161–170 of 238 posts
I stopped to think what a cool product in this area may look like, without being toxic. Maybe a site explaining why betting loses money in the long term, or how casinos hook gamblers up with random-looking but not entirely random responses of the one-handed bandits?
Wow, I'm shocked at the negative attitudes in this thread. Porn and gambling are legit businesses, even if you don't like it. (And some people used to argue that part of the rise of the PC was because some people bought it as a "porn machine.") It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt. When I was an intern at a big-name, conserva…
Also its silly to vilify porn and gambling but not social media and the plethora of seemingly socially acceptable / legal things which are still legitimately destroying the fabric of society. Most haters are just as culpable.
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They don't, because you would transfer them via lightning, of course. No one want to pay their porn subscription with traceable onchain transactions.
TIL
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Not to mention the entitlement of startups to just flaunt laws and regulations. Still kills me to this day Uber and AirBNB running illegal billion dollar operations. I suppose one can at least say Uber mitigates drunk driving tendencies. As far as AirBNB goes, it can rot straight in hell. My hometown is now 20% AirBNB, they ran illegally for many years, and this completely prices out normal folks trying to live near…
I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves; to try to get them changed. Civil disobedience is a long standing practice. However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc. Just because _you_ think the law isn't just doesn't mean it's not a law - it just means you think it should be changed. And the companies in questi…
This form of civil disobedience is effective against bad laws that nevertheless assign punishments proportional to the nominal offense. If "demonstrations without a permit" is punished by a week in jail and they won't give you a permit then you do the demonstration and spend the week in jail. A week later you're back out there demonstrating again. MLK Jr. was arrested 29 times in a span of 11 years.
It doesn't really work in the modern system which is tuned for coercing plea bargains and full of three strikes laws, because then "pissing off the government" is an aggravating factor that causes them to stack more charges until you're facing years instead of days. Then you're not making a point through a willingness to spend a few nights in a cell before your next press conference, you're getting taken off the board.
It also never really worked against bad economic rules because the nature of bad economic rules is to make good economic behavior uneconomical, like converting units to types in higher demand or funding new construction. The deleterious effect of the rule is that instead of it costing $50,000 to add a housing unit, it costs $500,000. But doing civil disobedience by building it anyway would catch you >$500,000 in fines and penalties, or carries penalties like demolition of the structure. So the bad law acts as an extremely effective deterrent against doing the good thing by making it uneconomical regardless of whether you follow the law or you don't. A bankrupt company can't continue to advocate for change or serve as an example of doing something good.
And if they actually did pay the fines then instead of people saying "that's not real civil disobedience" they would be saying "look at these lawless corporations paying token fines as a cost of doing business" and arguing for the penalties to be increased to a level that would bankrupt them wherever that isn't already the case.
So the remaining option is to break the law and then argue that the law is harmful and shouldn't be enforced.
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Not to mention the entitlement of startups to just flaunt laws and regulations. Still kills me to this day Uber and AirBNB running illegal billion dollar operations. I suppose one can at least say Uber mitigates drunk driving tendencies. As far as AirBNB goes, it can rot straight in hell. My hometown is now 20% AirBNB, they ran illegally for many years, and this completely prices out normal folks trying to live near…
If you can figure out a Gig Economy way to get robot/remote/AI pilots into airline cockpits, you will make a mint. "What? I can save ten bucks on airfare if I accept a robot pilot? GIVE ME THAT TICKET" A mint we will then need to spend on bribes to ALPA. DoT is almost entirely captured now, so that's less of a problem. In fact, here's a much better get-rich app / scheme: use AI to find regulatory situations that are…
How about a less cynical alternative: Use it to find ways to defeat regulatory capture so that you can enter a large market which is currently locked up by incumbents, or make more in an ancillary market from doing "commoditize your complement" on the one which is currently captured.
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> The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates. The same link also points out that the legalization happened rig…
>Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market In the case of cannabis it's been showing to lead to less underage use too. If it's a crime, then selling to anyone of any age is still just a crime. But if it's only a crime to sell to under 18/21 then legal shops will avoid selling to the under age to avoid revocation of their license.
That isn't true; crimes can have aggravating factors and selling drugs to a minor could aggravate the crime of selling drugs.
I don't think the laws were written that way, but they could have been.
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I mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though. It may actually be more beneficial to allow these things more broadly, because then social safety features can be wedged in between consumers and suppliers more easily and they don't have to deal with a gigantic shadow market that already gets stigmatised to death by the rest of the population. Just accept that a certain percen…
It's nuanced. When I was a kid I really enjoyed Scarne's books about gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scarne which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and…
Do you literally mean you are seeing people die around you? From doing drugs? What is your general location / occupation / lifestyle? I'm a 20+ year coder in the valley, and the closest I've come is hearing about some friends of my spouse (who is a teacher) who indulge in cannabis, and one couple who do adderall recreationally.
You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction. Good . You should face social stigma for creating products that literally ruin people's lives.
Generally speaking I am a classical liberal in that I believe "vices" like drugs, pornography, prostitution should be legal in order to be regulated and in the open. It cannot eliminate abuse but it can help mitigate it. What I would LOVE to see in the United States in particular is a system where we tax pornography and then plow that money back into sex education in public schools. The state of sex education in the…
What's the author trying to say here? It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society. If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.
I don't like mixing of everything 18+ in the article. I think the author wants to put all the stigma in one basket, and I don't it's as simple. For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale. I think like you argue, society shaping business is good. And some people should really reevaluate what they're going for if that's too much for them.