The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
What I find almost as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.
We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
> CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
As someone who doesn't pay much attention to traditional news stations much these days, I was kind of taken aback by the over-the-top product placements they do now when exposed to it.
@5:40 (if your platform doesn't carry over the timestamp)
Polymarket/Kalshi are far more damaging to society than soda, but seeing this I was struck by how we've reached a point where the old Wayne's World product placement gag wouldn't even read as satire anymore, that's just how things actually are now.
What I find almost just as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.
The gambling industry has been trying to normalize gambling for decades.
I first ran into this in the mid-90's when the PR woman for a race track told me not to call it "gambling," but instead to call it "gaming."
We see gambling language used everywhere now, if you know what to look for. Terms like "all in" and "table stakes" are gambling terms,† but people use them every day in regular conversation.
† Though "all in" was used as far back as the 1930's to mean "very tired," I hardly ever hear anyone use it that way anymore.
We are incredibly market-brained at this point. A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking among people who act completely irrationally with incredible regularity.
Perhaps our greatest cultural fiction right now is the "rationality" of markets, and people are looking for insight more than ever on our insane world. So that makes perfect sense to me, really.
> A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking
It also tends to assume a certain hypothetical ideal of perfect information, where all prices and transactions are public, secret deals don't exist, and ownership/interests are never hidden.
It’s the logical next step for the crypto bros. At this point it’s just political patronage for the small time MAGA grifters who are outside of the big boy financial frauds.
Of course. They didn't treat 45 like a real candidate in 2015 because he deserved to be seen as one, they did it because it's lowest common denominator content and it's what people watch.
Feels like we’re the ones being put in a bottle as rational thinking, integrity, consideration of the greater good on all things big and small are interpreted as being weak and/or arresting people’s freedoms. When you forget hard learned lessons, they have a way of reminding you eventually.
There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.
That perception bears almost no relation to reality. The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story.
Just start a small business, or build wealth through real estate is a take that indicates some severe divorce from the reality of poverty in America.
You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to).
Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up.
This runs counter to your internal narrative as a self made person I’m sure, but have you ever worked for 40 hours a week and not had anything left after paying for your share of rent, food and utilities? This is the reality that doesn’t seep into forums like this, where the majority is wealthy, college educated, and broadly privileged in some way either through exceptional talent or background.
> let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places
I will bite - homeownership is indeed higher in the rust belt, but many folks struggle to find jobs that meet the median without giving up their health and bodies, if they can find steady work at all.
Upward mobility still occurs in the US, at all levels. While the advice is difficult, almost impossible, for most to apply, it is sometimes applicable.
One of the main issues is that a lot of advice is presented as an unconditional, absolute guarantee to success. A college degree was never a guarantee of future success (contrary to great-grandparent's assertion), but the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless. Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people, but even for poorer individuals, it is possible to start, say, a cleaning service with very little assets. (At the same time, such businesses are unlikely to make a whole lot of money at the end, but you might be able to move from working class to middle class, e.g.). A lot of contractor businesses--your plumbers and the like--are going to be from the lower middle class or middle class, and you can make some good money there, although that is also likely to be at the cost of your health much sooner than you expect.
If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable. And yet on Saturday at the neighborhood Independence Day party I met a guy who immigrated from Ukraine about 25 years ago with no money, no college education, no family support, and no English language skills. Instead of complaining he just went to work and while not exactly wealthy he's now doing fairly well as an electrical contractor.
Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different.
I don't know what you mean, I mean I made a million dollars with only a small hundred million dollar loan from my dad! This sort of entrepreneurship is available to anyone in America.¹
> The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Hardly. My grandfather was working under union rules as a machinist. No education beyond the 8th grade and what he learned in the US Navy during WWII. He was able to afford a house in a Lower Midwestern city (one that would be considered LCOL) and five kids.
I have a bachelor's degree that's paid for, a decent paying software job, and no wife/kids. Wanna guess how many homes I own in the same city?
“Building wealth through real estate” should not be possible, and it’s half the reason we’re in this mess: people treating their homes as a store of wealth and blocking new construction to protect the value of their investment has locked young people out of the housing market. Hence all the gambling.
What you should be hoping is that YIMBY policies carry the day in the end and “building wealth through real estate” is eliminated as a thing.
By people paying for houses they actually want to live in?
Real estate as "investment" is not helping anything here; it hurts home availability, first because prospective homeowners have to compete with capital that just wants to use those as store of value/for rentseeking (driving up demand/prices) and secondly because this creates incentives against building more houses (because that hurts those real estate "investors").
Construction companies can still turn a profit building and selling them. The idea is that houses should be depreciating assets, like cars. If houses are appreciating in value it means you're not building enough of them.
Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).
Well said. It's an unspoken "secret" as well that state gambling is a tax on the poor, feeding on desperation. This isn't even funding taxes though, just lining these companies and their insiders pockets.
> no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future
This is exactly right. Widespread gambling has a fundamental nihilism baked into it. If you believe hard work and frugality are the best path to success, then gambling doesn't feel like a good use of your income and energy.
But if you feel like your dreams are falling out of reach despite your hard work, if it starts to look like even big investors are really just playing a game (often with loaded dice) rather than acting on fundamentals, if grift seems like a more reliable path to success then hard work and ingenuity, then all of a sudden gambling seems a lot more sensible. Even if the odds aren't in your favor, you can at least get lucky when you gamble. When the game feels rigged its easy to believe that hardwork is destined for failure, whereas even loaded dice have some probability of landing in your favor.
> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses.
If you're already losing and losses are capped past some point (worst case just kill yourself), high stakes gambling is quite logical. Of course in reality, gamblers are rarely driven by game-theoretical analysis.
I think we're trying really hard to rationalize a fundamentally irrational behavior here. The vast majority of people betting on Kalshi are not thinking "well, worst case I'll just kill myself".
Even better, be the guy that taxes the house and winners, sells the licensing to the house (or friends of them that have privileged advantage to sell compliance services), or the guys who determine whether the house gets its zoning or construction exemptions.
How is that better? Taxes are a cut of the profits and they mostly are spent back on other goods and services. The owners of the gambling business take the remaining majority of the money and use it to scale themselves up, remove competition or to enrich their ranks. If you want to exist as a parasite, option #2 is the way to go.
It is crazy to me that even when faced with the most irredeemable industry, one that is predicated on abusing addiction and human irrationality, one that takes and gives back nothing, the first reaction to this is to brush all of that off and go "but what about the construction permits?"
The American adoration for anything 'private' knows no bounds. When our corporate overlords will be scamming, poisoning and forming quasi-dictatorships to rule over us all for profit, they'll still be cheering that at least it's not one of those pesky public governments.
They're not independent problems. Right now, someone on the East Coast is taking their lunch break; in a world without phone gambling, they would be studying business principles so they can put their name up for a manager role when it opens. But instead they're trying to pick the right sports bet that will make them rich this evening.
Of course there are paths to success, and they are available, but we live in a tiktok world where everyone wants to be a millionaire tomorrow and not in 20 years.
How in the world do we get money out of politics? I want to so so so badly, but I have no idea how to successfully do it. I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.
