[HN Gopher] We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and predi...
___________________________________________________________________
We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets
will do
Author : mmcclure
Score : 452 points
Date : 2026-03-26 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.derekthompson.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.derekthompson.org)
| cat-turner wrote:
| Let's make a bet on how bad it can get
|
| I can place a bet that by 2027 we will have 1 bet and a payout on
| a bet that predicts a horrible catastrophe.
| tptacek wrote:
| I agree with Thompson about these kinds of prediction markets,
| but predicting horrible catastrophes is one of the prosocial
| early use cases of these things.
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| In the prediction markets, there's a fine line between
| predicting and manifesting.
| tptacek wrote:
| I mean, I'm talking about things like hurricanes and
| earthquakes and forest fires, not running death pools.
| echelon wrote:
| > forest fires
|
| Fire bug
|
| > earthquakes
|
| Dynamite the fault
|
| > hurricanes
|
| Crazy, but, hear me out: mirrors in space warming the
| Atlantic, mirrors in Africa warming the atmosphere
| ("solar power"), Trump wanting to nuke a hurricane, etc.
|
| Pandemic? Go harvest bats and put them in a cage with
| chickens. You don't even need a molecular bio lab.
|
| Stock market crash? Bombs. Terrorist attacks.
|
| Energy prices? Derail a train carrying fuel cars. Bonus
| points if it's in a major metro and has a blast radius.
| Or, I dunno, start a war with Iran.
|
| This could get really bad.
| tptacek wrote:
| "Dynamite the fault"? What are you, a Bond villain?
| echelon wrote:
| The Bond villain would be the person running the betting
| market.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Dynamite the fault? I presume you haven't seriously
| thought about how much dynamite it would take and how
| deeply you'd have to plant it.
|
| Mirrors in space? Again, have you done the math? How many
| thousands of acres of mirrors would you need, how many
| rockets would it take, and how much would they cost?
| Could you make enough on the betting market to break
| even?
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| I think I see where you're coming from, but if we're
| using them to predict hurricanes, it's likely just
| meteorological data arbitrage. All else seems like random
| chance; hardly an example of an oracle.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed, as long as it's a catastrophe that the bettors can't
| cause, but for which advance warning can mitigate harms.
|
| For instance, I'm in favor of bets that a certain astroid
| will strike the earth at a certain time and place. A signal
| from the prediction markets might cause somebody to evacuate
| in a scenario where they'd otherwise cry "fake news."
|
| Let's not bet on whether the water will remain drinkable,
| because the last thing we need is for somebody to have an
| incentive to poison it.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > For instance, I'm in favor of bets that a certain astroid
| will strike the earth at a certain time and place. A signal
| from the prediction markets might cause somebody to
| evacuate in a scenario where they'd otherwise cry "fake
| news."
|
| I understand the point you're making, but in this case,
| you're still incentivizing someone somewhere to not attempt
| to the best of their ability to intervene in that astroid.
| Bets that truly can't cause any change in behavior that
| might affect the outcome are a mostly theoretical category,
| in my opinion.
| hydroflame7 wrote:
| 'Predictions' market is the silliest loophole for gambling.
| Honestly, more surprised Fanduel, DraftKings and the like who
| have spent millions on lobbying and buying licenses, are not
| fighting tooth and nail on this.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| I believe they are (maybe indirectly on some though):
| https://www.actionnetwork.com/education/tracking-prediction-...
| qoez wrote:
| They totally are tho. And at the same time trying to win via
| the loophole if it doesn't close by launching their own efforts
| heavyset_go wrote:
| If I made a platform like that, I'd be RICO'd after the FBI
| kicked down my door and confiscated everything I own.
|
| If I had the connections Polymarket does, well, then we can
| just place bets on when people will die, everything will work
| out just fine and the President will invest in me.
| mothballed wrote:
| If you don't mind not having US customers, it's easy enough
| to get an online gambling license in a few jurisdictions,
| maybe $20-50k all in (Nevis and Anjouan are a couple of the
| more notable ones), at which point you can serve a large
| portion of the world. This was basically the scenario
| polymarket was in for awhile until they started making
| inroads into US regulatory apparatus.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Wasn't there a crypto betting platform that was operating
| outside of the US, blocked US traffic and the US still went
| after them?
|
| I don't remember any specifics, or if I'm remembering
| anything right at all, but I feel like I read something
| about that.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Kalshi has Trump Jr on its board and is federally regulated.
| I'm not sure FanDuel and DraftKings will win that fight for the
| next 3 years.
| markdown wrote:
| Inb4 Hunter Biden.
| owlninja wrote:
| Actually I believe DraftKings just added a prediction market...
| bko wrote:
| I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform
| isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of
| players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these
| platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My
| understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market
| making which is preferable
| kibwen wrote:
| _> I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the
| platform isn 't the bookmaker._
|
| Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly
| mean that poker isn't gambling.
| FajitaNachos wrote:
| poker and slots are two very different variants of
| gambling. Sure, there is plenty of chance/variance in poker
| but there is an undeniable skill component that is lacking
| in slots.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The one that really infuriates me is blackjack where - if
| you apply skill by counting cards - you get kicked out of
| the casino.
| barchar wrote:
| In theory this should limit the damage insiders can do, since
| as the probability of encountering an insider rises the
| market makers will need to widen the spread.
| paulddraper wrote:
| It truly is insane.
|
| The CFTC is granting "no-action" exemptions on the basis
| of....nothing, really.
|
| The "educational" value of these markets.
| pigeons wrote:
| On the basis of nothing, or on the basis of gifts and
| connections?
| brendanfinan wrote:
| the Kalshi legal team is a revolving door with the CFTC
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| And there is a kid's legal version! They sell them in Walmart -
| Pokemon packs. I don't know how any of this is legal in a
| civilized country.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| Don't forget the other children's gambling trainers:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=claw+machine&ia=images&iax=.
| ..
| markdown wrote:
| The average kid at these places thinks they're a skill-
| based game, so they aren't gambling any more than they are
| when they shoot hoops.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Kids version has been around my entire life (baseball cards)
| it even used to come with bubblegum!
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I have mixed feelings being a parent now. It can be fun to
| get a mystery box or pack. But it does feed on the
| anticipation and rush of surprise. Kids seem to lack the self
| control to stop. Video games seem the worst to me since
| they're so intangible it's easier to get carried away before
| others notice.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Especially when the "prediction" part isn't even part of the
| product, it is an accidental byproduct. No one pays for access
| to the predictions.
|
| And they aren't predictions, they are more like "outcome-
| shaping" markets, since the more liquidity that gets dumped on
| a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper
| with the real-world outcome, and at a certain point it will
| just always happen if it is billions of dollars.
|
| The higher the liquidity involved, the less likely the real
| world outcome ends up being the same as it would have been if
| the prediction market had never existed. Very messy.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Those predictions are just market data, market data is often
| very expensive (my data usage at work is probably about $100k
| a year and i'm not even a trader), I imagine polymarket will
| be too when they are more established.
| kqr wrote:
| Happens already. Selling market data is part of how they
| finance themselves.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Traders sometimes go to prison for insider trading. The
| wisdom of the crowd human when the crowd is following
| someone with insider information is deemed legal.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Those predictions are just market data,
|
| Any kind of fraud is just market data when you pay enough
| for it.
| woah wrote:
| > the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular
| outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the
| real-world outcome
|
| This only works if there are enough people betting on the
| other side. It's not some kind of magical money
| multiplication machine. As more stuff like the one-day Iran
| bet or the 64:56 minute press conference happen, people will
| avoid taking bets on highly specific outcomes.
|
| On more reasonable bets like "war with Iran in the next 6
| months", if there is some kind of shadowy cabal putting
| billions of dollars on the yes side, they just aren't going
| to have much upside if there isn't the same amount on the no
| side.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Actually, prediction markets are closer to stock markets
| (insofar as you consider stock trading to be gambling). Insider
| trading is the bigger issue
| pc86 wrote:
| I've heard people say this but it really only makes sense if
| you don't think about it for more than 10 or 20 seconds.
|
| Prediction markets by definition always resolve to one side
| being completely wiped out and losing everything. Stocks
| going to zero happens pretty seldomly, in prediction markets
| it's guaranteed to happen every single time.
| slibhb wrote:
| That's only true if you leave your money in...which you
| don't have to do.
|
| You can play prediction markets by betting on a swing. E.g.
| I made a few hundred dollars betting on Harris in 2024 when
| Trump was at ~65% odds and then selling before the election
| when it was closer to 50%.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _can play prediction markets by betting on a swing_
|
| The outcomes are still capped. In that respect, it's more
| like a derivative market than the stock market. You can
| trade in and out of options. But the value in the system
| is tightly defined and, after fees, a net negative-sum
| game.
| kqr wrote:
| There are no fees on Polymarket. Not sure about others.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Depends on the event:
|
| https://docs.polymarket.com/trading/fees
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _There are no fees on Polymarket_
|
| "Currently, small fees apply to Crypto and Sports
| markets.
|
| Starting March 30, 2026, this will expand to include
| other categories like Finance, Politics, Economics,
| Culture, Weather, and Tech" [1].
|
| More critically, Polymarket doesn't pay interest on
| deposits. (Kalshi does.)
|
| [1]
| https://help.polymarket.com/en/articles/13364478-trading-
| fee...
| barchar wrote:
| There is a fee implicit in the market spread. It's formed
| out of the time value of money w.r.t. the cost of NOT
| trading as well as the adverse selection faced by those
| with standing offers.
|
| Increased insider trading will increase spreads.
| barchar wrote:
| In that case you limit your upside as well as an insider,
| and have to deal with liquidity and slippage coming and
| going.
| losvedir wrote:
| So options markets then?
| beejiu wrote:
| Prediction markets are nothing like stock markets. Maybe they
| are more like binary options markets. In the UK for example,
| these were for a long time regulated as a gambling product,
| and for the past 7 years have been banned to retail
| consumers.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Insider trading does not (and should not) apply to prediction
| markets.
|
| When gambling companies make markets on Oscars, for example,
| they make those markets knowing 100% that people who know the
| outcome will bet on it. It is inherent to the product, they
| put protections in place. Equally, with some sports markets
| (i.e. transfers), they put in place protections to identify
| activity that IS a legal breach of player's agreements with
| sports leagues.
|
| But on prediction markets, there is inherent insider
| knowledge and people should have the sense not to trade on
| markets where you are trading with insiders. It should be
| obvious. Financial markets are different, they are supposed
| to be open. Prediction markets are not.
|
| There has been a strong drive to apply the concept of insider
| trading. In the UK, people were actually charged under a law
| intended to protect bookmakers...to be clear, this is
| happening whilst people close to central bankers and Treasury
| civil servants are being paid 7 figure sums to leak
| information, and all the stuff that happens with transfer/TV
| show markets. As ever, it is only when politics appears that
| these rules get invented (and to be very clear, politics
| markets have always had insider action too...it is inherent
| to the market, bookmakers know this, they did not ask for
| these people to be charged).
|
| Btw, the Gambling Act has also been used to prevent payments
| to gamblers who exploited casinos that failed to ensure their
| games were fair. If you told the people saying "insider
| trading" that there was a law whose only purpose was to
| protect casino's margins, they wouldn't lose their
| mind...these same laws are being used to prevent "insider
| trading".
