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Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

theguardian.com

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Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#101

Post by exabrial »

xixixao wrote: post #10
exabrial wrote: post #4

can we stop calling them "prediction markets" and please call them what they actually are: gambling

Honest question which I think is at the heart of the question: What’s the difference between these and NYSE / Robinhood?

I've never understood this comparison. To me it's simple: Investments actually produce net gain in the economy. Some people use the NYSE _like_ gambling, but the key difference is value is created.

Investing takes x capital, put it into a machine, and x + (yield * x) comes out. In gambling, x is put in, x always comes out, but on the way out x is simply distributed among a different population.

Investing literally creates net value (or loss, technically) that didn't exist before. Gambling cannot do either: x is always constant, however x is divided up differently.

There's many videos about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnRslDPlkg4

Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#102

Post by nhumrich »

LocalH wrote: post #96
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly it's just the regulations around sex that are wack. Jesus has great advice around taking care of the poor, the sick, and the refugee, which are given short shrift by the Christian nationalists on the US.

Modern Christians (especially the ones in power) would deport Jesus because he's not white enough

In Jesus' day, some Jews wanted to deport him. So ya, that fits.

Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#103

Post by nhumrich »

xixixao wrote: post #10
exabrial wrote: post #4

can we stop calling them "prediction markets" and please call them what they actually are: gambling

Honest question which I think is at the heart of the question: What’s the difference between these and NYSE / Robinhood?

All stocks are incentivized to go a specific direction. You could consider Options more like gambling, but for that reason they are restricted to specific people. We also have things to prevent bad incentives, like insider trading laws, which prediction markets don't have.

So, I guess the answer is, regulatory control.

Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#104

Post by nhumrich »

ekianjo wrote: post #32
aczerepinski wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good call on lootboxes. I’d love it if video games that include them would be forced to do age verification to whatever extent casinos need to, and be 18+.

Not just kids get addicted

Well sure. But not just kids get addicted to alcohol.

Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#105

Post by QuiEgo »

egorfine wrote: post #6
jackp96 wrote: post #2

Neither conservative nor Mormon, but online gambling is an addictive scourge that ruins lives, and I'd love to see it banned broadly. And go ahead and ban paid loot boxes as well. I don't love casinos or lotteries, but at least there's the friction of having to travel to a physical location to feed your addiction. And then there's the whole "insider trading" and "gambling on war" angles that come into play with predi…

As much as I hate what gambling does on the society, I'm still not sure if banning this activity counts as freedom. I believe that grown consenting adults do have a free will and should have the ability to destroy their lives if they so choose. OTOH allowing those kind of activities WILL end up with people opting in for the greater evil and thus some kind of limits should be enforced by governments. I have no idea wh…

> I believe that grown consenting adults do have a free will and should have the ability to destroy their lives if they so choose.

Part of living in a society is giving up some of your freedom to make the system work. I can't choose to kill myself of my own free will by smoking in an airplane anymore, no matter how happy it would make me, because it might not only hurt me, but everyone around me.

I think that's the line for me: When your self-destructive behavior causes harm to others, not just your self, it's fair for society to ban it.

If a bunch of people are going to end up a burden to society in the aftermath of their self destruction through gambling, it's fair for society to say "no".

This tradeoff has been debated my philosophers for millennia. We still haven't quite figured out a universal answer. Laws of nature vs laws of man and all that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rv-4aUbZxQ

Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#106

Post by egorfine »

SoftTalker wrote: post #19
egorfine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hate what gambling does on the society, I'm still not sure if banning this activity counts as freedom. I believe that grown consenting adults do have a free will and should have the ability to destroy their lives if they so choose. OTOH allowing those kind of activities WILL end up with people opting in for the greater evil and thus some kind of limits should be enforced by governments. I have no idea wh…

> some kind of limits should be enforced by governments I'm not sure why we think this works. Gambling is considered bad, and banned in many states, but many of those states run a lottery. This is just a straight up theft from the poor who are least well equipped to understand they are playing a rigged game, and not rigged in their favor.

