dear sir, it's simply common-sense that there are oodles of people out there with secrets that would be completely ethical to distribute and would undeniably better all humankind, but they're sitting on them purely because they haven't figured out how to make a profit from it. /s
In other words, the overlap between these is too small to justify the idea that prediction markets are a net-benefit by default:
1. Is valuable
2. Not already known
3. No current reward mechanism exists (e.g. patents)
4. Not criminal or unethical to disclose
There is definitely value in that, but that value is outweighed - dominated, even - by the incentive produced to fix outcomes, incentivized by that money put on the line.
How dare you impugn the mystical powers of the wisdom of the crowd. Why would anybody fix outcomes?
Wait a minute, you can bet on pro wrestling? OK I'm out of ideas.
https://www.betus.com.pa/sportsbook/entertainment/wwe/
It would be useful to predict things like earthquakes and tornados. Gambling on what politicians and celebrities will do is not science it's degenerate court gossip.
Game theory can be applied to these problem, and if you can correctly model reward, cost and motives, you can predict decisions of politicians more often than not.
Even granting the idea that game theory can be applied successfully here; that does not really help with one-off events. Consider, knowing the odds of a coin flip does not grant you any real help in knowing what the next coin flip will be.
This is also ignoring that game theory of partisan games breaks if any of the participants knows what the other will do. Is one of the more famous ideas.
To that end, if you want to predict what someone will do, more often than not you are best looking at their experience doing said thing.
> you can predict decisions of politicians more often than not
What makes you believe this? The performance of economist/sociology experts using game theory to make predictions has been worse than a coin-flip up to this point. It also has done enormous damage.
I don't think Nash envisioned politicians and their aides being able to profit from making decisions. Do you launch an attack on Eastasia? Well the market right now says there's a 40% chance, so I guess it's a good idea to grab your crypto keys and make some bets before you call the Joint Chiefs.
I think you're right broadly, but when that wisdom is applied to e.g. how many dildos will be thrown at WNBA players, I don't know how much actual value is created.
That… that actually seems like something which society should want to predict with more precision so that we can hire someone with a net on a stick.
It's also a real world event that can be influenced by the existence of the bet.
There's value in that only if assessments made by people using the prediction for something aren't better than crowd wisdom. I would guess that a large part of prediction market participants are simple gamblers whose assessment is worse than the prediction of someone doing it because they need the information for something.
So if people who need predictions for decision-making start relying on prediction markets with a lot of low value gambler predictions and opinion manipulators (wealthy participants can use the platform to mislead people as well) the value of these things might be negative.
Or if decision makers start using the gambling markets to drive their decisions, the value of these things will go extremely negative.
The headline bet in Polymarket right now is on when US troops will invade Iran. If some unscrupulous official can pull some strings to get boots in the ground in the next few days, they stand to win a significant amount of money.
Genuinely asking: has there been a case of the prediction markets being "right" or valuable about something outside of the norm?
That's why the metaverse happened. Lots of money bet on it's success
My understanding of the world is enhanced immensely because suckers can bet on how many times the president will reference the lips of his press secretary in a speech.
Wisdom such as the mass purchase of GameStop shares, temporarily inflating the value of an ultimately doomed company?
Buy a movie ticket and that money is gone. Throw $20 on a parlay for the weekend sportsball and thats actually interesting, something off script might happen. And that money might not actually be gone.
It can be useful for insurance/hedging purposes.
For example if you're a European farmer it might be rational to protect yourself from fertiliser price swings by buying/shorting natural gas futures, derivates or long dated delivery contracts. Polymarket bets on specific geopolitical events are just another option for this, which can be attractive depending on the price.
Prediction markets have a pretty unique benefit in terms of offering political protection. For example if you're a DEI NGO it might have been worth making bets on Trump winning so you have enough funds to ride out measures that target your traditional funding sources from gov/corps/edu.
There are a lot of baked in assumptions here. For instance, as an extreme example, betting on nuclear war or climate collapse happening and then "winning" doesn't really provide you anything of much use in the society you will be living in after such events.
Extreme events are always poorly priced in markets. For example, there's no point in making a trade for the S&P 500 falling by 90% because if it does we'll be in such a catastrophe that money doesn't matter any more.
Insurance / hedging is most useful in protecting you from realistic well defined risks that affect you personally but not the wider system.
>Insurance / hedging is most useful in protecting you from realistic well defined risks that affect you personally but not the wider system.
But a powerful earthquake can't affect the wider system in a country? and yet, people do buy insurances for earthquakes.
Perhaps I should’ve said financial system plus some system that allows you to spend money on things you’d like.
Very astute observation. Might I even add, as humans we never know when our last day could be. So I find it silly to gamble, since I could easily die in a car accident on my way to pick up my winnings.
Thank you for this call out. I was blown away by that number because it would have meant volume was maybe pushing 1T.
It's DT, don't expect honesty from his posts (unless he is bashing unions or workers, he's very honest about that).
Typo. It's obvious it can't be a revenue. Previous paragraph is dealing with the size of online gambling industry, next paragraph is about the same but for prediction market.
Well, the previous paragraph compares how much people bet online with how much people spend on airfare, which also isn't quite right. It assumes 100% of what people bet is lost. For sure, the house always wins, but the amount lost is probably closer to 50-60% of what is quoted.
It's market size. It shows the interest in some activity. Laundry and airfare are for sure necessary & valuable activities, whereas the interest of betting (for a society) is questionable.
The question is what do you do with your money. If you are a pharaon, and pay a good salary to build pyramids, is that good? People get paid, pharaon gets his pyramid. However, as a society, the loss is all the efforts that could have been spent on something much more useful, like hospitals, schools, roads... For the betting industry, no money is lost, it goes to the winner or the house. But how will these people use their money next?
Same as Block booking crypto trades as revenue.
Are the referenced companies referring to their volume as revenue?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/court-idf-reser...
This was just on the news:
"A reservist suspected of using classified information to place bets on the Polymarket prediction site served as a major in the Israeli Air Force, a Tel Aviv Court reveals.
The defendant was indicted alongside his alleged accomplice last month on severe security offenses, as well as bribery and obstruction of justice, after they allegedly bet on the timing of Israel’s opening strikes that kicked off the 12-day war with Iran last June.
The case was subject to a court-issued gag order, which was partially lifted this evening following a petition from several Hebrew-language outlets. The details of the case were cleared for publication, but the defendants’ names are still under wraps.
According to the indictment, the soldier was briefed on the June operation in a confidential meeting a day before it was carried out, then notified his civilian accomplice about the offensive. When Israeli warplanes were on their way to attack Iran, the reservist let the civilian know, and the latter placed a bet on the war’s timing.
The pair allegedly made $162,663 after winning the bet, which they agreed to split evenly between themselves."
In addition to this article, I've recently read this one [1], where the reported received numerous violence and death threats from people who wanted him to change the a story he published to match what they bet on Polymarket.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...
Yeah this is a much more likely outcome of unregulated gambling... I expect to hear a LOT more of this. Also plan for a swift, complete erosion of trust in sports officiating.
This is the literally the only use of prediction markets in the real world - insider trading leaks information
>literally the only use
I live in Taiwan
Can you find me an insurance company that will pay me out in case of a war with China? From what I see absolutely no one will insure that.
A $1k premium paid to Polymarket will cover me handsomely in the event of war and pay out instantly with no hassles.
A counterpoint to your hyperbole.
Hey, that's not fair! It's also used for degenerate gambling.
If you thought that was bad look at spx futures before trump iran announcement. $1.5b placement made 5 mins before trump spoke.
I’d love to read about their Opsec failures. It seems like an offline conversation or Signal chat with disappearing messages could’ve saved these two. Any links to details on the case?
The final conclusion about the evolving and rising focus on "money" as a core value is interesting, and one that seems to make sense to me.
I think most people before the age of information found meaning in life in these non-monetary "beliefs"... religion, community engagement, etc. Mostly to the benefit of the wealthy class.
I think people are finally waking up to the fact that the wealthy (parasite) class have been using these non-monetary values as a smokescreen for generations to extract more and more wealth out of the lower classes, and the internet has allowed this zeitgeist to forment.
Anecdotally, I've experienced this in the company i work at. For years and years and years, we would complain about low salaries, with respect to peer companies. And they would always throw distractions at us instead of just... raising salaries. "More happy hours, more team building activites, more company benefits that didnt actually cost anything". Anything but raise salaries.
I assure you that poor people have always been focused on money. Every time the rent is due, they are very aware. It's the wealthier folks who have historically had the privilege of being Bogleheads and ignore having to think about the financial implications of every decision they make.
Lower-income families have traditionally had community institutions to support them. You could be a church member for free, hang out at the union hall, or participate in any number of IRL activities that let you quit thinking about cashflow for a few blessed hours.
Replacing community engagement with an obsession over cash isn't healthy, either for individuals or communities.
But now the desire for earthly riches took a role similar to religion and it is being weaponized to extract even more wealth from the working class.
Yeah everyone likes to throw a stupid little comment at Robinhood but come on. My parents did not invest outside their 401k. My grandparents actually stuffed 20k in their mattress, must have been pretty good money when they put it under there.
We are approaching the first couple years of this country where investing knowledge has actually proliferated out of the country club. It is a huge shift in the tide but no one wants to talk about it, if only to make a jab at robinhood perhaps.
The rise of low/no fee brokers is a fantastic advancement for the reasons you cite. Robinhood gets grief because it tries to drive people to trade often and take riskier bets when the long-known wisdom is that accumulating wealth requires patience and diversification.
> Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.
Here's one story about gambling in the UK: the TV advertising is relentless and out of control after 9pm due to legislation passed in the early 00s. Gambling can quite literally lose you your house, friends and family. But apparently it's totally fine to advertise as long as HMRC get ££££. On some TV channels, every second advert, or worse, most adverts, are gambling. Bingo? Slots? Poker? Sports? All of the above.
The biggest UK tax payer for several years was Denise Coates.
Tobacco advertising, on the other hand, is totally banned in the UK, but won't lose you your house or family and friends (unless of course you die).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Coates
You forgot to mention the high street ...
Mine has a pub, a butcher, a baker, a sandwich shop, 3 coffee shops and 5 bookmakers.
No candlestick maker? I'm disappointed ;)
My local highstreet also had several betting shops where none previously existed. It's quite depressing really, and gambling invariably targets the poorest in the community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub-a-dub-dub
Most addictions will ruin your life - whether it is gambling, drugs or alcohol.
Right, so why advertise gambling or any other of them?
Food addiction kills too. Shall we stop advertising food?
Why should we advertise something that you have to go consume? Do you need advertising to tell you about bread, vegetables, meat?
> Do you need advertising to tell you about bread, vegetables, meat?
Looking around at the world, yes?
Less-heathy takeaway chains do advertise constantly, and concepts like the food pyramid are there to literally "tell you about bread, vegetables, meat" as an advertisement for a better alternative.
People aren't born knowing this - if they don't learn it from parents, they will either learn it from someone else, or not know it and have a poor diet out of ignorance.
> Food addiction kills too. Shall we stop advertising food?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5y2vzlyldo
> 4 January 2026: Junk food adverts are banned on television and online starting on Monday as part of a drive to tackle childhood obesity.
It seems that the factual answer is "yes", in certain conditions of the most addictive food and most susceptible audience.
South Park had the most honest alcohol ad, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJWEJuKXZyk
How much of this is fixed if a person is only able to bet token amounts on each outcome? Let's get crazy and make it $20. A few crazy people might run Sybil attacks but it'll be a lot more limited and obvious. Not that I'm opposed to consigning all these gambling apps back to the fiery depths from which they came, but if you do want to preserve the ability of healthy people to have a little bit of fun, limiting the bet size has almost no effect on that while drastically reducing the damage. It seems like a good compromise, if anyone is looking for one of those.
PredictIt operated with $850 limits for years, and overall this seemed fine. Limits of various sizes might make sense depending on the subject, where the risk of penalty greater outweighs the potential profits.
I'd bet that a significant majority of prediction market revenue comes from people who bet big.
So I expect your solution would fix all of it, as a second order effect, in that running one would stop being a viable business model.
That would be fine by me, but I don't think they need massive revenue to be viable. Certainly they would have to downsize from where they are now.
I bet that most of their revenue doesn't come from people who want to bet big!
If only there were some kind of market where we could materialise our bets...
You sound like the people proposing how a social network could operate without making people addicted to doomscrolling. Anyone can make a worse service like that but it won't stop the superior service from operating, which is the problem.
I guess I wasn't clear that I'm proposing a statutory limit on gambling amounts, not a voluntary limit by the service, as an alternative to banning it entirely.
I see, sorry.
I mean, you're not wrong, in retrospect I genuinely wasn't clear.
Part of the argument of prediction markets is that it incentivizes good forecasting. Theoretically if you wanted to concoct a novel political polling technique or rent some compute for a new hyper local weather model, you could recoup your costs via the prediction market.
I think in practice the volume of sharp money in the prediction markets is a small fraction and the majority would be better served with the limits you’re proposing
We're seeing high bets the day before, such that the bet goes through without too many people noticing and adjusting. Maybe forbidding bets X days before deadline would help to reduce chance of insider trading?
Or just shut down the whole thing. Bets on bombing is truly immoral and downright despicable.
There is a class of prediction markets that are useful and seem immune to most of these problems : play money prediction markets. I've been enjoying them for years; I feel they provide a useful service to understand what is going on in the world, and they don't seem to provide the perverse incentives that we are seeing here. Oh, and they seem to work just as well.
Indeed. I also want to give a recommendation in favour of forecast aggregation platforms like Metaculus and GJOpen. Aggregating forecasts works well even without phrasing it as gambling, because you can still have users compete to be the most accurate.
The benefit I see to prediction markets is that you don't have to constantly update your predictions, and yet they still provide useful results. Metaculus and friends are just too much work for me.
These "competitive forecasting" platforms seem very interesting. What do you need to be good at this sort of skill?
Strong beliefs that
- things rarely change,
- noise dominates most measurements,
- a good story is not evidence,
- it is very rarely possible to know things more certainly than 10--90 %.
Phrases to look up are "confirmation bias", "availability heuristic", "uncertainty calibration", "outside view", "Fermi method".
A good understanding of the world, your own capabilities, and how they relate to the capabilities of other players.
There is also some technical knowledge but that's easy to pick up.
Do you have a recommendation for a service? I'd like to try it out.
Is it specifically the financial maneuvering you like? Or do you want to test your prediction skills?
If you like financial maneuvering, Manifold is a popular play-money prediction market.
If you want to test your forecasting skill, treat the current Spring Cup on Metaculus as a warmup and then compete properly in the next seasonal cup.
Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading and perverse incentives. This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act).
Every new financial medium gets its moment in the sun when all the crooks extract everything they can, before eventually market governance steps in. Crypto's been in scammer phase for a while. It needs decentralized governance to solve it this time though, since obviously classic governance is a dumpster fire and couldn't enforce anything on crypto even if it tried.
> Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading
Why?
If a prediction market is supposed to predict it makes no sense to exclude the best informed people. If I want to know the risk of a Boeing airliner crashing this year, Boeing insiders have much more to contribute than armchair observers.
And if a Boeing insider sabotages a plane to profit on a prediction market - that's illegal. If they're willing to break the law on sabotaging planes, they're surely also willing to break the law on insider trading at the same time. If we think this is a realistic risk, prediction markets should be banned entirely.
Only reason to exclude insiders is if the real purpose of a prediction market is recreational gambling.
I agree. Don't bar anyone.
But do require KYC on all customers and require their profiles and wagers to be public. The societal values of prediction market data would be an order of magnitude more valuable this way.
And use of illegal insider info would cease.
How do you suppose that would work? The only predictions possible are things which are virtually impossible to influence, like atmospheric events?
> This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act).
Just because a rule was created after something bad happened doesn't mean that the rule is effective to prevent it from happening again. The most common result when they try to ban something without removing the incentive for it to happen is to cause it to happen less obviously. Then the rule (and all its unfortunate costs) gets credited with not observing the bad thing anymore, even though that's not the same as actually preventing it.
Notice that you can use the stock market in the same way as a prediction market. After that healthcare CEO got murdered the company's stock took a hit, as anyone could reasonably have predicted it would. That's a perverse incentive in line with betting that someone will kill the CEO. We don't really have a great way of preventing stock trading from creating that incentive, we mostly just rely on the fact that if you do the murder then murder is very illegal. But if that works for the stock market then why doesn't it work for prediction markets?
> Notice that you can use the stock market in the same way as a prediction market. After that healthcare CEO got murdered the company's stock took a hit, as anyone could reasonably have predicted it would. That's a perverse incentive in line with betting that someone will kill the CEO. We don't really have a great way of preventing stock trading from creating that incentive, we mostly just rely on the fact that if you do the murder then murder is very illegal. But if that works for the stock market then why doesn't it work for prediction markets?
This is true in theory, but in practice the impact of any regular individual's actions on a company is probably going to be small and uncertain enough that it's difficult to make a healthy and reliable profit from. Even the very extreme example of murdering the United Healthcare CEO seems to have caused the stock to drop ~16.5% (assuming the drop is entirely due to the murder). That's like placing a bet with ~1/6 odds. You'd need to short a lot of stock to make that worth the risk of murdering someone (leaving aside any moral issues obviously). You could use leverage to juice those returns but that is expensive and risky, too. If you can afford to deploy enough leverage to make it worth it, you can probably find ways to make money that don't carry a risk of the death penalty.
I guess viewed in this way a bet on a prediction market is like a very cheap, highly leveraged bet on a specific outcome. So the incentives are much stronger as the potential reward for the risk taken is greater.
> You'd need to short a lot of stock to make that worth the risk of murdering someone (leaving aside any moral issues obviously).