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Both have a prediction market product.
| sghiassy wrote:
| The amount of suspicious bets around international politics is
| disturbing
|
| One data point of many:
| https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/politics/iran-war-bets-predic...
|
| Fact: Donald Trump Jump Jr is an advisor of polymarket
| GenerWork wrote:
| I'm sorry, but all this handwringing just smacks of moral
| Puritanism. If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then
| don't.
| sghiassy wrote:
| It's the insider betting that's the problem. Not the intrinsic
| nature of gambling
| GenerWork wrote:
| You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks, and
| quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it in a
| betting app. This isn't like the stock market which is a
| vehicle for wealth for hundreds of millions.
| Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate
| in and you should go in with the expectation that you're
| going to lose.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks,
| and quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it
| in a betting app
|
| Absolutely garbage take, to be quite honest with you. War
| profiteering is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable,
| and the last thing we need in this world is more
| opportunities for it. Regardless of whether the punters
| getting screwed consented to gambling or not, the problem
| is the perverse incentives it creates at the highest
| echelons of power. Abusing access to military intel for
| profit is foul behavior that will only degrade the quality
| of our governance and foreign policy, not to mention the
| literal lives that will be lost as a result.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You're waving away the dangers of government officials
| having a financial incentive to take actions based not on
| societal well-being or integrity.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to
| participate in and you should go in with the expectation
| that you're going to lose.
|
| The stock market is 100% optional to participate in, and
| every broker tells you (is legally required to tell you, in
| fact) that you should go in with the expectation that
| you're going to lose money. That didn't stop whatever
| forces have made them essentially required to plan for the
| normal life stage of retirement these days.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't use these platforms so I don't know how the bets
| are structured. If someone comes along and places a bet
| that looks very much like insider knowledge, can you only
| bet against or can you place bets with them like following
| the shooter in craps?
|
| Betting against something that looks like an insider making
| the bet really is something willingly done. It's just a
| dumb bet.
| angiolillo wrote:
| > If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then don't.
|
| Three of the "four ways to lose" described in the article are
| significant harms inflicted on parties besides the bettors
| themselves. One cannot avoid these harms by not directly
| gambling.
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| The issue is the combined risk of insider trading coupled with
| the bias of disaster-centric betting, or at least event-centric
| betting. This means if you have the means to create an "out of
| the ordinary" event you have a strong incentive to make it
| happen and to bet on it. These must be controllable events, so
| not natural or complex systems. On the gentler side it would be
| sports fixing, which has always existed. On the worse side it
| would be causing war, making economic decisions that will
| impact many, betting on people death and so on. These kind of
| things are seemingly already happening to a certain degree.
| dheera wrote:
| > Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes
| sometimes change their performance to influence gambling
| outcomes.
|
| I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It's just bringing to public
| visibility exactly what happens across the stock market. Public
| companies do this _all the time_ -- engineer their performance
| end earnings to influence <strike>shareholder</strike> gambler
| expectations on earnings day.
| echelon wrote:
| Assassinations markets are what's next.
|
| eg. someone will bet $1M that Elon Musk will be assassinated in
| 2026.
|
| But these don't themselves even have to be legal. Second order
| wagers will be placed on SpaceX and Tesla stock prices, bets that
| "a hundred billionaire will die in 2026", etc.
|
| A bet that Putin will be assassinated could be encoded in, "there
| will be regime change in Russia."
| nlawalker wrote:
| Ah, you beat me to it. I learned about assassination markets in
| a previous post about the overall gambling/prediction markets
| topic a few weeks ago; the concept is so coherent that it has
| its own Wikipedia page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
| slopinthebag wrote:
| Is it actually illegal to bet on an assassination?
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| I am not sure, but you don't have to technically bet on
| assassination. You can bet on an event which would happen as
| a result of said assassination. X won't get re-elected.
| Company Y CEO will change in 2027. This is artist Z last
| tour. Athlete K won't participate in this event etc.
| nick__m wrote:
| It's the inverse, here how you have to bet (unless you plan
| to be doing the hands on assassination works) : X will get
| re-elected. Company Y CEO will not change in 2027. This is
| not artist Z last tour. Athlete K will participate in this
| event etc.
|
| Like I said elsewhere in this thread the bet have to be
| lost if you want your target dead.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Someone would need to take the opposite side of that bet. And
| who would do that knowing someone might try to assassinate him
| in order to win that bet?
| jerf wrote:
| In this scenario, that would be the people paying for the
| assassination. The people who want it to happen bet that it
| won't. The people who want to do it bet that it will. The net
| result is that if one of the people who bet on it happening
| _makes_ it happen, they are being paid by the people betting
| against it, in a plausibly deniable way.
|
| A country leader seeing someone suddenly take out a $50
| million position on them not being assassinated is not the
| $50 million vote of confidence a naive read on the market
| might indicate, it's a $50 million payout to the assassin.
| Albeit inefficiently so, since others can take the other side
| of the bet and do nothing. But the deniability may be worth
| it.
| nlawalker wrote:
| What's even more interesting is when you consider that A)
| it doesn't have to be one person taking out a large
| position, it can be multiple people, over time, and B) the
| assassin doesn't have to be known or confirmed ahead of
| time, if someone decides their "reserve price" has been
| met, all they have to do to receive a payout is place the
| appropriate bet before performing the act.
|
| The end result is a combination of Kickstarter and Doordash
| for targeted homicide.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I'm not sure there's any deniability in placing the "won't
| be assassinated" bet, when you could equally state it as "I
| will pay $1M to whoever accepts this bet and assassinated
| this person"
|
| Anyways, how exactly is this assassin going to collect on
| their bet? I'm pretty sure law enforcement will be looking
| into the fact that somebody place that bet and then shortly
| after, the assassination happened.
| nick__m wrote:
| If someone want him dead, someone have to bet that million on
| the target being alive at a specific date. Unless someone plan
| to do the execution themselves, the bet must be lost for the
| target to be unalive !
| jjmarr wrote:
| [deleted]
| chasebank wrote:
| Ban them too. Make bets have to be placed in person.
| kevinsync wrote:
| Assuming everything physical gets tokenized (as occasionally gets
| predicted), people could soon _literally_ lose their house on a
| bet! Maybe even a bet placed by their swarm of agents. The future
| 's so bright, I gotta wear shades!
| mikrl wrote:
| Bet your shirt AND the farm from the comfort of your phone
| testaccount28 wrote:
| as a wise guy once said, "a grown man made a wager; he lost."
| pixl97 wrote:
| Hence why we drastically reduced the number of
| wagers/addictive risk taking because of its cost on society.
|
| The libertarians here will say "oh yay, we've won". Then a
| few years later they'll cry about your mom losing her house
| to a gambling scam with no recourse. Then they'll cry again
| when the voters finally rid themselves of the gambling
| scourge years later.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Worse: It won't even be _your own_ bet that does the damage.
|
| It'll be bets collected (or "lost" bets which are actually
| payments) by other parties that have an interest in an outcome
| which involves whether you lose your house.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing
| options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing
| military engagements with their gambling position"
|
| To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to
| reveal war secretes to our enemies.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Why not both? There's money to be squeezed from both ends.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Hmm. That also means that key decision makers can _pay_ money
| in order to lie to our enemies.
| kibwen wrote:
| The Rosenbergs weren't spies, they were entrepreneurs providing
| an essential service to the nuclear proliferation industry!
| kqr wrote:
| Sure, and pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us. That's
| exactly the point of these things. Dangle money in front of
| people who know things we want to know.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us_
|
| Something tells me China has better opsec around such leaks
| than we do.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Taiwan is going to be invaded before 2030
| BowBun wrote:
| Then go bet on it! Why are you telling us?
| amrocha wrote:
| You've been brainwashed by your government. You don't have
| any enemies. Nobody cares about you. Nobody is coming to hurt
| you or your family. The biggest risk to your livelihood is
| your government sending you to die in Iran over oil prices.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _You don't have any enemies. Nobody cares about you.
| Nobody is coming to hurt you or your family_
|
| Do you think the U.S. and Israeli militaries have personal
| vendettas against each and every civilian we've killed in
| Iran? Of course we don't. We can barely count them. Just
| because you aren't personally on your community's
| adversary's radar doesn't mean they aren't a threat.
|
| (To be clear, I don't believe Iran was a threat. But there
| are threats to Americans, and it's absolutley not
| brainwashing to ascribe a threat to a group to oneself
| personally instead of waiting for it to be purely selfishly
| relevant before acting.)
| keybored wrote:
| The number one most proximate enemy to a regular person
| is their local/national elite and their
| sycophants/enablers.
|
| How easy this is to comprehend when Iran is killing
| protesters.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| Just workshopping some sv vc tech speak...
|
| Disrupt being a traitor...
|
| The uber of spying...
| keeda wrote:
| Or heck, with the amount of $$$ on the line, cash-strapped
| nation states could even finance their warfare this way. Like
| that $14M bet on when an attack would land in Israel:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401044 -- that could buy
| a lot of drones!
|
| Aww, conspiracy theories are no fun when they're so plausible.
| cowpig wrote:
| Just game-theoretically, suppose you bet $100 on some disaster.
|
| That disaster causes $10,000,000 of harm, but only causes you $90
| of harm individually.
|
| You've gained $10, but your $10 gain is a millionth of the harm
| caused.
