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How Kalshi Infects the News

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Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#61

Post by criddell »

rescripting wrote: post #29
hebleb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may take awhile, but it ends by voting in political candidates that actually care about combatting greed and corruption again

There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable. With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, rippin…

> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job.

College never guaranteed anything.

A college education may still be (statistically) a good investment:

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/04/is-col...

Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#62

Post by criddell »

xg15 wrote: post #35
rescripting wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable. With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, rippin…

The irony being that gambling is about as far from "guaranteed" or "stable" as you can get. But it does fit the ultralibertarian mindset best, I guess. The right to the pursuit of happiness, not to actually getting it.

The best way to win at gambling is to be the house.

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#64

Post by everforward »

SoftTalker wrote: post #22
dheera wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's instilled into society at every level in the US. If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year. The "smart" way to write the tax law would be to just let taxpayers deduct whatever medical expenses they have at tax reporting time. But instead, they want you to make a bet because you're highly likely to either (a) not use all of it and…

An FSA should not be a "bet" it should be set up for expenses you know you are going to need to pay: dependent care, recurring care and prescriptions, planned procedures. Your employer, not you, owns the account and keeps any balance remaining at the end of the year so you should not really guess at how much you contribute. An advantage of the FSA is that the full contribution is available immediately but the payroll…

Those things are less static than you seem to believe. Eg recurring prescriptions; at least once a year my insurance gets mad about my scripts and requires a pre authorization that occasionally contains a stipulation that I try their “preferred” (read: cheaper for them) alternatives.

My planning is now wrong. Likewise I can only do FSA for planned procedures if I know close to a year ahead of time, which isn’t super likely. What portion of procedures are serious enough that insurance won’t call them elective, but also tame enough that you can put it off for a year for your FSA?

I don’t think I’ve ever had my FSA be completely correct. I’m always either over-stocked and losing money, or under-stocked and paying with post-tax dollars when I don’t have to.

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#65

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

nradov wrote: post #40
xg15 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find almost as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice. We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

[flagged]

Of course. They didn't treat 45 like a real candidate in 2015 because he deserved to be seen as one, they did it because it's lowest common denominator content and it's what people watch.

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#66

Post by nradov »

kevinob11 wrote: post #39
aqme28 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the gambling industry is going to have a much wealthier and more powerful lobby than any effort to displace it.

How in the world do we get money out of politics? I want to so so so badly, but I have no idea how to successfully do it. I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.

We would need a Constitutional amendment to explicitly state that spending money on political campaigns doesn't count as an exercise of freedom of speech (1st Amendment). The Supreme Court Citizens United v. FEC decision was built on that legal foundation. We can argue about whether the court's interpretation was correct or politicized, and it might be reversed someday by different justices, but ultimately the only stable solution will be an amendment.

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#67

Post by jmyeet »

Over the last 2+ decades gambling has increased massively. By "gambling" I include sports betting, prediction markets, online casinos and crypto (including NFTs). Yes, I'm including crypto under gambling. When ordinary people buy crypto it's mostly because they saw the stratospheric rise of Bitcoin, don't really understand why and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin.. Straight up. That's gambling.

But why? Ease of access (ie the Intenret and particularly smartphones) are obviously a factor. There was a time when if you wanted to gamble you had to do it illegally or you had to go to a physical casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (and then riverboats, etc). You can look across to see how ease of access to gambling absolutely increases the amount of gambling and thus gambling addiction. A good example are the poker machines that are available in some states in Australia but not all.

But there's something deeper than that (IMHO). And I think that thing is the increasing inequality [1] and the affordability crisis. People may be talking about affordability a lot now but it's not a new issue. It was a key issue in the 2016 election, for example.

The thesis is that as people become increasingly desperate to have enough money (and espeically if they fall below that level) then gambling increases because people see this as the only way they can get ahead (eg [2]).

I believe gambling is a symptomo and indicator of a deeply broken societ and a deteriorating society.

The sad reality is that gambling is an excellent way of extracting what little wealth poor people have and it makes everything worse on a macro scale. Gambling should be relatively inaccessible. Yet we have the Federal government suing to stop states to ban prediction markets [3].

[1]: https://wir2026.wid.world/

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8643406/

[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/where-the-feds-are-fighting-...

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#68

Post by peder »

keiferski wrote: post #21
baggachipz wrote: post #3

The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).

Society needs to rediscover the idea that not all moral judgements are religious in nature, and in many cases are just basic pragmatic ones. The bans on gambling were often framed in Christian terms, so as society became more secular, they were undone. Now they probably need to be re-added with practical reasoning.

Rediscovering first principles

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#69

Post by blini-kot »

baggachipz wrote: post #3

The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).

there was a certain approach tried back in 1917 in Russia

isn't without its issues of course, but you know, desperate times call for desperate measures

Re: How Kalshi Infects the News

#70

Post by jtr1 »

chucksmash wrote: post #34
Pxtl wrote: post #6

It's amazing how naked it is that laws just don't apply to certain people. Kalshi et al are obviously gambling, and yet somehow all the laws about gambling have been politely forgotten by law enforcement.

Here at least I believe the gambling laws have changed. Most gas stations I go into now have "gaming" machines and there's always some soul sitting at them at any time of day. I'm mostly on team let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them but it's disheartening to watch a dad sitting there totally sucked into it and just ignoring their kid in a stroller behind them.

I think the limitation to team "let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them" is that it's rooted in outdated assumptions about what free will and coercion look like. Broadly speaking, libertarian notions of negative freedom assume a model of coercion with a very small footprint, primarily the threat of immanent physical violence. Similarly, it sees the exercise of free will as a binary action, rather than a spectrum of ability.

We entered this era a long time ago, where psychological insight and computational or chemical power can combine to override people's ability to make free choices. But I'm still not sure there is a widely shared philosophical or ideological framework that has fully digested and responded to these new realities yet.

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