Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, at least treat it like a public health issue. Used to be that if you wanted to gamble, you had to physically to a dedicated gambling zone.
Which we called the "stock market"
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9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
41–50 of 184 posts
Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#42> “Congress did not take a wrecking ball to all sports gambling regulations built up over decades by federal, state, and tribal governments when it amended the (Commodity Exchange Act),” Judge Ryan Nelson wrote in the unanimous decision. Incredible that it's taken this long to arrive at the obvious.
The law is slow by design, it's deliberative, it's multi-staged, it's escalatory and obsessed with consulting multiple jurists. That can be extremely frustrating until you start looking into how the country would look if individual judges were able to fast-track the whole system. Naturally we'd celebrate the positive outcomes, but the bad ruling would immediately go into effect rather than facing injunction, review,…
Was great when the world ran on horses and whale blubber.
The legal system tells itself this noble story of measured action without realizing it actually became the bad guy many decades ago.
My brief little opinion here is half informed from dating a lawyer for a few years.
Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#43Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#44as an argument for sports betting as a market, i remember when the wrong team won the world series, and hadnt setup their correct merch and so on for online sales, and it was a disaster trying to get all the right stuff together to minimize fraud and abuse. if an online sales provider could hedge against the risk of that win, the gamble would help pay for all the chaos as a result
Lots of bespoke insurance already exists.
Lloyds will insure your rocket cargo or even provide terrorist strikes.
Doesn’t mean we need people wagering at kalshi on “number of terrorism fatalities in London before end of 2025”.
Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the stock market is not gambling (or at least hasn't been, need not, and should not be). The stock market is a positive sum game, linked to the growth of the economy as a whole. Humanity is very, very far from the maximum possible utilization (and maximum efficiency) of matter and energy in this solar system or even this world. What decisions we make matters a lot in how well/how fast/whether we continue to get r…
By a strict definition of gambling, the stock market is gambling: It's a monetary wager placed on an unknown future event. Just because it (often) is positive sum doesn't mean it isn't an unknown that people are betting money on.
>By a strict definition of gambling, the stock market is gambling: It's a monetary wager placed on an unknown future event.
No, that is not a strict definition of gambling, that is your own loose, personal and casual definition. The strict definition of the gambling in question under Arizona law (the subject of this article) is I believe partly under 13-3301 [0] and has a number of criteria that clearly differentiate it from investment (whether it be stock, loan by a bank or any other entity/person, or whatever else). Other polities will have their own flavors, but all of them are aimed at a net negative, destructive social activity. That's the whole point of regulating it, it's not some metaphysical philosophy thing about life having uncertainty it's about long experienced concrete harm. Trying to argue that buying shares in a broad index fund is a "wager that a meteor will not hit the Earth" is uninteresting.
>Just because it (often) is positive sum doesn't mean it isn't an unknown that people are betting money on.
It does actually! Positive sum changes everything in terms of collective incentives, strategies available and how investors can hedge risk. You may not choose to make use of all the tools available, but that doesn't make investment the equivalent of gambling. Part of the whole point of markets is to manage changing risk and information discovery (including dead ends) such that we still continue to grow overall.
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Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which we called the "stock market"
No, the stock market is not gambling (or at least hasn't been, need not, and should not be). The stock market is a positive sum game, linked to the growth of the economy as a whole. Humanity is very, very far from the maximum possible utilization (and maximum efficiency) of matter and energy in this solar system or even this world. What decisions we make matters a lot in how well/how fast/whether we continue to get r…
> or at least hasn't been
The stock market was so gambling that we had 'bucket shops' where people would just buy and sell fake stocks that tracked real stock prices.
Now we have public companies directly selling shares with no voting rights and no plans to ever pay dividends, which is the same thing.
Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#47> “Congress did not take a wrecking ball to all sports gambling regulations built up over decades by federal, state, and tribal governments when it amended the (Commodity Exchange Act),” Judge Ryan Nelson wrote in the unanimous decision. Incredible that it's taken this long to arrive at the obvious.
Gambling is a negative externality that needs to be taxed. Gambling takes advantage of the poor, under-educated, and addictive personalities and puts them into financial distress. This places burden on families, the state, and local municipalities. It creates strain on the workforce and deflects legitimate economic activity that would otherwise strengthen the economy. We're a free society. I'm fine with gambling from…
The government never needs to tax things. If you think it is negative to society then it can be banned so that money can be spent elsewhere.
Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#48Lawyer here - As i explained last time we had a variant of this thread (see comment history if you are interested), this is a very complicated area that people try to make very simple. It doesn't have to be complicated, mind you, but right now the way the law is written is basically: 1. Transmitting sports betting info between states is a federal crime unless it's legal in both states (18 U.S.C. § 1084(a)) 2. The CEA…
> Kalshi is just hoping to be treated like Uber was.
This is not a bad strategy for a company in our asymmetric regulatory environment. Fortunes were made in crypto on exactly this one-way bet.
Go on breaking the law until you get a favorable judge/Congress. Nobody is going to jail (we don't really do that anymore), you might pay a fine. Every once in a while you'll have change the app a little to sort of comply with a judicial order. There's practically no downside to this strategy.
Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, at least treat it like a public health issue. Used to be that if you wanted to gamble, you had to physically to a dedicated gambling zone.
Which we called the "stock market"
The problem with this comparison is that it only really serves to water down the very real harms of actual gambling.
Unlike sports gambling or casinos, the stock market actually does have some legitimate utility, as compared to being (at best) pure entertainment.
Re: 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because Kalshi doesn't want to follow the actual law Correction: because the federal government doesn't want Kalshi to follow the actual law. CFTC ordered Kalshi to continue operating in NY when NY tried to crack down on it. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor for Kalshi. The US Government's conservative leaders are ignoring states' rights in order to personally profit, using Kalshi as a tool. > this will end up at…
We have them because the Founders thought it was a good idea. Then they thought it was a good idea to have two houses with different criteria, giving two chances to quash legislation. Plus the veto. Plus the Supreme Court (whose job they left almost completely undefined, so they made up a job description). So we have them because we can't get rid of them. But they are practically useless. They can usually manage the…
That’s the history of separation of powers, the judiciary is the final check in the loop. It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.
That’s not to say states have lost power, their reach has also grown exponentially far outpacing even the federal in terms of number of workers and written law.
It’s mostly just Congress has become self satisfied on being negotiators for spending the most money in their own states, while ignoring the minimization of their role in the greater power dynamic.
Everyone makes a big deal about president as the signal but IMO if you take a 10,000-foot view of US history Congress neutering itself is the real long term narrative. Including most major current populist issues like immigration, debt, war, abortion, etc. They are hands off unless it involves new spending.