|
| Generally-speaking, there's an enormous asymmetry between the
| cost to create/build and the cost to destroy. So now we have a
| mechanism by which individuals have a financial incentive to
| cause harm...
|
| Don't these markets create a mechanism for society to race to
| self-destruction?
| Jblx2 wrote:
| How is that different from regular old insurance?
| cowpig wrote:
| Insurance is usually for things that primarily affect the
| purchaser?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Search for "assassination markets", which is a longish
| treatment of this idea. Specifically, people collectively can
| bet large sums of money that X _will not_ be killed Thursday at
| 5pm. And anyone can take the other side at insanely good
| odds...
| pants2 wrote:
| Couldn't that be said of stock markets and any markets?
|
| United Healthcare stock dropped 10% immediately after its CEO
| was killed.
| cowpig wrote:
| Well, there are laws against insider trading.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Prediction markets advertise insider trading as a feature,
| and enforcement of financial crimes is a racket anyway. If
| you know the right people, make the right campaign
| contributions, laws just don't apply to you.
| ant6n wrote:
| Wait, is the shooter in "insider" in this case?
| kqr wrote:
| Is shorting a company and then murdering its CEO considered
| insider trading in your jurisdiction?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yes, and sounds like a great way to get RICO conspiracy to
| commit murder added to your charges just for trading on it.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| How does someone with a mere $10 stake have the opportunity to
| contribute to the cause of a $10mil disaster?
|
| Realistically, they'd have to be far more connected to the
| event, and as such, far more exposed to some kind of risk.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Pessimistically, i imagine that's what they meant by
| "enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the
| cost to destroy". Like its a lot easier to destroy an art
| piece in a museum than to create one.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > I don't think people have thought hard enough about how bad
| this could get.
|
| given that the crypto anarchist papers from the 90s that these
| markets are built on are very well thought out instruction
| manuals about how bad it could get, this title implies users are
| gullible idiots as opposed to the creators and power users
|
| An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual
| problem. So I take issue with all the flippant comments about
| this being a "gambling loophole", like, who cares? I don't think
| any financial game should be seen as a different category than
| the other.
|
| Even the "positive expected value" framework masquaraded as a
| distinction between trading and a casino game is completely false
| and entirely a cultural distinction. There are many equities and
| bond trades that have lower expected value than a casino game,
| even this forum is populated by people that receive shares and
| derivatives as compensation, who will earn nothing - even lose
| money - under positive outcomes. Exhibit A. Not everyone needs to
| care how a particular financial game is perceived. Not all
| cultures need any social segregation of gambling versus another
| way of making money from money. I'd rather be part of those
| cultures. And in the US/Western gambling regulatory frameworks
| and prohibitions, prediction markets don't fit, that isn't a
| loophole to me. They are structurally different and I'm not
| entirely sure what people want to happen and how it is supposed
| to be enforced. I don't get the impression they've looked at all,
| and are just operating on a feeling that I find irrelevant.
|
| And on the insiders, yes, that's the point of prediction markets.
| They are intended to be distributed bounties with plausible
| deniability. That's literally what Jim Bell's 1995 crypto-
| anarchist paper was about.
|
| In the natural course of finance, every asset, including
| information, should be tradable, as long as improvements in
| liquidity continue to come.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual
| problem.
|
| That ignore the societal influence on an individual. If
| everyone around you gambles, you are more inclined to take up
| gambling.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Not ignoring, deterring the state from involving itself in
| anything except the individual.
| dash2 wrote:
| You put your own case powerfully, but you don't seem to have
| reacted to Derek Thompson's case, except to say that you're not
| bothered about gambling addiction. (And why not? If people
| predictably do things that are bad for themselves, that damages
| the efficiency case for free markets and everything.)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I did read his article, and there are the geopolitical events
| and the sporting events he talks about.
|
| I don't really understand why sports leagues require faith in
| their institution. Is the economy overleveraged on collateral
| debt swaps on league merchandise sells? Is our economy built
| on preteens in Nebraska believing their only way out of there
| is a worthwhile pursuit?
|
| I'm not sure why I am supposed to care about the sanctity of
| that market, what are the consequences of it feeling rigged?
| and the FBI was on those insider trades instantly, so the
| sports side seems tightly regulated already whether I
| understand why a segment of that market needs certain
| assurances.
|
| And the non-sporting trades I recognize the danger of, the
| liquidity in the market altering the outcome as someone in
| control of the outcome does something selfish. I say do what
| we can to avoid the death markets and the nuclear ones, but
| distributed bounties otherwise are very transparent and
| efficient wealth distribution mechanisms that fulfill other
| goals of compensating labor more correctly.
| dash2 wrote:
| Surely a big point of sport is to get young people to do
| healthy, character-building team activities. That requires
| sporting heroes they can look up to, rather than cheats who
| will throw a game for money.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| It doesn't require that
|
| Representation is a powerful driver for a large swath of
| humans, there are many others who get inspired for other
| reasons, or inspired by fictional characters
|
| I'm fine with those other traits being expressed more
| frequently
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| That's a lot of words to tell everyone you don't know what an
| "externality" is.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> An individual 's susceptibility to a vice is an individual
| problem._
|
| Maybe if you're Tom Hanks in Castaway. In real life, people
| contract lung damage from secondhand smoke; homes are mortgaged
| to fund gambling habits; families are destroyed by drunk
| drivers.
|
| That's not to say that people can't partake in their vices
| responsibly. But the idea that any harms are limited to the
| person with the problem is just not true.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| the basis of my view is the observation that homes can be
| mortgaged to trade financial markets as well
|
| all the protective frameworks out there do not prevent
| someone from becoming a debt serf or excluded from the credit
| markets if they want to
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think adding barriers to doing something dumb:
|
| 1. Gives the person more opportunities to reconsider.
|
| 2. Gives loved ones more opportunities to notice what's
| happening and intervene.
|
| There's a world of difference between refinancing your home
| by visiting a bank several times over a period of a few
| weeks and refinancing your home by tapping a few buttons on
| your phone.
|
| The difference convenience makes to the rate of making
| errors in judgement is actually so obvious that even
| military equipment will have additional steps you have to
| take to enable lethal weapons/eject/etc.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Sure, there isn't a silver bullet that magically prevents
| all possible harm while also imposing no burden or
| inconvenience. The basis of my view is that the non-
| existence of such a framework is a terrible reason to have
| no protective framework at all.
| jbxntuehineoh wrote:
| > An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual
| problem.
|
| libertarianism is a cancer
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Not as much as Communism, but both seem like utopian
| ideologies based on an idealized model of human behavior.
| seydor wrote:
| Why do we need to reinvent the wheel again. There's a reason why
| these things are banned.
|
| And by the way, shame on all the podcasters and VCs who
| advertised those abominable 'platforms'. To name one, the cast of
| the All-in podcast
| grvdrm wrote:
| It's everywhere. Bill Simmons. Makes me insane.
|
| How many individual podcast hosts actually control those
| advertising slots?
| amazingamazing wrote:
| More doomer takes. The world survived two world wars and a cold
| war. This stuff is nothing. Engagement bait as usual.
| esafak wrote:
| You're joking, right? A hundred million people died in those
| wars.
|
| "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed.
| But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops."
| smarf wrote:
| the implied suggestion that we should not seek to remedy
| anything that is not the worst thing that has ever happened to
| the species seems more like bait than the article
| jbxntuehineoh wrote:
| > Oh, you think (bad thing) might happen? Why do you even care
| when (worse thing) happened in the past? Checkmate! I am very
| intelligent.
|
| gr8 b8 m8 i r8 8/8
| ed_balls wrote:
| Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your
| average yearly tax (last 5 years). Prediction market should be
| banned.
| imglorp wrote:
| That seems to imply concern for the gambler, who at least has
| chosen to play.
|
| A much bigger problem might be when these markets bet on a
| meatspace event and then a bunch go out and try to influence
| innocents in meatspace, to great detriment of society. Like
| this journalist https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-
| polymarket
| baal80spam wrote:
| > Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your
| average yearly tax
|
| How about you let people decide what they do with THEIR own
| money?
| juleiie wrote:
| Today _Integrity_ is merely means to score more views and likes
|
| That's how far we have fallen. We are all painfully aware how
| corrupted all sorts of people are but instead of actual action we
| give each other likes on social media under carefully crafted
| anger bait.
|
| So much everything online is fake that it is tempting to just
| throw your phone away.
|
| The genuineness is the highest luxury
|
| I try to make sure to get truly downvoted to hell every other
| week on social media. It resets the addicted brain and stops hive
| mind progress bar for a little while at least. Also get banned -
| this is good for you too precisely because it feels slightly
| uncomfortable.
|
| That's how I try to survive online landscapes anyway.
| canticleforllm wrote:
| We are repeating a very, very old lesson. We will learn once
| more, the hard way.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I like prediction markets because they offer much more diverse
| markets compared to stocks/options and sports betting, which are
| far more limited. The downsides are limited liquidity and fraud,
| but this is endemic to other markets too.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Sounds like good ol' fashioned developing country style
| corruption to me!
|
| Anti-intellectualism 1, liberal democratic values 0.
| seatac76 wrote:
| Prediction market creators making the case that their existing is
| some sort of a market efficiency play is the most laughable thing
| I have ever heard.
|
| SC made a mistake in the Draft King/Fan duel saga and has
| unleashed the worst kind of market, takes up may too much money
| and time especially from young people.
| blitzar wrote:
| Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world
| gambling has been a thing for centuries.
|
| We also have people under the age of 20 drinking alcohol.
|
| I am not suggesting in any way that gambling is good - but it
| wasnt invented last week in america
| tolerance wrote:
| This posh HN culture war has gotta end.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Can't speak for everyone here, but I (as a US citizen) am way
| less bothered by sports gambling specifically than I am by
| generalized Kalshi-type gambling being abused by powerful
| insiders in the federal government (or other institutions).
| Like yeah I don't think it's great that we've enabled yet
| another route for young men to completely ruin their lives, but
| civil liberties, personal responsibility, etc. etc. etc.
|
| What really is scaring me is how transparently the current US
| executive branch has been basically running a Black Sox scam
| for the last year or so. This is not something that I think is
| really happening with eg. Ladbrokes. Seems more like an even
| more insidious form of insider trading which is already
| disgustingly prevalent across the whole US political system;
| except now it's even less traceable, and even easier to exploit
| for things like military actions.