Any sort of reform that would successfully get money out of politics would require a constitutional amendment. I have little faith that the current Congress would pass any sort of amendment that would eliminate the system they benefit from unless there was at least a reasonable possibility that the states would call for an Article V convention, but the state legislatures also benefit from the current corrupt system so I don't see this happening either. You can't wholesale replace Congress either because the lack of term limits and the staggered terms means that the special interest groups that benefit from corruption will try to primary candidates before you can build up a critical mass (see what happened to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush).
We would need a Constitutional amendment to explicitly state that spending money on political campaigns doesn't count as an exercise of freedom of speech (1st Amendment). The Supreme Court Citizens United v. FEC decision was built on that legal foundation. We can argue about whether the court's interpretation was correct or politicized, and it might be reversed someday by different justices, but ultimately the only stable solution will be an amendment.
One approach is to reduce discontinuities and spoiler-effects in voting, which in turn reduces the incentives for a politician to accept—or someone else to offer—a devil's bargain. As it stands now, there's lots of potential for: "Do me a favor and my money will push you the small distance that distinguishes total defeat from total victory."
That leads to some game theory and math, with things like some form of ranked-voting, uncapping the House of Representatives, and maybe even proportional-representation rather than lots of just-one-winner races.
Others have offered contrived rules for solving it through policy, but these don't account for how to get those with power over us to institute such rules to bind their own hands and then to follow the rules to their own detriment
I think some places have the government give every party equal (by what measure? I don't remember. Past votes maybe?) money for campaigning and no donations are allowed.
Money is important, but there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to lobbying and campaigning. Elon's success at putting candidates into office isn't great, despite flooding massive amounts of cash into several elections.
Candidates themselves and the way they campaign matters more. Cuomo had 3x the warchest than Mamdani had, for example.
Small dollar donations can also level the playing field for candidates that can gain some national appeal (this does come with its own set of problems and perverse incentives, though)
Democracy doesn't exactly have a long history of stable states, and the US only been a liberal democracy for about 60 years. In that time we've done very little to hold politicians accountable. It's not clear there is a democratic fix outside of the theoretical realm. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose....
See also: the healthcare system, and the military.
We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing. A ton worse than a proper jobs program building public infrastructure (the CCC or something) or dumping that money into doctor training or whatever. Extremely poor ROI, but we can't touch them or GDP craters (nominally only—these aren't producing much in the first place, the P part of GDP, of course, which is probably part of why the US doesn't feel as rich as it looks on paper)
The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.
Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation.
About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing people, and the rest is everything else.
Society needs to rediscover the idea that not all moral judgements are religious in nature, and in many cases are just basic pragmatic ones.
The bans on gambling were often framed in Christian terms, so as society became more secular, they were undone. Now they probably need to be re-added with practical reasoning.
I disagree with your assessment, the ban wasn't undone because of secularism. In fact, this prediction market craze was embraced by the right almost instantly, which is the side currently most favored by Christians.
Gambling bans have been slowly undone for decades. This isn’t something that happened in the recent MAGA populist era; which is the portion of the right that seems to be okay with the gambling stuff.
I mean, white evangelicals largely sided with Trump last year, so I don't know how cleanly you can separate Christianity (as it currently exists in the USA) from MAGA populism and what policies the movement favors.
I don’t think it’s that difficult. Evangelicals’ beliefs and who they vote for are not the same thing; they largely seem to have voted for his Supreme Court nominees and consequently decisions like Roe. That’s a reality of a two party system.
Evangelicals are also but one branch of Christianity, something like a third of American Christians, so to suggest that it is the same is wrong from the start.
Yeah, the prevailing fear (at least out loud) is that going after "outcome markets" would open Pandora's box on everything from options and futures to the very concept of insurance. Obviously there's a huge and easily definable difference, but people love their slippery slopes, and nuanced discussion would mean giving up an easy way for connected people to cash in on non-public knowledge.
I try to run YouTube in librewolf with adblockers stacked to the tits but every so often I have to use Chrome. The volume of gambling ads is repugnant.
Also country. Visited Sweden recently, gambling ads everyone on the internet, on TV and in public spaces, but back home Spain I still see some, but nowhere near the level as it was in Sweden.
Even something that should be as fun as collecting and trading cards (baseball, pokemon, etc.) revolves around "pull odds" for rare cards. There are people spending thousands of dollars monthly just to rip a desirable card they could flip for money that in most cases would never make up for how much they spent just buying packs and boxes of the product.
I was taking an Uber from Sonoma back to the Bay, and the driver was one of those people. He wouldn't stop talking about how he was spending thousands a month on rare cards, then reselling them, all the while losing money, his wife, etc.
I really got into baseball cards a few years back. It is fun to collect for favorite players and all but once you realize it's a money pit you either are too deep and addicted or you're able to wean yourself back off it.
Fortunately it was the latter for me. I'd love to keep buying the stuff but it's such a waste. Better to buy singles I actually want. It's just not as fun as me being the one who pulled the card.
And I don't, save for a Super Bowl square or fantasy football entry fees. My point is that it's doing real damage to the most vulnerable and acting like it's some flippant choice is both myopic and selfish.
Here's an answer for you: we need a new temperance movement.
Sounds pretty ridiculous at first, but that's because people know little of the temperance and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century besides "prohibition failed". There was a whole lot more to it than mere anti-alcohol push, it included labour rights and reform (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, etc), Anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, anti-political corruption, consumer protection (food regulation), women's suffrage, etc. The 20th century progressives essentially saw a huge concentration of money and power turning society into a cruel, exploitative machine that ground people up and spat them out. Rampant alcoholism was only one part of it.
A modern version would be different in details but similar overall. Alcohol and cigarettes are not major problems, but corruption, monopoly, and engineered addiction are very real and very problematic. A new temperance movement would be about tackling rampant gabling and addiction (everything from gas station drugs to social media algorithms), political corruption, tech monopolies, misinformation etc.
Big problems need big solutions, but I suspect things will have to get worse before people realize the scale of the problem they're facing.
I mean, it's instilled into society at every level in the US. If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year. The "smart" way to write the tax law would be to just let taxpayers deduct whatever medical expenses they have at tax reporting time. But instead, they want you to make a bet because you're highly likely to either (a) not use all of it and lose it, or (b) realize you haven't spent all of it and spend it on random shit you wouldn't have otherwise bought, handing over profits to some suppliers who are in on the whole game, or (c) underestimate your medical needs and the tax man gets to tax some more of your money.
Stuff like this is all over the place in American life.
Conflating unavoidable risk in life with games designed to entice you to play while guaranteeing that you will lose is certainly some sort of perverse argument.
Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs. They should just be allowed to tax deduct everything when the need arises.
You ARE almost-guaranteed to lose the FSA game, basically. You'll either bet too much or too little, and the collective house wins either way.
In my opinion, it's even more sickening that the system is designed to scalp a few extra bucks off of peoples' medical situations in this way. The gambling on sports, I could care less about.
Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs.
Your entire argument sounds very much like how certain religions are against insurance because they view it as gambling.
It's led to the rise of an even riskier practice of shared health benefit pools, which market themselves as not being insurance even though they're pretty much the same thing as "mutual insurance," except that when you need them most, suddenly they're not insurance at all.
It also sounds very young. When you get over a certain age, you WILL use up that FSA. Every. Single. Year.