When they know exactly when something is going to happen, buying put options that are cheap because they're slightly out of the money seems like it would be pretty effective.
> I guess viewed in this way a bet on a prediction market is like a very cheap, highly leveraged bet on a specific outcome. So the incentives are much stronger as the potential reward for the risk taken is greater.
You seem to be trying to make this about leverage as if that's a thing that isn't available anywhere else.
Let's try another example. Some group breaks into the systems of some publicly traded company and gets access to everything. Now they're in a position to publicly disclose their trade secrets to competitors, publish internal documents that will cause scandals for the company, vaporize the primary and backup systems at the same time, etc. Anything that allows them to place a bet against the company gives them the incentive to do this; the disincentive is that the thing itself is illegal. Leverage gives them a larger incentive, but there are plenty of wages to place a leveraged bet in the stock market.
> When they know exactly when something is going to happen, buying put options that are cheap because they're slightly out of the money seems like it would be pretty effective.
But you don't know exactly what would happen. You know what you will do, but not how it will affect the company's stock price. Maybe it will go down a little, maybe it will go down a lot. Maybe you kill the CEO on the same day as good news is published about the company, which offsets the drop. Or maybe the market just decides the guy wasn't that good a CEO anyway. So you bought a bunch of cheap puts with a strike price of 100, but the stock only drops to 101, and you lose everything. You can buy puts with a higher strike but they will be more expensive.
> Leverage gives them a larger incentive, but there are plenty of wages to place a leveraged bet in the stock market.
Yes, but they are expensive, is my point.
Generally, the disincentive outweighs the incentive. You can increase the incentive through leverage. But that also increases the costs, which increases the disincentive.
There may well be situations where the incentive outweighs the disincentive. But in the context of traditional financial markets I think those situations are likely very rare due to the risks and costs, whereas with a predictions market the risks and costs could be reduced, so it is more likely to happen.
> But you don't know exactly what would happen. You know what you will do, but not how it will affect the company's stock price. Maybe it will go down a little, maybe it will go down a lot. Maybe you kill the CEO on the same day as good news is published about the company, which offsets the drop.
You never know exactly what would happen. You know what you will do, but not if the CEO is going to catch the flu and not show up that day, or have better security than you were expecting, or have a great surgeon, or a spouse who is willing to keep them on life support until after your prediction market contract expires.
> Yes, but they are expensive, is my point.
Only they're not. There are many ways to bet all or nothing on something people generally expect to have a <1% chance of happening, so that you either lose $1000 or make $100,000. Under normal circumstances you could make that bet 100 times in a row and lose $100,000 and the counterparty is happy to take all your money, but if you're able to do something to change the outcome yourself then it's different, which is why it's the same.
I don't buy it. It can easily be mirrored to hard money bets.
> There is a class of prediction markets that are useful
No there is not.
That's as damaging a statement as "soft" drugs or "problem" gambling.
Statements usured by corporate PR to set up a fake middle ground and delegate responsibility to the consumer for any "bad" behaviour.
There literally are drugs vastly less addictive and harmful than others. So some designation of some as "soft" and others as "hard" is not unwarranted (though we can argue where that cutoff is) and anything that paints all drugs the same is a false equivalence that suspiciously appears more ideologically anti-drug driven rather than impartial evidence-driven.
Same goes for anyone saying all gambling is the same.
Just game-theoretically, suppose you bet $100 on some disaster.
That disaster causes $10,000,000 of harm, but only causes you $90 of harm individually.
You've gained $10, but your $10 gain is a millionth of the harm caused.
Generally-speaking, there's an enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy. So now we have a mechanism by which individuals have a financial incentive to cause harm...
Don't these markets create a mechanism for society to race to self-destruction?
Search for "assassination markets", which is a longish treatment of this idea. Specifically, people collectively can bet large sums of money that X will not be killed Thursday at 5pm. And anyone can take the other side at insanely good odds...
Couldn't that be said of stock markets and any markets?
United Healthcare stock dropped 10% immediately after its CEO was killed.
Well, there are laws against insider trading.
Prediction markets advertise insider trading as a feature, and enforcement of financial crimes is a racket anyway. If you know the right people, make the right campaign contributions, laws just don't apply to you.
this kind of cynicism is malignant
See I would say the malignant part is the systems and people in power who enable and profit from corruption.
The statement that "this is how it works, it's completely corrupt" is what enables the corruption.
It is only through the collective demand that systems serve us that they can be aligned.
If you believe that the system is corrupt then your decisionmaking function will conclude that taking action to demand systems serve you is useless.
But it's only useless if we collectively believe it is useless.
This is what I mean when I say that cynicism is malignant. The more people believe it, the more true it is.
[dead]
but you don't deny there's some element of truth to it tho?
Is shorting a company and then murdering its CEO considered insider trading in your jurisdiction?
That wouldn't be insider trading; in fact unless the CEO's death was known to insiders, it almost by definition couldn't be insider trading.
It could be other types of fraud, however.
Wait, is the shooter in “insider” in this case?
Yes, and sounds like a great way to get RICO conspiracy to commit murder added to your charges just for trading on it.
How is that different from regular old insurance?
Insurance is usually for things that primarily affect the purchaser?
There is no law that requires that and plenty of policies are bought that don't directly effect the purchaser in the way you imply.
And in some of those cases they can warp incentives, right?
How does someone with a mere $10 stake have the opportunity to contribute to the cause of a $10mil disaster?
Realistically, they'd have to be far more connected to the event, and as such, far more exposed to some kind of risk.
Pessimistically, i imagine that's what they meant by "enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy". Like its a lot easier to destroy an art piece in a museum than to create one.
That simply describes entropy. I don't know what the example of someone putting a wager on an event represents.
Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan[1]:
“When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near the bomb shelter; we look at it every day’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really that popular over there?’” he added. “That’s very powerful. That’s an undeniable value proposition that did not exist before.”
I'm with Matt Levine here[2]:
"There is something particularly dystopian about the idea that:
a) Some countries will bomb other countries.
b) The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets.
c) This will cause the prediction markets to correctly reflect the probability of bombing, allowing the people getting bombed to avoid being bombed."
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/polymarke... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-12/lev...
This is naive. The people deciding about the bombing will profit most by taking a very large and unlikely position against the market’s predictions and then carrying it out immediately.
Anonymous trading on prediction markets leads to unpredictable chaos in the end. And as destruction is easier than creation that’s what we will see more of.
Example: a fake German market for train punctuality was announced to make a point recently. If it had been real, train staff and passengers could trivially have profited by betting against any expected punctual train and blocking a door for a few minutes. Or betting against many trains and throwing a hopefully fake body onto a busy line.
Having nice things in society is fragile and not a given. They mostly exist through mutual consent and mild disincentives to destroy the common good. Allow people to profit by destroying them and enough of them will.
> blocking a door for a few minutes. Or betting against many trains and throwing a hopefully fake body onto a busy line.
Not necessary. If you just bet against them being punctual always, you'll have a 80% plus success rate.
yes, but win ratio is adjusted to that.
Oh,
An adding bonus would be nations tilting prediction odds to get people sleeping in vulnerable places and then bomb those place - ideally the nation also reversing their deceptive bets at the last minute.
And as a cherry on the cake: making a bet a few hours before so they can profit (even more) from it.
I think the other side of the argument goes that (a) the bombings would happen anyway, and (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading. (The bombs "only" get marginally cheaper.) Thus the only actual effect is the early warning, which is a good thing in this case.
Like if someone managed to figure out a way to make slightly cheaper bombs but with the tradeoff that the cheaper bombs gave a few hours of eary warning to the people being bombed, I think I would prefer you used those bombs.
(There are many other cases where insiders may change the outcome to align with their bet. That is bad if the outcome is bad.)
> (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading
The people profiting aren't buying the bombs with their own money.
>bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits
You don’t actually believe bombs are sold without out a proper margin.
We're just in a bleak time. It seems that many people are scrambling to do the most harm possible. Everyone's building the torment nexus. I'm not sure what else to do but attempt to insulate my family from it.
I'm hoping that someday more people will appreciate the humor in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Until then, there is always "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/optimism-uncertai...
Whenever I think to myself "how did things get this bad?", I also force myself to think, "how did they get good, in the first place?"
Today, we are building the Torment Nexus. But yesterday, we were building the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, etc. etc. Things can get worse, but they can also get better - we just have to do our small part in making them better.
They got good through legislation.
The left is focused not on the correct thing (albeit a thing worthy of support), and the right refuse to acknowledge the benefit of regulation / legislation and are totally disenchanted with the possibility of politics while they just just blame the left for all their problems.
The article’s “worst case” is not dark enough.
The real evil is when someone ensures the famine occurs so they can profit from an outside betting position.
The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'.
I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity. I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city.
It’s always been bad, but in my eyes it’s so much worse now that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas or something to bet (and lose) big.
Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.
Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source of a large part of their revenue?
It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in somehow.
Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol - one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives against putting this cat back in the bag.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_R._Eadington
>Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
Explain this more? Let's assume you're Nate Silver and predict the 50 state outcome perfectly - you have a 50% in the class, so failing? Then the only way to "win" is to wager 50 points on the stock market (doesn't matter which way it goes). Wagering less makes no sense, because you start at 50 and so going "up" 25 to 75% protects nothing as the downside is still way below failing.
It sounds like a game theory question - you should be able to get 40 points on the states easy enough even if you get the toss-up ones wrong, and then gamble the full total on the stock market (which in general should go up, the market loves certainty and hates uncertainty).
It was exactly a game theory question, and a perfect exercise in real world betting markets. You’ll never have the most information and you’ll never be the biggest fish.
I learned the lesson that day, and I’d argue that even Obama with 365 electoral votes and control of the legislature learned it soon afterwards. Being a naïve hopeful Obama supporter, I bet 50 points on up and lost my ass.
Nate Silver came into the national spotlight after his analysis that year. There were other polling prediction models out of Princeton, but I heavily relied on Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight. I remember predicting every state correctly except North Carolina.
Interestingly in the context of this post, the University of Iowa has been hosting a market for real monetary binary options on US political outcomes for 30 years now. [1] It’s probably some small stakes fun for Midwest market makers looking for some action during off season corn futures.
Other things we learned: - The players club at Harrah’s marked the beginning of the rewards points programs available at nearly every single seller of goods today. - Casinos, in cracking down on card sharp teams playing blackjack with a mathematical edge and who had been 86’d but often returned in disguise, developed software to identify people from security camera footage by their stride. This was in 2008. - Bet the pass line, and stack the odds behind your number. It’s the best odds in the casino and nobody likes the guy betting Don’t.
[1] https://iem.uiowa.edu/iem/
+1 please explain (and tell us your bet & final grade!!)
My friend's idiot loser husband got addicted to sports betting and day trading and lost their life savings and even spent kids college funds. She found out because he had started to apply for a home equity loan to catch up on some of his debts and they called her to verify some paperwork.
The only reason I found out was because she had a HUGE obnoxious gorgeous flower arrangement delivered to her at work and I asked her what they were for and she started crying and then told me they were his apology flowers - that he put on her credit card!
She doesn't want to divorce because their kids but I'm encouraging her to think about protecting herself and I sent her some attorney recommendation links. He's never had a decent job it's majority her income so divorcing isn't even that favorable for her now afaik. Sad situation.
> He's never had a decent job it's majority her income so divorcing isn't even that favorable for her now afaik
It is totally favorable, because he is going to make more debt. And if she does not divorce, she will be responsible for that debt. Moreover, money she earns after divorce are her except for the part of debt she is already responsible for. Right now, they are theirs, he has equal access to them and she is half responsible for his current and future debts.
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
Can't say I agree with that specific take (and find it a bit naive to be honest), unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has.
I think the difference between the two is Amazon and Meta do provide some utility to balance it out, whereas gambling is purely a net negative on society. You can be young and naive enough to believe you're "making the world a better place" in big tech. You can't work on pure gambling products without being a scammer at heart; you know what you signed up for.
You can, because the definition of gambling is loose. Magic The Gathering is gambling. You by a pack and hope you get a valuable card, no different than buying a lottery ticket and hope you win. Pokemon Go is also gambling. You pay to hatch eggs and hope you get a rare pokemon. I'm pretty confident the people who made these games don't consider their design to be evil or wrong. In fact, I'm sure they see themselves has having provided millions of people with fun entertainment.
If we end up losing Magic The Gathering when we ban gambling, I will somehow find a way to sleep at night. Yes, all of these card games that are targeted at kids and young people are somewhat exploitative and are a pipeline into more conventional gambling games + whatever esoteric online pay-to-play stuff comes next.
I'd be slightly more specific with those assertions, and point them at the gambling mechanics themselves, although I do agree. The games are not inseparable from those mechanics, and are quite fun on their own.
I just got into magic, and am sadly watching my more gambling prone friends fall down that rabit hole. They keep asking me what cards I've bought or whatever and the answer is none, aside from a starter deck. I have literally zero interest in engaging with any game in that way, despite enjoying the booster pack gamble as kid with pokemon.
If I were to gamble, I'd much rather throw a couple bucks on who wins a game rather than what cards I'll get.
One of the only good things I got from MtG is Card Forge (https://card-forge.github.io/forge/), an open-source unofficial rule engine that also contains a desktop and a mobile app.
They allow playing a game similar to the old Shandalar from Microprose, in which you wander around a world dueling enemies (playing MtG against them), getting money and resources, and improving your deck until you can beat the big bosses.
It's one of the best ways to play the game: single-player, offline, and unofficial. Therefore you can have almost any card in existence without having to gamble with real-world money. It lets you enjoy the strategic part of the game and its meta, including deck building. The only downside is that the single-player game robs you of part of the charm, that is playing with other people.
Xmage is basically an unofficial variant of MTGO that does support actual multiplayer. All the cards are free, you don’t even have to grind to get them.
It is ugly as sin, but so is MTGO.
Fascinating, thanks for the link!
I think Richard Garfield would not be a fan of the "gambling" or "speculation" parts of MTG. To the extent that they exist I do not think they contribute to the quality of the games or the amount of entertainment.
Really? Because he invented the gambling part of MTG - booster packs and then introduced drafting to get people to crack even more.
He’s not full time (or even part time) on MTG these days but he is often called in as a consultant.
Not to mention the ante mechanic, abandoned in 1995.
Nothing Meta has done comes remotely close to paying for the damage they've done to individuals and to society as a whole. I think the metamates know exactly what they're doing. There are innumerable documents with people at all levels admitting to literal crimes and how best to cover them up or minimize them. These are the types of people you wouldn't let into your home for fear of things going missing.
This comment would make more sense if it were before the new wave of prediction markets, which are high-profile gambling products clearly largely made and popularized by true believers who think they are making the world a better place.
Then you don't want to hire someone so insane as to think that gambling is making the world a better place.
> clearly largely made and popularized by true believers who think they are making the world a better place.
Is it clear? To a lot of people they come off as “true believers” in the same way as Kenneth Copeland and all the prosperity gospel hustlers. A lot of people thought Elizabeth Holmes was a true believer too. Easy to believe in something when it’s making you rich. Maybe VCs are just suckers for a bit of charisma.
Thinking gambling in any way or form makes the world a better place or just leaves it as it is, is utterly delusional and any contact (or support) with that person should be avoided like the plague.
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Sounds like there's a good chance your company is one of the few I'd want to work for then. I don't think I'd meet your standards though, having worked in decentralized finance in the past
Big “you can’t fire me, I quit!” vibes.
I’m guessing the Venn diagram of “companies who won’t hire ex-faang” and “companies who can afford to hire ex-faang” is basically just two circles.
For us it just turned out that their experience and mindset wasn't really applicable or appreciated, and most of our peers felt the same way after the first round of ex-faang people washed through.
And none of them are actually hiring.
Sibling comments are right. Refusing to hurt people is a crime against money.
Wow. Glad i wont ever work for/with you. Not because i worked at any of those “bad bad” companies but because your take is a horrible sign of what to expect.
Like, if it was a pm or leadership person i can kinda understand it. They are the ones pushing direction. But what, some call center support guy is sol because his resume has kelshi on it? Not everyone is in a position to have luxury beliefs.
I definitely think there's a middle ground here, that the commenter to which you are replying may also be alluding. If a human is scanning resumes, job titles tend to be more important than the company, although both are obviously relevant.
So yes, if one is "Senior VP - Engagement Optimization" at e.g. Draft Kings, that would imply a level of culpability for "gambling experience = do not hire".
But if the title is "call center support - kelshi - 6 mo. contract"? Sure. I don't think the policy needs to be as stringent as all that.
Not necessarily disagreeing with either perspective, since they don't seem incompatible to me.
But if you are hiring people that have had that luxury, and yet have chosen immoral paths, what does that say about them and about you?
Sure, but the vast majority of even technical positions are not in the luxury belief bucket.
Hmmm,
So my friend works for a sports betting app and I personally do judge him from a philosophical point of view. I would never! Same with Meta, I would never!
But since I never once thought to de-friend him, I thought more about it. I leaned in. And TLDR: we are all part of this machine. Literally, everyone's work output gets bundled up into public retirement funds invested in these baddie public companies.
What's really the difference? Guy earns his paycheck directly, must be worse than all of us complicit to make money on stock market go up? Yes stock-market metaphor is intentional. The original gambler's paradise.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes. You really think someone who took a job at Google as a bright-eyed young graduate is forever tainted and could never be worth hiring?
If it is your company then this is fine, it is your money afterall, and can do as you see fit. If you are employed or have co-shareholders, you are managing someone elses money. And you are not supposed to act within your morals, but those of the company. It would be kind of hipocritical to act on your own morals using someone elses money - up to the point where it could be illegal misapropriation. And then taking the moral highground and being judgemental about people because they worked in gambling is probably something one should reconsider.
