Fun fact: Biff Tannen was modeled after Donald Trump.
Turns out the darkest timeline is also the dumbest.
https://www.nme.com/news/back-to-the-future-writer-reveals-b...
Addiction Markets
341–350 of 479 posts
Re: Addiction Markets
#342What happened to America. Maybe 70's or 40's were it's peak. Every activity has become a betting. Investments, sports, relationships, home-buying. Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom. Excessive prosperity breaks social rythm. It removes dependencies and relations across individuals. It's like…
Eh?
Theres too many moving parts in your very short paragraph, to actual engage with without any substantial engagement being minced into woodchips, I fear.
Theres many things that have happened since the 40s, just to name ONE thing that has resulted in this - we have much better psychological technology than we did ever before. Skinnerian conditioning, reward schedules, their results - we never had that.
MS Excel alone would mean we better ways for the statistically inclined to zero in on more attractive addictions, just through better data analysis.
Just consider how common place and obvious A/B testing is. How do you think humanity will fare on average, against industrial strength siren songs?
Re: Addiction Markets
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
A state is funding essential public services not through productive economic activity, but by extracting money from people losing bets
Sounds like a win to me, you can leave more for productive activity to grow and attract more, there less incentive for illegal gambling, and no one is forced to do it. If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.
> no one is forced to do it
This logic always bugs me because no one truly lives in a vacuum. People are flawed and generally need help from a community. A small community can't really fight back a well endowed company like gambling companies. The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps.
It's obvious to me that gambling is generally a vulnerability in the human psyche. For many, it short circuits something in their brain and forms genuine addiction.
It's actually insane to me to use this vulnerability as a tax base to fund roads and schools, because regardless of the funds, your incentives will still be perverse and those incentives will dictate that more people need to be losing their money to out-of-state firms because a small portion of it might fund roads and schools.
The incentives basically state: "A percentage of our population must become sick and addicted to risk and reward in order for society to function". Is this not basically the concept of Omelas?
Re: Addiction Markets
#344Isn’t everything deceptive? Isn’t every thing that produces a dopaminergic burst addictive? Should we dismantle and ban fast food? Social media? Fried food? Everything is coercive. You want a cure; force feed people mindfulness and psychology. All commercials are potentially coercive and deceptive. I’m watching a Walgreens commercial; there is no line in the commercial, the person behind the pharmacy is smiling and h…
If everything is coercive - Yes.
Your definition of coercive is too permissive, so it ends up being more of an ideological stance, but its a saturday, so its a fun argument to work through.
If something is coercive, its inherently aiming to generate an unfair transaction. That means we need to spend a ton of effort on forums where such unfair transacations can be reversed, and punitive measures applied.
Otherwise we are always going to fail as a society, simply because coercive technqiues will be the default. Any new business, discovery, or product which provides a net benefit without defending itself from predatory practices will be torpedoed. resulting in a moribund economy and culture.
Having gone through what you have, I suspect you quietly prefer people learning from your example, over discovering the same lessons by following in your foot steps.
Re: Addiction Markets
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
No to both. You probably understand it but it’s not that amazing. States don’t tax corporations much (it’s often fairly easy to move your company to the next state over if taxes are lower) the federal government does. They tax things like sales, homes, gambling and other vices, etc.
Yes but states provide the roads, EMS, schools, etc the commenter was talking about, not the autocratic regime.. and the corporations benefit from those services way more than gamblers do.
U.S. DOT provides a ton of road funding to the states as well. If memory serves, it’s often over half their budget.
[Edit: fun fact: threatening to withhold this funding is how the U.S. DOT managed to essentially federalize drinking age of 21. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole)]
Re: Addiction Markets
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does drafting feel like that?
I'm not that poster, but 4 times as many unique cards are released a year as 20 years ago (2X vs 10 years ago). The pace has greatly increased the commitment to keep abreast of the game.
Yes and it’s obvious the only reason is because making more money is better than only making enough money. This is probably why gameplay has changed so much to where every deck is some combo blah blah. Like most of the older deck formats are gone. Like look at the decks when they published the 1999 Grand Prix winning decks and compare them to today. Like it had mono green stompy next to these fiddly urza combo decks. I dunno I’m just sad the game sucks now. I had a lot of fun playing with friends when I was younger.
Re: Addiction Markets
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Options can be thought of as a form of insurance, so they have a useful purpose. In the simplest case you might hold a stock and a put to limit your downside for a set period of time.
The opposite is also true - you can use options to increase risk. I don't think insurance is a particularly good analogy in general.
I mean generally speaking derivatives can be used as insurance or for speculation, and a wide gradient of gray in between.
By contrast, sports gambling is well, gambling. And importantly as we've seen in a lot of reports - the big online sports books essentially freeze out anyone who is good so that they are collecting revenue primarily from the.. innumerate.
Of course you also have some markets like India without legal gambling and oversized derivatives markets that are unfortunately serving as a replacement.
I'd also point out that you don't see the sort of degenerate nonstop advertising for options punting that you see for sports gambling. "Thanks for tuning into the ESPN FanDuel pregame show at the Caesars Superdome / and don't forget to stop by the DraftKings Sportsbook lounge." Followed by a barrage of other gambling ads in between plays.
Re: Addiction Markets
#348What happened to America. Maybe 70's or 40's were it's peak. Every activity has become a betting. Investments, sports, relationships, home-buying. Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom. Excessive prosperity breaks social rythm. It removes dependencies and relations across individuals. It's like…
> Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom.
Sure, or any of the other million reasons people get addicted, like despair, or other healthier activities being too expensive. Super weird take.
Re: Addiction Markets
#349What happened to America. Maybe 70's or 40's were it's peak. Every activity has become a betting. Investments, sports, relationships, home-buying. Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom. Excessive prosperity breaks social rythm. It removes dependencies and relations across individuals. It's like…
Eh? Theres too many moving parts in your very short paragraph, to actual engage with without any substantial engagement being minced into woodchips, I fear. Theres many things that have happened since the 40s, just to name ONE thing that has resulted in this - we have much better psychological technology than we did ever before. Skinnerian conditioning, reward schedules, their results - we never had that. MS Excel al…
In the din of industrial strength siren songs, you may have not noticed the rot that is accumulating in the society. MS Excel exists only because you have some data that you think you should care about and you can't fit in your mind. As an individual, you shouldn't need that much data to handle.
The accumulated social rot is not compensated by Excel sheets or any gadget toys, you call as tech.
Re: Addiction Markets
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you lose (most people, most of the time), you don't have to pay tax on winnings because there aren't any. But gambling itself seems like sort of a regressive tax that preys upon those susceptible to gambling. Edit: at least with state lotteries the state gets most of the money so it is more like a tax; in the case of corporate sports betting the corporation takes the money and then pays a small corporate tax on…
Regressive taxes can be counterbalanced by redistributive policies. Sales taxes are regressive too for example and bring much much more revenue. The issue is sales taxes disincentivize consumption whereas gambling taxes disinventivize gambling.
Sales taxes are levied on the buyer. Gambling taxes are not levied on the player.