They will be uttered in response to criticism and then quietly ignored until the inevitable. Rinse and repeat. A true mark of a grifter.
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.
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?
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.
This isn't big oil (yet) you can't just externalize all the downside and say the product is a net benefit.
Wait a minute, you can bet on pro wrestling? OK I'm out of ideas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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"?
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Regardless, from HN's guidelines:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
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.
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.
* 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...
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).
Mine has a pub, a butcher, a baker, a sandwich shop, 3 coffee shops and 5 bookmakers.
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.
- 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".
There is also some technical knowledge but that's easy to pick up.
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.
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.
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.
And use of illegal insider info would cease.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until then, there is always "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/optimism-uncertai...
"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. ..."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.
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.
If only there were some kind of market where we could materialise our bets...
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
Or just shut down the whole thing. Bets on bombing is truly immoral and downright despicable.
The real evil is when someone ensures the famine occurs so they can profit from an outside betting position.
“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...
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.
Not necessary. If you just bet against them being punctual always, you'll have a 80% plus success rate.
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.
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.)
The people profiting aren't buying the bombs with their own money.
You don’t actually believe bombs are sold without out a proper margin.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It is ugly as sin, but so is MTGO.
He’s not full time (or even part time) on MTG these days but he is often called in as a consultant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Companies don't have morals, only people. Abdicating your moral responsibilities because you're employed is cowardice.
Avoiding working in deeply unethical areas also shields the company from legal or PR liability.
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.
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??
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.
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.
> > I don't personally have an issue with folks who worked on weapons of war.
Makes sense.
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.
Literally not what that means, at all. What a ridiculous assertion.
Why do you think virtue signaling causes harm?
Can you explain the relevance of 'ignorance isn't a virtue'?
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.
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.
> (eventally) higher prices
I have not noticed Amazon charging higher prices than others. The difficulty in charging higher prices is competitors emerge.
I seriously doubt mr jobs wouldnt take one look at the app store home screen and puke in disgust at how awful it is.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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/…
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?).
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.
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.
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.
If the maximum you could spend gambling each day was $20 across all online platforms, you'd not really have an issue.
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.
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?
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.
In most countries, but not in the US.
- 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.
> 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.
> PS A "curve-off" public welfare policy is far more effective than banning guns.
Roll eyes emoji.
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.
Working in sports bettings is like working on an online casino.
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...
On my deathbed I want to look back on life and feel I've made a small positive impact on the world.
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.
I'm surprised there's so much support for this in these HN comments.
I'm a live and let live kind of guy
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.
If the output doesn't work, roll the dice again and spend more tokens.
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
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.
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.
thanks for telling everyone you are in senior leadership
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.
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.
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.
As in, even a dev, HR, etc person having worked for an online gambling company? I feel this may be a slippery slope..
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.
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.
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
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.
Society is fundamentally counter to individual freedom, and the degree determines the nature of that society and the degree of cooperation possible within it.
Creating a fake Indian cricket league - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37580599 - Sept 2023 (10 comments)
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.
People are gambling on the "low of the day?"
Might as well make back alley chicken fighting legal.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have to make another market that is a proxy for you (not) getting screwed.
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.
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.
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.
I don't remember any specifics, or if I'm remembering anything right at all, but I feel like I read something about that.
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.
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.
Any kind of fraud is just market data when you pay enough for it.
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 kind of miss it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=claw+machine&ia=images&iax=...
Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly mean that poker isn't gambling.
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.
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".
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.
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%.
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.
"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...
Increased insider trading will increase spreads.
The CFTC is granting "no-action" exemptions on the basis of....nothing, really.
The "educational" value of these markets.
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.
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?
United Healthcare stock dropped 10% immediately after its CEO was killed.
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.
It could be other types of fraud, however.
Realistically, they'd have to be far more connected to the event, and as such, far more exposed to some kind of risk.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Can also be used to hedge the risk of rain on the day you've planned an outdoor barbecue!
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?
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.
The folly of man in a single sentence.
To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to reveal war secretes to our enemies.
Aww, conspiracy theories are no fun when they're so plausible.
Something tells me China has better opsec around such leaks than we do.
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.)
How easy this is to comprehend when Iran is killing protesters.
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.
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.
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.
Disrupt being a traitor…
The uber of spying…
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.
Maybe it's the separation of powers that's not working...
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
What?! Beg I your pardon, but I think sport is a very different thing to me.
Anti-intellectualism 1, liberal democratic values 0.
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.
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.
That does not only explain gambling but explains many things. And it's not just about the US, it's about the whole West.
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?
I can place a bet that by 2027 we will have 1 bet and a payout on a bet that predicts a horrible catastrophe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
I mean, insurance is basically basically betting that bad things happen to you.
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.
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
How many individual podcast hosts actually control those advertising slots?
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.
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.
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.
No.
I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
In a free market system, wealth is created, not concentrated.
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.
> In a free market, you get wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it.
You can do either, or both.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/opinion/scams-trust-insti...
Things have gotten dramatically worse since then.
And why would you go out of your way to misspell her name? What do you gain by that aside from just looking petulant?
Europe: freedom from
“Not even pretending to care about the people they elect.”
There, I fixed it for you.
The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.
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.
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.
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...
Capitalist countries build walls to keep people out.
Socialist countries build walls to keep people in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/gwJQG4tFqZA?si=9IbdAR4O-lGiTVtN
See: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/politics/trump-prediction-mar...
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."
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.
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.
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.
"I bet I won't die this year."
The only life insurance you get to collect on while you're alive.
Like I said elsewhere in this thread the bet have to be lost if you want your target dead.
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
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.
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/
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).
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.
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.
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.
Betting against something that looks like an insider making the bet really is something willingly done. It's just a dumb bet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
That ignore the societal influence on an individual. If everyone around you gambles, you are more inclined to take up gambling.
libertarianism is a cancer
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
How about you let people decide what they do with THEIR own money?
I don't get why people make such a big deal betting on sports; if you want to waste your money go for it.
gr8 b8 m8 i r8 8/8
“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.”
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.
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...
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...