|
| edit: Like is this kind of stuff already prevalent in places
| where gambling is legal? https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-
| reporter-polymarket/
| ragazzina wrote:
| In my European country gambling is very strictly regulated.
| Isn't it the same in yours?
| matsemann wrote:
| In Norway, gambling is controlled by a state monopoly, same as
| our alcohol sales. Probably for the same reasons.
| morkalork wrote:
| Canada too, you buy liquor and lotto tickets from a crown
| corporation
| AlexandrB wrote:
| A lot of gambling is Canada is privatized. Sports gambling,
| for example. Most of the money being made in the gambling
| industry is not in the lotto.
|
| Edit: Also the liquor thing varies by province. Ontario has
| a crown corporation selling liquor, but in Alberta all
| liquor sales are by private entities.
| markdown wrote:
| Nonsense!
| watwut wrote:
| All those other countries also have history of regulating it
| and body of literature (as in opinion pieces and stories) about
| observed harms of it.
| toraway wrote:
| Well, we were able to observe in the impact of legalization of
| online betting in real time, watching every other ad slot
| during sports games turning into gambling app ads designed to
| hook 20 something men into lighting their paycheck on fire for
| a brief dopamine hit.
|
| Plus, prediction markets going from a harmless novelty where
| people would bet a few bucks on an election into a massive
| offshoot of gambling industry incentivizing manipulating
| outcomes/insider trading, once again leaving the average
| gambler left holding the bag and poorer.
|
| You honestly couldn't design a better experiment to test the
| theory of whether open and legal vs. banned but underground
| gambling leads to better outcomes. So I'm not sure why it
| matters that other countries have different laws (that likely
| were more thoughtfully designed than basically just saying
| "it's legal now" out of the blue).
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Americans would definitely not be shocked at the idea of
| gambling being legal, and I don't know why you'd think they
| would be. The US has gambling tourist destinations.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the
| world gambling has been a thing for centuries
|
| People who write vacuous "America bad" comments online without
| understanding the topic may be shocked to learn that America
| has also had gambling for a long time.
|
| The debate now is about the current changes to regulations and
| proliferation of apps and ads. Gambling now is objectively more
| accessible and less regulated than in the past.
| dash2 wrote:
| An argument not mentioned here and which I didn't appreciate
| until I actually took part in these markets myself, is that you
| need a supply of stupid/uninformed people to take the other side
| of the informed people's bets.(In economic terms, no-trade
| theorems apply.) That suggests to me that the dream of perfect
| information revelation isn't going to come true. Instead, the
| liquid markets will be those with a large supply of marks, who
| bet for identity reasons or who are simply ignorant and naive.
| (Currently polymarket gives a 16% ish probability that Trump will
| lose office this year. Sounds like wishful thinking to me?)
| qup wrote:
| If the odds are set correctly, you should have the same EV on
| either side of a bet.
|
| That's why it's hard to beat Vegas at sports betting--they set
| the correct odds way too often.
|
| When regular folks make up their own odds, they're not very
| good at it, but in theory the market just buys up any +EV
| position, even if it's a longshot.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I agree with you overall but I'm not sure the Trump bet is the
| best example.
|
| He certainly isn't going to be thrown out of office
| (unfortunately) but those 16% of bettors also win if he dies
| this year, and he's 80, fat, still gobbling burgers and shows
| signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far.
|
| On the other hand he has access to the best medical care, but
| even still a 16% chance he drops dead before the end of the
| year isn't that outrageous.
| barchar wrote:
| Polymarket "odds" I think are just the price of the contract *
| 100 right?
|
| That's not actually the predicted odds by the market because
| every single bet is also a bet on interest rates.
|
| A contract that literally 100% always would resolve to "true"
| in 1 year would have a non-zero price for the "false" side
| because selling that option (and thus taking the "false" side
| means you get ~$97 today and then pay $100 in a year.
|
| Polymarket's 4% chance of jesus returning by 2026 actually
| represents a market consensus of basically a 0% chance.
|
| For trump losing office there might be some bets predicated on
| his losing office being correlated to a higher interest rate
| outcome, too.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Obligatory: The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the
| FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed,
| beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO)
| of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
| (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a
| San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the
| development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in
| August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an
| assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized
| in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason
| University, and several journalists.[1]
|
| [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I got into weather betting markets earlier this year since I
| figured those can't possibly be rigged, it is automated weather
| station data yet some groups in the market know the truth a few
| minutes before everyone else based on the way the markets move.
|
| BUT, I stopped on the day that the PHL airport preliminary report
| said the low of the day was 17 and then later than day the low
| was raised to 18. The way the market was behaving, insiders knew
| the low would be retracted because normally the markets clear out
| a tranche of bets that are no longer possible and that wasn't
| happening that day.
|
| So I don't do that. The whole game seems to be based on a group
| of insiders that know when and what temperature reports will say
| seconds or minutes before the general public and they have the
| capacity to play with validation on the back-end (I suspect).
|
| I built a few models to predict weather 6+ hours out using
| blended model forecast data, but that didn't do better than
| break-even.
|
| I don't know my point. It is the wild west, caveat emptor, you
| need thick skin and ridiculous attention to detail to beat the
| game, and even then the deck is probably stacked against you.
| learn_more wrote:
| it seems this could be solved by refusing last minute bets?
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Data is released every minute, every five minutes, every
| hour, and then 6 hour high/low, and then mid-day preliminary
| reports, so there is no last-minute since any one of those
| reports could contain data (with various validation/rounding
| caveats) that could eliminate a market of temperatures, so
| there isn't really a last minute.
|
| My conclusion was to focus on forecast and attempt to predict
| the temperature better than forecast vs. market implied
| probability rather than attempt to respond very quickly to
| published information. I learned (with my skills) the latter
| was a losing proposition, but the former isn't impossible
| (although also possibly beyond my skills it seems).
| themafia wrote:
| > said the low of the day was 17
|
| People are gambling on the "low of the day?"
|
| Might as well make back alley chicken fighting legal.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a
| boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was
| looking at weather underground map of stations around central
| park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on
| my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next
| few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from
| the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running
| in the US) and see how it added features and new reporting
| values over its long 100+ year life. It was a fun winter side
| quest.
|
| I don't think this needs regulated if the people involved are
| responsible and having fun. No chickens died for sure, which
| is probably why these articles focus on the more serious bets
| where people are dying (and not weather).
| dugidugout wrote:
| I sure enjoyed reading your account of the experience!
| Thank you!
| themafia wrote:
| > if the people involved are responsible and having fun.
|
| I think "please gamble responsibly" has the same power as
| "please drink responsibly." Which is to say, we regulate
| the ever loving hell out of alcohol sales, and that's
| probably where gambling should be headed as well.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The high speed traders win, and you're not part of the club.
| jackfruitpeel wrote:
| The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in
| the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious
| negative for those countries -- and had been optimized brutally
| like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade
| ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to
| have banned online gambling'.
|
| I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to
| prey on a subset of humanity. I'm in senior leadership, and have
| made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should
| not be hired.
| paulddraper wrote:
| They're the financial equivalent of recreational drugs.
|
| Not everyone gets addicted, but many do. Harms your own
| health/assets. Can destroy lives. Has spillover effects into
| general society.
|
| The libertarian/authoritarian argument is much the same.
| butlike wrote:
| Gambling is the only vice where the store doesn't close. Even
| the prostitutes go to sleep for a while. But you can drive to
| the casino and gamble it all away anytime.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's even worse on the phone.. there's a running gag on IG
| with a lot of truth about "you might be at the bar with
| your friends at 12am but I'm locked in on German object
| splitting in half / other obscure betable 'sports'". It's
| insane we let people do this to themselves and their
| families.
|
| https://youtu.be/sMDppu-X1mY?si=MK7JGHYjW3u4iyBy
| taurath wrote:
| The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people,
| from my vantage point right now. Whether it's attention, drugs,
| or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and
| they're not even pretending to care about people they affect.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Yes. The "freedom" people refer to is "the freedom to be an
| asshole and exploit people without repercussion".
| alphawhisky wrote:
| Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that,
| I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or
| gender self determination, obviously).
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| The UK? or Ireland? or USA?
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Professor Cottom's a certified (McArthur) Genius, and she
| clocked this "scam culture" back in 2021:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/opinion/scams-trust-
| insti...
|
| Things have gotten dramatically worse since then.
| RyanOD wrote:
| Completely agree with this. I watch many commercials on
| television targeting elderly folks and I just cringe. They
| seem to be doing everything they can to separate the viewer
| from their money for a dubious product or service.
| abbadadda wrote:
| "There's a sucker born every minute, and we're gonna take
| 'em for all they got" - Harry Wormwood in Matilda
|
| At least in the book/movie(s) Harry Wormwood faces
| consequences. The enablement top down is the problem. The
| system is rotten and no one faces any real consequence only
| a slap on the wrist at a fraction of revenue many years
| later.
| macNchz wrote:
| Watching over shoulders as elderly people watch YouTube
| with ads and engage with clips of deepfake celebrities
| selling fraudulent nonsense is both enlightening and
| painful.
| katzgrau wrote:
| I've seen this too. And with AI, it's empowered even more
| people to spam, imitate, steal and remix others' work,
| research and artistic expression.
|
| The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the
| epitome of it.
| goosejuice wrote:
| If this is referring to the US, yes indeed. We're great at
| the whole free market, fiduciary duty to shareholder bit.
| We're terrible at using law to manage the negative
| externalities.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| I have bad news, I don't think we're that great at the free
| market either.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Well, really, that's all countries.
|
| Some dude was willing to resort to more depraved measures
| than his rivals, and made enough people do what he wanted in
| order to become the leader.
| boelboel wrote:
| Very ahistorical view
| Lalabadie wrote:
| I read "scambling" recently and the word has stayed with me
| since.
| kingleopold wrote:
| This goes back to dying for your own country at scale for
| wars that had nothing to with risking your family, your land,
| your country. back then if you refused to fight for war that
| never risked anyting you care, they would literally killed
| you or made you slave labor.
