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We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

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Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#351

Post by pixl97 »

testaccount28 wrote: post #330
pixl97 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence why we drastically reduced the number of wagers/addictive risk taking because of its cost on society. The libertarians here will say "oh yay, we've won". Then a few years later they'll cry about your mom losing her house to a gambling scam with no recourse. Then they'll cry again when the voters finally rid themselves of the gambling scourge years later.

some people like gambling. for them, risking money is an efficient way to purchase a thrill. do we not care about them?

People like doing Crack, do we not care for them?

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#352

Post by cortesoft »

munk-a wrote: post #263
socalgal2 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme societal harm.

I am pretty sure anyone without a vested interest will also realize that alcoholism has caused extreme societal harm as well. I would say with pretty strong certainty that alcohol has caused more damage, and is currently causing more damage, than gambling. I would be VERY curious to hear someone try to make an argument that more damage is caused by gambling than drinking. Drunk driving kills about 13,000 people in the US every year. Drunk driving accounts for 30% of all traffic fatalities. THIRTY PERCENT! I am sure we all know alcoholics, and so many people have been abused by angry drunks. The raging abusive alcoholic parent is a trope for a reason.

So clearly, we should not get too 'caught up in the bureacracies of maybe' and go ahead and banning just this one thing. Surely banning alcohol will make the world a better place!

Well, we tried that. It was a horrible failure. It lead to the rise of organized crime, and that fact is STILL harming us to this day, almost 100 years after we reversed the decision to ban alcohol.

In fact, when we legalized alcohol, a lot of the organized crime moved into gambling, and have used the fact that it is illegal to fund crime for decades.

I also hate how sports gambling and now prop gambling has taken over. I don't think we should just sit here and do nothing, but there are a lot of things we can do that isn't outright banning, which I think is bad for a lot of reasons.

We should outlaw gambling advertising, just like we did with tobacco. I am fine with adding other restrictions, and placing more responsibility to identify and protect problem gamblers onto the gambling companies. I am open to hearing other ideas, too.

My biggest problem with your comment is the idea that we should stop thinking about the consequences of an outright ban and just go ahead and ban it now. This isn't a 'philosophical debate', it is trying to make sure your action doesn't cause more harm than good. I think looking at other vices, seeing how we deal with those and what has happened when we have tried things like banning in the past, to inform us about how we can mitigate the harm gambling does to our society is a good thing.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#353

Post by marssaxman »

WalterBright wrote: post #338
flir wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

> When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid In a free market system, wealth is created, not concentrated.

It does both! There is no natural law which prevents the formation of a monopoly.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#354

Post by cortesoft »

llmthrow0827 wrote: post #347
socalgal2 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Personal liberties are overrated, and a functioning society is underrated. OnlyFans, sports betting, and junk food appeal to some people with low impulse control and high time preference in the short term, but have massive negative consequences on everyone in the long run.

Personal liberties being overrated is a wild take. I feel like this is one of those things that is easy to say when it isn't something you are interested in being infringed upon. I would be curious if you would feel the same way if people were trying to ban something you want to do.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#355

Post by zarathustreal »

amrocha wrote: post #348
zarathustreal wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re significantly worse off assuming your government is adversarial than cooperative, regardless of what reality may be, and the majority of us know that. It’s why the chaos psyops aren’t working. We’re not happy with our government but apes together strong

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#356

Post by JumpCrisscross »

amrocha wrote: post #348
zarathustreal wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re significantly worse off assuming your government is adversarial than cooperative, regardless of what reality may be, and the majority of us know that. It’s why the chaos psyops aren’t working. We’re not happy with our government but apes together strong

[flagged]

> what has that attitude gotten you?

I've gotten language I wrote passed into multiple state and a few federal laws. Definitey helps when I'm the only one to call my electeds on an issue.

The lazy and nihilistic aren't great for our country. But they're great if you put any work into civic engagement.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#357

Post by JumpCrisscross »

amrocha wrote: post #331
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thre…

[flagged]

> Nobody is going to attack the US if your government stopped trying to meddle in other countries affairs

How did that work out for Ukraine? The idea that we live in a just world where everyone who has chaos rain down on them deserves it is so simply refuted even by a cursory glance at just modern history.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#358

Post by TheCowboy »

hermannj314 wrote: post #154
learn_more wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it seems this could be solved by refusing last minute bets?

Data is released every minute, every five minutes, every hour, and then 6 hour high/low, and then mid-day preliminary reports, so there is no last-minute since any one of those reports could contain data (with various validation/rounding caveats) that could eliminate a market of temperatures, so there isn't really a last minute. My conclusion was to focus on forecast and attempt to predict the temperature better than…

A lot of people assume insider trading in weather markets on data that's publicly available but they're unaware of.

It's also a massive whoosh that you only consider the insider trader aspect in choosing to play weather markets. No consideration of how you would get an edge in these markets against extremely powerful weather models used by meteorologists who understand the subject and how to apply the data. It seems much different than betting against political pundits.

It's also another whoosh not realizing that some of these stations are actually not that secure when you take a look at them in real life. Less insiders than betting on things that aren't tamper-resistant.

Also, a lot of people complain about insiders profiting from last minute data. One way to limit this would be requiring markets to close in advance of final data, but people love to gamble (read: bet without an edge) on things at the last minute across all prediction market subjects.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#359

Post by cortesoft »

zug_zug wrote: post #222
socalgal2 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 w…

> Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"

I don't think this is a fair comparison, because it is much easier to tie losing all your money to gambling than it is to tie your health issues to twinkies. For one, it isn't just twinkies, it is a bunch of different foods, and the consequences are temporally separated from the action; you don't eat a twinkie and immediately notice you are bigger and less healthy. Your heart attack will come years down the line, and there was no one action you took that you can regret, so the feeling is not the same. Gambling is very easy to feel the pain, you lose a bet and you lose the money, immediately.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#360

Post by brailsafe »

edwcross wrote: post #306
brailsafe wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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…

Fascinating, thanks for the link!
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