And if you're young enough not to, there are plenty of over-the-counter everyday goods that qualify for FSA, like Tylenol.
From the worker’s point of view, it’s adding a gambling element to every transaction, complete with the usual gambler’s folk wisdom about which ones are going to pay out and how to maximize your luck, which I think is part of what makes it popular.
Everyone who’s ever worked for tips has stories of unexpected “wins” and the biggest jackpots are reported on like big lottery wins.
Well, then any insurance is also gambling, according to your argument. Mean return of buying insurance must be always worse than not buying, but you don't want it to happen to _you_.
PS: except for home insurance in hurricane areas, government allows insurance plans to be non-actuarial, so essentially all other taxpayers pay for destroyed homes there. Gov even promotes rebuilding destroyed homes in the same place, instead of people moving out, only exacerbating the problem. Whether it's good or bad I don't know.
An FSA should not be a "bet" it should be set up for expenses you know you are going to need to pay: dependent care, recurring care and prescriptions, planned procedures. Your employer, not you, owns the account and keeps any balance remaining at the end of the year so you should not really guess at how much you contribute. An advantage of the FSA is that the full contribution is available immediately but the payroll deductions are spread over the whole year.
Those things are less static than you seem to believe. Eg recurring prescriptions; at least once a year my insurance gets mad about my scripts and requires a pre authorization that occasionally contains a stipulation that I try their “preferred” (read: cheaper for them) alternatives.
My planning is now wrong. Likewise I can only do FSA for planned procedures if I know close to a year ahead of time, which isn’t super likely. What portion of procedures are serious enough that insurance won’t call them elective, but also tame enough that you can put it off for a year for your FSA?
I don’t think I’ve ever had my FSA be completely correct. I’m always either over-stocked and losing money, or under-stocked and paying with post-tax dollars when I don’t have to.
Again, the FSA is for known expenditures, not unknown or variable. It's not perfect and I'm not really even defending it; I think an HSA is generally a better idea but the FSA does have certain specific advantages.
But for a ton of people that amount is extremely variable. Do you plan on getting into a car accident? Do you plan on getting an appendectomy in June when making your elections the November before? Sorry doctor, getting cancer wasn't in the plans for 2026, can we reschedule that to 2027 after my open enrollment?
I hate FSAs. Anyone have a good argument on why we should have them instead of just making HSAs open to everyone regardless of healthcare plan?
Requiring certain healthcare plans to access HSAs is the only thing that keeps HSAs from primarily being (in terms of amount of tax income lost to the program) a benefit for the upper-middle-class and higher, i.e. a regressive redistribution scheme.
Optimal (maximizing your benefit... and also cost in lost tax receipts) use of HSAs requires not touching the money until retirement. You pay medical bills with non-HSA money and keep the HSA money invested and growing tax-advantaged, like an extra retirement account. Spending the money you put in every year offers relatively tiny gains compared to keeping it in those accounts for decades.
Your options to mitigate this are to limit access, or to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term, approaches to which look kinda FSA-like.
> to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term
We could just continue to enforce the 20% penalty indefinitely to get rid of the concept of these accounts turning into retirement accounts.
FSAs benefit the upper-middle-class and wealthy more than poor people as well. You'll see quite a bit more savings when your top end tax rate is 35% than 12%. They're also far more likely to be able to plan on setting aside some portion of their incomes into a FSA at enrollment time rather than the bigger effects of the gamble with lower income earners; the outcomes of the risk of overfunding is way more impactful for someone making little money.
The tax benefit helping the wealthy more seems to me to move more towards eliminating the tax advantages of healthcare spending entirely.
> If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year.
Conflating this with gambling is dishonest. I'll grant you that I've always viewed the way FSA is structured is weird, but this is absolutely not gambling unless you're completely unaware.
If you have any regular, annual medical expenses that are out of pocket, or plan to purchase any of the very wide variety of items that are eligible for FSA (e.g. gym equipment, many foods, glasses, contacts, etc. that might not be fully covered), then you can estimate this with exceptional accuracy.
Its just another symptom of the silicon valley startup "do something illegal, scale fast, and dare the government to do something about it" business model. It is an absolute cancer to society, if there is such a thing as late stage capitalism that is it, and we need to vaporize companies that do it with fines and jail time.
On a broader scale it can be viewed as part of modern culture going towards "screw everyone else, I'm gonna do whatever to get ahead." Kids on tiktok are teaching each other how to scam people. At this rate we'll have scam call centers in the US by the end of the decade and nobody will do anything about it.
> > The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
It is just showing you in the clear what propaganda managed to hide from you with regards to the stock market and the bond market , and all the other markets for that matter.
Insiders do trade and it's impossible to stop them or catch them, and the further you are from the information (both geographically and socially) the harder it is to be first in line and more probably you are next to last in line and you gotta pray that you find some bigger fool to sell your bags to.
If anything there are some things on the prediction markets that really give the advantage to the small guy, for example some farmer whose family has been living there for many years could have a big advantage on weather forecasters and those who bet on them. Say they see the wind pick up or a particular cloud formation that gives an expert eye the idea that rain is gonna come whereas forecasters won't see it coming
Painfully obvious when you realize how heavily involved the current administration is with both Paramount Skydance (CNN owner / Trump has equity) and Kalshi (Trump Jr has equity).
Not really? It's an interesting proxy for public opinion that requires zero investment from the news org. They don't have to pay a polling agency or wait for someone else to.
Of course that suffers some likely substantial bias from oversampling a specific domain/sub-population
Not sure why you’re getting downvotes, this is exactly the case, along with I’m sure a nice payoff from the prediction markets for sponsored segments. Same reason betting odds are so heavily integrated into sports news
I mean, it only feels weird if you missed Kalshi becoming a CNN partner 6 months ago. Media is entirely captured by capital, so I wasn't even surprised when they did that.
The "best" part of this is all the trading algos that scrape the news act on it. They 1) can't vet sources all that well and 2) absolutely cannot discern lies (eg, anything coming out of the official admin channels) from facts. You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
>You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
This was a temporary discrepancy that has gone away now that physical prices have fallen.
This means the future traders were right; the $150+ prices for a physical barrel of oil were a short-term situation that would resolve in a few months. It was correct for futures to be priced substantially lower.
What's absurd is internet commentators thinking the market is broken because they see something they don't immediately understand.
> discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices
If you see mispricing, trade the hell out of it and pocket the cash before some hedge fund does. The system is rigged against us normal folk and given any opportunity to take money legally from the system, I absolutely would.
(Now sometimes, there are good reasons for paper and physical to differ, most particularly if the paper is structured in a high-risk way, and you need to be aware of that.)
Over the last 2+ decades gambling has increased massively. By "gambling" I include sports betting, prediction markets, online casinos and crypto (including NFTs). Yes, I'm including crypto under gambling. When ordinary people buy crypto it's mostly because they saw the stratospheric rise of Bitcoin, don't really understand why and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin.. Straight up. That's gambling.
But why? Ease of access (ie the Intenret and particularly smartphones) are obviously a factor. There was a time when if you wanted to gamble you had to do it illegally or you had to go to a physical casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (and then riverboats, etc). You can look across to see how ease of access to gambling absolutely increases the amount of gambling and thus gambling addiction. A good example are the poker machines that are available in some states in Australia but not all.