> It would be kind of hipocritical to act on your own morals using someone elses money - up to the point where it could be illegal misapropriation
This is hyperbole. Refusing to hire anyone out of any of the big tech companies is an own goal. But being silly in management is absolutely legal. The only legal obligation I can think of revolves around disclosure, i.e. you should be open with investors and the company about the fact that you're putting up these moral guardrails, rails which may have effects on the company's competitiveness.
It is not black/white. If you have a qualified candidate that asks less money and reject them over a less-qualified candidate on the sole grounds they worked for a prediction marked, it could be called silly. If the discprancy in qualification and salary demends is high enough and you do this repeatedly, it can be gross misconduct and not only a reason to be fired, but to be held financially liable for the damage.
> If the discprancy in qualification and salary demends is high enough and you do this repeatedly, it can be gross misconduct and not only a reason to be fired, but to be held financially liable for the damage
Again, major caveat, if you do it without disclosing your reasons, possibly. And unless you're personally profiting from it in some way, highly doubtful on financial liability. (Disclaier: not a lawyer.)
Just put it at top of values or some kinda culture fit or hiring policy document, and youre fine.
PS: Not absolutely every company has to let go of all morals and focus purely on profit. Thats the beauty of companies, you can open and lead them for different reasons.
Im from Germany and there are many companies like that, there the Values (or a Mission) that are actually taken into account when decision making and sometimes you lose money but that's expected and normal.
Acting within your morals is not incompatible with serving the company's interests. Especially if it means your team is very much still competent while maintaining a culture that is healthy. That leads to better delivery.
Avoiding working in deeply unethical areas also shields the company from legal or PR liability.
It is compatible if you align your actions with the morals of the company. A big sign that you are not aligned with the values of the company, if you do not want anybody within that company (especially your boss) to know on what moral grounds you make your decision and justify your actions.
No, you should always follow you're own moral code.
Companies don't have morals, only people. Abdicating your moral responsibilities because you're employed is cowardice.
Gross! There is no arena of life in which I can ethically abstain from adhering to my own morals.
I am acting on my own morals when I work, shop, flirt, cook, shit, and ride my bicycle! My morals do not get to recuse themselves just because a paycheck is involved! What sort of evil cope is this??
> up to the point where it could be illegal misapropriation
Huh..?
> And then taking the moral highground and being judgemental about people because they worked in gambling is probably something one should reconsider.
Ah I see.
> unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has
It depends on the role. If you were doing something deeply technical, or facing customers who loved your work, I think you get a pass. If you were building features nobody outside your company is thankful for, you need to do a convincing repentance act. If you worked on Instagram for Kids or whale optimization, fuck off.
I remember a company during the interview asked me are things I do not work with or don't like, especially since they had a very diverse team culturally where e.g. some folks couldn't work on any kinda gambling resembling platform due to their religious beliefs.
I told them that TBH didn't think much before about it, appreciate the question and to answer: I could never see myself working on weapons used for war, products used by countries to repress their population (relevant due to my upbringing) or any kinda of mass surveillance system. The HR just noted them down but I saw every technical person smiled and understood truly what I'm talking about and they insured me that they so and so don't ever work on those kinda projects.
PS: before someone comes now and says "BUT DO U USE IG?!" No I don't use most social platforms but also if I did just because I'm flawed and the system isnt perfect, doesn't mean I'm gonna give up on all my morals right away and not choose better when I have the option.
Building part of a killing machine isn't really something you can defend, even if you weren't working on the part of the machine that does the killing.
> Building part of a killing machine isn't really something you can defend
Of course it is. I don't personally have an issue with folks who worked on weapons of war. Particularly if they're honest with themselves about the work they did. Doubly particularly if they felt a sense of mission in it.
And in an integrated culture and economy, the difference between a person who happens to work at a company with an evil project in a random division and a person who grows complacent about politics with their non-problematic job is thin to the point of vanishing.
> > If you worked on Instagram for Kids or whale optimization, fuck off.
> > I don't personally have an issue with folks who worked on weapons of war.
Makes sense.
What part? If you work on the manufacturing line for bolts, and one of the ten thousand bolts your company makes is sometimes used in cruise missiles, are you a munitions worker?
I think you're likely trying to say "the guy who wrote the positioning code" is as much a killing machine maker as the guy who loaded the explosives.
We all live in glass houses
Do me a favor. Go to Ukraine with someone who worked on the Javelin anti-tank missile and tell them that. I bet the guy who worked on the Javelin will be considered a hero. You will likely receive a kick in the balls for ever daring to criticize him or repeating your post. Your take is naive in the extreme.
Or the young person who needs a job and doesn't yet have OP's fully formed understanding of exactly where the line is - apparently gambling bad/ ad tech OK.
If they got a job at one of those companies, they could've gotten a job elsewhere. It's a specific choice, and "but I'm only 25, how could I possibly be expected to know right from wrong" isn't really an excuse.
Morals start and stop somewhere, please don't attack people when they actually show some proper morals on this forum despite the employment of many members here.
It depends, if the morals cause more harm than they prevent, then no, the people espousing those "morals" don't deserve respect. They should be treated as naive which is what they are. Also, this is why we have the phrase, "virtual signaling" which specifically means a "moral" which causes more harm than good and seems to exist mostly to make the speaker seem more ethical than they actually are. Ignorance isn't a virtue and it shouldn't be treated as such.
Can you provide examples of morals that cause more harm than they prevent?
Why do you think virtue signaling causes harm?
Can you explain the relevance of 'ignorance isn't a virtue'?
> "virtual signaling" which specifically means a "moral" which causes more harm than good
Literally not what that means, at all. What a ridiculous assertion.
Naive? I think it shows a higher than average level of awareness. Gambling is rent-seeking that targets vulnerable individuals. It's really only a small step away from dealing in addicting drugs; and is in some ways worse, because it addicts not just individuals, but also cities and countries who get used to the tax output.
this is a false equivalence. Amazon and Meta have caused plenty of damage, companies in our capitalist economies are bad etc. But shipping you books or connecting you to other people isn't inherently evil. There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is. It's been a vice in virtually every culture for thousands of years. It's akin to peddling drugs. The practice itself is corrosive and destroys people.
It's one thing to acknowledge that any for profit company in some way behaves badly, but you can't change the world. You can choose not to sell poison.
> There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is.
I think this is waaaay too black and white. Gambling can be fun, and there isn't anything wrong with enjoying gambling in a healthy manner. It is very comparable to drinking, I think. I refuse to apologize for enjoying the occasional drink or the occasional game of poker.
I like a poker game with friends, I enjoy sitting at a blackjack table for a few hours sometimes. I have even enjoyed entering a few poker tournaments.
There is a line between a poker game with friends, or even a professional poker industry, and a sophisticated tech company operating a nationwide low-friction gambling app, incentivized to optimize harming its users as much as possible. This line was enshrined into law until recently.
I agree, which is why I think it is going too far to say “anyone who works in the gambling industry is bad”
I have no problem with gambling as long we are absolutely sure its not done by children and teens, heavily regulated, strong limits (e.g. one play per day), required training or community memberships at addiction groups and things like that.
I didn't finish the full registration but Polymarket basically didn't ask about anything besides email and new pass. Maybe later when someone wants to bet but it should be harder and take a week at least like a cooldown effect, and never more than 100 EUR at a time.
There are many ways to heavily regulate it so that a few people can enjoy it at times occasionally but help those people who need it and make it very hard for them to come back. But then the income iwould be so small it wouldnt land on the news anymore.
PS: Not an expert in gambling and addiction, my concrete examples might not work but still I haven't seen other efforts so that was my point.
Between these I think Amazon is less bad. It's a monopoly & monopsony which causes a lack of innovation and (eventually) higher prices but it's also a much more efficient way to sell things and it doesn't destroy the fabric of society or anything. Meta though is just as bad if not worse than any gambling site out there. Its products are optimized to destroy your attention span, feed you polarizing content, destroy your mental health and waste hours of your time every day all while ironically making you less connected to other people because users won't get off their phones and have a conversation.
Amazon is not a monopoly. See Walmart, Ebay, etc. Lots of companies sell products online.
> (eventally) higher prices
I have not noticed Amazon charging higher prices than others. The difficulty in charging higher prices is competitors emerge.
Amazon extracts a lot of the value of a purchase from the seller's take. Sellers risk sanctions if they sell a product cheaper thru their brand website.
It's normal for wholesale prices being at 50% to 60% of what the retailer will sell it for. It's always been like that.
And those wholesalers would not do business with you if you undercut their retail price.
Amazon's practice is normal throughout the industry.
I know this because my business in the 80s would wholesale my products through mail order retailers.
Honestly, i think apple is worse wrt gambling then either meta or Amazon . Apple has been allowing and pushing “gamble-lite” products for years on the app store. So much gatcha game slop on there it is genuinely unusable for me. Even worse, they are now optimizing ad revenue for those that pay to push their crap into ads u cannot skip.
I seriously doubt mr jobs wouldnt take one look at the app store home screen and puke in disgust at how awful it is.
I don't like Amazon personally. But how is it like gambling or social media? I guess shopping can be an addiction but wouldn't that condemn the entire retail sector?
I'd be ok with the rule only if the candidate liked the field. I respect anyone who is willing to have a bad time in order to put food on the table, and be upfront about it. There's plenty of psychopathic candidates where I won't get that datapoint simply because they were luckier with the job market.
> I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity
This triggers thoughts. I don't like people being taken advantage of. At the same time, I like my personal liberties.
It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics. That sucks and you could spin this has the liquor companies taking advantage, but I have tons of friends that enjoy drinking and tons of good experiences drinking with them (wine/beer/cocktails) in all kinds of situations (bars/sports-bars/pubs/parties/bbqs). I don't want that taken away because some people can't control their intake.
Similarly the USA is obese so you could spin every company making fattening foods (chips/dips/bacon/cheese/cookies/sodas/...) as taking advantage (most of my family is obese (T_T)) but at the same time, I enjoy all of those things in moderation and I don't want them taken away because some people can't handle them.
You can try to claim gambling is different, but it is? Should Magic the Gathering be banned (and Yugioh Card,Pokemon Cards, etc..)? Baseball cards? I don't like that video games like Candy Crush apparently make money on "whales" but I also don't want people that can control their spending and have some fun to be banned from having that fun because a few people can't control themselves.
I don't have a solution, but at the moment I'd choose personal liberties over nannying everyone.
> It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics.
I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme societal harm.
Would you be opening to banning just this one thing and then calling it a day and opening the floor back up to such arguments? I think modern politics is too caught up in the bureaucracies of maybe to let good ideas be carried out - honestly, this thought line could easily be written up into an argument that parallels strong-towns. Local bureaucracy is rarely created for a downright malicious reason - here we have a change that could cause an outsized positive outcome so why should we get caught up in philosophical debates about how similar decisions might be less positive and let that cast doubt on our original problem?
> I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme societal harm.
I am pretty sure anyone without a vested interest will also realize that alcoholism has caused extreme societal harm as well. I would say with pretty strong certainty that alcohol has caused more damage, and is currently causing more damage, than gambling. I would be VERY curious to hear someone try to make an argument that more damage is caused by gambling than drinking. Drunk driving kills about 13,000 people in the US every year. Drunk driving accounts for 30% of all traffic fatalities. THIRTY PERCENT! I am sure we all know alcoholics, and so many people have been abused by angry drunks. The raging abusive alcoholic parent is a trope for a reason.
So clearly, we should not get too 'caught up in the bureacracies of maybe' and go ahead and banning just this one thing. Surely banning alcohol will make the world a better place!
Well, we tried that. It was a horrible failure. It lead to the rise of organized crime, and that fact is STILL harming us to this day, almost 100 years after we reversed the decision to ban alcohol.
In fact, when we legalized alcohol, a lot of the organized crime moved into gambling, and have used the fact that it is illegal to fund crime for decades.
I also hate how sports gambling and now prop gambling has taken over. I don't think we should just sit here and do nothing, but there are a lot of things we can do that isn't outright banning, which I think is bad for a lot of reasons.
We should outlaw gambling advertising, just like we did with tobacco. I am fine with adding other restrictions, and placing more responsibility to identify and protect problem gamblers onto the gambling companies. I am open to hearing other ideas, too.
My biggest problem with your comment is the idea that we should stop thinking about the consequences of an outright ban and just go ahead and ban it now. This isn't a 'philosophical debate', it is trying to make sure your action doesn't cause more harm than good. I think looking at other vices, seeing how we deal with those and what has happened when we have tried things like banning in the past, to inform us about how we can mitigate the harm gambling does to our society is a good thing.
We ban other drugs though? Just saying that we DO ban things already...
Yeah, and that is a great example of how it doesn’t work.
I agree, to a point, but it seems like this is the false dilemma that comes up every time, meanwhile there are achohol, fast food, and gambling ads imbued in nearly all popular entertainment and everywhere in public.
Is severely restricting the marketing of those things not a valid step in between having or not having liberties? For an adult to be free to engage in gambling, does insidious advertising also need to be permitted everywhere? If say 25% of people engaging with a highly addictive activity can't responsibly regulate their behavior with it, is it important that we allow a contingent of everyone else to abuse them?
I think about it like property rights and others. If we want everyone to respect the idea of private property ownership, then policy should act to contain abuse of those rights and somewhat fairly distribute access to them. If only an older richer generation benefits, and everyone else pays rent and effectively has to give up those rights, then eventually opposition to them should accumulate. I'm much more interested now in seeing bans on the ownership of multiple residential properties within the same municipality at present, and sympathizing with people seeking a market crash, than I am to actually try and buy a house, because the ratio is so wildly in favor of one group over another.
If only 25% of people didn't know someone who ruined their life gambling—and it's only a matter of time—then it would be potentially acted upon much more severely.
Alcohol, especially hard alcohol, used to have limits on advertising. Baseball is now literally sponsored by/partnered with Polymarket.
https://www.mlb.com/press-release/press-release-mlb-names-po...
Physical cards don't have the same 'whale' issue as electronic gambling/games on a phone that are designed to get you exactly to the point where you go 'ok, $20 more', that always is your pocket ready to feed that itch. No physical game/liquor store is using that kind of psychology or instant gratification (my understanding is addictiveness tied to action/reward length, with the most addictive things the ones with the most instant grattification?).
You also have an upper limit (which might be surprisingly high) with things like alcohol; nobody is drinking 200 gallons of whiskey a day, they'd be dead.
But nothing really limits how much you can burn gambling in a day. Even per app limits can be worked around with multiple accounts and multiple games.
Personal liberties are overrated, and a functioning society is underrated. OnlyFans, sports betting, and junk food appeal to some people with low impulse control and high time preference in the short term, but have massive negative consequences on everyone in the long run.
Personal liberties being overrated is a wild take. I feel like this is one of those things that is easy to say when it isn't something you are interested in being infringed upon. I would be curious if you would feel the same way if people were trying to ban something you want to do.
The idea that prioritizing the good of society, rather than one's personal desires, is considered a "wild take" is just a reflection of the culture of narcissism you live in.
We probably could both be more nuanced with our statements.
What I hear when you say “the good of society” is that this means we would allow the majority to choose what is “for the good of society” and then enforce that on others.
You might not mean that. You are probably thinking of obvious “good” like not dying and not going bankrupt. But that is just what you are thinking of.
There are a lot of people who think other things are what is meant by “the good of society”. Lots of people think keeping trans people from having gender affirming surgery is “for the good of society”. Lots of people think requiring teaching the 10 commandments in school is “for the good of society”.
There are views like this on all sides. Some people think owning guns are for the good of society while some people thinking banning them is for the good of society. Some people think allowing people to eat meat harms society. Some people think gay marriage harms society.
So, do we allow all personal freedoms to be voted on by the populace? Or do we make the burden higher to infringe on individual freedoms?
Now, I do think we can place some limits when the damage far outweighs the cost of denying the freedom, but it has to really be worth it, because yes, individual freedom is very, very important.
Again, it is kind of crazy to take polar opposite views on this.
We mostly all grow up starting off with very few personal liberties and gaining them as we get older. We routinely take them away from people of they show they cannot be trusted with those liberties.
At present that process is fairly blunt, but it could be more nuanced. And that doesn't have to mean micro judging every interaction like China's social credit system. It could mean to allow freedoms wherever possible, but curtail those freedoms, where it has a negative impact on the rest of us.
And I think the best way of doing this is to put responsibility on the person or group causing the negative impact. So the gambler who embezzles money due to the addiction is just as responsible as the company who enables their addiction. Why cant we send both to jail? Or if there is not enough cause to deprive them of liberty, divert them from jail under probation. For a company that could mean enforcing open books and monitored communications, to make sure they are on the straight and narrow..
What we need to do though is to value both society and personal liberty.
It's not polar opposite views, I'm just saying that personal liberties are overrated not that they're inherently bad.
There are entire political schools of thought that put maximizing personal liberty above everything, and the trend in America has been to allow more vices at the cost a functioning society. Sports betting just being a recent example.
> And I think the best way of doing this is to put responsibility on the person or group causing the negative impact.
Agreed. There are people profiteering at the cost of society and they should be punished for it.
> What we need to do though is to value both society and personal liberty.
Also agreed. We are not really that far off in conclusions I believe.
The market producing what people desire is a functioning society. All the concern about so called addiction is simply a displaced puritanism disguised as humanism.
So, adults who gamble a lot never steal from their parents, siblings and friends in order to keep on gambling?
A father who gambles a lot would never threaten his parents or his wife's parents to stop allowing those parents to visit their grandchildren unless those parents give the father money for gambling? (I.e., the father is making the threat not because he judges the grandparents to be a bad influence on the child, but rather to extract money from the grandparents that the grandparents would not otherwise choose to give because they know it will just go to gambling.)
In your opinion, it is displaced puritanism to want to do something about the fact that in our society such things happen frequently?
