There's no reason we need to and there's every reason to believe that the people and companies foisting this technology on society will accrue the benefits and dump the fallout on everyone else.
Ok, but a more honest comparison here would be removing the cost of hiring architects and hiring lawyers to draft contracts, not all the per-house costs.
My favorite Siri behavior is telling it, on my phone, to turn on a focus state only for it to transfer the request to a nearby HomePod that tells me it can't help with that. I hope the new changes to it are an improvement, but the bar is currently buried in the dirt.
Of course. xAI can also run gas generators to power its data centers and pump toxins into the air around local communities. Grok can generate non-consensual nude images of women (and CSAM). Their owner can make nazi salutes and demolish agencies millions depend on. Rules, laws and ethics are for poor people.
I would say prediction markets are more dangerous since they don't claim its gambling while sports gambling is much more explicit (not that the industry is a saint by any means)
obviously and definitely true in their current form. But it's maybe worth clarifying that before this last year or two, when Kalshi became an obvious regulatory dodge (including adding sports and really leaning into the gambling demographic), many were interested in prediction markets not just for that purpose: e.g. the rationalist community seems to have had a longstanding interest in the idea, manifold didn't have real money, and predictit (which is like a decade old) had academic origins.
As a tangent, it reminds me a bit of cryptocurrency: in the earliest days the interested parties have a mix of intellectual (can it be done? How can it be done?) and some idealistic (this technology will have utility, like reducing spam or libertarianism for crypto, or giving us a more accurate and precise understanding of the world for prediction markets) values. Of course, as both are directly financial, the third value is that one stands to get rich off of the technology. This third value might be adequately communally suppressed in the beginning, but the force of money gradually makes this third value the only one that matters, and both technologies become net-negatives on humanity.
IEM is still functioning but pretty dead since Kalshi put up election markets. Looking just now I see well under $100 in volume for all of August. (At least when Kalshi first put up those markets it gave me the only opportunity I've had to make a pure arbitrage.)
Might be something the populace is just too dumb to have - the people seem to overwhelmingly prefer their events to be pretty much games of chance (BTC price up/down at 15 minute intervals) or sports.
I figure Kalshi and Polymarket for dead before too long, if only because the "traditional" sportsbooks seem to have much better "government relations".
Do you have any sources for this? My understanding is that all of the discussion about prediction market wildfires are completely speculative, nobody has actually started a wildfire for a prediction market payout yet.
I've been in the desert fighting fires for the last 4 months. The news isn't going rampant with the arson stories for reasons (who knows, scaring the public, informing the public, etc).
Open the watchduty app and start looking into how many fires are currently arson suspected/apprehended and how this is the largest national wildfire year we've ever had.
The Dick and Cleetus methheads doing this stuff aren't the brightest and most well informed tech risk takers out there. Most of them will get caught and never get a dime, who the hell knows how why or else they're causing fires, the FBI isn't investigating anyone. They don't tell us WHY an arson occurred. Who knows how many of these apps exist in other markets, etc. The last global wildfire article I saw said either 86 or 96 arsons were arrested. I can't remember if it was France or in Africa.
This is THE strangest wildfire year anyone has had and the news is nowhere.
I'm not the only ex-tech wildland person, plenty of laid off firefighters right now back to their old lives.
At a minimum, if it was going to be legal why could they not have restricted the advertising like we do with tobacco ads? At this point the sports broadcasts themselves are advertisements.
Its not just the broadcasts are advertisements. Its completely engrained in every professional sports league now. They now all have some kind of multi-year contracts with casino's, betting platforms and prediction markets. This is way beyond advertising now. Our local sports talk show has an hour long show that precedes the pre-game that is 100% all about NFL gambling for Sunday's games.
Not only are you seeing the advertisements for these platforms and their betting apps, you're having a coordinated focus on actively pushing it in a myriad of other ways as well.
Yeah, it's just like being able to take an insurance policy on other people's lives. It's a wonderful idea for all of 15 minutes until people start getting murdered.
> bare minimum of regulation
No amount of regulation will solve the issue when what you can take insurance on is not regulated.
Prediction markets are to insurance the same as crypto is to banking: a speedrun of all the frauds that happened in the past until the perpetrators are sent to jail or regulated so heavily that they are virtually identical to what they were supposed to disrupt.
We literally have political appointees betting on the contents of speeches they're about to make, military members betting on the likelihood of classified missions they're about to undertake, people vandalizing/manipulating weather stations.
I don't think it's quite that tendentious. You can say "well, but that's not the majority of the marketplace" and you're right. But it's not an inconsequential one, either.
Where is that "less than 1%" figure coming from or did you just pull that out from you-know-where?
And alcohol has always been highly accessible. I have 5 stores within a 5 minute walk of me that I can get it from, and that's not to mention all of the restaurants and bars within that same radius.