But there's something deeper than that (IMHO). And I think that thing is the increasing inequality [1] and the affordability crisis. People may be talking about affordability a lot now but it's not a new issue. It was a key issue in the 2016 election, for example.
The thesis is that as people become increasingly desperate to have enough money (and espeically if they fall below that level) then gambling increases because people see this as the only way they can get ahead (eg [2]).
I believe gambling is a symptomo and indicator of a deeply broken societ and a deteriorating society.
The sad reality is that gambling is an excellent way of extracting what little wealth poor people have and it makes everything worse on a macro scale. Gambling should be relatively inaccessible. Yet we have the Federal government suing to stop states to ban prediction markets [3].
> The thesis is that as people become increasingly desperate to have enough money (and espeically if they fall below that level) then gambling increases because people see this as the only way they can get ahead
I have plenty of cash (let's just say over a half-mil), so well ahead of the poverty level. I find myself nearly falling into this trap often. I used to work in FAANG as a developer making big bucks and earning far more than I spend. I left FAANG a couple of years ago and now I feel like I'm just breaking even with the lower salary. Quality of life has improved, but I miss having that "cushion" in each paycheck, so I look to things like the stock market to determine if I can get ahead again somehow. The fact that the tech market is absolute trash right now makes me fear for my future which in turn drives this "gotta find a way to get ahead" line of thinking even more aggressively. It's definitely not just impacting the poor.
It's amazing how naked it is that laws just don't apply to certain people. Kalshi et al are obviously gambling, and yet somehow all the laws about gambling have been politely forgotten by law enforcement.
Here at least I believe the gambling laws have changed.
Most gas stations I go into now have "gaming" machines and there's always some soul sitting at them at any time of day.
I'm mostly on team let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them but it's disheartening to watch a dad sitting there totally sucked into it and just ignoring their kid in a stroller behind them.
I think the limitation to team "let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them" is that it's rooted in outdated assumptions about what free will and coercion look like. Broadly speaking, libertarian notions of negative freedom assume a model of coercion with a very small footprint, primarily the threat of immanent physical violence. Similarly, it sees the exercise of free will as a binary action, rather than a spectrum of ability.
We entered this era a long time ago, where psychological insight and computational or chemical power can combine to override people's ability to make free choices. But I'm still not sure there is a widely shared philosophical or ideological framework that has fully digested and responded to these new realities yet.
Right, but as exploitive as those things are, they're still regulated and taxed as gambling. The regs may be a joke, but they exist. Like in some places they're required to remind the player about addiction concerns and direct them to help for it, and to fund those programs. And part of the reason that states (and provinces here in Canada) were so gung-ho on the liberalization of gambling is that they take a fat cut.
aside: recreational gambling should require a federal ID with losses tracked online, and if you're down more than 10% of last year's after-tax income you're cut off for the rest of the year, but I assume the Canadian and especially US constitutions rules against doing good things federally make that impossible.
While your analogy is valid, I find it hard to get upset at people who flout an artificially imposed limit to a license to engage in employment.
I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.
Some states are trying to fight against Kalshi. One of the problems is the President's family has a financial interest in these markets and so the Republican party does their best to say "hey, these are clearly "swaps" and not bets!!!1!"
I would also like to take a moment to evangelize against the notion that all politicians are crooks.
Some politicians are crooks. They should be voted out, investigated, prosecuted and publicly scorned.
"Everyone cheats" is something cheaters say to (a) feel better about themselves and (b) try to get other people to ignore their cheating when they get caught. Don't believe their lies. Most people don't cheat.
In studies of cooperative behavior, most people choose to cooperate, and the key predictor of whether someone will cooperate is whether they believe other people will choose to cooperate. Cynicism is permission to defect.
I think it was kind of a chain reaction... gambling liberalization and bitcoin happened around the same time, and then people figured out "Oh this thing we do with buying bitcoin and then talking everybody else into buying bitcoin... we can just do that with regular securities can't we" and then the hyper-valuation of Tesla and Gamestop happened.
Now everything is either gambling or a scam or both.
We are reaching a new post-rational or neu-rational stage of our society which i think many HNers and educated people will find deeply uncomfortable
The difficult truth is that as we've engeineered our society over the last 50 years into more and more deterministic outcomes, and began to assign morality itself TO determinism. Where in we've reached a point where when we must face that life is probablistic (i.e. gambling) we assign that space a moral evil
As a person who is deeply entrenched in this way of thinking I find gambing uncomforatable, but when we invented the core AI technology of prediction systems at Google that power LLM tech today, 'gambling' on probablistic outcomes at a super short term and long term level is questining the determinism of life itself.
Gambling is a collective signal on cohort outcomes and wisdom of crowds, which becomes training data itself for long/high dimensional-vectors required to fuel intelligence.
In other words, it turns out EVERYTHING is gambling, some things just have better odds than others, and most of those better odds choices come from OHTERS gambling to make those odds better for you.
Humanity moving forward out of this trap of high odds probability gravity wells and growing as a species will involve a lot of gambling i suspect.
The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
What I find almost as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.
We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
> CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
As someone who doesn't pay much attention to traditional news stations much these days, I was kind of taken aback by the over-the-top product placements they do now when exposed to it.
See for example:
https://youtu.be/9BPO-swW5eo?si=vLExNIXfeQmYHIDc&t=340
@5:40 (if your platform doesn't carry over the timestamp)
Polymarket/Kalshi are far more damaging to society than soda, but seeing this I was struck by how we've reached a point where the old Wayne's World product placement gag wouldn't even read as satire anymore, that's just how things actually are now.
What I find almost just as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.
The gambling industry has been trying to normalize gambling for decades.
I first ran into this in the mid-90's when the PR woman for a race track told me not to call it "gambling," but instead to call it "gaming."
We see gambling language used everywhere now, if you know what to look for. Terms like "all in" and "table stakes" are gambling terms,† but people use them every day in regular conversation.
† Though "all in" was used as far back as the 1930's to mean "very tired," I hardly ever hear anyone use it that way anymore.
We are incredibly market-brained at this point. A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking among people who act completely irrationally with incredible regularity.
Perhaps our greatest cultural fiction right now is the "rationality" of markets, and people are looking for insight more than ever on our insane world. So that makes perfect sense to me, really.
> A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking
It also tends to assume a certain hypothetical ideal of perfect information, where all prices and transactions are public, secret deals don't exist, and ownership/interests are never hidden.
It’s the logical next step for the crypto bros. At this point it’s just political patronage for the small time MAGA grifters who are outside of the big boy financial frauds.
People still watch CNN?
Of course. They didn't treat 45 like a real candidate in 2015 because he deserved to be seen as one, they did it because it's lowest common denominator content and it's what people watch.
People still watch CNN?
910,000 in prime time hours in April, which is 909,999 more than you.
https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-the-cable-news-rati...
Feels like we’re the ones being put in a bottle as rational thinking, integrity, consideration of the greater good on all things big and small are interpreted as being weak and/or arresting people’s freedoms. When you forget hard learned lessons, they have a way of reminding you eventually.
Something bad will happen, and the idiots will just follow whatever the next thing is.
It may take awhile, but it ends by voting in political candidates that actually care about combatting greed and corruption again
There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.