This ignores the fact that as a society there are certain desires that are agreed upon as harmful, such as CSAM. Everything must have its limits.
You use the words "so called addiction" as if addiction is not an extremely well-documented pyschological (and in some cases physical) phenomenon. Gambling preys on the fact that the variable reward rate method of reinforcement is the one that produces the most dopamine in our brains. Unless someone is acutely aware of how they are being manipulated it is very easy to become addicted to something that is financially dependent on your addiction.
> I don't have a solution,
Just try to entertain any alternatives. Any at all.
There could be public option to opt-in to have your specific “personal liberties” curtailed, like for alcohol. Doesn’t affect you at all. Completely opt-in. Only for those who want it.
No solutions? Or no corporate-backed solutions?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532954
It's just not going to be a clear hard line. Would it be ok for alcohol companies to sneak in an additive that makes those who consume their product ten times as likely to develop alcoholism? I think that's a different scenario than just selling a product, and I think that there is a lot of corporate activity just like the former.
What you're arguing for is more or less what the status quo has been for gambling. Like gambling? Cool! You can go to Vegas or a casino on native lands to do it. We have geofencing for mobile apps as well if you don't want to sit next to a smoker pulling a slot machine. Curbing it like this -- but not making it entirely unavailable -- acts as a buffer against the social malaise described in the article.
Why does it have to be either/or? Why not just ban the thing you don't want and just criminalise the whaling?
an added negative aspect of going further down the banning path is:
it lessens the need (or signal) to improve education, or does it not?
Not talking about the theory part of education, more the parts that are not handled well in schools like e.g. (!) habits and understanding better what is behind your daily actions (often “Glaubenssätze” are the reason). Many important parts of education is assumed to happen at home, and only very much later I saw through close friendships to what and what extent (!) some people have to go through… not having grown up in a household permitting learning essentially important life skills (or usually worse… grew up with mindsets that make it very much harder to tackle problems in a helpful way).
TLDR: More banning can result in a weaker signal to improve aforementioned (!) classical education weaknesses, which can spiral into more problems, more need and calling for banning/micro-managing adults, more resistance, more damaging/self-damaging adult actions, … spiral (and bigger threatening fights over the different approaches and the very real felt need to restrict others to feel safe).
That is a topic that I think AND care a lot (!!) about, so very happy for comments pros and cons (but please in a constructive manner). Also very happy about private messages/new insights/blindspots/…
This is definitely an aspect, but it's also a continuum - there are some people who will "never" be able to be educated out of addiction. Something needs to be done to protect them (or we just admit there's a subclass of human who exists to feed other parasitic ones).
25% is too low, I think it's more like 80% of alcohol sales to drinkers that consume unhealthy amounts (whether that makes you an "alcoholic" or not is rather subject).
Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"
It'd actually be quite easy to set certain sane limits on gambling like you can't gamble more than 1% of your annual income per year, but I bet gambling platforms would fight that like the plague because those are their whales, the true addicts.
I know 100s of people who've been to vegas and had a good time gambling, not one of them would say "I wish I'd never gambled in the first place". I personally know zero people who gambled so much they regret it. I'm not denying those people exist, but I suspect if you ask everyone, a very small percent have had a strong negative experience
Yes it's a very small % of the population, but it's actually a significant percent of the earnings of these platforms.
Just for illustration -- when I worked at Zynga they'd sell in-game purchases for over $10k USD for virtual items because there were people who just couldn't help themselves, and those "whales" were actually the bulk of the profit of the company.
That's why these platforms should have mandatory sane limits that can only be exempted with special circumstances.
It has to be regulated outside of the platform, because otherwise you just get people using multiple platforms.
If the maximum you could spend gambling each day was $20 across all online platforms, you'd not really have an issue.
> Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"
I don't think this is a fair comparison, because it is much easier to tie losing all your money to gambling than it is to tie your health issues to twinkies. For one, it isn't just twinkies, it is a bunch of different foods, and the consequences are temporally separated from the action; you don't eat a twinkie and immediately notice you are bigger and less healthy. Your heart attack will come years down the line, and there was no one action you took that you can regret, so the feeling is not the same. Gambling is very easy to feel the pain, you lose a bet and you lose the money, immediately.
The real litmus test for your beliefs is gun rights. Taken to it's logical conclusion you would think that you would be staunchly pro 2A.
I'm not sure my position on 2A but it seems you're making a pretty big leap to connect them.
Guns kill others. To me, that's a big difference. Gambling does not, only indirectly, you gamble your money away your family doesn't eat. But if you're going indirect than anything fits. Cars kill more than guns.
You could argue the similarity is that some people can be responsible with guns and others can't but you're back the previous point. Irresponsible gun use directly harms others. Irresponsible gambling at most indirectly harms others.
> Cars kill more than guns.
In most countries, but not in the US.
Just some context because gun violence studies are probably the most manipulated data sets in history. The two numbers (auto deaths and gun deaths) are pretty close to each other and different policies can and do push one above the other.
- Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.
- This wasn't true before about 2015 and the change (increase in non-suicide gun deaths) over the last decade is largely the consequence of 'defund the police' policies.
- 90+% of gun violence happens in about 4 urban zip codes, all of which have some of the strictest gun control laws in the US.
There is a reason you have never heard a criminologist rail about guns (its usually a sociologist). The data points to problems with other policies. Also gathering the data honestly is difficult; people stop reporting types of crimes when the police stop investigating those types of crimes.
PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.
Not to get into a gunfight in the gambling hall, but:
> Most of those gun deaths are suicides and the vast majority would happen anyway without guns.
Apparently any form of obstacle between a suicidal person and their gun greatly reduces successful suicides.
Things like the gun being in a safe that McSuicidepants owns, operates, and can get in with a fingerprint. Things like the bullets being on the other side of the room.
Americans desperately trying to justify their firearm fetish is embarrassing.
> PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.
Roll eyes emoji.
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
I appreciate your approach, but I wonder: would you hire somebody with a past in Meta, or ByteDance (to just name two)? They are at least as bad in pushing addiction to people, maybe worse if you think about the scale.
It's a very different kind of addiction.
Working in sports bettings is like working on an online casino.
A feed is optimized for engagement.
A casino is optimized to take your rent money.
The broader move, "you don't like X? so Y is good?," can extend forever. Defense contractors, payday loan apps, ad-tech...
They earn billions from pushing gambling as well, substantial portion of their ads.
Gambling and weapons (or "defence" depending on perspective) are two industries I refuse to work on principle.
On my deathbed I want to look back on life and feel I've made a small positive impact on the world.
If your deathbed is at the hands of an adversary that beat you because you didn't have any weapons, do you think your views might change?
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
I do not like gambling or the prevalence of gambling products, but this is not a good thing for you to do.
You should not ban people from your job for reasons that are not relevant to the job you're hiring for. People take jobs for many reasons, including some times simply needing to take the first job they can get in order to pay the bills.
People also change their minds. Working for a gambling product company doesn't mean the person is still pro-gambling.
or even if they are pro-gambling jeez would you never be able to work with someone you disagreed with politically
Having your job eligibility depend on your boss aligning with your personal morals on topics that have nothing to do with work is terrible
I'm surprised there's so much support for this in these HN comments.
Do you really want your labor enriching someone you think is a bad person? Do you want someone whose values go against yours being in a position of power over you?
Yes, I'm not so petty that I wish poverty upon everyone who holds a opinion different from mine!
I'm a live and let live kind of guy
And if they're not live and let live people? If they're working to ban or destroy something you value highly? To harm you or someone you care about?
thats reasonable, but its a question of degree. for me gambling and predictions markets dont meet that bar
Not wanting to work for someone or not wanting to hire someone is not equivalent to wishing poverty on them.
My daughter thinks shrimp are adorable little animals and doesn't eat them. That's a moral choice she has every right to make. She is not saying anyone who eats shrimp is a terrible person or trying to outlaw it.
> and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
I encourage this concept but also to expand it further, including the ones who work on other evil schemes like the ones used to violate your privacy, sell your data, and participate in sketchy business and/or contracts. Just like how I don’t want to work with someone who develops a gambling platform, I don’t want to work with someone who’s building a cameras spying on public, an app that use facial recognition against strangers, an app that track people, an AI to automate killing, a cloud that host and process such systems. There should be an open source database that has lists of all people who worked/working in such companies, categorized by industry (gambling, privacy, etc.), where anyone can look up potential employees, getting the names is easy when you have the best OSINT goldmine out there (LinkedIn), plus manual submission. Some people have no morals or intrinsic values to prevent them from working in legal yet shady businesses, those however will double think their decision when they know there will be a consequences and they won’t be hired anywhere else.
...or you could look at their resume. btw, maybe i'm missing the joke, but working on the system you're describing would put you on the black list.
The paradox of the paradox of tolerance.
Anyone who worked in it? Like someone who needed a salary took a job, and now due to your grandstanding they're locked in to keep working in that industry because they can't get a job elsewhere?
I'm not sure your virtue signalling has the effect you want it to have. In fact I think it has the exact opposite effect
The intended effect is to feel good about oneself, so I’m sure it’s working fine.
What this tends to largely accomplish is ensure that those who come from non-traditional backgrounds are further locked out of mainstream high-end tech jobs. If you grew up in a rough area with shitty parents, didn’t go to college, and came into the industry entirely self-taught there aren’t that may decently paying jobs in the field willing to hire you. The “vice industries” are some of the few typically willing to take a chance, while also allowing such a person to level up on relevant cutting edge tech. It’s generally that or working for a small company on 25 year old IT gear and often getting pigeon holed in those (low paying) roles.
And I’m not even saying that it justifies working for such places to many. That’s a personal choice of course. Just saying that it’s mostly a class signal vs moral one.
> have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
That's a bit cruel. Sometimes tech workers don't have the luxury of choosing their workplaces. Also companies pivot. So, say, a cryptocurrency startup might have later become a gambling website.
Or an AI company acting as a casino with offers, boosted usage and limits to get you addicted into spending more tokens + credits on their digital slot machine which accepts 'tokens' as an exchange for 'promises of productivity' and 'intelligence'.
If the output doesn't work, roll the dice again and spend more tokens.
Reminds me of the US healthcare system.
> anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired
Respect for that. Everybody seems to give up to all-powerful corporations and greed for short term profits seem to blind many otherwise brilliant folks into amoral and/or outright stupid shortsighted behavior and moral 'flexibility'. Nice to see good reason to keep some hope for humanity.
I do myself just a sliver of this via purchasing choices for me and my family, its a drop in the ocean but ocean is formed by many drops, nothing more.
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Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year) has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during live sports events.
It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
As for sportspeople throwing games, well that’s been happening for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless examples from football (soccer) and cricket.
>Same in Australia and only recently
AFAIK Australia is most gambling addicted western country, loosing the most money per capita at the pokies.
>It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
I remember how Henry Ford was giving his employee great benefits to attract the best workers so the Dodge brothers bought Ford shares to become shareholders, then sued Henry Ford and won because he wasn't doing what's good for the shareholders.
Similarly, I feel like if you'd try to regulate these anti humane businesses and practices you'd get sued because you're doing something that hurts shareholders.
It has been going on in the US for years - even when it was illegal, there was still illegal gambling and more then one person has been caught throwing games. Sports beet was always legal in Law Vegas though (at least from what I can tell), but most states banned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose#Betting_scandal,_per...
Yep. Gambling is Australia's version of America's gun problem. We've recently banned kids from social media, yet we're apparently unable to ban gambling ads from kids content. Every time the (various levels of) government here talk about even the tiniest new gambling related regulation, somehow - definitely totally without any brown paper bags whatsoever going into any back pockets - it doesn't seem to actually happen. Magic!
If you're from a place like Malta it's basically the only way to do IT and perhaps "escape" it later.
what do you mean legal "for many years"? it was never illegal. we have had telephone betting for decades, gambling for centuries...the reason online gambling was banned in the US was because the biggest donors to both parties requested it...there is no other reason because banning is a proven way to maximise harm (and even overly restrictive regulation has been proven to be very poor, as in Hong Kong).
thanks for telling everyone you are in senior leadership
Super surprised to see Ireland mentioned at the top comment here. I've always thought it catastrophic that betting companies could advertise on TV here, but never really considered how other countries compared to us. Is it really the case that we're outliers? Would love to see laws change here.
i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid, both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.
The real nail in the coffin was watching the Sears in the mall turn into a casino about a decade ago. Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures, politicians turn to the last grift in their arsenal and roll out legalized gambling before packing up and leaving town or retiring.
having failed the digital future, ransacked it for every last penny, politicians again in 2025 turned to the supreme court to legalize online gambling and in doing so obliterate a generation of young adults. in another decade i expect a political movement to "hold these scoundrels to account" similar to Facebook, long after any meaningful reform or regulation could have been made and the industry itself is on the decline. just one last grift for the government that enabled it in the first place.
So cyberpunk is a real outlook after all hearing your situation.
Bold of you to assume we'll get biological immortality and cybernetics before an extinction event.
So you want them to keep working on those products?
Even at the best of times, the United States does not have a strong culture of observing or learning from other nations.
At the very least we should make it like smoking. Let people do it if they want but definitely dont allow advertisements.
> made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired
As in, even a dev, HR, etc person having worked for an online gambling company? I feel this may be a slippery slope..
Don't forget the janitors. They're all accomplices of the peddlers of misery.
Everything is a slippery slope to somewhere. That doesn't mean you can't draw lines.
Doesn't mean it is wise to do so either. I promise you, 5 lines of your political beliefs and I can make you look like a hypocritical and ignorant a55hole to the world. And I can do so purely with data and various ethical guidelines.
I doubt you have though through most of your "beliefs" or learned of the policy consequences of many of your political positions. If you had, you wouldn't be such an absolutist. You still think you should be judge, jury and executioner over others? What are you, 6?
PS Your type of absolutist moralism has been the basis for most of humanities worst atrocities, stop it...you aren't more moral than other people.
I have no idea who you think you're responding to, but it's not me. Also, your angry tone won't convince anyone.
ok, what's buying milk at a corner shop a slippery slope to?
The extermination and/or enslavement of all mammals.
Oh, so the slope doesn't need to be plausible?
Prediction markets are far, far more slippery. Anyone working at one of these places had other options & chose to sell their morals so I think it's perfectly reasonable to not hire them.
Presumably you include anyone who worked at any FANG, or Chic-Fila, or Elon-attached corp etc etc?
Actions have consequences. You can justify your actions however you want, and I can judge you for them.
I'm not sure what this moralising adds to this conversation, I was talking about hiring practises.
God forbid some poor soul who needs a job to feed their family works for a casino. snob
Here in the Netherlands we have a big building housing a pro gambling lobbyist organization. Their sole goal is to bribe politicians and spread misinformation on public tv channels. A typical example of rottenness inside the western society.
They’re the financial equivalent of recreational drugs.
Not everyone gets addicted, but many do. Harms your own health/assets. Can destroy lives. Has spillover effects into general society.
The libertarian/authoritarian argument is much the same.
Gambling is the only vice where the store doesn't close. Even the prostitutes go to sleep for a while. But you can drive to the casino and gamble it all away anytime.
It’s even worse on the phone.. there’s a running gag on IG with a lot of truth about “you might be at the bar with your friends at 12am but I’m locked in on German object splitting in half / other obscure betable ‘sports’“. It’s insane we let people do this to themselves and their families.
https://youtu.be/sMDppu-X1mY?si=MK7JGHYjW3u4iyBy
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct. It's exactly the same problem.
You can ban drugs/gambling, but some people are unfortunately just wired to seek them out and will do so regardless. So a ban results in fewer people using them in total, but all of the revenue going to the black market.
In an extreme scenario (for example, you ban a drug used by a large % of the population), that black market revenue becomes a real problem and you get Al Capone driving around Chicago with a Tommy gun shooting at people, massive corruption etc.
I wouldn't put gambling in that bracket but a significant minority of people are wired to enjoy it and historically when it was illegal it was a significant fraction of the revenue stream of organised crime, so completely banning it is not cost free - you will get a slice of violence and political corruption to go with it.
Having said that I agree there should be restrictions on advertising especially anywhere kids might be exposed to it
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Care to disclose the company you work for? Is that the stakeholders stance too, or just your own? Did you disclose this policy to your bosses if any?
EDIT: Due to the downvotes without comments, here is my point: As an employee, you manage someone elses money in that position. As such, you have to holdup morals of the company and follow the companies interest, not your own - unless you are the 100% owner of that company. If you are not, and impose your own morals using someone elses money, you shouldn't be taking the moral highground here.
It's tough, because I think outlawing 'vices' like gambling is an infringement on your individual freedom - but when it's done with an enterprise it's so much more problematic. Thinking about for instance tobacco companies vs locally grown in the backyard.
We also outlaw vices like physical violence and property theft.
Society is fundamentally counter to individual freedom, and the degree determines the nature of that society and the degree of cooperation possible within it.
I was reminded of this bizarre article: https://www.si.com/betting/2023/09/15/fake-indian-cricket-le...
Discussed a little bit here:
Creating a fake Indian cricket league - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37580599 - Sept 2023 (10 comments)
I got into weather betting markets earlier this year since I figured those can't possibly be rigged, it is automated weather station data yet some groups in the market know the truth a few minutes before everyone else based on the way the markets move.
BUT, I stopped on the day that the PHL airport preliminary report said the low of the day was 17 and then later than day the low was raised to 18. The way the market was behaving, insiders knew the low would be retracted because normally the markets clear out a tranche of bets that are no longer possible and that wasn't happening that day.
So I don't do that. The whole game seems to be based on a group of insiders that know when and what temperature reports will say seconds or minutes before the general public and they have the capacity to play with validation on the back-end (I suspect).
I built a few models to predict weather 6+ hours out using blended model forecast data, but that didn't do better than break-even.