Addiction is addiction. Alcohol is one object of that addiction. Sports betting can be another. Porn, food, drugs, etc.
What's to say sports betting addiction won't become as severe as alcohol now that it's becoming more accessible to the public?
Under 1% of the population is not the same as under 1% of people exposed, and if we dramatically increase exposure, we probably will proportionally increase problem gambling. Regardless, this is a good point, this isn’t nearly as high as alcoholism or even drug addiction, I suspect.
You haven't addressed the problem of availability. It's one thing to go to the track physically to bet, vs having the track in your pocket available 24/7 with wagers on literally everything.
Do I think betting addiction will be as bad or prevalent as alcholism? Probably not, yet it's worth considering restricting it for social good. Just like we don't let 13 year olds buy bottles of whiskey.
Ah yes, so reasonable. You remind me of the alcohol and marijuana prohibitionists. Tell me, how are your bans implemented? Do jack-booted thugs enforce said laws and throw people in cages, or does it somehow magically just... happen?
I'm sympathetic to this perspective, but the downstream negative externalities of sports gambling aren't just what happens to gambling addicts. The whole sport starts to revolve around the gambling - including strong incentives for players to "throw" games. I don't think integrity in sports can co-exist with a massive, legal gambling industry.
This is one my biggest problems with sports gambling and prediction markets. It completely negates any sense of fair play. Sports are supposed to be for everyone. Kids should not be exposed to this. You should not be able to advertise services to an audience partially made up of people who legally can’t use them. It’s like putting a gun store right next to a prison and handing out coupons to anyone who walks by… like newly released felons
How is it unjust? A company is not owed any profits, if it gets rekt by an union then it gets rekt. It cannot say "oh its not fair you guys are fighting me, only I can fight you in a just fight!" Ridiculous logic.
GP is in favor of unions and thinks they perform beneficial public services. They don't.
addendum: people who like unions because they balance the power relationship between employee and employer (i.e. the idiots downvoting me, idiots not because they like unions, but idiots because they are downvoting me) might see that as a public service, but it's not, that is a private relationship between employer and employee. it confers no direct benefit to other parties, that's why I said it does not provide a public service. You can't analyze economic relationships without qui bono
"Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it."
– Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, describing how he stopped using sarcasm in his essays because it provokes hostility. He goes on describe the ironic person as a "pest to society."
> Both unions (as legally constructed in the US) and sports gambling are cancers.
What's wrong with sports gambling? No one's forcing anyone to play, and it's a highly lucrative business with lots of customers.
Unions, on the other hand, involuntarily infringe on the freedoms of business owners to wield their economic power for their own benefit as they see fit.
I appreciate the libertarian take on this, which works well for high IQ people and people with good self control. It doesn't work for many without those attributes. Unrestrained gambling can ruin lives and families.
The stock market isn't fundamentally a gamble. Spending money to buy a share of a company's future dividends is a sound way to invest money and earn a return on it.
The problem with the stock market is when there aren't enough new companies going public to soak up the spigot of all the capital that people want to invest, leading average P/E ratios to increase over time. There is too much money chasing too few earnings. When the underlying fundamentals don't match up, then all that investors are doing is speculating that someone else will be the bigger fool and buy from them at an even more unreasonable price - and that is a gamble.
You want short term trading because you want the prices to be as close to efficient as possible.
You may never trade short term but at some point you are going to buy and at some point you are going to sell. Market being far from efficient one would hurt you there.
So let them trade and discover price. You don't have to play that game but you still benefit.
Inefficient market means someone is getting a bad price. That someone is going to be a retail/naive investor - Bill and Nancy who want to invest in Apple with part of their salary.
Sophisticated investors would never be on the other side of the trade. Add to that bigger spreads and unsophisticated market participants get fleeced. As they wouldn't want to get fleeced they would hire an intermediary to do trades for them - a stock broker who again charges commission.
We already had that: spreads were bigger, prices were less efficient. The main victims were retail/naive investors and the main beneficiaries would be big institutions, brokers and sophisticated investors.
Current system benefits:
-retail/unsophisticated investors
-vanishingly small group of the best/fastest/most sophisticated traders
Who lost:
-big institutions, banks, stock brokers
-investing wannabes who no longer get access to easy money from retail/naive buyers
You seem to assume there is a pool of sharks that prey on pure souls without fast connection. It's not the case at all. Most HFTs lose money without exchange incentives which are provided because exchanges understand liquidity and low spreads are good for other participants. The pool of people who make money out of spreads/inefficient prices is way lower than it used to be as well.
The best possible world would have efficient prices every nano-second coming from god himself. Having a group of very sophisticated market makers is the second best we can have - at least if you care about normal investors who don't have resources to process all the information themselves.
For one thing because now people who own high-speed low-latency connections to stock markets have no advantage over "normal" people who actually do meaningful work, like being a policeman or nurse.