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| Are you saying this is specific to the US?
|
| I think you would be hard pressed to find a country that
| didn't get involved in some war that had nothing to do with
| defense.
| kingleopold wrote:
| nope, it's as old as war itself
| flir wrote:
| When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top
| of the pyramid, people get more desperate to take any
| advantage that comes their (or their children's) way. In
| really bad situations, it stops being about improvement and
| starts being about avoidance of decline. The late Roman
| Republic is an example - wealth, land and influence
| concentrated in fewer hands, society just gets more vicious
| and corrupt as people look for any edge they can get. The
| reign of AEthelred Unread is another example.
|
| I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age -
| it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend
| to agree.
|
| Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a
| family supported by a single income who could afford the rent
| or to buy their house and put their kids through college.
|
| By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where
| more households than not had both parents working.
|
| Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part
| because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as
| they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
|
| And the last 10+ years has taken this further where we now
| have "side gigs" or "side hustles" or people who are
| desperate to be "influencers" or "Youtubers" or whatever. Any
| hobby you have needs to be monetized to get by. You have to
| sell something, even if it's advice on how to do the thing.
|
| That's what's meant by "hobbies are a luxury". It means
| you're earning enough not to need to monetize some portion of
| your life. And the number of people who can do that is
| continually decreasing.
|
| The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital
| owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical,
| housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable
| things like demand raises and better working conditions or,
| worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some
| of your time not creating value for some capital owner to
| exploit.
|
| Every aspect of our lives is getting financialized so
| somebody else can get wealthier. Every second of your time
| and thing you do needs to be monetized and exploited.
|
| Gambling isn't a net negative for society. It's just a
| negative. There are no positive aspects to it. Gambling
| addicts are incredibly likely to commit suicide. It's
| incredibly destructive.
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| I'm still reeling from the fact that the sitting president
| pumped some meme coin the day (iirc) he took office. And this
| largely passed by without any consequence, reckoning, or
| repercussions. It's just accepted now that even the highest
| office will scam their own supporters
| isubkhankulov wrote:
| The US government and private interests are clearly
| incentivized to keep the crypto industry subdued to a
| chaotic casino. Participants engage willingly. If crypto is
| legitimized, it threatens the US dollar, sanctions regime
| and the US's ability to project power as the world leading
| reserve currency.
|
| The president and any other shitcoin operator know this and
| are playing the game on the field.
|
| Every country has the same challenge. Some ban crypto,
| which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
|
| Hopefully that helps explain why there weren't and wont be
| any consequences.
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| That's a fair point. But I'm not talking about the
| legitimacy (or not) of crypto. More that the president
| was (is?) running a pump and dump scheme. It should be
| profoundly embarrassing to supporters and it should be
| political suicide for the scammer. But it barely
| registered.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| It was extremely obviously not some intentional 500 IQ
| plot to keep crypto illegitimate...
| willio58 wrote:
| I live in a state in the U.S. that's had legalized gambling for
| decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city.
|
| It's always been bad, but in my eyes it's so much worse now
| that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away
| everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas
| or something to bet (and lose) big.
| willturman wrote:
| Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able
| to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William
| Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.
|
| Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the
| electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state
| where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and
| then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock
| market would rise or fall the day after the election.
|
| I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could
| possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to
| collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the
| outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable
| shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that
| collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but
| didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a
| grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to
| do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source
| of a large part of their revenue?
|
| It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative
| externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for
| nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the
| country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in
| somehow.
|
| Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling
| seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol -
| one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons
| ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives
| against putting this cat back in the bag.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_R._Eadington
| bluetidepro wrote:
| > I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone
| who has worked on these products should not be hired.
|
| Can't say I agree with that specific take (and find it a bit
| naive to be honest), unless you're also not hiring anyone from
| companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies
| that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just
| as much as any gambling app has.
| kakacik wrote:
| Morals start and stop somewhere, please don't attack people
| when they actually show some proper morals on this forum
| despite the employment of many members here.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| This is such a HN comment. Yes, I am not hiring those people
| either. If that sounds unviable or even uncommon then you're
| just too deep in the culture. This is quite common.
| rustystump wrote:
| Wow. Glad i wont ever work for/with you. Not because i
| worked at any of those "bad bad" companies but because your
| take is a horrible sign of what to expect.
|
| Like, if it was a pm or leadership person i can kinda
| understand it. They are the ones pushing direction. But
| what, some call center support guy is sol because his
| resume has kelshi on it? Not everyone is in a position to
| have luxury beliefs.
| ggggffggggg wrote:
| But if you are hiring people that have had that luxury,
| and yet have chosen immoral paths, what does that say
| about them and about you?
| rustystump wrote:
| Sure, but the vast majority of even technical positions
| are not in the luxury belief bucket.
| rafterydj wrote:
| I definitely think there's a middle ground here, that the
| commenter to which you are replying may also be alluding.
| If a human is scanning resumes, job titles tend to be
| more important than the company, although both are
| obviously relevant.
|
| So yes, if one is "Senior VP - Engagement Optimization"
| at e.g. Draft Kings, that would imply a level of
| culpability for "gambling experience = do not hire".
|
| But if the title is "call center support - kelshi - 6 mo.
| contract"? Sure. I don't think the policy needs to be as
| stringent as all that.
|
| Not necessarily disagreeing with either perspective,
| since they don't seem incompatible to me.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| If it is your company then this is fine, it is your money
| afterall, and can do as you see fit. If you are employed or
| have co-shareholders, you are managing someone elses money.
| And you are not supposed to act within your morals, but
| those of the company. It would be kind of hipocritical to
| act on your own morals using someone elses money - up to
| the point where it could be illegal misapropriation. And
| then taking the moral highground and being judgemental
| about people because they worked in gambling is probably
| something one should reconsider.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It would be kind of hipocritical to act on your own
| morals using someone elses money - up to the point where
| it could be illegal misapropriation_
|
| This is hyperbole. Refusing to hire anyone out of any of
| the big tech companies is an own goal. But being silly in
| management is absolutely legal. The only legal obligation
| I can think of revolves around disclosure, _i.e._ you
| should be open with investors and the company about the
| fact that you 're putting up these moral guardrails,
| rails which may have effects on the company's
| competitiveness.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| It is not black/white. If you have a qualified candidate
| that asks less money and reject them over a less-
| qualified candidate on the sole grounds they worked for a
| prediction marked, it could be called silly. If the
| discprancy in qualification and salary demends is high
| enough and you do this repeatedly, it can be gross
| misconduct and not only a reason to be fired, but to be
| held financially liable for the damage.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If the discprancy in qualification and salary demends
| is high enough and you do this repeatedly, it can be
| gross misconduct and not only a reason to be fired, but
| to be held financially liable for the damage_
|
| Again, major caveat, if you do it without disclosing your
| reasons, possibly. And unless you're personally profiting
| from it in some way, _highly_ doubtful on financial
| liability. (Disclaier: not a lawyer.)
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Acting within your morals is not incompatible with
| serving the company's interests. Especially if it means
| your team is very much still competent while maintaining
| a culture that is healthy. That leads to better delivery.
|
| Avoiding working in deeply unethical areas also shields
| the company from legal or PR liability.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| It is compatible if you align your actions with the
| morals of the company. A big sign that you are not
| aligned with the values of the company, if you do not
| want anybody within that company (especially your boss)
| to know on what moral grounds you make your decision and
| justify your actions.
| closewith wrote:
| No, you should always follow you're own moral code.
|
| Companies don't have morals, only people. Abdicating your
| moral responsibilities because you're employed is
| cowardice.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| > up to the point where it could be illegal
| misapropriation
|
| Huh..?
|
| > And then taking the moral highground and being
| judgemental about people because they worked in gambling
| is probably something one should reconsider.
|
| Ah I see.
| apsurd wrote:
| Hmmm,
|
| So my friend works for a sports betting app and I
| personally do judge him from a philosophical point of view.
| I would never! Same with Meta, I would never!
|
| But since I never once thought to de-friend him, I thought
| more about it. I leaned in. And TLDR: we are all part of
| this machine. Literally, everyone's work output gets
| bundled up into public retirement funds invested in these
| baddie public companies.
|
| What's really the difference? Guy earns his paycheck
| directly, must be worse than all of us complicit to make
| money on stock market go up? Yes stock-market metaphor is
| intentional. The original gambler's paradise.
| throwaway7679 wrote:
| Sibling comments are right. Refusing to hurt people is a
| crime against money.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Sounds like there's a good chance your company is one of
| the few I'd want to work for then. I don't think I'd meet
| your standards though, having worked in decentralized
| finance in the past
| titanomachy wrote:
| Only a Sith deals in absolutes. You really think someone
| who took a job at Google as a bright-eyed young graduate is
| forever tainted and could never be worth hiring?
| mcmcmc wrote:
| I think the difference between the two is Amazon and Meta do
| provide some utility to balance it out, whereas gambling is
| purely a net negative on society. You can be young and naive
| enough to believe you're "making the world a better place" in
| big tech. You can't work on pure gambling products without
| being a scammer at heart; you know what you signed up for.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| You can, because the definition of gambling is loose. Magic
| The Gathering is gambling. You by a pack and hope you get a
| valuable card, no different than buying a lottery ticket
| and hope you win. Pokemon Go is also gambling. You pay to
| hatch eggs and hope you get a rare pokemon. I'm pretty
| confident the people who made these games don't consider
| their design to be evil or wrong. In fact, I'm sure they
| see themselves has having provided millions of people with
| fun entertainment.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I'd be slightly more specific with those assertions, and
| point them at the gambling mechanics themselves, although
| I do agree. The games are not inseparable from those
| mechanics, and are quite fun on their own.
|
| I just got into magic, and am sadly watching my more
| gambling prone friends fall down that rabit hole. They
| keep asking me what cards I've bought or whatever and the
| answer is none, aside from a starter deck. I have
| literally zero interest in engaging with any game in that
| way, despite enjoying the booster pack gamble as kid with
| pokemon.
|
| If I were to gamble, I'd much rather throw a couple bucks
| on who wins a game rather than what cards I'll get.
| edwcross wrote:
| One of the only good things I got from MtG is Card Forge
| (https://card-forge.github.io/forge/), an open-source
| unofficial rule engine that also contains a desktop and a
| mobile app.
|
| They allow playing a game similar to the old Shandalar
| from Microprose, in which you wander around a world
| dueling enemies (playing MtG against them), getting money
| and resources, and improving your deck until you can beat
| the big bosses.
|
| It's one of the best ways to play the game: single-
| player, offline, and unofficial. Therefore you can have
| almost any card in existence without having to gamble
| with real-world money. It lets you enjoy the strategic
| part of the game and its meta, including deck building.