I don't know my point. It is the wild west, caveat emptor, you need thick skin and ridiculous attention to detail to beat the game, and even then the deck is probably stacked against you.
> said the low of the day was 17
People are gambling on the "low of the day?"
Might as well make back alley chicken fighting legal.
I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was looking at weather underground map of stations around central park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running in the US) and see how it added features and new reporting values over its long 100+ year life. It was a fun winter side quest.
I don't think this needs regulated if the people involved are responsible and having fun. No chickens died for sure, which is probably why these articles focus on the more serious bets where people are dying (and not weather).
> if the people involved are responsible and having fun.
I think "please gamble responsibly" has the same power as "please drink responsibly." Which is to say, we regulate the ever loving hell out of alcohol sales, and that's probably where gambling should be headed as well.
I sure enjoyed reading your account of the experience! Thank you!
There's a classic type of British bar-bet that is based on basically anything somewhat random. Wodehouse had lots of examples of it - betting on what hat the next lady to walk in would be wearing, things like that.
The key was they were local and person to person in person - not online.
You and I sitting at the bar get into an argument/bet about what the low today will be, and the bartender bookies the bet before he checks what the low actually was - that makes a certain amount of sense.
Putting it online and making it accessible over TCP/IP opens it up to all sorts of scams and manipulation.
Absolutely every single thing you could ever bet on can be rigged.
I'd be curious to know why you decided to bet on weather patterns in the first place. Seems like a very roundabout way to lose money.
Your question implies a sense of moral outrage about gambling so I don't if it was asked in good faith or not.
Kalshi was on my radar because of Tim Walz dropping out the Minnesota governor race and an article about who would replace him being wagered on prediction markets, coincidently this was during a boring part of January after a snow storm and so weather was on my mind.
You can wager on aggregate precipitation, high and low temp, etc. The price is a binary contract between two parties with the market taker paying a small percent fee, so the conclusion you make that it "seems like a roundabout way to lose money" was not the conclusion I drew then nor believe that conclusion to be true even now, being a market maker using a trivial model from one-day forecast data was break-even for me.
The high speed traders win, and you're not part of the club.
it seems this could be solved by refusing last minute bets?
Data is released every minute, every five minutes, every hour, and then 6 hour high/low, and then mid-day preliminary reports, so there is no last-minute since any one of those reports could contain data (with various validation/rounding caveats) that could eliminate a market of temperatures, so there isn't really a last minute.
My conclusion was to focus on forecast and attempt to predict the temperature better than forecast vs. market implied probability rather than attempt to respond very quickly to published information. I learned (with my skills) the latter was a losing proposition, but the former isn't impossible (although also possibly beyond my skills it seems).
A lot of people assume insider trading in weather markets on data that's publicly available but they're unaware of.
It's also a massive whoosh that you only consider the insider trader aspect in choosing to play weather markets. No consideration of how you would get an edge in these markets against extremely powerful weather models used by meteorologists who understand the subject and how to apply the data. It seems much different than betting against political pundits.
It's also another whoosh not realizing that some of these stations are actually not that secure when you take a look at them in real life. Less insiders than betting on things that aren't tamper-resistant.
Also, a lot of people complain about insiders profiting from last minute data. One way to limit this would be requiring markets to close in advance of final data, but people love to gamble (read: bet without an edge) on things at the last minute across all prediction market subjects.
Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From what I've seen, the level of threats, abuse, etc. is just horrifying. The 30x increase in money bet, sadly, seems to be translating into a 30x increase in betters' hostile conduct.
I've seen a huge amount of videos of sports fans having melt downs when their team/player loses, to the point of destroying their own TVs and attacking their guests. I have to believe gambling is a factor in this behavior.
>I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.
After traditions and religion become less important, virtue wasn't replaced by money and market but by status seeking. We are all now comparatively rich to how we were 50 years ago or to people from third world countries. So money doesn't make a big difference, but status does. Followers, approvals, being highly viewed in a particular niche is much more valuable for many people than money.
And even money, when they are important, they aren't important because one can buy good and service, money are important because they can confer status.
So my conjecture is that it's status seeking what might be the end goal for many people in the West and what is provoking big issues for societies, like severely declining birth rates.
If you wager in a prediction market, isn't it expected that there will be some insider trading or thrown results? Because there are clearly people who know when and where bombs will land, and financial incentive to throw results.
Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
Prediction markets are just inside traders profiting off gambling addicts. If you are not an inside trader, you're the loser paying out.
I think we got “lucky” for a while when prediction markets were a small niche interest and they provided a weird novel way of making predictions.
But once they get big enough to attract the attention of people that directly affect the outcomes they will eventually become useless because people will realize the only options are to have inside information or be willing to hand money over with inside info.
The only “fair” outcomes will be things outside human control, like betting on the weather.
That's absolutely it. Cheaters or chumps, neither of whom should be encouraged.
Or you are simply better at predicting the future than most other people.
I’m sure that’s what the gambling addicts like to tell themselves.
Being good at predicting the future will give you only a slight edge, so even a small amount of inside trading can make you unprofitable.
Being good at predicting is a broad skill which is applicable widely, while insider information only works for the specific thing the information is about. Far from every market will have insiders with special information. E.g. on who will win an election.
Not really. I have a pretty solid 5+% edge over a long time period even on the competitive markets I bet in. On many markets I think it's closer to 10-20%. These are things that inside information can't really help as much as you'd think.
And even on markets where someone would benefit from inside information... insiders leak a lot more information than you'd think before it tends to hit the market. Even reading the news can tell you more than you'd think if you look at it right. The single biggest hint is "Why am I reading this, and why now?". News stories on geopolitics almost never arise naturally, and that question will get you to a LOT of information that was not explicitly stated.
> Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
Um, exactly?
You don't have a legal system to hold the companies accountable for any payout. You don't have published odds with a regulator ensuring those odds are enforced. You have zero transparency whatsoever. You have systems where if you start winning, they will effectively cut you off.
Everything about online betting screams "SCAM!" from the rooftops. Everything about online betting has always screamed "SCAM!" from the rooftops.
What part of this aren't people getting? The house always wins.
The real power in prediction markets is creating a market for what you want to occur - it's a tangible method to leverage hyperstition.
If you want Polymarket to no longer exist, then simply create a pool for "Polymarket will no longer exist by Jan 1st 2027" on Kalshi, pump the price, and wait for one of these whales to do the job of making it come true for you. When done right, you get the satisfaction of the thing happening, and all of the ROI for entering on the ground floor.
Rinse and repeat and you no longer have to sit by the sidelines and view world events as things that unfold without your input. You can be an active participant in making history the way you want it.
How? Some guy wants Polymarket gone so he bets $1 billion that it will be gone. Since this is absurd, everybody bets against him and makes a tidy profit. Whatever this is you’re proposing it doesn’t work.
I think they're saying you bet $1 billion it will not be gone, and someone takes that bet and kills Polymarket (How?)
Ah yes, of course and then he pays poly market ceo half that to close the company in time. But how do you not get screwed in your subterfuge?
> how do you not get screwed in your subterfuge?
You have to make another market that is a proxy for you (not) getting screwed.
So are you advocating for the idea that the wealthy should be able to control history then, by nature of having the largest amount of betting capital?
Don't the wealthy already "control history" by having the "largest amount of capital"?
To some extent yes, so why make it easier for them? While also giving them another way to siphon wealth off the losers for betting against them?
I'm arguing for taking advantage of this before you can't.
People who aren’t sociopaths might argue no one should be taking advantage of this, and that the people behind these services should be in prison
“People who disagree with me are sociopaths” doesn’t have the persuasive power you seem to imagine.
Strawmen aren’t particularly persuasive either. If I said “people who think murder is okay are sociopaths” would you have a problem?
Murder is definitionally killing that isn't okay. That makes your statement a bit strange, from a logical standpoint.
There are people that think killing is okay, you're almost definitely one of them. It's just, there's a very specific set of contexts where killing is considered okay. For example, a police sniper taking out an active shooter at a sports event would probably be nearly universally considered a justified killing. It isn't murder because there are reasons it's ok for the killing to have been done.
Just an interesting thing to think about. Using murder for examples like this is a bit loaded.
Murder is definitionally intentional killing that isn't okay.
Intent and justification both matter in common law; manslaughter covers killing that isn't okay that lacks intent to kill, and that often comes in degrees of severity.
Sounds like good ol' fashioned developing country style corruption to me!
Anti-intellectualism 1, liberal democratic values 0.
Wait, people can bet on bombings now? What the hell man.
MAGA gets rich on bombing Iran? The "Uno reverse card" of millions of dollar paid out if you assassinate Trump came into play recently. This one regime is not trying for plausible deniability, though, which is not quite a reverse of just using the prediction market tool, too.
The article conflates prediction markets with gambling but they serve different functions. Traditional sportsbooks take a 5-10% vig and are your counterparty - they need you to lose. Kalshi and Polymarket are exchanges where users trade against each other, more like a stock exchange than a casino. The real concern should be insider trading, not the existence of the markets themselves.
Assuming everything physical gets tokenized (as occasionally gets predicted), people could soon literally lose their house on a bet! Maybe even a bet placed by their swarm of agents. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!
Worse: It won't even be your own bet that does the damage.
It'll be bets collected (or "lost" bets which are actually payments) by other parties that have an interest in an outcome which involves whether you lose your house.
Bet your shirt AND the farm from the comfort of your phone
as a wise guy once said, "a grown man made a wager; he lost."
Hence why we drastically reduced the number of wagers/addictive risk taking because of its cost on society.
The libertarians here will say "oh yay, we've won". Then a few years later they'll cry about your mom losing her house to a gambling scam with no recourse. Then they'll cry again when the voters finally rid themselves of the gambling scourge years later.
some people like gambling. for them, risking money is an efficient way to purchase a thrill. do we not care about them?
People like doing Crack, do we not care for them?
let's outlaw pulp fiction, and daytime teevee, while we're at it.
'Predictions' market is the silliest loophole for gambling. Honestly, more surprised Fanduel, DraftKings and the like who have spent millions on lobbying and buying licenses, are not fighting tooth and nail on this.
If I made a platform like that, I'd be RICO'd after the FBI kicked down my door and confiscated everything I own.
If I had the connections Polymarket does, well, then we can just place bets on when people will die, everything will work out just fine and the President will invest in me.
If you don't mind not having US customers, it's easy enough to get an online gambling license in a few jurisdictions, maybe $20-50k all in (Nevis and Anjouan are a couple of the more notable ones), at which point you can serve a large portion of the world. This was basically the scenario polymarket was in for awhile until they started making inroads into US regulatory apparatus.
Wasn't there a crypto betting platform that was operating outside of the US, blocked US traffic and the US still went after them?
I don't remember any specifics, or if I'm remembering anything right at all, but I feel like I read something about that.
Especially when the "prediction" part isn't even part of the product, it is an accidental byproduct. No one pays for access to the predictions.
And they aren't predictions, they are more like "outcome-shaping" markets, since the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome, and at a certain point it will just always happen if it is billions of dollars.
The higher the liquidity involved, the less likely the real world outcome ends up being the same as it would have been if the prediction market had never existed. Very messy.
> the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome
This only works if there are enough people betting on the other side. It's not some kind of magical money multiplication machine. As more stuff like the one-day Iran bet or the 64:56 minute press conference happen, people will avoid taking bets on highly specific outcomes.
On more reasonable bets like "war with Iran in the next 6 months", if there is some kind of shadowy cabal putting billions of dollars on the yes side, they just aren't going to have much upside if there isn't the same amount on the no side.
> It's not some kind of magical money multiplication machine
Right, it's not even consistent, the manipulation can go either way, at random, but what is sure is the higher the liquidity, the higher the motivation becomes to tamper
Those predictions are just market data, market data is often very expensive (my data usage at work is probably about $100k a year and i'm not even a trader), I imagine polymarket will be too when they are more established.
It's inherently free data. You have to be able to trade against it, and to trade against it you need to see it _before_ you give them money, so they can basically never charge for it. When they sell it to people, it's just laziness, they could scrape it themselves.
edit: apparently they do, that's even more wild lol
Normally you have to pay for data although in crypto it's often free
Traders sometimes go to prison for insider trading. The wisdom of the crowd human when the crowd is following someone with insider information is deemed legal.
Happens already. Selling market data is part of how they finance themselves.
>Those predictions are just market data,
Any kind of fraud is just market data when you pay enough for it.
Give one example.
The throwing dildos at WNBA games thing https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/wnba/2025/08/07/wnba-s...
And there is a kid’s legal version! They sell them in Walmart - Pokémon packs. I don’t know how any of this is legal in a civilized country.
I have mixed feelings being a parent now. It can be fun to get a mystery box or pack. But it does feed on the anticipation and rush of surprise. Kids seem to lack the self control to stop. Video games seem the worst to me since they're so intangible it's easier to get carried away before others notice.
I feel so guilty about how often I begged my parents for new magic, Star Wars ccg, or battletech booster packs.
Why feel guilty when you've been manipulated by marketing to beg your parents for it?
LEGO does it too, with "mystery minifigure" packages.
I watch kids squeezing the polybags trying to find an identifying bump or edge, hoping to either get the one they want, or at least not get one they already have.
And yeah, baseball cards are/were no different, going back decades.
But at least the financial loss here is constrained to a few dollars. I don't think these are the gateway drugs to gambling problems, but they are definitely exploitative.
Kids version has been around my entire life (baseball cards) it even used to come with bubblegum!
It was like sweetened emulsified chalk.
I kind of miss it.
Don't forget the other children's gambling trainers:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=claw+machine&ia=images&iax=...
The average kid at these places thinks they're a skill-based game, so they aren't gambling any more than they are when they shoot hoops.
I believe they are (maybe indirectly on some though): https://www.actionnetwork.com/education/tracking-prediction-...
They totally are tho. And at the same time trying to win via the loophole if it doesn't close by launching their own efforts
I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market making which is preferable
In theory this should limit the damage insiders can do, since as the probability of encountering an insider rises the market makers will need to widen the spread.
> I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker.
Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly mean that poker isn't gambling.
Slots have odds which change throughout the day and are usually (on average) pretty bad. In Poker, you play against other players, not the house. There is a rake which is very minor when compared against the average returns against other players.
They are fundamentally different. In slots, you bet against the house, in poker you bet against other players. So slots are gambling in the traditional sense. Poker however is no different than buying a house. There is still a house fee in both cases and in both cases you are betting against other people. And in poker, new players can enter and inject capital just like the housing market. You going to ban buying houses next? You can't eliminate risk from life.
You are basically trying out outlaw luck and randomness at this point.
I'm not trying to outlaw anything. I'm trying to make gambling addicts stop delusionally coping when it comes to "predictions markets" and just admit that they're gambling.
poker and slots are two very different variants of gambling. Sure, there is plenty of chance/variance in poker but there is an undeniable skill component that is lacking in slots.
The one that really infuriates me is blackjack where - if you apply skill by counting cards - you get kicked out of the casino.
This has always been the case for most high-stakes gambling. The problem isn't winning big, the problem is getting the counterparty to pay. Skilled gamblers (when it comes to games with any skill component) throughout history have been adept at winning subtly and then moving on before anyone figures out they have an edge.
Where did I say it wasn't gambling. I said prediction markets are preferable to sports books like DraftKings. I don't like either personally but its an important distinction
Except there is still adverse selection, just like there is in the stock market. People who have inside information are going to bet more, and you will take the other side of that bet not realizing that has happened.
Actually I believe DraftKings just added a prediction market...
Actually, prediction markets are closer to stock markets (insofar as you consider stock trading to be gambling). Insider trading is the bigger issue
Insider trading does not (and should not) apply to prediction markets.
When gambling companies make markets on Oscars, for example, they make those markets knowing 100% that people who know the outcome will bet on it. It is inherent to the product, they put protections in place. Equally, with some sports markets (i.e. transfers), they put in place protections to identify activity that IS a legal breach of player's agreements with sports leagues.
But on prediction markets, there is inherent insider knowledge and people should have the sense not to trade on markets where you are trading with insiders. It should be obvious. Financial markets are different, they are supposed to be open. Prediction markets are not.
There has been a strong drive to apply the concept of insider trading. In the UK, people were actually charged under a law intended to protect bookmakers...to be clear, this is happening whilst people close to central bankers and Treasury civil servants are being paid 7 figure sums to leak information, and all the stuff that happens with transfer/TV show markets. As ever, it is only when politics appears that these rules get invented (and to be very clear, politics markets have always had insider action too...it is inherent to the market, bookmakers know this, they did not ask for these people to be charged).
Btw, the Gambling Act has also been used to prevent payments to gamblers who exploited casinos that failed to ensure their games were fair. If you told the people saying "insider trading" that there was a law whose only purpose was to protect casino's margins, they wouldn't lose their mind...these same laws are being used to prevent "insider trading".
I've heard people say this but it really only makes sense if you don't think about it for more than 10 or 20 seconds.
Prediction markets by definition always resolve to one side being completely wiped out and losing everything. Stocks going to zero happens pretty seldomly, in prediction markets it's guaranteed to happen every single time.
Prediction markets are not binary options. They are closer to a liquid equity option market (and most equity option markets aren't liquid at all). That means you can trade into and out of positions at any time and for different prices depending on where the market is. You can even do time spreads where you can't lose it all no matter what happens. Maybe your 10 or 20 seconds of thinking wasn't as perfect as you think since you don't seem to understand how prediction markets actually work.
That's only true if you leave your money in...which you don't have to do.
You can play prediction markets by betting on a swing. E.g. I made a few hundred dollars betting on Harris in 2024 when Trump was at ~65% odds and then selling before the election when it was closer to 50%.
