401–410 of 525 posts
I left my home country over 10 years ago, and ever since I've travelled back once every 1 or 2 years. Since 4-5 years ago I started to notice these betting houses cropping up where my family and friends live. They are impossible to miss, with big pictures of different sports and no windows. The most important thing to notice is where these place are and are not. They proliferate in working class and less well off nei…
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https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy In the author’s words, long degeneracy represents “a belief that the world will only get more degenerate, financialized, speculative, lonely, tribal and weird”. The most concise and holistic explanation of this trend is: "As real returns compress, risk increases to compensate".
The combination of anime children, terms like "degeneracy", and crypto shilling is frankly extremely repellant.
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Pretty much any country. If you have $1m in assets you can simply stick it in a passive fund and earn more than the average wage in the highest earning countries. You can certainly live like a king in low cost countries.
You’re either using nominal, not real, returns, or assuming that passive fund is taking on a lot of risk/recency bias. If you had said $2 million, I’d say that’s closer to accurate, although there’s still a conversation to be had about risk vs return.
Median wage in the USA is globally very high at just over $60k.
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Gambling is addictive for some , in the same way that alcohol is addictive for some, yet blanket alcohol prohibition is not considered a great idea in hindsight.
I don't know how we could put limits on gambling that would make sense, though. There's a huge difference in bets that I used to make (which were all black-market sports bets, usually on 'game winner' or over/under) ~ once a week during the NFL season vs. the shit going on with FanDuel and all these phone-based gamified services. And that stuff absolutely encourages you to make bets that you can't afford and can easi…
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Insurance is moral stewardship, and not unearned gain. In fact, refusing insurance when your neighbors are of the same religion is seen as gambling.
You don’t earn a payout for cancer treatment. It is definitely unearned.
Did you choose to get cancer or fake it?
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I agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers. A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under…
> $10MM Ah, so they are just basing their life decisions on falsehoods then? lol I know the world is different now, but I graduated high school in the wake of the 08 financial crisis. A lot of this Zoomer doomerism sounds like what people said about millennials. But I (and my future wife) just went to a state school with in-state tuition. Got tech/eng degrees with some debt (5 figures). Have worked in the industry wi…
I'm not sure that it's an accurate view of reality this time. And to be clear I'm older than you, so this isn't me being a doomer and throwing my hands in the air about my own future. This is me noticing that if I myself can't afford a house in my city, how is the younger generation supposed to do it? They simply can't, not after only 5yrs of savings at least. Not even if they cut down on avocado toasts.
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Gambling used to be so illegal in the US that it used its global Internet jurisdiction to shut down poker companies located outside the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
And yet every bar I go to, as far back as I can remember, has slot machines and somehow that doesn't count? Even gas stations. Never understood this.
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“Is insurance gambling” is a question of definition. You’re trying to argue that it’s not gambling because it’s beneficial. But that’s absurd because you’re trying to define gambling as specifically “bad” in a conversation of whether gambling is bad. You can’t argue circularly and then gripe about clarifying definitions.
No, nobody's trying to argue that gambling is by definition bad – that is to say, nobody's defining the category boundaries of "gambling" contingent on possessing the property "is bad". Some people have constrained the definition of "gambling" such that it only contains things they view as bad, and then observed that all the things they consider "gambling" are bad, but that's not the vacuous, circular claim you make…
> Some people have constrained the definition of "gambling" such that it only contains things they view as bad
If there is some internally consistent definition that excludes all the “good” stuff without excluding it specifically for being good, no one has shared that so far as I’ve seen.
The arguments about insurance so far have been “but it’s a good thing” and “you aren’t happy when your insurance pays out”. The former is exactly gambling==bad and the latter is just wrong. I could bet that a politician I despise will win and I won’t necessarily be happy that I won. I’ll be more happy that I got a payout than not, exactly the same as insurance. That’s what a hedge is.
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You are right customers are not getting rich from sports betting, but the true reason is that once 'the house', the betting company sees a consistent winner, it will ban them or lower their betting limit to discourage them from betting again. There are people that would get rich otherwise. Also betting companies are coordinating their odds to prevent arbitrage. And also, of course: there are gangs influencing the out…
> There are people that would get rich otherwise. This is highly unlikely. Nobody has the magical ability to predict the outcome of sporting events. > there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich. This is highly unlikely for most of the things that Americans are gambling on, such as NFL…
I'm not sure if you'd discount that as obviously thats completely different than 1 person sitting in their bedroom placing bets but just thought I'd raise it incase this level of sports betting interests you.
From what I understand they place their bets in Asian markets rather than the markets consumers in the west would.
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> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better. Kyla Scanlon (?) coined the term "financial nihilism" to describe this feeling: * https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism She thinks it's why things like cryptocurrencies/BTC have taken off: it's a chance to 'hit the jackpot', as many folks don't see another way to (financial) success.
I think it’s rational in the same sense as insurance. Insurance is a small cost to cover the costs of a potential event that you can’t afford. Lotteries are a small cost for a potential event that you can’t afford not to benefit from. The key is that in a well-functioning society and wisely-lived life, you don’t need to spend the cost on lottery because you can afford life/retirement without it’s winnings.