Addiction Markets
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Addiction Markets
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Re: Addiction Markets
#2Related:
Coffeezilla: Exposing the Gambling Epidemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773049 - October 2025
Re: Addiction Markets
#3“Take athletics. Americans love sports, and that cultural centerpiece is being corrupted in an orgy of greed and speculative ferver.”
Professional (and collegiate) athletics has always been corrupt - now it’s just more visible.
The only thing needing abolishing is the advertising of gambling.
Re: Addiction Markets
#4> A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling.
No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.
Re: Addiction Markets
#5Should be abolished, but please leave the prediction markets and just limit participation to a small number.
Re: Addiction Markets
#6I am really tired of the lazy argument style of using "corporate" as a synonym for "bad". I too think it's bad to encourage addictive gamblers. I don't care if it is corporate, individual, or state run.
Re: Addiction Markets
#7“Take athletics. Americans love sports, and that cultural centerpiece is being corrupted in an orgy of greed and speculative ferver.” Professional (and collegiate) athletics has always been corrupt - now it’s just more visible. The only thing needing abolishing is the advertising of gambling.
Say it ain’t so Joe
Re: Addiction Markets
#8The problem isn't the 70M people who placed bets, its the ~25M with broken risk aversion.
These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.
Re: Addiction Markets
#9> A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling. No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.
>> addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay
The exact same argument could be used to make social media illegal.
Re: Addiction Markets
#10I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead.
It might be something we should treat more like smoking.
- Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5.
- Ad targeting restrictions.