> poor who are least well equipped to understand

I fail to understand how this is someone's business. As I see it, in the US a person is free to be as dumb as possible. And have as much freedom as possible. I don't get it why anyone would patronize poor people (or any people) from making bad decisions.

Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#107

Post by gottorf »

dpark wrote: post #99
gottorf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we disagreeing about the definition of "poor people"? I'm not sure why someone would find it so hard to believe that the poor, especially the long-term poor, have character traits that are not conducive to lifting themselves out of poverty. On that same vein, there is no particular evidence needed to convince someone that people who share the characteristics with me of not being very tall or particularly athletic…

> I'm not sure why someone would find it so hard to believe that the poor, especially the long-term poor, have character traits that are not conducive to lifting themselves out of poverty. This is real close to just “poor people deserve to be poor”. > On that same vein, there is no particular evidence needed to convince someone that people who share the characteristics with me of not being very tall or particularly a…

> This is real close to just “poor people deserve to be poor”

No, I'm saying that there are reasons why some people stay poor. My further implication is that it isn't for the most part because society is keeping them down.

> Your investment math also seems pretty far off. Those numbers appear to assume a 15% return from the S&P 500, a number I’ve never heard a financial advisor recommend.

It was based on an initial $100 investment followed by a monthly $200 investment into the S&P 500 (as an alternative destination for the $2500/year claimed by that study that some high spenders put that much into the lottery) applied over the actual past 10 years of performance[0].

Prudent financial advisors would of course tell you not to count on 15% CAGR forever, but my example was based on real results that anyone could have obtained by consistently buying boring index funds instead of lottery tickets! There's no trickery here.

> that means there are a lot of poor non-ticket-buying households in order for the numbers to work out. Why are those people poor?

In discussions about the poor, we all should distinguish between those who happen to be poor at any given moment, and those who are poor their whole lives, or even over generations. My comments about the character traits of the poor only apply to the latter.

[0]: https://testfol.io/

Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#108

Post by dpark »

gottorf wrote: post #107
dpark wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why someone would find it so hard to believe that the poor, especially the long-term poor, have character traits that are not conducive to lifting themselves out of poverty. This is real close to just “poor people deserve to be poor”. > On that same vein, there is no particular evidence needed to convince someone that people who share the characteristics with me of not being very tall or particularly a…

> This is real close to just “poor people deserve to be poor” No, I'm saying that there are reasons why some people stay poor. My further implication is that it isn't for the most part because society is keeping them down. > Your investment math also seems pretty far off. Those numbers appear to assume a 15% return from the S&P 500, a number I’ve never heard a financial advisor recommend. It was based on an initial $…

> My further implication is that it isn't for the most part because society is keeping them down.

There are many reasons why the poor tend to stay poor. For the most part, society does not actively “keep them down” but we are certainly structured in a way that makes it hard for impoverished individuals to climb up. The notion of saving money is foreign when you can’t even pay all of your bills.

The retreat to lottery tickets is an escape, not an investment strategy. And as already pointed out, while lottery revenues are disproportionately drawn from the poor, this does not mean all poor people are buying lottery tickets. Someone poor buying 2500/year of lottery tickets is not the norm.

> my example was based on real results

Fair. I didn’t realize you were actually using the actual last 10 years of the S&P500.

> My comments about the character traits of the poor only apply to the latter.

And I argue that this is reductionist. No different than someone who insists that the poor are only poor because the man is keeping them down. It is a multifaceted problem.

Re: Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

#109

Post by SamTinnerholm »

Sol- wrote: post #17

Shame that prediction markets seem to have failed a bit, since they seem in principle like a good idea. You force participants to have skin in the game and remove the usual mood affiliation and ideological bias that afflicts the professional commentariat in the media. Perhaps a solution instead of banning them would be to create a class similar to accredited investors that are allowed to participate. And stuff like m…

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