| The only downside is that the single-player game robs you
| of part of the charm, that is playing with other people.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| this is a false equivalence. Amazon and Meta have caused
| plenty of damage, companies in our capitalist economies are
| bad etc. But shipping you books or connecting you to other
| people isn't inherently evil. There's nothing wrong with the
| service itself. Gambling is. It's been a vice in virtually
| every culture for thousands of years. It's akin to peddling
| drugs. The practice itself is corrosive and destroys people.
|
| It's one thing to acknowledge that any for profit company in
| some way behaves badly, but you can't change the world. You
| can choose not to sell poison.
| adamandsteve wrote:
| Between these I think Amazon is less bad. It's a monopoly &
| monopsony which causes a lack of innovation and
| (eventually) higher prices but it's also a much more
| efficient way to sell things and it doesn't destroy the
| fabric of society or anything. Meta though is just as bad
| if not worse than any gambling site out there. Its products
| are optimized to destroy your attention span, feed you
| polarizing content, destroy your mental health and waste
| hours of your time every day all while ironically making
| you less connected to other people because users won't get
| off their phones and have a conversation.
| rustystump wrote:
| Honestly, i think apple is worse wrt gambling then either
| meta or Amazon . Apple has been allowing and pushing
| "gamble-lite" products for years on the app store. So much
| gatcha game slop on there it is genuinely unusable for me.
| Even worse, they are now optimizing ad revenue for those
| that pay to push their crap into ads u cannot skip.
|
| I seriously doubt mr jobs wouldnt take one look at the app
| store home screen and puke in disgust at how awful it is.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _unless you 're also not hiring anyone from companies like
| Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also
| ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any
| gambling app has_
|
| It depends on the role. If you were doing something deeply
| technical, or facing customers who loved your work, I think
| you get a pass. If you were building features nobody outside
| your company is thankful for, you need to do a convincing
| repentance act. If you worked on Instagram for Kids or whale
| optimization, fuck off.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Building part of a killing machine isn't really something
| you can defend, even if you weren't working on the part of
| the machine that does the killing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Building part of a killing machine isn 't really
| something you can defend_
|
| Of course it is. I don't personally have an issue with
| folks who worked on weapons of war. Particularly if
| they're honest with themselves about the work they did.
| Doubly particularly if they felt a sense of mission in
| it.
|
| And in an integrated culture and economy, the difference
| between a person who happens to work at a company with an
| evil project in a random division and a person who grows
| complacent about politics with their non-problematic job
| is thin to the point of vanishing.
| beachy wrote:
| Or the young person who needs a job and doesn't yet have OP's
| fully formed understanding of exactly where the line is -
| apparently gambling bad/ ad tech OK.
| teekert wrote:
| If you're from a place like Malta it's basically the only way
| to do IT and perhaps "escape" it later.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products
| should not be hired
|
| As in, even a dev, HR, etc person having worked for an online
| gambling company? I feel this may be a slippery slope..
| adamandsteve wrote:
| Prediction markets are far, far more slippery. Anyone working
| at one of these places had other options & chose to sell
| their morals so I think it's perfectly reasonable to not hire
| them.
| markdown wrote:
| Don't forget the janitors. They're all accomplices of the
| peddlers of misery.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Everything is a slippery slope to somewhere. That doesn't
| mean you can't draw lines.
| amrocha wrote:
| Actions have consequences. You can justify your actions
| however you want, and I can judge you for them.
| nimbius wrote:
| i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of
| watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the
| steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid,
| both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.
|
| The real nail in the coffin was watching the Sears in the mall
| turn into a casino about a decade ago. Having failed their
| people at all other prosperities and futures, politicians turn
| to the last grift in their arsenal and roll out legalized
| gambling before packing up and leaving town or retiring.
|
| having failed the digital future, ransacked it for every last
| penny, politicians again in 2025 turned to the supreme court to
| legalize online gambling and in doing so obliterate a
| generation of young adults. in another decade i expect a
| political movement to "hold these scoundrels to account"
| similar to Facebook, long after any meaningful reform or
| regulation could have been made and the industry itself is on
| the decline. just one last grift for the government that
| enabled it in the first place.
| holoduke wrote:
| So cyberpunk is a real outlook after all hearing your
| situation.
| alphawhisky wrote:
| Bold of you to assume we'll get biological immortality and
| cybernetics before an extinction event.
| kakacik wrote:
| > anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired
|
| Respect for that. Everybody seems to give up to all-powerful
| corporations and greed for short term profits seem to blind
| many otherwise brilliant folks into amoral and/or outright
| stupid shortsighted behavior and moral 'flexibility'. Nice to
| see good reason to keep some hope for humanity.
|
| I do myself just a sliver of this via purchasing choices for me
| and my family, its a drop in the ocean but ocean is formed by
| many drops, nothing more.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Care to disclose the company you work for? Is that the
| stakeholders stance too, or just your own? Did you disclose
| this policy to your bosses if any?
|
| EDIT: Due to the downvotes without comments, here is my point:
| As an employee, you manage someone elses money in that
| position. As such, you have to holdup morals of the company and
| follow the companies interest, not your own - unless you are
| the 100% owner of that company. If you are not, and impose your
| own morals using someone elses money, you shouldn't be taking
| the moral highground here.
| holoduke wrote:
| Here in the Netherlands we have a big building housing a pro
| gambling lobbyist organization. Their sole goal is to bribe
| politicians and spread misinformation on public tv channels. A
| typical example of rottenness inside the western society.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is
| weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity
|
| This triggers thoughts. I don't like people being taken
| advantage of. At the same time, I like my personal liberties.
|
| It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything.
| Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics. That sucks
| and you could spin this has the liquor companies taking
| advantage, but I have tons of friends that enjoy drinking and
| tons of good experiences drinking with them
| (wine/beer/cocktails) in all kinds of situations (bars/sports-
| bars/pubs/parties/bbqs). I don't want that taken away because
| some people can't control their intake.
|
| Similarly the USA is obese so you could spin every company
| making fattening foods
| (chips/dips/bacon/cheese/cookies/sodas/...) as taking advantage
| (most of my family is obese (T_T)) but at the same time, I
| enjoy all of those things in moderation and I don't want them
| taken away because some people can't handle them.
|
| You can try to claim gambling is different, but it is? Should
| Magic the Gathering be banned (and Yugioh Card,Pokemon Cards,
| etc..)? Baseball cards? I don't like that video games like
| Candy Crush apparently make money on "whales" but I also don't
| want people that can control their spending and have some fun
| to be banned from having that fun because a few people can't
| control themselves.
|
| I don't have a solution, but at the moment I'd choose personal
| liberties over nannying everyone.
| stuffn wrote:
| The real litmus test for your beliefs is gun rights. Taken to
| it's logical conclusion you would think that you would be
| staunchly pro 2A.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'm not sure my position on 2A but it seems you're making a
| pretty big leap to connect them.
|
| Guns kill others. To me, that's a big difference. Gambling
| does not, only indirectly, you gamble your money away your
| family doesn't eat. But if you're going indirect than
| anything fits. Cars kill more than guns.
|
| You could argue the similarity is that some people can be
| responsible with guns and others can't but you're back the
| previous point. Irresponsible gun use directly harms
| others. Irresponsible gambling at most indirectly harms
| others.
| closewith wrote:
| > Cars kill more than guns.
|
| In most countries, but not in the US.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Alcohol, especially hard alcohol, used to have limits on
| advertising. Baseball is now literally sponsored by/partnered
| with Polymarket.
|
| https://www.mlb.com/press-release/press-release-mlb-names-
| po...
|
| Physical cards don't have the same 'whale' issue as
| electronic gambling/games on a phone that are designed to get
| you exactly to the point where you go 'ok, $20 more', that
| always is your pocket ready to feed that itch. No physical
| game/liquor store is using that kind of psychology or instant
| gratification (my understanding is addictiveness tied to
| action/reward length, with the most addictive things the ones
| with the most instant grattification?).
| zug_zug wrote:
| Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are
| guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a
| survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever
| gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been
| allowed to buy twinkies"
|
| It'd actually be quite easy to set certain sane limits on
| gambling like you can't gamble more than 1% of your annual
| income per year, but I bet gambling platforms would fight
| that like the plague because those are their whales, the true
| addicts.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I know 100s of people who've been to vegas and had a good
| time gambling, not one of them would say "I wish I'd never
| gambled in the first place". I personally know zero people
| who gambled so much they regret it. I'm not denying those
| people exist, but I suspect if you ask everyone, a very
| small percent have had a strong negative experience
| zug_zug wrote:
| Yes it's a very small % of the population, but it's
| actually a significant percent of the _earnings_ of these
| platforms.
|
| Just for illustration -- when I worked at Zynga they'd
| sell in-game purchases for over $10k USD for virtual
| items because there were people who just couldn't help
| themselves, and those "whales" were actually the bulk of
| the profit of the company.
|
| That's why these platforms should have mandatory sane
| limits that can only be exempted with special
| circumstances.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I agree, to a point, but it seems like this is the false
| dilemma that comes up every time, meanwhile there are
| achohol, fast food, and gambling ads imbued in nearly all
| popular entertainment and everywhere in public.
|
| Is severely restricting the marketing of those things not a
| valid step in between having or not having liberties? For an
| adult to be free to engage in gambling, does insidious
| advertising also need to be permitted _everywhere_? If say
| 25% of people engaging with a highly addictive activity can
| 't responsibly regulate their behavior with it, is it
| important that we allow a contingent of everyone else to
| abuse them?
|
| I think about it like property rights and others. If we want
| everyone to respect the idea of private property ownership,
| then policy should act to contain abuse of those rights and
| somewhat fairly distribute access to them. If only an older
| richer generation benefits, and everyone else pays rent and
| _effectively_ has to give up those rights, then eventually
| opposition to them should accumulate. I 'm much more
| interested now in seeing bans on the ownership of multiple
| residential properties within the same municipality at
| present, and sympathizing with people seeking a market crash,
| than I am to actually try and buy a house, because the ratio
| is so wildly in favor of one group over another.
|
| If only 25% of people didn't know someone who ruined their
| life gambling--and it's only a matter of time--then it would
| be potentially acted upon much more severely.
| munk-a wrote:
| > It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything.
| Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics.
|
| I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of
| the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be
| slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to
| everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme
| societal harm.
