101–110 of 202 posts
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).
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.
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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 people…
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.
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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 ev…
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 m…
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.
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It may take awhile, but it ends by voting in political candidates that actually care about combatting greed and corruption again
Unfortunately, the gambling industry is going to have a much wealthier and more powerful lobby than any effort to displace it.
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)
Did anyone else think it was strange how fast legitimate news orgs (cnn for example) integrated prediction markets into their businesses?
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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 can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.
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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 pr…
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.
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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.
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
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).