> can play prediction markets by betting on a swing
The outcomes are still capped. In that respect, it's more like a derivative market than the stock market. You can trade in and out of options. But the value in the system is tightly defined and, after fees, a net negative-sum game.
There are no fees on Polymarket. Not sure about others.
> There are no fees on Polymarket
"Currently, small fees apply to Crypto and Sports markets.
Starting March 30, 2026, this will expand to include other categories like Finance, Politics, Economics, Culture, Weather, and Tech" [1].
More critically, Polymarket doesn't pay interest on deposits. (Kalshi does.)
[1] https://help.polymarket.com/en/articles/13364478-trading-fee...
Thanks for the correction! I have to admit it was a while since I last looked into this and I shouldn't have been so confident.
There is a fee implicit in the market spread. It's formed out of the time value of money w.r.t. the cost of NOT trading as well as the adverse selection faced by those with standing offers.
Increased insider trading will increase spreads.
Then explain why the average prediction market has a smaller spread than the average equity option market.
Depends on the event:
https://docs.polymarket.com/trading/fees
In that case you limit your upside as well as an insider, and have to deal with liquidity and slippage coming and going.
So options markets then?
Prediction markets are nothing like stock markets. Maybe they are more like binary options markets. In the UK for example, these were for a long time regulated as a gambling product, and for the past 7 years have been banned to retail consumers.
Kalshi has Trump Jr on its board and is federally regulated. I'm not sure FanDuel and DraftKings will win that fight for the next 3 years.
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It truly is insane.
The CFTC is granting "no-action" exemptions on the basis of....nothing, really.
The "educational" value of these markets.
On the basis of nothing, or on the basis of gifts and connections?
the Kalshi legal team is a revolving door with the CFTC
I thought the “daily fantasy” loophole was pretty silly too.
Both have a prediction market product.
The problem is that these markets allow to translate political power directly to money. Worse destructive events are rare, need a lot less action (butterfly effect) and leave thus less traces and command high odds. Once committed the ones in power have a vested interest in causing destruction.
Capitalism took care of the exchange between money and power long ago. Prediction markets, as terrible as they are, are peanuts in comparison.
yes, because the last century of communism showed that it was really just capitalism where centralized power corrupts..
kqr didn't make that claim
>A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.
That does not only explain gambling but explains many things. And it's not just about the US, it's about the whole West.
They really need to regulate this things. Like people could spoof markets and stuff so easily. Do things that would be traditionally illegal in regular markets but not predication markets.
It's like poker. If you don't know who the patsy is, the patsy is you.
pennywagers seemed reasonable but has shut down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30163868
> We give users a little bit of money each week to play with ($0.50 right now) and if they can run it up past a certain point we'll pay them out in cash. If they lose the money, we put another $0.50 in the next week. It's legal in the US since the users aren't allowed to deposit and mainly for entertainment purposes.
The big issue underlying gambling, betting, alcohol, tobacco, and other addictive stuff all the way to fentanyl, is that people may literally lose their mind over it, at least party. A heavy addict ceases to be a responsible adult who can act reasonably and autonomously, and becomes driven by impulses they cannot control, like a schizophrenic who cannot control the voices in their head.
Even more unpleasantly, this does not happen to everyone every time. Quite many people can have a glass of wine here and there without becoming alcoholics. A ton of people can play a game like Bejeweled out of boredom, and happily switch to more interesting activities, given a chance. Some people can voluntarily stop even taking heroin and subject themselves to therapy. Etc, etc.
But a relatively small minority gets hooked badly. They cannot quit. They do not want to stop. The addiction becomes a primary life activity. Many more who could be hooked to physiologically brutal addictions like nicotine or heroin are wise enough to never approach those, understanding how badly it might end. But again, a relative minority cannot resist the lure.
A less tolerant society would stigmatize such outcomes, adding strong social pressure that might keep potential addicts from getting into the habit. A society could also consider addiction a medical condition that requires intervention and treatment, like poisoning or a dangerous infection. Even modern Western societies are capable of that when sufficiently frightened, see COVID-19.
Another approach, which I'd call "extremist libertarian", would just let addictions form, proclaiming that this is what people do exercising their free will. It would not be different from a complete lack of civilization, and leaving the problem to the evolution to solve. In either case the addicts would suffer, in worst cases going destitute and die. That would remove the addicts from the gene pool, probably lowering the risk of addiction in future generations, slowly. Slowly, and painfully, often not only to addicts but also to people around them.
We struggle with addressing addictions because we struggle to admit that addictions exist, and that in bad cases they affect the sufferer's agency quite a bit. I'm afraid that without admitting this property of heavy addiction we won't be able to act in an efficacious way.
Gambling is flourishing not because we're in a low-trust world, as the article says, but because the living conditions of an increasingly large part of the population as such that they cannot hope of ever achieving a comfortable life. We're returning to the social dynamics that dominated much of history (if you consider how much gambling was a scourge, from ancient Rome to thousands of years of history in China).
So do you have a lot of trust in people that "cannot hope of ever achieving a comfortable life"? It seems like a risky proposition.
Still, yes. I can trust that if I were in an accident, people passing by would be decent enough to try to help me. To see a place where you'd have the rational expectation of being robbed by passers-by, see Russia.
These prediction markets shouldn't be allowed for situations where humans can control the outcome.
They do have their place however - one I find particularly interesting is weather prediction markets, primary because they end up having a net benefit. Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models and are duking it out. Over time these models get better, and the rest of us benefit.
I think these markets could be a net good, but right now they're just enabling insider trading on a scale we've never seen before.
With enough cash on the line, humans are very resourceful at manipulating outcomes.
Humans already control the weather: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding.
We already have an example of humans sabotaging the measurement of weather: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684440. Two ranchers sabotaged weather monitoring stations in order to fraudulently collect millions in drought insurance. One of the farmhands involved ended up dead.
And we have an example of prediction markets attempting to manipulate reporting of events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397822.
I have a hard time believing weather prediction markets will be net beneficial. The incentive for sabotage & manipulation up and down the chain seems likely to lead to worse weather predictions overall.
Funny, downthread there is actually a report of someone experiencing manipulation of weather prediction markets:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535355
In the same way that crypto has been speed running the history of banking scams, it seems prediction markets are going to speed run the history of gambling and insurance fraud.
Who is to say if it rained or not? Well now they are a target.
A NY Times reporter was the target of a pressure and threat campaign to change their reporting over whether a rocket in the middle east was intercepted or not before it hit the ground.
Prediction markets are not going to end well full stop IMHO.
That was a Times of Israel reporter Emanuel Fabian [1] but your point stands.
Prediction markets create incentives to predict the outcome of an event, which can be done in one of three ways: develop better models to predict the event, affect the event, or affect the reporting on the event.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
That's only for futures that are easy to invent, for others it is way easier to just bribe or threaten a journalist (works on most journalists, YMMV) to say that you've invented it and then run off with the money before anyone can prove you wrong.
> is weather prediction markets
Humans can, and do, manipulate the weather. There's actually international treaties against doing it.
> Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models
Weather is chaotic. You don't run a model once and use the result. You run it hundreds of times and average the results. You also need really high quality real time data to be fed into the system to achieve any sort of accuracy, which, is not something any of these hundreds could do on their own.
> markets could be a net good
You can already sell weather predictions. You can just hang a shingle and do it directly. Why do we need a third party gambling apparatus involved?
> Why do we need a third party gambling apparatus involved?
Wisdom of crowds > wisdom of individual firms, also a market solution actually would work in this case imo. Manipulating the weather seems easy enough to detect and much more expensive than any benefit you'd get, and there aren't really any negative externalities.
> Wisdom of crowds > wisdom of individual firms
I doubt the utility of this simple aphorism. Primarily "the crowd" has a strong bias and would only consist of people willing to take the time to put a financial stake on their position.
> Manipulating the weather seems easy enough to detect
What are you basing this off of?
> and much more expensive than any benefit you'd get
Cloud seeding is not particularly expensive. The problem is the people performing this work may never interact with your market. You're literally playing a rigged game without any clue.
> and there aren't really any negative externalities.
The folly of man in a single sentence.
Or you could just fund the NOAA instead of making up reasons for more markets.
> weather prediction markets
Can also be used to hedge the risk of rain on the day you've planned an outdoor barbecue!
You can do this with some forms of trip insurance. I stared hard at arbitrage there a few years ago but it was too hard to get your money out if you were right.
"where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position"
To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to reveal war secretes to our enemies.
Hmm. That also means that key decision makers can pay money in order to lie to our enemies.
Or heck, with the amount of $$$ on the line, cash-strapped nation states could even finance their warfare this way. Like that $14M bet on when an attack would land in Israel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401044 -- that could buy a lot of drones!
Aww, conspiracy theories are no fun when they're so plausible.
Just workshopping some sv vc tech speak…
Disrupt being a traitor…
The uber of spying…
"Disrupt" feels like yesterday's Web 2.0 lingo, now we say "Democratizing".
The Rosenbergs weren't spies, they were entrepreneurs providing an essential service to the nuclear proliferation industry!
Sure, and pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us. That's exactly the point of these things. Dangle money in front of people who know things we want to know.
> pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us
Something tells me China has better opsec around such leaks than we do.
Taiwan is going to be invaded before 2030
Then go bet on it! Why are you telling us?
To fake out the markets
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> You don’t have any enemies. Nobody cares about you. Nobody is coming to hurt you or your family
Do you think the U.S. and Israeli militaries have personal vendettas against each and every civilian we've killed in Iran? Of course we don't. We can barely count them. Just because you aren't personally on your community's adversary's radar doesn't mean they aren't a threat.
(To be clear, I don't believe Iran was a threat. But there are threats to Americans, and it's absolutley not brainwashing to ascribe a threat to a group to oneself personally instead of waiting for it to be purely selfishly relevant before acting.)
The number one most proximate enemy to a regular person is their local/national elite and their sycophants/enablers.
How easy this is to comprehend when Iran is killing protesters.
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> Nobody is going to attack the US if your government stopped trying to meddle in other countries affairs
How did that work out for Ukraine? The idea that we live in a just world where everyone who has chaos rain down on them deserves it is so simply refuted even by a cursory glance at just modern history.
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We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamewar comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. No, this is is not because of the account's political views; I haven't tracked them and don't know what they are. We just care about preserving this forum as a place for curious, respectful conversation, whatever one's views.
You’re significantly worse off assuming your government is adversarial than cooperative, regardless of what reality may be, and the majority of us know that. It’s why the chaos psyops aren’t working. We’re not happy with our government but apes together strong
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> what has that attitude gotten you?
I've gotten language I wrote passed into multiple state and a few federal laws. Definitey helps when I'm the only one to call my electeds on an issue.
The lazy and nihilistic aren't great for our country. But they're great if you put any work into civic engagement.
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Why not both? There's money to be squeezed from both ends.
Gambling may be bad on its own, but the gambling and advertising combo are a very harmful combination IMHO.
I think the worst part is carrying the two in your pocket at all times. Previously a gambler trying to quit could avoid specific locations. How the hell do you avoid the internet?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you also craft an Etherium contract to do the same thing as these prediction markets. So even without a company "framing all the markets" you could still have gambling based on base eth?
Yes, this is precisely how Polymarket works under the hood. IIRC you can even participate by working directly with the smart contracts.
I like prediction markets because they offer much more diverse markets compared to stocks/options and sports betting, which are far more limited. The downsides are limited liquidity and fraud, but this is endemic to other markets too.
This is what "AGI" will bring more of. An "abundance" of gamblers.
The amount of suspicious bets around international politics is disturbing
One data point of many: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/politics/iran-war-bets-predic...
Fact: Donald Trump Jump Jr is an advisor of polymarket
And a paid advisor to Kalshi.
Well corporate stocks have the same dynamic. People are banding together and manipulating reality in unproductive ways to make their stocks go up.
Countries literally go to war so that weapon dealers can sell weapons and banks can later sell loans to rebuild the country.
The real problem is centralization of power.
Within the horrible context of the current situation, it's a good thing that at least there is a force to drive outcomes that seem random as opposed to just being around money. It democratizes the horrors a bit so that rich people who have money and live in corporate stock lala land can get a slight taste of the negatives of large-scale vested interests collaborating towards dystopian outcomes.
That said, a better solution would be to shut down all public markets and companies.
My view is that if a company is so well recognized that government officials can reference it by name in congress, then that company should be shut down automatically. We know it didn't get there by economic efficiency... It almost certainly got there by voting and sociopolitical manipulation.
You can't shut down betting markets without shutting down the public stock markets because they are betting markets themselves.
Isn't the bomb argument actually a statement about (the current way we implement) democracy?
Maybe it's the separation of powers that's not working...
Inventive markets is a better term for what they will become.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Obligatory: The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists.[1]
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market
Today Integrity is merely means to score more views and likes
That’s how far we have fallen. We are all painfully aware how corrupted all sorts of people are but instead of actual action we give each other likes on social media under carefully crafted anger bait.
So much everything online is fake that it is tempting to just throw your phone away.
The genuineness is the highest luxury
I try to make sure to get truly downvoted to hell every other week on social media. It resets the addicted brain and stops hive mind progress bar for a little while at least. Also get banned - this is good for you too precisely because it feels slightly uncomfortable.
That’s how I try to survive online landscapes anyway.
We are repeating a very, very old lesson. We will learn once more, the hard way.
Anyone with half a brain, or who doesn't stand to be personally enriched by the plague of parasitical gambling / prediction sites can see they are obviously a net negative for society, yet they stand to make some already very rich people even richer, so they will of course be allowed to run wild regardless of the harm they cause.
We do not live in a world where policy decisions are based on what's best for the people, we live in a world where policy decisions are almost exclusively made according to what will further enrich the wealthy elites, so there's effectively a 0% chance we will see any meaningful regulatory action here, as it doesn't' matter if gambling is destroying the fabric of society as long as some bastards are getting rich off of it, as that's literally all that matters these days.
Betting on sport is kind of what sports where made for. It's something without any consequence or meaning. The Author mixing that with the dictator and his cronies making buck from their position is offensive.
> Betting on sport is kind of what sports where made for.
What?! Beg I your pardon, but I think sport is a very different thing to me.
We have the 'official' stock (prediction) market regulated by the SEC, FINRA, CFTC, ... , yet (allegedly) insider trading isn't unheard of. We have the more recent crypto (prediction) markets with (allegedly) complete market manipulation where those same regulators stepped in after being woken up late to the party. Now we have these 'open range' prediction markets with the CFTC wrestling for getting a toe in without stepping on those of the casino, sports betting, Native American gaming, lotteries ... interests?
I've always said we should just legalize insider trading. Just make it painfully obvious to everyone that speculative trading is the loser's game.
Maybe it would be better to ban Las Vegas.
Have Westerners ever thought of working and creating real value instead of betting on the death of little children?
Yes, they have. They’ve made tons of great products and services that you use every day without even thinking about it, in contrast to Russia for example. It’s a shame you don’t see how much they've improved our quality of life.
You must be confused. Most of the products that end in your hands were made by hard working folks from the Global South. All Westerers do is own the companies, the labour and the politicians from those countries. But don't worry, sooner rather than later, even Westerners will have to relearn what working truly means.
Let's make a bet on how bad it can get
I can place a bet that by 2027 we will have 1 bet and a payout on a bet that predicts a horrible catastrophe.
I agree with Thompson about these kinds of prediction markets, but predicting horrible catastrophes is one of the prosocial early use cases of these things.
Agreed, as long as it's a catastrophe that the bettors can't cause, but for which advance warning can mitigate harms.
For instance, I'm in favor of bets that a certain astroid will strike the earth at a certain time and place. A signal from the prediction markets might cause somebody to evacuate in a scenario where they'd otherwise cry "fake news."
Let's not bet on whether the water will remain drinkable, because the last thing we need is for somebody to have an incentive to poison it.
> For instance, I'm in favor of bets that a certain astroid will strike the earth at a certain time and place. A signal from the prediction markets might cause somebody to evacuate in a scenario where they'd otherwise cry "fake news."
I understand the point you're making, but in this case, you're still incentivizing someone somewhere to not attempt to the best of their ability to intervene in that astroid. Bets that truly can't cause any change in behavior that might affect the outcome are a mostly theoretical category, in my opinion.
If the bet can't cause any change in behavior then the whole thing is useless. The whole point is to do some good with it. The constraint is that the bettor can't alter the outcome.
Another one would be discovering malware in a PR and betting loudly enough that it won't get merged. The bet is how you make your certainty rise above the bot noise and attract extra attention on the maintainers' part.
Granted that's also theoretical, but it's worth theorising about how we'll get things done in a world where the only way to be heard is to put your money where your mouth is.
> Another one would be discovering malware in a PR and betting loudly enough that it won't get merged. The bet is how you make your certainty rise above the bot noise and attract extra attention on the maintainers' part.
This example seems weaker than the asteroid example. Consider that if you're betting "loudly enough" it won't get merged, the less likely option becomes the malware actually being merged. Now you have a repo maintainer who can bet that it'll get merged (probably a more lucrative bet since it's less likely), and merge it to make money from that bet.
In the prediction markets, there's a fine line between predicting and manifesting.
I mean, I'm talking about things like hurricanes and earthquakes and forest fires, not running death pools.
I think I see where you're coming from, but if we're using them to predict hurricanes, it's likely just meteorological data arbitrage. All else seems like random chance; hardly an example of an oracle.
> forest fires
Fire bug
> earthquakes
Dynamite the fault
> hurricanes
Crazy, but, hear me out: mirrors in space warming the Atlantic, mirrors in Africa warming the atmosphere ("solar power"), Trump wanting to nuke a hurricane, etc.
Pandemic? Go harvest bats and put them in a cage with chickens. You don't even need a molecular bio lab.
Stock market crash? Bombs. Terrorist attacks.
Energy prices? Derail a train carrying fuel cars. Bonus points if it's in a major metro and has a blast radius. Or, I dunno, start a war with Iran.