|
| Would you be opening to banning just this one thing and then
| calling it a day and opening the floor back up to such
| arguments? I think modern politics is too caught up in the
| bureaucracies of maybe to let good ideas be carried out -
| honestly, this thought line could easily be written up into
| an argument that parallels strong-towns. Local bureaucracy is
| rarely created for a downright malicious reason - here we
| have a change that could cause an outsized positive outcome
| so why should we get caught up in philosophical debates about
| how similar decisions might be less positive and let that
| cast doubt on our original problem?
| nfin wrote:
| an added negative aspect of going further down the banning
| path is:
|
| it lessens the need (or signal) to improve education, or does
| it not?
|
| Not talking about the theory part of education, more the
| parts that are not handled well in schools like e.g. (!)
| habits and understanding better what is behind your daily
| actions (often "Glaubenssatze" 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/...
| cam_l wrote:
| Why does it have to be either/or? Why not just ban the thing
| you don't want and just criminalise the whaling?
| keybored wrote:
| > I don't have a solution,
|
| Just try to entertain any alternatives. Any at all.
|
| There could be public option to opt-in to have your specific
| "personal liberties" curtailed, like for alcohol. Doesn't
| affect you at all. Completely opt-in. Only for those who want
| it.
|
| No solutions? Or no corporate-backed solutions?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532954
| phillipcarter wrote:
| What you're arguing for is more or less what the status quo
| has been for gambling. Like gambling? Cool! You can go to
| Vegas or a casino on native lands to do it. We have
| geofencing for mobile apps as well if you don't want to sit
| next to a smoker pulling a slot machine. Curbing it like this
| -- but not making it entirely unavailable -- acts as a buffer
| against the social malaise described in the article.
| tamimio wrote:
| > and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these
| products should not be hired.
|
| I encourage this concept but also to expand it further,
| including the ones who work on other evil schemes like the ones
| used to violate your privacy, sell your data, and participate
| in sketchy business and/or contracts. Just like how I don't
| want to work with someone who develops a gambling platform, I
| don't want to work with someone who's building a cameras spying
| on public, an app that use facial recognition against
| strangers, an app that track people, an AI to automate killing,
| a cloud that host and process such systems. There should be an
| open source database that has lists of all people who
| worked/working in such companies, categorized by industry
| (gambling, privacy, etc.), where anyone can look up potential
| employees, getting the names is easy when you have the best
| OSINT goldmine out there (LinkedIn), plus manual submission.
| Some people have no morals or intrinsic values to prevent them
| from working in legal yet shady businesses, those however will
| double think their decision when they know there will be a
| consequences and they won't be hired anywhere else.
| chasd00 wrote:
| ...or you could look at their resume. btw, maybe i'm missing
| the joke, but working on the system you're describing would
| put you on the black list.
| amarant wrote:
| Anyone who worked in it? Like someone who needed a salary took
| a job, and now due to your grandstanding they're locked in to
| keep working in that industry because they can't get a job
| elsewhere?
|
| I'm not sure your virtue signalling has the effect you want it
| to have. In fact I think it has the exact opposite effect
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone
| who has worked on these products should not be hired.
|
| I do not like gambling or the prevalence of gambling products,
| but this is not a good thing for you to do.
|
| You should not ban people from your job for reasons that are
| not relevant to the job you're hiring for. People take jobs for
| many reasons, including some times simply needing to take the
| first job they can get in order to pay the bills.
|
| People also change their minds. Working for a gambling product
| company doesn't mean the person is still pro-gambling.
| sjkoelle wrote:
| or even if they are pro-gambling jeez would you never be able
| to work with someone you disagreed with politically
| Aurornis wrote:
| Having your job eligibility depend on your boss aligning
| with your personal morals on topics that have nothing to do
| with work is terrible
|
| I'm surprised there's so much support for this in these HN
| comments.
| comprev wrote:
| Gambling and weapons (or "defence" depending on perspective)
| are two industries I refuse to work on principle.
|
| On my deathbed I want to look back on life and feel I've made a
| small positive impact on the world.
| matt_daemon wrote:
| Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year)
| has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during
| live sports events.
|
| It's difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what
| the US is currently going through.
|
| As for sportspeople throwing games, well that's been happening
| for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless
| examples from football (soccer) and cricket.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> Same in Australia and only recently_
|
| AFAIK Australia is most gambling addicted western country,
| loosing the most money per capita at the pokies.
|
| _> It's difficult to compare how normalised it is here
| versus what the US is currently going through._
|
| I remember how Henry Ford was giving his employee great
| benefits to attract the best workers so the Dodge brothers
| bought Ford shares to become shareholders, then sued Henry
| Ford and won because he wasn't doing what's good for the
| shareholders.
|
| Similarly, I feel like if you'd try to regulate these anti
| humane businesses and practices you'd get sued because you're
| doing something that hurts shareholders.
| bluGill wrote:
| It has been going on in the US for years - even when it was
| illegal, there was still illegal gambling and more then one
| person has been caught throwing games. Sports beet was always
| legal in Law Vegas though (at least from what I can tell),
| but most states banned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete
| _Rose#Betting_scandal,_per...
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| what do you mean legal "for many years"? it was never illegal.
| we have had telephone betting for decades, gambling for
| centuries...the reason online gambling was banned in the US was
| because the biggest donors to both parties requested it...there
| is no other reason because banning is a proven way to maximise
| harm (and even overly restrictive regulation has been proven to
| be very poor, as in Hong Kong).
|
| thanks for telling everyone you are in senior leadership
| mrighele wrote:
| > I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone
| who has worked on these products should not be hired.
|
| I appreciate your approach, but I wonder: would you hire
| somebody with a past in Meta, or ByteDance (to just name two)?
| They are at least as bad in pushing addiction to people, maybe
| worse if you think about the scale.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| It's a very different kind of addiction.
|
| Working in sports bettings is like working on an online
| casino.
| boelboel wrote:
| They earn billions from pushing gambling as well, substantial
| portion of their ads.
| refulgentis wrote:
| A feed is optimized for engagement.
|
| A casino is optimized to take your rent money.
|
| The broader move, "you don't like X? so Y is good?," can
| extend forever. Defense contractors, payday loan apps, ad-
| tech...
| spullara wrote:
| So you want them to keep working on those products?
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| If you wager in a prediction market, isn't it expected that there
| will be some insider trading or thrown results? Because there are
| clearly people who know when and where bombs will land, and
| financial incentive to throw results.
|
| Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the
| one doing the cheating.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Prediction markets are just inside traders profiting off
| gambling addicts. If you are not an inside trader, you're the
| loser paying out.
| cubefox wrote:
| Or you are simply better at predicting the future than most
| other people.
| adamandsteve wrote:
| Being good at predicting the future will give you only a
| slight edge, so even a small amount of inside trading can
| make you unprofitable.
| cubefox wrote:
| Being good at predicting is a broad skill which is
| applicable widely, while insider information only works
| for the specific thing the information is about. Far from
| every market will have insiders with special information.
| E.g. on who will win an election.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Not really. I have a pretty solid 5+% edge over a long
| time period even on the competitive markets I bet in. On
| many markets I think it's closer to 10-20%. These are
| things that inside information can't really help as much
| as you'd think.
|
| And even on markets where someone would benefit from
| inside information... insiders leak a lot more
| information than you'd think before it tends to hit the
| market. Even reading the news can tell you more than
| you'd think if you look at it right. The single biggest
| hint is "Why am I reading this, and why now?". News
| stories on geopolitics almost never arise naturally, and
| that question will get you to a LOT of information that
| was not explicitly stated.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'm sure that's what the gambling addicts like to tell
| themselves.
| bsder wrote:
| > Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are
| the one doing the cheating.
|
| Um, exactly?
|
| You don't have a legal system to hold the companies accountable
| for any payout. You don't have published odds with a regulator
| ensuring those odds are enforced. You have zero transparency
| whatsoever. You have systems where if you start winning, they
| will effectively cut you off.
|
| Everything about online betting _screams_ "SCAM!" from the
| rooftops. Everything about online betting has _always_ screamed
| "SCAM!" from the rooftops.
|
| What part of this aren't people getting? The house always wins.
| saltyoldman wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you also craft an Etherium
| contract to do the same thing as these prediction markets. So
| even without a company "framing all the markets" you could still
| have gambling based on base eth?
| colesantiago wrote:
| Maybe it would be better to ban Las Vegas.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go
| wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's
| analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From what I've seen,
| the level of threats, abuse, etc. is just horrifying. The 30x
| increase in money bet, sadly, seems to be translating into a 30x
| increase in betters' hostile conduct.
| leflob wrote:
| Maybe we should build a prediction model of upcoming events based
| on volume of bets made on polymarket
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I've always said we should just legalize insider trading. Just
| make it painfully obvious to everyone that speculative trading is
| the loser's game.
| Vaslo wrote:
| While many of us try to stay true as possible to be Libertarian
| when we say we are, this, like smoking in public, are not hills
| I'm willing to die on if someone decides to restrict.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Americans coming to the realisation that much of the rest of the
| world came to decades ago and acting like it's a massive
| revelation is...absolutely par for the course for the US. Just
| hurry up and implode already.
| drstewart wrote:
| Lost from reddit, are we?
| Zigurd wrote:
| How much of a hurry depends on whether Trump gets his $200
| billion to continue the war. Have you checked the odds on
| Kalshi?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The real power in prediction markets is creating a market for
| what you want to occur - it's a tangible method to leverage
| hyperstition.
|
| If you want Polymarket to no longer exist, then simply create a
| pool for "Polymarket will no longer exist by Jan 1st 2027" on
| Kalshi, pump the price, and wait for one of these whales to do
| the job of making it come true for you. When done right, you get
| the satisfaction of the thing happening, and all of the ROI for
| entering on the ground floor.
|
| Rinse and repeat and you no longer have to sit by the sidelines
| and view world events as things that unfold without your input.
| You can be an active participant in making history the way you
| want it.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| So are you advocating for the idea that the wealthy should be
| able to control history then, by nature of having the largest
| amount of betting capital?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I'm arguing for taking advantage of this before you can't.
| jjcm wrote:
| These prediction markets shouldn't be allowed for situations
| where humans can control the outcome.
|
| They do have their place however - one I find particularly
| interesting is weather prediction markets, primary because they
| end up having a net benefit. Hundreds are creating their own
| weather prediction models and are duking it out. Over time these
| models get better, and the rest of us benefit.
