391–400 of 741 posts
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> 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.
No, it does not concentrate wealth. Wealth is not a fixed pie. In a free market, you get wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it.
As for monopolies, competition is what prevents them.
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I'm arguing for taking advantage of this before you can't.
People who aren’t sociopaths might argue no one should be taking advantage of this, and that the people behind these services should be in prison
The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'. I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to…
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> The problem is capitalism Capitalist countries build walls to keep people out. Socialist countries build walls to keep people in.
This is a trite response that doesn't engage with what was originally stated. The double edged brilliance/danger of capitalism is that it constantly opens up and moves into new markets. This is good, it means once the market determines a need, capital investment can accelerate production of the good that meets that need. But the flip side is it is coming for everything. Everything will be marketized and monetized and…
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I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market making which is preferable
> I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly mean that poker isn't gambling.
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree. Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college. By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working. Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part be…
This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
All this fearmongering about decision markets lately is really annoying. If you don't like gambling — just don't gamble and shut the fuck up. It's not for you to decide if gambling is good or bad for me. If I am stupid enough to bet anything on an outcome that clearly depends on a person who could, potentially, be betting as well — it's my problem, not yours.
That’s not what people are worried about, it’s the rigging of real world events (including wars!) that has people worried.
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree. Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college. By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working. Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part be…
True, but somewhat misleading. This includes parents that work part-time. If we only include full-time work then it's never been over 50%. Largely this reflects the second wave of feminism and women being able to get jobs they want!
> Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
Employers tend to prefer full-time employees because they are more efficient. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee and you'd rather get the max number of hours out of them. It's actually quite hard to get a part-time job in many fields. It's true that part-time employment has gone up but again I think this is largely good! And in any case the ratio of part-time employees has barely changed since the 1960s: ~17% today vs ~13% back then. So it's hardly the typical case.
> The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Silly Marxist voodoo economics. Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
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I think the difference between the two is Amazon and Meta do provide some utility to balance it out, whereas gambling is purely a net negative on society. You can be young and naive enough to believe you're "making the world a better place" in big tech. You can't work on pure gambling products without being a scammer at heart; you know what you signed up for.
You can, because the definition of gambling is loose. Magic The Gathering is gambling. You by a pack and hope you get a valuable card, no different than buying a lottery ticket and hope you win. Pokemon Go is also gambling. You pay to hatch eggs and hope you get a rare pokemon. I'm pretty confident the people who made these games don't consider their design to be evil or wrong. In fact, I'm sure they see themselves h…