That perception bears almost no relation to reality. The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story.
Just start a small business, or build wealth through real estate is a take that indicates some severe divorce from the reality of poverty in America.
You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to).
Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up.
This runs counter to your internal narrative as a self made person I’m sure, but have you ever worked for 40 hours a week and not had anything left after paying for your share of rent, food and utilities? This is the reality that doesn’t seep into forums like this, where the majority is wealthy, college educated, and broadly privileged in some way either through exceptional talent or background.
> let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places
I will bite - homeownership is indeed higher in the rust belt, but many folks struggle to find jobs that meet the median without giving up their health and bodies, if they can find steady work at all.
Upward mobility still occurs in the US, at all levels. While the advice is difficult, almost impossible, for most to apply, it is sometimes applicable.
One of the main issues is that a lot of advice is presented as an unconditional, absolute guarantee to success. A college degree was never a guarantee of future success (contrary to great-grandparent's assertion), but the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless. Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people, but even for poorer individuals, it is possible to start, say, a cleaning service with very little assets. (At the same time, such businesses are unlikely to make a whole lot of money at the end, but you might be able to move from working class to middle class, e.g.). A lot of contractor businesses--your plumbers and the like--are going to be from the lower middle class or middle class, and you can make some good money there, although that is also likely to be at the cost of your health much sooner than you expect.
If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable. And yet on Saturday at the neighborhood Independence Day party I met a guy who immigrated from Ukraine about 25 years ago with no money, no college education, no family support, and no English language skills. Instead of complaining he just went to work and while not exactly wealthy he's now doing fairly well as an electrical contractor.
Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different.
I don't know what you mean, I mean I made a million dollars with only a small hundred million dollar loan from my dad! This sort of entrepreneurship is available to anyone in America.¹
¹ Terms and conditions apply.
> The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Hardly. My grandfather was working under union rules as a machinist. No education beyond the 8th grade and what he learned in the US Navy during WWII. He was able to afford a house in a Lower Midwestern city (one that would be considered LCOL) and five kids.
I have a bachelor's degree that's paid for, a decent paying software job, and no wife/kids. Wanna guess how many homes I own in the same city?
“Building wealth through real estate” should not be possible, and it’s half the reason we’re in this mess: people treating their homes as a store of wealth and blocking new construction to protect the value of their investment has locked young people out of the housing market. Hence all the gambling. What you should be hoping is that YIMBY policies carry the day in the end and “building wealth through real estate” is eliminated as a thing.
> Building wealth through real estate should not be possible
I am sympathetic to this argument, but there are problems. How do you get homes built if you make this change?
By people paying for houses they actually want to live in?
Real estate as "investment" is not helping anything here; it hurts home availability, first because prospective homeowners have to compete with capital that just wants to use those as store of value/for rentseeking (driving up demand/prices) and secondly because this creates incentives against building more houses (because that hurts those real estate "investors").
Construction companies can still turn a profit building and selling them. The idea is that houses should be depreciating assets, like cars. If houses are appreciating in value it means you're not building enough of them.
or that the cost to build them is going up.
> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job.
College never guaranteed anything.
A college education may still be (statistically) a good investment:
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/04/is-col...
Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).
> There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future.
Gambling is the closest we've come to figuring out how to directly tax hope.
Well said. It's an unspoken "secret" as well that state gambling is a tax on the poor, feeding on desperation. This isn't even funding taxes though, just lining these companies and their insiders pockets.
> no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future
This is exactly right. Widespread gambling has a fundamental nihilism baked into it. If you believe hard work and frugality are the best path to success, then gambling doesn't feel like a good use of your income and energy.
But if you feel like your dreams are falling out of reach despite your hard work, if it starts to look like even big investors are really just playing a game (often with loaded dice) rather than acting on fundamentals, if grift seems like a more reliable path to success then hard work and ingenuity, then all of a sudden gambling seems a lot more sensible. Even if the odds aren't in your favor, you can at least get lucky when you gamble. When the game feels rigged its easy to believe that hardwork is destined for failure, whereas even loaded dice have some probability of landing in your favor.
> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses.
If you're already losing and losses are capped past some point (worst case just kill yourself), high stakes gambling is quite logical. Of course in reality, gamblers are rarely driven by game-theoretical analysis.
I think we're trying really hard to rationalize a fundamentally irrational behavior here. The vast majority of people betting on Kalshi are not thinking "well, worst case I'll just kill myself".
The irony being that gambling is about as far from "guaranteed" or "stable" as you can get.
But it does fit the ultralibertarian mindset best, I guess. The right to the pursuit of happiness, not to actually getting it.
The best way to win at gambling is to be the house.
Even better, be the guy that taxes the house and winners, sells the licensing to the house (or friends of them that have privileged advantage to sell compliance services), or the guys who determine whether the house gets its zoning or construction exemptions.
How is that better? Taxes are a cut of the profits and they mostly are spent back on other goods and services. The owners of the gambling business take the remaining majority of the money and use it to scale themselves up, remove competition or to enrich their ranks. If you want to exist as a parasite, option #2 is the way to go.
It is crazy to me that even when faced with the most irredeemable industry, one that is predicated on abusing addiction and human irrationality, one that takes and gives back nothing, the first reaction to this is to brush all of that off and go "but what about the construction permits?"
The American adoration for anything 'private' knows no bounds. When our corporate overlords will be scamming, poisoning and forming quasi-dictatorships to rule over us all for profit, they'll still be cheering that at least it's not one of those pesky public governments.
They're not independent problems. Right now, someone on the East Coast is taking their lunch break; in a world without phone gambling, they would be studying business principles so they can put their name up for a manager role when it opens. But instead they're trying to pick the right sports bet that will make them rich this evening.
Of course there are paths to success, and they are available, but we live in a tiktok world where everyone wants to be a millionaire tomorrow and not in 20 years.
Unfortunately, the gambling industry is going to have a much wealthier and more powerful lobby than any effort to displace it.
How in the world do we get money out of politics? I want to so so so badly, but I have no idea how to successfully do it. I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.
Any sort of reform that would successfully get money out of politics would require a constitutional amendment. I have little faith that the current Congress would pass any sort of amendment that would eliminate the system they benefit from unless there was at least a reasonable possibility that the states would call for an Article V convention, but the state legislatures also benefit from the current corrupt system so I don't see this happening either. You can't wholesale replace Congress either because the lack of term limits and the staggered terms means that the special interest groups that benefit from corruption will try to primary candidates before you can build up a critical mass (see what happened to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush).
We would need a Constitutional amendment to explicitly state that spending money on political campaigns doesn't count as an exercise of freedom of speech (1st Amendment). The Supreme Court Citizens United v. FEC decision was built on that legal foundation. We can argue about whether the court's interpretation was correct or politicized, and it might be reversed someday by different justices, but ultimately the only stable solution will be an amendment.
One approach is to reduce discontinuities and spoiler-effects in voting, which in turn reduces the incentives for a politician to accept—or someone else to offer—a devil's bargain. As it stands now, there's lots of potential for: "Do me a favor and my money will push you the small distance that distinguishes total defeat from total victory."
That leads to some game theory and math, with things like some form of ranked-voting, uncapping the House of Representatives, and maybe even proportional-representation rather than lots of just-one-winner races.