|
| I think these markets could be a net good, but right now they're
| just enabling insider trading on a scale we've never seen before.
| kqr wrote:
| > weather prediction markets
|
| Can also be used to hedge the risk of rain on the day you've
| planned an outdoor barbecue!
| debatem1 wrote:
| You can do this with some forms of trip insurance. I stared
| hard at arbitrage there a few years ago but it was too hard
| to get your money out if you were right.
| themafia wrote:
| > is weather prediction markets
|
| Humans can, and do, manipulate the weather. There's actually
| international treaties against doing it.
|
| > Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models
|
| Weather is chaotic. You don't run a model once and use the
| result. You run it hundreds of times and average the results.
| You also need really high quality real time data to be fed into
| the system to achieve any sort of accuracy, which, is not
| something any of these hundreds could do on their own.
|
| > markets could be a net good
|
| You can already sell weather predictions. You can just hang a
| shingle and do it directly. Why do we need a third party
| gambling apparatus involved?
| adamandsteve wrote:
| > 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.
| themafia wrote:
| > Wisdom of crowds > wisdom of individual firms
|
| I doubt the utility of this simple aphorism. Primarily "the
| crowd" has a strong bias and would only consist of people
| willing to take the time to put a financial stake on their
| position.
|
| > Manipulating the weather seems easy enough to detect
|
| What are you basing this off of?
|
| > and much more expensive than any benefit you'd get
|
| Cloud seeding is not particularly expensive. The problem is
| the people performing this work may never interact with
| your market. You're literally playing a rigged game without
| any clue.
|
| > and there aren't really any negative externalities.
|
| The folly of man in a single sentence.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Who is to say if it rained or not? Well now they are a target.
|
| A NY Times reporter was the target of a pressure and threat
| campaign to change their reporting over whether a rocket in the
| middle east was intercepted or not before it hit the ground.
|
| Prediction markets are not going to end well full stop IMHO.
| simgt wrote:
| Or you could just fund the NOAA instead of making up reasons
| for more markets.
| praptak wrote:
| Attaching payouts to events skews the incentives. A baseball
| player gets the incentive to fuck up on purpose. Fortunately
| politicians are much more honest and would never make a decision
| to profit from a bet in a similar dishonest way.
| bombdailer wrote:
| Inventive markets is a better term for what they will become.
| barbazoo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
| rvz wrote:
| This is what "AGI" will bring more of. An "abundance" of
| gamblers.
| kdamica wrote:
| I agree that this is bad but the libertarian in me says "the
| market will resolve this because who in their right mind would be
| a counterparty to these bets knowing that there is so much
| insider trading?". But then again, many people are not in their
| right mind.
| snaily wrote:
| Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket
| founder Shayne Coplan[1]:
|
| _"When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying,
| 'Hey, we're looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near
| the bomb shelter; we look at it every day' and I'm like, 'Oh,
| it's really that popular over there?'" he added. "That's very
| powerful. That's an undeniable value proposition that did not
| exist before."_
|
| I'm with Matt Levine here[2]:
|
| _" There is something particularly dystopian about the idea
| that:
|
| a) Some countries will bomb other countries.
|
| b) The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by
| insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets.
|
| c) This will cause the prediction markets to correctly reflect
| the probability of bombing, allowing the people getting bombed to
| avoid being bombed."_
|
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/polymarke...
| [2]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-12/lev...
| kqr wrote:
| I think the other side of the argument goes that (a) the
| bombings would happen anyway, and (b) bombing is very expensive
| so nobody actually profits from the insider trading. (The bombs
| "only" get marginally cheaper.) Thus the only actual effect is
| the early warning, which is a good thing in this case.
|
| Like if someone managed to figure out a way to make slightly
| cheaper bombs but with the tradeoff that the cheaper bombs gave
| a few hours of eary warning to the people being bombed, I think
| I would prefer you used those bombs.
|
| (There are many other cases where insiders may change the
| outcome to align with their bet. That is bad if the outcome is
| bad.)
| dwaltrip wrote:
| > (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits
| from the insider trading
|
| The people profiting aren't buying the bombs with their own
| money.
| nine_k wrote:
| The big issue underlying gambling, betting, alcohol, tobacco, and
| other addictive stuff all the way to fentanyl, is that people may
| literally lose their mind over it, at least party. A heavy addict
| ceases to be a responsible adult who can act reasonably and
| autonomously, and becomes driven by impulses they cannot control,
| like a schizophrenic who cannot control the voices in their head.
|
| Even more unpleasantly, this does not happen to everyone every
| time. Quite many people can have a glass of wine here and there
| without becoming alcoholics. A ton of people can play a game like
| Bejeweled out of boredom, and happily switch to more interesting
| activities, given a chance. Some people can voluntarily stop even
| taking heroin and subject themselves to therapy. Etc, etc.
|
| But a relatively small minority gets hooked badly. They cannot
| quit. They do not want to stop. The addiction becomes a primary
| life activity. Many more who could be hooked to physiologically
| brutal addictions like nicotine or heroin are wise enough to
| never approach those, understanding how badly it might end. But
| again, a relative minority cannot resist the lure.
|
| A less tolerant society would stigmatize such outcomes, adding
| strong social pressure that might keep potential addicts from
| getting into the habit. A society could also consider addiction a
| medical condition that requires intervention and treatment, like
| poisoning or a dangerous infection. Even modern Western societies
| are capable of that when sufficiently frightened, see COVID-19.
|
| Another approach, which I'd call "extremist libertarian", would
| just let addictions form, proclaiming that this is what people do
| exercising their free will. It would not be different from a
| complete lack of civilization, and leaving the problem to the
| evolution to solve. In either case the addicts would suffer, in
| worst cases going destitute and die. That would remove the
| addicts from the gene pool, probably lowering the risk of
| addiction in future generations, slowly. Slowly, and painfully,
| often not only to addicts but also to people around them.
|
| We struggle with addressing addictions because we struggle to
| admit that addictions exist, and that in bad cases they affect
| the sufferer's agency quite a bit. I'm afraid that without
| admitting this property of heavy addiction we won't be able to
| act in an efficacious way.
| heisenbit wrote:
| The problem is that these markets allow to translate political
| power directly to money. Worse destructive events are rare, need
| a lot less action (butterfly effect) and leave thus less traces
| and command high odds. Once committed the ones in power have a
| vested interest in causing destruction.
| kqr wrote:
| Capitalism took care of the exchange between money and power
| long ago. Prediction markets, as terrible as they are, are
| peanuts in comparison.
| jrexilius wrote:
| yes, because the last century of communism showed that it was
| really just capitalism where centralized power corrupts..
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Gambling may be bad on its own, but the gambling and advertising
| combo are a very harmful combination IMHO.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the worst part is carrying the two in your pocket at
| all times. Previously a gambler trying to quit could avoid
| specific locations. How the hell do you avoid the internet?
| mlmonkey wrote:
| I was reminded of this bizarre article:
| https://www.si.com/betting/2023/09/15/fake-indian-cricket-le...
| amelius wrote:
| Do you even need prediction markets if the department of war can
| just make the real markets do whatever the hell they want?
| rbbydotdev wrote:
| It's tough, because I think outlawing 'vices' like gambling is an
| infringement on your individual freedom - but when it's done with
| an enterprise it's so much more problematic. Thinking about for
| instance tobacco companies vs locally grown in the backyard.
| enceladus06 wrote:
| Why is this such a big deal?
|
| I don't get why people make such a big deal betting on sports; if
| you want to waste your money go for it.
| willturman wrote:
| Because there are societal costs to poverty, regardless of how
| people arrive there. Gambling can be as addictive and
| personally and societally destructive as any drug.
| deviantony wrote:
| Wait, people can bet on bombings now? What the hell man.
| a3w wrote:
| MAGA gets rich on bombing Iran? The "Uno reverse card" of
| millions of dollar paid out if you assassinate Trump came into
| play recently. This one regime is not trying for plausible
| deniability, though, which is not quite a reverse of just using
| the prediction market tool, too.
| firloop wrote:
| > And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket
| and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50
| billion.
|
| Bizarre to call trading volume "revenue". Last year, trading fees
| for Kalshi amounted to about $263 million[0], whereas Polymarket
| largely did not have fees in 2025 and is turning them on in a few
| days[1].
|
| [0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kalshi-fee-
| revenue-2025-263-1...
|
| [1]: https://thedefiant.io/news/defi/polymarket-begins-rolling-
| ou...
| krick wrote:
| All this fearmongering about decision markets lately is really
| annoying. If you don't like gambling -- just don't gamble and
| shut the fuck up. It's not for you to decide if gambling is good
| or bad for me. If I am stupid enough to bet anything on an
| outcome that clearly depends on a person who could, potentially,
| be betting as well -- it's my problem, not yours.
| jongjong wrote:
| Well corporate stocks have the same dynamic. People are banding
| together and manipulating reality in unproductive ways to make
| their stocks go up.
|
| Countries literally go to war so that weapon dealers can sell
| weapons and banks can later sell loans to rebuild the country.
|
| The real problem is centralization of power.
|
| Within the horrible context of the current situation, it's a good
| thing that at least there is a force to drive outcomes that seem
| random as opposed to just being around money. It democratizes the
| horrors a bit so that rich people who have money and live in
| corporate stock lala land can get a slight taste of the negatives
| of large-scale vested interests collaborating towards dystopian
| outcomes.
|
| That said, a better solution would be to shut down all public
| markets and companies.
|
| My view is that if a company is so well recognized that
| government officials can reference it by name in congress, then
| that company should be shut down automatically. We know it didn't
| get there by economic efficiency... It almost certainly got there
| by voting and sociopolitical manipulation.
|
| You can't shut down betting markets without shutting down the
| public stock markets because they are betting markets themselves.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| How much of this is fixed if a person is only able to bet token
| amounts on each outcome? Let's get crazy and make it $20. A few
| crazy people might run Sybil attacks but it'll be a lot more
| limited and obvious. Not that I'm opposed to consigning all these
| gambling apps back to the fiery depths from which they came, but
| if you do want to preserve the ability of healthy people to have
| a little bit of fun, limiting the bet size has almost no effect
| on that while drastically reducing the damage. It seems like a
| good compromise, if anyone is looking for one of those.
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