This could get really bad.
Dynamite the fault? I presume you haven't seriously thought about how much dynamite it would take and how deeply you'd have to plant it.
Mirrors in space? Again, have you done the math? How many thousands of acres of mirrors would you need, how many rockets would it take, and how much would they cost? Could you make enough on the betting market to break even?
"Dynamite the fault"? What are you, a Bond villain?
The Bond villain would be the person running the betting market.
Kind of Nice i would say ?
Not really commenting on the politics side, but do Americans realise sports betting has been legal in other countries for decades? (Since 1960 in the UK at least).
Yes, there were a few fixes when in-game betting and exchanges first came in in the UK, but by and large most problems are solved now.
Maybe a less parochial view would help them get a sense of proportion?
Maybe we should build a prediction model of upcoming events based on volume of bets made on polymarket
All this fearmongering about decision markets lately is really annoying. If you don't like gambling — just don't gamble and shut the fuck up. It's not for you to decide if gambling is good or bad for me. If I am stupid enough to bet anything on an outcome that clearly depends on a person who could, potentially, be betting as well — it's my problem, not yours.
I've been active and profitably trading in prediction markets for a long time now, but I think this perspective is also not helpful.
Prediction markets exist within the laws and institutions of society to be able to function, and the public should debate and discuss how they're regulated. Problem gamblers do present a negative externality where third parties can bear the cost, especially when they have dependents.
Gambling outside of equities and securities is a negative externality. (Investment in startups, goods, etc. makes the economy spin. Investing in what hoop a ball goes through does no good at all.)
This puts plenty of people who shouldn't gamble into debt and lowers their societal fitness.
The other side of the gamble is probably losing on average too. Only the house and infrequent insiders win.
These private companies are fleecing our economy's dynamicity without reinvesting it in aligned positive externalities.
It's a cancer.
At least the lottery goes to education, in theory. My college was subsidized by the lotto, so there's that.
Kalshi and PolyMarket aren't doing anything positive.
It is not for you to decide what one should or shouldn't do. Plenty of people want to gamble, and don't give a fuck of what you think they should or shouldn't do. And they are right: it's none of your fucking business.
Kalshi and PolyMarket are doing something absolutely wonderful for those people (i.e. the only people who should care about these "prediction markets" at all): they actually make betting fair, which was impossible before. It is not impossible now, because in fact there are much better decentralized markets than these (basically all you need to make a completely decentralized betting platform are Ethereum contracts), but they are handier to use and hence more popular. But it was impossible with traditional gambling, where a bookmaker can set any odds and reject any bets.
> It is not for you to decide what one should or shouldn't do.
What's the limit?
Murder? Taking fentanyl? Selling fentanyl? Shitting on the sidewalk? Taking photos of kids in public? Screaming fire in a theater? Defamation? Misleading poor people into thinking they can get ahead by spending their savings?
If there was no limit to what I should or should not do, I could just kill everyone I disagree with and take their money. But we know that's preposterous.
Here's the thing though: in aggregate, that's exactly what this is. Taking money from poor and undereducated people is like killing them. It's stealing their lives, indebting them, making them less fit, putting them on a lower trajectory for life. Killing their chances.
That's about the biggest fucking negative externality big tech has introduced to the world. And for what? To make a handful of people rich?
This does nothing for society. It's worse than crypto.
> Plenty of people want to gamble, and don't give a fuck of what you think they should or shouldn't do. And they are right: it's none of your fucking business.
Plenty of people want to rape kids, and it is our business to stop them. This argument is bunk.
A low level of gambling was okay because there was a controlled lever on it. Only a handful of casinos existed, and the government had the monopoly on the lottery program.
Now anyone can do it anytime. That is not good for our economy.
This is not a harmless activity. People are losing their financial well-being. Becoming addicted. Needing to fix their debt by becoming more in debt.
People getting exiting the workforce as productive members of society because they lose their shirt. That is not good for individuals or society.
We're damaging the robustness of our economy by allowing these entities to exist. They should be taxed at 100% of their gross revenue, and those funds should go to educating kids about statistics while they're young and impressionable.
That’s not what people are worried about, it’s the rigging of real world events (including wars!) that has people worried.
It's also a bit overblown. If you could rig a war, you would stand to make a lot more money playing the stock market than small potatoes prediction markets. A lot of money has been on the line based on which party wins elections even before prediction markets existed (see fracking or pipeline project approval as obvious examples).
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I agree that this is bad but the libertarian in me says "the market will resolve this because who in their right mind would be a counterparty to these bets knowing that there is so much insider trading?". But then again, many people are not in their right mind.
Prediction market creators making the case that their existing is some sort of a market efficiency play is the most laughable thing I have ever heard.
SC made a mistake in the Draft King/Fan duel saga and has unleashed the worst kind of market, takes up may too much money and time especially from young people.
While many of us try to stay true as possible to be Libertarian when we say we are, this, like smoking in public, are not hills I’m willing to die on if someone decides to restrict.
An argument not mentioned here and which I didn’t appreciate until I actually took part in these markets myself, is that you need a supply of stupid/uninformed people to take the other side of the informed people’s bets.(In economic terms, no-trade theorems apply.) That suggests to me that the dream of perfect information revelation isn’t going to come true. Instead, the liquid markets will be those with a large supply of marks, who bet for identity reasons or who are simply ignorant and naive. (Currently polymarket gives a 16% ish probability that Trump will lose office this year. Sounds like wishful thinking to me?)
Polymarket "odds" I think are just the price of the contract * 100 right?
That's not actually the predicted odds by the market because every single bet is also a bet on interest rates.
A contract that literally 100% always would resolve to "true" in 1 year would have a non-zero price for the "false" side because selling that option (and thus taking the "false" side means you get ~$97 today and then pay $100 in a year.
Polymarket's 4% chance of jesus returning by 2026 actually represents a market consensus of basically a 0% chance.
For trump losing office there might be some bets predicated on his losing office being correlated to a higher interest rate outcome, too.
If the odds are set correctly, you should have the same EV on either side of a bet.
That's why it's hard to beat Vegas at sports betting--they set the correct odds way too often.
When regular folks make up their own odds, they're not very good at it, but in theory the market just buys up any +EV position, even if it's a longshot.
I agree with you overall but I'm not sure the Trump bet is the best example.
He certainly isn't going to be thrown out of office (unfortunately) but those 16% of bettors also win if he dies this year, and he's 80, fat, still gobbling burgers and shows signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far.
On the other hand he has access to the best medical care, but even still a 16% chance he drops dead before the end of the year isn't that outrageous.
So for example "shows signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far" sounds like the kind of "information" that has not yet made it into a mainstream news outlet, probably for good reason. And indeed when I searched, I found it on The Daily Beast, whose reliability I doubt.
But maybe I'm wrong. If so, you could always take the opposite side of the bet. For sure, the correct probability is not zero!
Checks annuity tables for an 80 year old making it to 81...you giving 1:6 odds? Sure I will take that bet because the actual odds are only a small fraction. If I spread out the risk on multiple positions, I can make a very good return taking those types of bets.
People that place bets on the political outcomes on PolyMarket are from one of three groups: 1) Insiders who think they have an edge (but probably don't), 2) fools that believe what their media of choice tells them and 3) People who make money on the first 2 groups.
We both know that that the Trump market and people who believe everything they see on MSNBC (or whatever it is called now) have a big overlap. Its basically a way to print money because there are always people who are out of touch enough to believe their side is right 100% of the time and a <insert color here> wave is coming in the next election. Is this taking advantage of them? Maybe, but they are a walking negative externality in every other way in life so why not. Consider it a tax on political extremism and partisanship which I think it a good thing. Prove me wrong...
Do you even need prediction markets if the department of war can just make the real markets do whatever the hell they want?
Half-OT: when does gambling become safe?
I mean, insurance is basically basically betting that bad things happen to you.
Attaching payouts to events skews the incentives. A baseball player gets the incentive to fuck up on purpose. Fortunately politicians are much more honest and would never make a decision to profit from a bet in a similar dishonest way.
Why do we need to reinvent the wheel again. There's a reason why these things are banned.
And by the way, shame on all the podcasters and VCs who advertised those abominable 'platforms'. To name one, the cast of the All-in podcast
It’s everywhere. Bill Simmons. Makes me insane.
How many individual podcast hosts actually control those advertising slots?
You need to select better content then. None of the creators I follow/watch advertise gambling and I could care less if they did.
Examples? And what app or platform do you use for listening?
Trump and his Tech Bros enable this to make money for themselves its like Trump is turning the whole of America into Alternate reality Hill Valley of 1985 in Back to the Future
https://youtu.be/gwJQG4tFqZA?si=9IbdAR4O-lGiTVtN
See: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/politics/trump-prediction-mar...
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
I'm still reeling from the fact that the sitting president pumped some meme coin the day (iirc) he took office. And this largely passed by without any consequence, reckoning, or repercussions. It's just accepted now that even the highest office will scam their own supporters
The US government and private interests are clearly incentivized to keep the crypto industry subdued to a chaotic casino. Participants engage willingly. If crypto is legitimized, it threatens the US dollar, sanctions regime and the US’s ability to project power as the world leading reserve currency.
The president and any other shitcoin operator know this and are playing the game on the field.
Every country has the same challenge. Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
Hopefully that helps explain why there weren’t and wont be any consequences.
That's a fair point. But I'm not talking about the legitimacy (or not) of crypto. More that the president was (is?) running a pump and dump scheme. It should be profoundly embarrassing to supporters and it should be political suicide for the scammer. But it barely registered.
I feel like you missed the suggestions that the move (the shiiling and scamming) may have surved or been subborinate to an ulterior motive.
By taking relatively low risk public position (from the guy making wildly innapropriate comments and taking wildly irresponsible actions seemingly daily) they are able to effectively spread FUD with regard to crypto. And that could have been motivated by a perceived threat by crypto against USD and/or fiat in general.
Like...this dude took food from genuinely starving people because there was some abuse in the system and had no plans whatever to restore the food to the starving.
Scamming people that are typically seen (by his constituency) as elitist tech-mongers and coin-bros? How's that supposed to negatively impact his ratings anyay? At worst it confirms pre-existing favor both for and against him.
People who hate him for the coin shilling already hated him and were not likely to ever be convinced in his favor, people who fanaticize him will see it as stated above and will also not change their opinions in anything but degree.
Yeah I don't buy the ulterior motive. He just wants to enrich himself. That's the primary motivator for ~everything he does. Running a scam on your supporters is perfectly viable if you think nothing of them, and they think everything of you
I feel like you're giving way too much credit here.
It was extremely obviously not some intentional 500 IQ plot to keep crypto illegitimate...
> Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
This is worded like it's something negative, but I honestly fail to see what exactly. Tokens will be pushed to grey market, and? They are already fully utilizing grey and black markets, half of the worlds drug, arm and sanctioned oil trade is done in these shittokens. Cutting out the legal bridges and exchanges would reduce total amount of legal liquidity and on/off ramps and not not change grey and black markets much, since criminals are already operating there.
Instead it would cut a lot of the "legal" schemes by which country elites are laundering bribes and evade taxes. At least part of the schemes.
Forget pumping. He set free a high profile white collar criminal, who in return deposited 2 billion real dollars into Trump shitcoin exchange. And NO ONE bat the eye, not a single congressman or regulator body. Check and balances, my ass. More like cheeks and obeisances.
Yeah the whole thing is absolutely scandalous. The president being anywhere near crypto is such a huge, blaring warning. Even more so if people are "investing" as a quid pro quo. But ~nobody cares. Scam economy
Yes. The "freedom" people refer to is "the freedom to be an asshole and exploit people without repercussion".
No. Those are the abusers of freedom who like to pretend their freedom doesn't stop at the tip of our collective noses. They are also a minority regardless of how vocal that small minority and the psyop saboteurs are that egg them on and keep them company.
Maybe we should just abandon the concept of "freedom" and embrace material values. Or is that too 19th-century progressive? Must we always ignore all discourse that happened after the bill of rights was scribbled?
Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that, I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or gender self determination, obviously).
Hmmm...Defending yourself is literally the same as abortion and gender dysphoria.
No.
Insofar as there's some nuance to what individuals choose to do but we like to eschew that in debate and make blanket statements about what you should or should not be allowed to do?
When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid, people get more desperate to take any advantage that comes their (or their children's) way. In really bad situations, it stops being about improvement and starts being about avoidance of decline. The late Roman Republic is an example - wealth, land and influence concentrated in fewer hands, society just gets more vicious and corrupt as people look for any edge they can get. The reign of Æthelred Unread is another example.
I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
> When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid
In a free market system, wealth is created, not concentrated.
It does both! There is no natural law which prevents the formation of a monopoly.
> It does both!
No, it does not concentrate wealth. Wealth is not a fixed pie. In a free market, you get wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it.
As for monopolies, competition is what prevents them.
This sounds incredibly naive. Competition does not magically prevent monopolies -- once you have a dominant player they just buy or undercut the occasional competing startup.
> once you have a dominant player they just buy or undercut the occasional competing startup
If they buy startups, a thousand more will spring up hoping to be bought. Investors love this game.
And if you think undercutting works, read up on the story of Dow and how they broke the German bromine monopoly [1].
There is no such thing as a natural monopoly. Only governments can create monopolies, usually through regulation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Henry_Dow#Breaking_a_m...
Every market exists within a regulatory system, which exerts power over the participants in the market. Using wealth, you can acquire influence, and thereby direct the power of the regulatory system to inhibit your competition, or create a legal monopoly for yourself. A free market is not magic; people have to make it happen, and people have many motivations beyond the freedom of markets.
> In a free market, you get wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it.
You can do either, or both.
Unregulated capitalism inevitably trends towards a mafia state with an oligarchic structure and concentrated monopolistic power. It’s just an empirical fact at this point.
The engine that really drives innovation and wealth creation is regulated capitalism that preserves competitive markets by restraining anticompetitive behavior.
If you’re ideologically attached to capitalism I have good news for you. That’s the approach that leads to its most effective implementation.
If you’re ideologically attached to “market fundamentalism” as I suspect, which is a reflexive opposition to regulation, then this concentrated market structure is what you’re advocating for.
A free market relies on prohibition of using force or fraud in one's dealings.
If what you mean by "mafia" is "your signature on the contract or or brains" that is not free market.
> Unregulated capitalism inevitably trends towards a mafia state with an oligarchic structure and concentrated monopolistic power. It’s just an empirical fact at this point.
Has there ever been a jurisdiction with unregulated capitalism? I'm unaware of any.
Even the most laissez-faire economies have had bedrock legal infrastructure: property rights enforcement, contract law, courts, which is regulation.
Maybe you’re thinking of anarcho-capitalism? But that has never worked at scale.
Why do you see those two processes as orthagonal?
Transferring A to B is concentrating it in B.
B creating something has nothing to do with A.
> nothing to do with
quite.
Completely agree with this. I watch many commercials on television targeting elderly folks and I just cringe. They seem to be doing everything they can to separate the viewer from their money for a dubious product or service.
“There’s a sucker born every minute, and we’re gonna take ‘em for all they got” - Harry Wormwood in Matilda
At least in the book/movie(s) Harry Wormwood faces consequences. The enablement top down is the problem. The system is rotten and no one faces any real consequence only a slap on the wrist at a fraction of revenue many years later.
Watching over shoulders as elderly people watch YouTube with ads and engage with clips of deepfake celebrities selling fraudulent nonsense is both enlightening and painful.
Professor Cottom's a certified (McArthur) Genius, and she clocked this "scam culture" back in 2021:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/opinion/scams-trust-insti...
Things have gotten dramatically worse since then.
I knew a couple of McArthur Genius grant recipients (they were students like me) when I was in college. I wouldn't put any of them among the top most intelligent students I went to school with. The way they are chosen isn't exactly bad but it doesn't end up with giving the grants to "geniuses". If you aren't in one of the top most competitive fields, its more about applying and getting the right recommendations. If you get one in math or CS, then yes...that's very impressive. Professor Cotton (sp?) isn't in one of those fields.
Bro. You don't apply for the McArthur.
And why would you go out of your way to misspell her name? What do you gain by that aside from just looking petulant?
This sounds like everyone is not perfect therefore no one should be singled out as a bad guy, everyone is equally shady. Which is objectively not true. Even the shit IT practices like stealing private information or stealing copyrighted property can be "rationalized" to benefit better targeted advertisement or better LLM generators and so on. Gambling on the other hand is pure 100% social damage with zero redeeming qualities. Even drugs have some positive aspects to them, unlike gambling.
I read "scambling" recently and the word has stayed with me since.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree.
Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college.
By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
And the last 10+ years has taken this further where we now have "side gigs" or "side hustles" or people who are desperate to be "influencers" or "Youtubers" or whatever. Any hobby you have needs to be monetized to get by. You have to sell something, even if it's advice on how to do the thing.
That's what's meant by "hobbies are a luxury". It means you're earning enough not to need to monetize some portion of your life. And the number of people who can do that is continually decreasing.
The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Every aspect of our lives is getting financialized so somebody else can get wealthier. Every second of your time and thing you do needs to be monetized and exploited.
Gambling isn't a net negative for society. It's just a negative. There are no positive aspects to it. Gambling addicts are incredibly likely to commit suicide. It's incredibly destructive.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
True, but somewhat misleading. This includes parents that work part-time. If we only include full-time work then it's never been over 50%. Largely this reflects the second wave of feminism and women being able to get jobs they want!
> Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
Employers tend to prefer full-time employees because they are more efficient. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee and you'd rather get the max number of hours out of them. It's actually quite hard to get a part-time job in many fields. It's true that part-time employment has gone up but again I think this is largely good! And in any case the ratio of part-time employees has barely changed since the 1960s: ~17% today vs ~13% back then. So it's hardly the typical case.