It begins with hierarchy
Others have offered contrived rules for solving it through policy, but these don't account for how to get those with power over us to institute such rules to bind their own hands and then to follow the rules to their own detriment
I'm curious. Can you flesh out what it begins wirh hierarchy means?
I think some places have the government give every party equal (by what measure? I don't remember. Past votes maybe?) money for campaigning and no donations are allowed.
Japan has such rules. They have absolutely massive decades-long scandals with money corrupting their politics, and ongoing right now.
I'm sure, I was just trying to help with
> I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.
Money is important, but there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to lobbying and campaigning. Elon's success at putting candidates into office isn't great, despite flooding massive amounts of cash into several elections.
Candidates themselves and the way they campaign matters more. Cuomo had 3x the warchest than Mamdani had, for example.
Small dollar donations can also level the playing field for candidates that can gain some national appeal (this does come with its own set of problems and perverse incentives, though)
Democracy doesn't exactly have a long history of stable states, and the US only been a liberal democracy for about 60 years. In that time we've done very little to hold politicians accountable. It's not clear there is a democratic fix outside of the theoretical realm. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose....
Genuinely curious what the golden goose refers to here?
There's a lot of money in gambling. Nobody seems to want do anything that might depress the economy, even if it means the death of democracy.
See also: the healthcare system, and the military.
We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing. A ton worse than a proper jobs program building public infrastructure (the CCC or something) or dumping that money into doctor training or whatever. Extremely poor ROI, but we can't touch them or GDP craters (nominally only—these aren't producing much in the first place, the P part of GDP, of course, which is probably part of why the US doesn't feel as rich as it looks on paper)
The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.
Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation.
About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing people, and the rest is everything else.
Only works with fair elections
Society needs to rediscover the idea that not all moral judgements are religious in nature, and in many cases are just basic pragmatic ones.
The bans on gambling were often framed in Christian terms, so as society became more secular, they were undone. Now they probably need to be re-added with practical reasoning.
Rediscovering first principles
I disagree with your assessment, the ban wasn't undone because of secularism. In fact, this prediction market craze was embraced by the right almost instantly, which is the side currently most favored by Christians.
Gambling bans have been slowly undone for decades. This isn’t something that happened in the recent MAGA populist era; which is the portion of the right that seems to be okay with the gambling stuff.
I mean, white evangelicals largely sided with Trump last year, so I don't know how cleanly you can separate Christianity (as it currently exists in the USA) from MAGA populism and what policies the movement favors.
I don’t think it’s that difficult. Evangelicals’ beliefs and who they vote for are not the same thing; they largely seem to have voted for his Supreme Court nominees and consequently decisions like Roe. That’s a reality of a two party system.
Evangelicals are also but one branch of Christianity, something like a third of American Christians, so to suggest that it is the same is wrong from the start.
Yeah, the prevailing fear (at least out loud) is that going after "outcome markets" would open Pandora's box on everything from options and futures to the very concept of insurance. Obviously there's a huge and easily definable difference, but people love their slippery slopes, and nuanced discussion would mean giving up an easy way for connected people to cash in on non-public knowledge.
I try to run YouTube in librewolf with adblockers stacked to the tits but every so often I have to use Chrome. The volume of gambling ads is repugnant.
Ublock Origin Lite is quite capable.
It probably depends on the algorithm. I never see gambling ads on YouTube.
Also country. Visited Sweden recently, gambling ads everyone on the internet, on TV and in public spaces, but back home Spain I still see some, but nowhere near the level as it was in Sweden.
> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle
Just ban or regulate it? It's only a form gambling after all.
there was a certain approach tried back in 1917 in Russia
isn't without its issues of course, but you know, desperate times call for desperate measures
Even something that should be as fun as collecting and trading cards (baseball, pokemon, etc.) revolves around "pull odds" for rare cards. There are people spending thousands of dollars monthly just to rip a desirable card they could flip for money that in most cases would never make up for how much they spent just buying packs and boxes of the product.
I was taking an Uber from Sonoma back to the Bay, and the driver was one of those people. He wouldn't stop talking about how he was spending thousands a month on rare cards, then reselling them, all the while losing money, his wife, etc.
I really got into baseball cards a few years back. It is fun to collect for favorite players and all but once you realize it's a money pit you either are too deep and addicted or you're able to wean yourself back off it.
Fortunately it was the latter for me. I'd love to keep buying the stuff but it's such a waste. Better to buy singles I actually want. It's just not as fun as me being the one who pulled the card.
It's both a key driver and symptom of societal disintegration and ultimate downfall.
"I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle"
laws, that's how. push it back down to the dark net where most people can't be bothered to get at it.
You are 100% free to not gamble
And I don't, save for a Super Bowl square or fantasy football entry fees. My point is that it's doing real damage to the most vulnerable and acting like it's some flippant choice is both myopic and selfish.
> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
You severely punish those involved with prison time for whatever you can find on them. And I'm not talking a few months at Club Fed.
This has an outsized impact on young men.
Here's an answer for you: we need a new temperance movement.
Sounds pretty ridiculous at first, but that's because people know little of the temperance and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century besides "prohibition failed". There was a whole lot more to it than mere anti-alcohol push, it included labour rights and reform (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, etc), Anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, anti-political corruption, consumer protection (food regulation), women's suffrage, etc. The 20th century progressives essentially saw a huge concentration of money and power turning society into a cruel, exploitative machine that ground people up and spat them out. Rampant alcoholism was only one part of it.
A modern version would be different in details but similar overall. Alcohol and cigarettes are not major problems, but corruption, monopoly, and engineered addiction are very real and very problematic. A new temperance movement would be about tackling rampant gabling and addiction (everything from gas station drugs to social media algorithms), political corruption, tech monopolies, misinformation etc.
Big problems need big solutions, but I suspect things will have to get worse before people realize the scale of the problem they're facing.
I mean, it's instilled into society at every level in the US. If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year. The "smart" way to write the tax law would be to just let taxpayers deduct whatever medical expenses they have at tax reporting time. But instead, they want you to make a bet because you're highly likely to either (a) not use all of it and lose it, or (b) realize you haven't spent all of it and spend it on random shit you wouldn't have otherwise bought, handing over profits to some suppliers who are in on the whole game, or (c) underestimate your medical needs and the tax man gets to tax some more of your money.
Stuff like this is all over the place in American life.
Conflating unavoidable risk in life with games designed to entice you to play while guaranteeing that you will lose is certainly some sort of perverse argument.
I'm not conflating anything here.
Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs. They should just be allowed to tax deduct everything when the need arises.
You ARE almost-guaranteed to lose the FSA game, basically. You'll either bet too much or too little, and the collective house wins either way.
In my opinion, it's even more sickening that the system is designed to scalp a few extra bucks off of peoples' medical situations in this way. The gambling on sports, I could care less about.
Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs.
Your entire argument sounds very much like how certain religions are against insurance because they view it as gambling.
It's led to the rise of an even riskier practice of shared health benefit pools, which market themselves as not being insurance even though they're pretty much the same thing as "mutual insurance," except that when you need them most, suddenly they're not insurance at all.
It also sounds very young. When you get over a certain age, you WILL use up that FSA. Every. Single. Year.
And if you're young enough not to, there are plenty of over-the-counter everyday goods that qualify for FSA, like Tylenol.
I’d put working for tips in here as well.
From the worker’s point of view, it’s adding a gambling element to every transaction, complete with the usual gambler’s folk wisdom about which ones are going to pay out and how to maximize your luck, which I think is part of what makes it popular.
Everyone who’s ever worked for tips has stories of unexpected “wins” and the biggest jackpots are reported on like big lottery wins.
Well, then any insurance is also gambling, according to your argument. Mean return of buying insurance must be always worse than not buying, but you don't want it to happen to _you_.
PS: except for home insurance in hurricane areas, government allows insurance plans to be non-actuarial, so essentially all other taxpayers pay for destroyed homes there. Gov even promotes rebuilding destroyed homes in the same place, instead of people moving out, only exacerbating the problem. Whether it's good or bad I don't know.
> Well, then any insurance is also gambling, according to your argument.
That's what they are. Three big industries are net-losses to the economy by definition: banking, insurance and gambling.
An FSA should not be a "bet" it should be set up for expenses you know you are going to need to pay: dependent care, recurring care and prescriptions, planned procedures. Your employer, not you, owns the account and keeps any balance remaining at the end of the year so you should not really guess at how much you contribute. An advantage of the FSA is that the full contribution is available immediately but the payroll deductions are spread over the whole year.
Those things are less static than you seem to believe. Eg recurring prescriptions; at least once a year my insurance gets mad about my scripts and requires a pre authorization that occasionally contains a stipulation that I try their “preferred” (read: cheaper for them) alternatives.
My planning is now wrong. Likewise I can only do FSA for planned procedures if I know close to a year ahead of time, which isn’t super likely. What portion of procedures are serious enough that insurance won’t call them elective, but also tame enough that you can put it off for a year for your FSA?
I don’t think I’ve ever had my FSA be completely correct. I’m always either over-stocked and losing money, or under-stocked and paying with post-tax dollars when I don’t have to.
Again, the FSA is for known expenditures, not unknown or variable. It's not perfect and I'm not really even defending it; I think an HSA is generally a better idea but the FSA does have certain specific advantages.
But for a ton of people that amount is extremely variable. Do you plan on getting into a car accident? Do you plan on getting an appendectomy in June when making your elections the November before? Sorry doctor, getting cancer wasn't in the plans for 2026, can we reschedule that to 2027 after my open enrollment?
I hate FSAs. Anyone have a good argument on why we should have them instead of just making HSAs open to everyone regardless of healthcare plan?
Requiring certain healthcare plans to access HSAs is the only thing that keeps HSAs from primarily being (in terms of amount of tax income lost to the program) a benefit for the upper-middle-class and higher, i.e. a regressive redistribution scheme.
Optimal (maximizing your benefit... and also cost in lost tax receipts) use of HSAs requires not touching the money until retirement. You pay medical bills with non-HSA money and keep the HSA money invested and growing tax-advantaged, like an extra retirement account. Spending the money you put in every year offers relatively tiny gains compared to keeping it in those accounts for decades.
Your options to mitigate this are to limit access, or to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term, approaches to which look kinda FSA-like.
> to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term
We could just continue to enforce the 20% penalty indefinitely to get rid of the concept of these accounts turning into retirement accounts.
FSAs benefit the upper-middle-class and wealthy more than poor people as well. You'll see quite a bit more savings when your top end tax rate is 35% than 12%. They're also far more likely to be able to plan on setting aside some portion of their incomes into a FSA at enrollment time rather than the bigger effects of the gamble with lower income earners; the outcomes of the risk of overfunding is way more impactful for someone making little money.
The tax benefit helping the wealthy more seems to me to move more towards eliminating the tax advantages of healthcare spending entirely.
> If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year.
Conflating this with gambling is dishonest. I'll grant you that I've always viewed the way FSA is structured is weird, but this is absolutely not gambling unless you're completely unaware.
If you have any regular, annual medical expenses that are out of pocket, or plan to purchase any of the very wide variety of items that are eligible for FSA (e.g. gym equipment, many foods, glasses, contacts, etc. that might not be fully covered), then you can estimate this with exceptional accuracy.
This is not the same as playing roulette.
Its just another symptom of the silicon valley startup "do something illegal, scale fast, and dare the government to do something about it" business model. It is an absolute cancer to society, if there is such a thing as late stage capitalism that is it, and we need to vaporize companies that do it with fines and jail time.
On a broader scale it can be viewed as part of modern culture going towards "screw everyone else, I'm gonna do whatever to get ahead." Kids on tiktok are teaching each other how to scam people. At this rate we'll have scam call centers in the US by the end of the decade and nobody will do anything about it.
> > The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
It is just showing you in the clear what propaganda managed to hide from you with regards to the stock market and the bond market , and all the other markets for that matter.
Insiders do trade and it's impossible to stop them or catch them, and the further you are from the information (both geographically and socially) the harder it is to be first in line and more probably you are next to last in line and you gotta pray that you find some bigger fool to sell your bags to.
If anything there are some things on the prediction markets that really give the advantage to the small guy, for example some farmer whose family has been living there for many years could have a big advantage on weather forecasters and those who bet on them. Say they see the wind pick up or a particular cloud formation that gives an expert eye the idea that rain is gonna come whereas forecasters won't see it coming
It's really terrible. Gambling addiction is a serious issue that needs to be educated towards people first before any 'Kalshi' mention.
I suppose that's what those 'Gambling problem?'ads are for.
Well we don't need ads. We need responsible education against the effects of gambling addiction or we need to raise wages, which is it?
Or we could also ban sports betting apps and Kalshi and Polymarket.
Where does raising wages have to deal with this?
Did anyone else think it was strange how fast legitimate news orgs (cnn for example) integrated prediction markets into their businesses?
Painfully obvious when you realize how heavily involved the current administration is with both Paramount Skydance (CNN owner / Trump has equity) and Kalshi (Trump Jr has equity).
Not for those of us around in 2018 when they became QVC for sh*tcoins
Not really? It's an interesting proxy for public opinion that requires zero investment from the news org. They don't have to pay a polling agency or wait for someone else to.
Of course that suffers some likely substantial bias from oversampling a specific domain/sub-population
Not really. It's easy "content"for them and adds a veneer of quantitative rigor to what would otherwise be pure vibes.
Not sure why you’re getting downvotes, this is exactly the case, along with I’m sure a nice payoff from the prediction markets for sponsored segments. Same reason betting odds are so heavily integrated into sports news
I mean, it only feels weird if you missed Kalshi becoming a CNN partner 6 months ago. Media is entirely captured by capital, so I wasn't even surprised when they did that.
https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-cnn-prediction-market-partn...
The "best" part of this is all the trading algos that scrape the news act on it. They 1) can't vet sources all that well and 2) absolutely cannot discern lies (eg, anything coming out of the official admin channels) from facts. You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
>You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
This was a temporary discrepancy that has gone away now that physical prices have fallen.
This means the future traders were right; the $150+ prices for a physical barrel of oil were a short-term situation that would resolve in a few months. It was correct for futures to be priced substantially lower.
What's absurd is internet commentators thinking the market is broken because they see something they don't immediately understand.
> discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices
If you see mispricing, trade the hell out of it and pocket the cash before some hedge fund does. The system is rigged against us normal folk and given any opportunity to take money legally from the system, I absolutely would.