> The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Silly Marxist voodoo economics. Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
> Employers tend to prefer full-time employees ...
They don't [1][2].
> Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
Small businesses absolutely fit the model, specifically "petite bourgeoisie" [3]. The problem with small business owners is they think they're capital owners (or will be someday) so they vote for the interests of capital owners but most small businesses are just jobs you have to buy with typically less pay and less security.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/part-tim...
[2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/still-falling-short-on-hours...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
> The problem is capitalism
Capitalist countries build walls to keep people out.
Socialist countries build walls to keep people in.
This is a trite response that doesn't engage with what was originally stated.
The double edged brilliance/danger of capitalism is that it constantly opens up and moves into new markets. This is good, it means once the market determines a need, capital investment can accelerate production of the good that meets that need.
But the flip side is it is coming for everything. Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient. And there are genuine problems with that.
Regulation has been the historical response, but we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
This is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. One can be pro-capitalism or anti-capitalism and come to the same conclusion.
> we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
There are more and more regulations every day. Oil refineries are being abandoned in California due to regulations so heavy there's no way for them to operate anymore. A friend of mine pulled his business out of California due to stifling regulations.
> Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient.
I give my unwanted items to the thrift store rather than the landfill. Others sell it on eBay. This is monetizing/making things more efficient. And it's good.
but not universally. oil refineries were causing asthma and environmental degradation.
them moving to another state is a regulatory failure (they shouldn't have another jurisdiction to move to, they should just operate without imposing negative externalities on others, spelling of the refineries).
what value is clean air? what is the value of a human life? how much is your attention worth?
these are questions that capitalism should not answer, but will nevertheless try to.
Socialist economies are much more environmentally destructive, because they are so inefficient they cannot afford the luxury of being environmentally cleaner.
The problem isn't capitalism. That's just poor thinking from someone who has spent too much time thinking about political ideology. The problem is how we finance campaigns combined with gerrymandering. And if you want proof, look at corruption in communist and formerly communist countries. It makes the US look like a bunch of choir boys by contrast. Thinking that it is about capitalism is just an attempt to wedge in some political ideology into a practical problem of governance and a sign someone has never actually had to lead real humans before.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
This is Reagan-era starve the beast propaganda [1][2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
The enormous increases in government spending is not propaganda.
This goes back to dying for your own country at scale for wars that had nothing to with risking your family, your land, your country. back then if you refused to fight for war that never risked anyting you care, they would literally killed you or made you slave labor.
Are you saying this is specific to the US?
I think you would be hard pressed to find a country that didn’t get involved in some war that had nothing to do with defense.
nope, it's as old as war itself
If this is referring to the US, yes indeed. We're great at the whole free market, fiduciary duty to shareholder bit. We're terrible at using law to manage the negative externalities.
I have bad news, I don't think we're that great at the free market either.
Reminds me of what Frank Sobotka says in The Wire: "We used to make shit in this country, build shit here. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535377.
Well, really, that's all countries.
Some dude was willing to resort to more depraved measures than his rivals, and made enough people do what he wanted in order to become the leader.
All of the greatest societies champion their defeat of and superiority from people exactly like that.
Very ahistorical view
Really? Show me one society that wasn't ruled by a class of people that didn't, at some point, operate a monopoly on violence, often with basically nothing that would count as "due process" today.
One.
I’ve seen this too. And with AI, it’s empowered even more people to spam, imitate, steal and remix others’ work, research and artistic expression.
The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.
> “not even pretending to care about people they affect.”
“Not even pretending to care about the people they elect.”
There, I fixed it for you.
Americans: freedom to
Europe: freedom from
The UK? or Ireland? or USA?
Isn't it interesting that you can't tell!
Assassinations markets are what's next.
eg. someone will bet $1M that Elon Musk will be assassinated in 2026.
But these don't themselves even have to be legal. Second order wagers will be placed on SpaceX and Tesla stock prices, bets that "a hundred billionaire will die in 2026", etc.
A bet that Putin will be assassinated could be encoded in, "there will be regime change in Russia."
Someone would need to take the opposite side of that bet. And who would do that knowing someone might try to assassinate him in order to win that bet?
In this scenario, that would be the people paying for the assassination. The people who want it to happen bet that it won't. The people who want to do it bet that it will. The net result is that if one of the people who bet on it happening makes it happen, they are being paid by the people betting against it, in a plausibly deniable way.
A country leader seeing someone suddenly take out a $50 million position on them not being assassinated is not the $50 million vote of confidence a naive read on the market might indicate, it's a $50 million payout to the assassin. Albeit inefficiently so, since others can take the other side of the bet and do nothing. But the deniability may be worth it.
What's even more interesting is when you consider that A) it doesn't have to be one person taking out a large position, it can be multiple people, over time, and B) the assassin doesn't have to be known or confirmed ahead of time, if someone decides their "reserve price" has been met, all they have to do to receive a payout is place the appropriate bet before performing the act.
The end result is a combination of Kickstarter and Doordash for targeted homicide.
> The end result is a combination of Kickstarter and Doordash for targeted homicide.
or kidnappers. Someone could take the opposite side, kidnap the individual and guarantee their survival for the year. When time is up they just dump them in the street and collect the bet.
I'm not sure there's any deniability in placing the "won't be assassinated" bet, when you could equally state it as "I will pay $1M to whoever accepts this bet and assassinated this person"
Anyways, how exactly is this assassin going to collect on their bet? I'm pretty sure law enforcement will be looking into the fact that somebody place that bet and then shortly after, the assassination happened.
This could make for fun anti-life insurance.
"I bet I won't die this year."
The only life insurance you get to collect on while you're alive.
Ah, you beat me to it. I learned about assassination markets in a previous post about the overall gambling/prediction markets topic a few weeks ago; the concept is so coherent that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
If someone want him dead, someone have to bet that million on the target being alive at a specific date. Unless someone plan to do the execution themselves, the bet must be lost for the target to be unalive !
Is it actually illegal to bet on an assassination?
I am not sure, but you don’t have to technically bet on assassination. You can bet on an event which would happen as a result of said assassination. X won’t get re-elected. Company Y CEO will change in 2027. This is artist Z last tour. Athlete K won’t participate in this event etc.
It's the inverse, here how you have to bet (unless you plan to be doing the hands on assassination works) : X will get re-elected. Company Y CEO will not change in 2027. This is not artist Z last tour. Athlete K will participate in this event etc.
Like I said elsewhere in this thread the bet have to be lost if you want your target dead.
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Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries.
We also have people under the age of 20 drinking alcohol.
I am not suggesting in any way that gambling is good - but it wasnt invented last week in america
> Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries
People who write vacuous "America bad" comments online without understanding the topic may be shocked to learn that America has also had gambling for a long time.
The debate now is about the current changes to regulations and proliferation of apps and ads. Gambling now is objectively more accessible and less regulated than in the past.
In my European country gambling is very strictly regulated. Isn’t it the same in yours?
Can't speak for everyone here, but I (as a US citizen) am way less bothered by sports gambling specifically than I am by generalized Kalshi-type gambling being abused by powerful insiders in the federal government (or other institutions). Like yeah I don't think it's great that we've enabled yet another route for young men to completely ruin their lives, but civil liberties, personal responsibility, etc. etc. etc.
What really is scaring me is how transparently the current US executive branch has been basically running a Black Sox scam for the last year or so. This is not something that I think is really happening with eg. Ladbrokes. Seems more like an even more insidious form of insider trading which is already disgustingly prevalent across the whole US political system; except now it's even less traceable, and even easier to exploit for things like military actions.
edit: Like is this kind of stuff already prevalent in places where gambling is legal? https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-polymarket/
All those other countries also have history of regulating it and body of literature (as in opinion pieces and stories) about observed harms of it.
Well, we were able to observe in the impact of legalization of online betting in real time, watching every other ad slot during sports games turning into gambling app ads designed to hook 20 something men into lighting their paycheck on fire for a brief dopamine hit.
Plus, prediction markets going from a harmless novelty where people would bet a few bucks on an election into a massive offshoot of gambling industry incentivizing manipulating outcomes/insider trading, once again leaving the average gambler left holding the bag and poorer.
You honestly couldn't design a better experiment to test the theory of whether open and legal vs. banned but underground gambling leads to better outcomes. So I'm not sure why it matters that other countries have different laws (that likely were more thoughtfully designed than basically just saying "it's legal now" out of the blue).
"Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries."
You've had online gambling for centuries? With phones, and apps?
Wherever you are from should really have tried selling this technology. While the US was still rolling out steam engines, you could have really cornered the cell phone market.
Americans would definitely not be shocked at the idea of gambling being legal, and I don't know why you'd think they would be. The US has gambling tourist destinations.
In Norway, gambling is controlled by a state monopoly, same as our alcohol sales. Probably for the same reasons.
Canada too, you buy liquor and lotto tickets from a crown corporation
A lot of gambling is Canada is privatized. Sports gambling, for example. Most of the money being made in the gambling industry is not in the lotto.
Edit: Also the liquor thing varies by province. Ontario has a crown corporation selling liquor, but in Alberta all liquor sales are by private entities.
Nonsense!
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This posh HN culture war has gotta end.
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> If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then don't.
Three of the "four ways to lose" described in the article are significant harms inflicted on parties besides the bettors themselves. One cannot avoid these harms by not directly gambling.
The issue is the combined risk of insider trading coupled with the bias of disaster-centric betting, or at least event-centric betting. This means if you have the means to create an “out of the ordinary” event you have a strong incentive to make it happen and to bet on it. These must be controllable events, so not natural or complex systems. On the gentler side it would be sports fixing, which has always existed. On the worse side it would be causing war, making economic decisions that will impact many, betting on people death and so on. These kind of things are seemingly already happening to a certain degree.
It’s the insider betting that’s the problem. Not the intrinsic nature of gambling
You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks, and quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it in a betting app. This isn't like the stock market which is a vehicle for wealth for hundreds of millions. Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
You're waving away the dangers of government officials having a financial incentive to take actions based not on societal well-being or integrity.
> Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
The stock market is 100% optional to participate in, and every broker tells you (is legally required to tell you, in fact) that you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose money. That didn't stop whatever forces have made them essentially required to plan for the normal life stage of retirement these days.
I don't use these platforms so I don't know how the bets are structured. If someone comes along and places a bet that looks very much like insider knowledge, can you only bet against or can you place bets with them like following the shooter in craps?
Betting against something that looks like an insider making the bet really is something willingly done. It's just a dumb bet.
> You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks, and quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it in a betting app
Absolutely garbage take, to be quite honest with you. War profiteering is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, and the last thing we need in this world is more opportunities for it. Regardless of whether the punters getting screwed consented to gambling or not, the problem is the perverse incentives it creates at the highest echelons of power. Abusing access to military intel for profit is foul behavior that will only degrade the quality of our governance and foreign policy, not to mention the literal lives that will be lost as a result.
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Ban them too. Make bets have to be placed in person.
Why is this such a big deal?
I don't get why people make such a big deal betting on sports; if you want to waste your money go for it.
Because there are societal costs to poverty, regardless of how people arrive there. Gambling can be as addictive and personally and societally destructive as any drug.
Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your average yearly tax (last 5 years). Prediction market should be banned.
That seems to imply concern for the gambler, who at least has chosen to play.
A much bigger problem might be when these markets bet on a meatspace event and then a bunch go out and try to influence innocents in meatspace, to great detriment of society. Like this journalist https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-polymarket
> Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your average yearly tax
How about you let people decide what they do with THEIR own money?
Americans coming to the realisation that much of the rest of the world came to decades ago and acting like it’s a massive revelation is…absolutely par for the course for the US. Just hurry up and implode already.
Lost from reddit, are we?
How much of a hurry depends on whether Trump gets his $200 billion to continue the war. Have you checked the odds on Kalshi?
> Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It's just bringing to public visibility exactly what happens across the stock market. Public companies do this all the time -- engineer their performance end earnings to influence <strike>shareholder</strike> gambler expectations on earnings day.
More doomer takes. The world survived two world wars and a cold war. This stuff is nothing. Engagement bait as usual.
> Oh, you think (bad thing) might happen? Why do you even care when (worse thing) happened in the past? Checkmate! I am very intelligent.
gr8 b8 m8 i r8 8/8
vintage meme
the implied suggestion that we should not seek to remedy anything that is not the worst thing that has ever happened to the species seems more like bait than the article
You're joking, right? A hundred million people died in those wars.
“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”
> I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
given that the crypto anarchist papers from the 90s that these markets are built on are very well thought out instruction manuals about how bad it could get, this title implies users are gullible idiots as opposed to the creators and power users
An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem. So I take issue with all the flippant comments about this being a "gambling loophole", like, who cares? I don't think any financial game should be seen as a different category than the other.
Even the "positive expected value" framework masquaraded as a distinction between trading and a casino game is completely false and entirely a cultural distinction. There are many equities and bond trades that have lower expected value than a casino game, even this forum is populated by people that receive shares and derivatives as compensation, who will earn nothing - even lose money - under positive outcomes. Exhibit A. Not everyone needs to care how a particular financial game is perceived. Not all cultures need any social segregation of gambling versus another way of making money from money. I'd rather be part of those cultures. And in the US/Western gambling regulatory frameworks and prohibitions, prediction markets don't fit, that isn't a loophole to me. They are structurally different and I'm not entirely sure what people want to happen and how it is supposed to be enforced. I don't get the impression they've looked at all, and are just operating on a feeling that I find irrelevant.
And on the insiders, yes, that's the point of prediction markets. They are intended to be distributed bounties with plausible deniability. That's literally what Jim Bell's 1995 crypto-anarchist paper was about.
In the natural course of finance, every asset, including information, should be tradable, as long as improvements in liquidity continue to come.
> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
Maybe if you're Tom Hanks in Castaway. In real life, people contract lung damage from secondhand smoke; homes are mortgaged to fund gambling habits; families are destroyed by drunk drivers.
That's not to say that people can't partake in their vices responsibly. But the idea that any harms are limited to the person with the problem is just not true.
the basis of my view is the observation that homes can be mortgaged to trade financial markets as well
all the protective frameworks out there do not prevent someone from becoming a debt serf or excluded from the credit markets if they want to
Sure, there isn't a silver bullet that magically prevents all possible harm while also imposing no burden or inconvenience. The basis of my view is that the non-existence of such a framework is a terrible reason to have no protective framework at all.
I think adding barriers to doing something dumb:
1. Gives the person more opportunities to reconsider.
2. Gives loved ones more opportunities to notice what's happening and intervene.
There's a world of difference between refinancing your home by visiting a bank several times over a period of a few weeks and refinancing your home by tapping a few buttons on your phone.
The difference convenience makes to the rate of making errors in judgement is actually so obvious that even military equipment will have additional steps you have to take to enable lethal weapons/eject/etc.
That’s a lot of words to tell everyone you don’t know what an “externality” is.
> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
That ignore the societal influence on an individual. If everyone around you gambles, you are more inclined to take up gambling.
Not ignoring, deterring the state from involving itself in anything except the individual.
You put your own case powerfully, but you don’t seem to have reacted to Derek Thompson‘s case, except to say that you’re not bothered about gambling addiction. (And why not? If people predictably do things that are bad for themselves, that damages the efficiency case for free markets and everything.)
I did read his article, and there are the geopolitical events and the sporting events he talks about.
I don't really understand why sports leagues require faith in their institution. Is the economy overleveraged on collateral debt swaps on league merchandise sells? Is our economy built on preteens in Nebraska believing their only way out of there is a worthwhile pursuit?
I'm not sure why I am supposed to care about the sanctity of that market, what are the consequences of it feeling rigged? and the FBI was on those insider trades instantly, so the sports side seems tightly regulated already whether I understand why a segment of that market needs certain assurances.
And the non-sporting trades I recognize the danger of, the liquidity in the market altering the outcome as someone in control of the outcome does something selfish. I say do what we can to avoid the death markets and the nuclear ones, but distributed bounties otherwise are very transparent and efficient wealth distribution mechanisms that fulfill other goals of compensating labor more correctly.
Surely a big point of sport is to get young people to do healthy, character-building team activities. That requires sporting heroes they can look up to, rather than cheats who will throw a game for money.
It doesn’t require that
Representation is a powerful driver for a large swath of humans, there are many others who get inspired for other reasons, or inspired by fictional characters
I’m fine with those other traits being expressed more frequently
> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
libertarianism is a cancer
Not as much as Communism, but both seem like utopian ideologies based on an idealized model of human behavior.
Is there a site which implements the ideas behind the file Indecent Proposal[1]?
It would be a site where folks could start auctions based on stuff they want from other folks. So Bob wants Janes jumper. He goes onto the site, creates an auction with an initial offer of $5. Jane is informed that Bob wants to buy her jumper. She turns down the offer. Bob raises his offer to $10. She declines the offer. Then Cane joins the auction and makes an offer for $15. Jane refuses that too.
One see where this is going. The point is that Jane cannot shutdown the auction and anyone can make a bid. The trajectory is that Jane will reach a point where she is forced to make a moral choice (much like in the film). Everyone has their price, even Jane in this case.
It is easy enough to imagine what besides jumpers will be placed on the site. It is an highly immoral idea and something akin to cyber mobbing or AI fake porn. So does the site exist already? Asking for a friend.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_Proposal
This sounds like a great Black Mirror episode
that's just darkweb stuff right?
Why? I find Polymarket and these gambling sites just as bad. Is AI with it's fake porn is any better? And just yesterday, Meta and Google was found responsible for addiction[1].
How is this worse? I guess I forgot to say that a site like that would be simply be a poke in the eye of how stupid the internet has become. It's ridiculous to see folks not liking this idea yet finding the idea of betting on wars to be ok.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/03/25/meta-and...