(Now sometimes, there are good reasons for paper and physical to differ, most particularly if the paper is structured in a high-risk way, and you need to be aware of that.)
Reminds me of news articles that are just Twitter screenshots, except now there's money directly involved.
Btw every ad around the stadium in World Cup is for Kalshi now. Really makes me question the fairness of the games.
They blocked gambling ads from in stadium ads for the world cup, but Kalshi was still able to get one in because it's "predictions" and not gambling.
It's funny, the only place I see Kalshi mentioned is here on HN for articles about how bad Kalshi is. Same for all the sports betting sites.
I'm sure they are all bad, but damned if I never encounter them outside of HN.
Felt this video I saw this morning was relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV3rpuf8iAk
Kalshi is a virus
Over the last 2+ decades gambling has increased massively. By "gambling" I include sports betting, prediction markets, online casinos and crypto (including NFTs). Yes, I'm including crypto under gambling. When ordinary people buy crypto it's mostly because they saw the stratospheric rise of Bitcoin, don't really understand why and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin.. Straight up. That's gambling.
But why? Ease of access (ie the Intenret and particularly smartphones) are obviously a factor. There was a time when if you wanted to gamble you had to do it illegally or you had to go to a physical casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (and then riverboats, etc). You can look across to see how ease of access to gambling absolutely increases the amount of gambling and thus gambling addiction. A good example are the poker machines that are available in some states in Australia but not all.
But there's something deeper than that (IMHO). And I think that thing is the increasing inequality [1] and the affordability crisis. People may be talking about affordability a lot now but it's not a new issue. It was a key issue in the 2016 election, for example.
The thesis is that as people become increasingly desperate to have enough money (and espeically if they fall below that level) then gambling increases because people see this as the only way they can get ahead (eg [2]).
I believe gambling is a symptomo and indicator of a deeply broken societ and a deteriorating society.
The sad reality is that gambling is an excellent way of extracting what little wealth poor people have and it makes everything worse on a macro scale. Gambling should be relatively inaccessible. Yet we have the Federal government suing to stop states to ban prediction markets [3].
[1]: https://wir2026.wid.world/
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8643406/
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/where-the-feds-are-fighting-...
> The thesis is that as people become increasingly desperate to have enough money (and espeically if they fall below that level) then gambling increases because people see this as the only way they can get ahead
I have plenty of cash (let's just say over a half-mil), so well ahead of the poverty level. I find myself nearly falling into this trap often. I used to work in FAANG as a developer making big bucks and earning far more than I spend. I left FAANG a couple of years ago and now I feel like I'm just breaking even with the lower salary. Quality of life has improved, but I miss having that "cushion" in each paycheck, so I look to things like the stock market to determine if I can get ahead again somehow. The fact that the tech market is absolute trash right now makes me fear for my future which in turn drives this "gotta find a way to get ahead" line of thinking even more aggressively. It's definitely not just impacting the poor.
There's 3 kinds of crypto buyers: The investor, the criminal, and your weird libertarian uncle
s/investor/speculator/
It's amazing how naked it is that laws just don't apply to certain people. Kalshi et al are obviously gambling, and yet somehow all the laws about gambling have been politely forgotten by law enforcement.
Here at least I believe the gambling laws have changed.
Most gas stations I go into now have "gaming" machines and there's always some soul sitting at them at any time of day.
I'm mostly on team let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them but it's disheartening to watch a dad sitting there totally sucked into it and just ignoring their kid in a stroller behind them.
I think the limitation to team "let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them" is that it's rooted in outdated assumptions about what free will and coercion look like. Broadly speaking, libertarian notions of negative freedom assume a model of coercion with a very small footprint, primarily the threat of immanent physical violence. Similarly, it sees the exercise of free will as a binary action, rather than a spectrum of ability.
We entered this era a long time ago, where psychological insight and computational or chemical power can combine to override people's ability to make free choices. But I'm still not sure there is a widely shared philosophical or ideological framework that has fully digested and responded to these new realities yet.
If I ever see that, I'll tell the dad something
Right, but as exploitive as those things are, they're still regulated and taxed as gambling. The regs may be a joke, but they exist. Like in some places they're required to remind the player about addiction concerns and direct them to help for it, and to fund those programs. And part of the reason that states (and provinces here in Canada) were so gung-ho on the liberalization of gambling is that they take a fat cut.
aside: recreational gambling should require a federal ID with losses tracked online, and if you're down more than 10% of last year's after-tax income you're cut off for the rest of the year, but I assume the Canadian and especially US constitutions rules against doing good things federally make that impossible.
Same thing happened in the early days of Uber, with taxi licenses
While your analogy is valid, I find it hard to get upset at people who flout an artificially imposed limit to a license to engage in employment.
I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.
And DraftKings/FanDuel
Some states are trying to fight against Kalshi. One of the problems is the President's family has a financial interest in these markets and so the Republican party does their best to say "hey, these are clearly "swaps" and not bets!!!1!"
https://www.yogonet.com/international/news/2026/06/29/125136...
I would also like to take a moment to evangelize against the notion that all politicians are crooks.
Some politicians are crooks. They should be voted out, investigated, prosecuted and publicly scorned.
"Everyone cheats" is something cheaters say to (a) feel better about themselves and (b) try to get other people to ignore their cheating when they get caught. Don't believe their lies. Most people don't cheat.
In studies of cooperative behavior, most people choose to cooperate, and the key predictor of whether someone will cooperate is whether they believe other people will choose to cooperate. Cynicism is permission to defect.
Defectors must be punished.
Sure lets act like Democrats are innocent little victims in all of this
Not defending Kalshi but stock market has been gambling lite for a while now. It is pretty wild how blatant it is now though.
I think it was kind of a chain reaction... gambling liberalization and bitcoin happened around the same time, and then people figured out "Oh this thing we do with buying bitcoin and then talking everybody else into buying bitcoin... we can just do that with regular securities can't we" and then the hyper-valuation of Tesla and Gamestop happened.
Now everything is either gambling or a scam or both.
We are reaching a new post-rational or neu-rational stage of our society which i think many HNers and educated people will find deeply uncomfortable
The difficult truth is that as we've engeineered our society over the last 50 years into more and more deterministic outcomes, and began to assign morality itself TO determinism. Where in we've reached a point where when we must face that life is probablistic (i.e. gambling) we assign that space a moral evil
As a person who is deeply entrenched in this way of thinking I find gambing uncomforatable, but when we invented the core AI technology of prediction systems at Google that power LLM tech today, 'gambling' on probablistic outcomes at a super short term and long term level is questining the determinism of life itself.
Gambling is a collective signal on cohort outcomes and wisdom of crowds, which becomes training data itself for long/high dimensional-vectors required to fuel intelligence.
In other words, it turns out EVERYTHING is gambling, some things just have better odds than others, and most of those better odds choices come from OHTERS gambling to make those odds better for you.
Humanity moving forward out of this trap of high odds probability gravity wells and growing as a species will involve a lot of gambling i suspect.
It seems CNN fails to put their mouth where their money is.
This is a really interesting piece. It's weird seeing Kalshi adverts in the World Cup. Not sure how I feel about the whole thing in general.