>people who actually do meaningful work, like being a policeman
Making a sudden event that happened on the other side of the world reflect in the local market price at almost the speed of light is far more meaningful work than going around shooting dark-skinned people.
If this is how people in finance think, then this only makes my point stronger. The financial world is disconnected from reality and needs to be restrained.
Yeah, it makes sense to advocate for that if you are a sophisticated trader who hope to fleece the naive retail. For 99%+ of people though near instant price discovery and efficient price is a big net benefit.
Imagine news broke that makes a company worth 15% less. Naive investors isn't aware of it and makes their bid on the market. They look at a recent price, make some offer and buys the shares now worth 15% less while bankers who were able to process the information just made a killing.
This is even worse in "slow exchanges" where participants need to come-up with bid price themselves because recent transaction price is not a relevant indicator of fair value.
If this whole efficiency argument means I'm going to make $1 more per month while some lousy traders make $100k more per month, then I'd say: to hell with "efficiency". Fairness and wealth equality are more important to me than $1.
Also considering that these traders will use their $100k in ways that my $1 will become worth even less. For example by buying all the housing in my neighborhood and thereby increasing my rent.
Without that efficiency it'd be like the old days before electronic trading where you're paying 100x larger fees to a crusty old brokerage any time you want to trade.
You do realise that countries other than the USA exist, right? The UK has had various forms of sports gambling legal for nearly 100 years and society hasn't crumbled and neither did sport.
You've been able to gamble on your mobile device for 100 years in the UK?
Modern gambling isn't you talking to a bookie and putting down $100 on your favorite team. That should still be legal. Phone apps which learn your behavior, your favorite teams, the offers you are likely to accept, the time of day that you're most likely to make a bet, etc etc and use that to barrage you with notifications, "free" plays, high paying parlays with horrible odds, should not be.
Society bears the downsides of gambling and gambling addiction, while the casinos gather all of the upside.
By "bookie" I was actually thinking of all the small sportsbooks I saw in the UK when I've visited in the past. Calling them a casino would have been wrong and I couldn't remember the term "sportsbook".
"A more recent survey in 2022, conducted by the United Kingdom Gambling Commission found that 'headline problem gambling rate is statistically stable at 0.2%. The moderate risk and low risk rates are also statistically stable at 0.9% and 1.4% respectively.'[45]"
Sports gambling is controlled by FTC in the US. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket found a loophole where they can run gambling operations under CFTC and and not be controlled by FTC. There needs to be some legislative actions from the Congress to close the loophole.
It's a lazy argument imo. As corrupt as they might be there is way more money to make in the stock market or bond market if you have insider info.
There is little reason for them to go after peanuts in the prediction markets.
I don't entirely agree. There's an angle on the "if corrupt, who cares?" but the stock and bond market have orders of magnitude more oversight and (potential) consequences than the risks and consequences of insider trading on the prediction markets.
Incorrect. Ninth circuit ruled in favor of Nevada State, but earlier this year third circuit ruled in favor of Kalshi. So it's going to the Supreme Court.
All of the above is completely independent from what Congress can or cannot do.
The third circuit's opinion is poorly reasoned and its not binding precedent in California anyway, which can now regulate Kalshi because the ninth circuit's decision is binding precedent in California. Congress does not need to do anything, the law is clear that states can regulate gambling. The thought that Congress needs to address that is preposterous. They'll go through to same song and dance in the second circuit too - want to make a bet on how that'll turn out?
Searched the quote and you neglected to elaborate on how small the number is:
> Health service figures show that from April to September 2024, 1,914 people were treated at NHS gambling clinics. This compares to the previous financial year when a total of 1,389 patients were cared for. In 2022-23 this number was 1,013, and in 2020-21 it was 775 patients.
I get that you're probably trying to make a point that it's bad for everyone in general, but the US is on a completely different level of societal corruption from all of this.
So in ~4 years the number of people needing professional medical help to combat their gambling addiction has over doubled and that's not a sign that there's a growing issue?
I guess I should just stick to really deep thoughts like "America is not the UK and its citizens are not capable of regulating themselves in the face of this sort of exploitation", with absolutely nothing other than vibes that it's true. Because of course Americans are dumb.
Likely an Amerocentric comment, yes, that assumes gambling can only be as destructive and predatory as it is in the US. I don't know anything about how it works in the UK but it's plausible to me that it's not as harmful a force there, as you say.
If it had never happened, maybe sport would be some platonic ideal but if you look at the premier league, it seems to function OK as a sports league comparable to the NFL, despite people loading up on accas for fun.
gambling in the UK "as destructive and predatory as it is in the US" is not something that I have a measure for, and anyway it is the wrong measure.
Even if that is true, UK gambling really is not a force for good, quite the opposite. And becoming worse as it moves from a betting shop on the high street into a betting app in a persons pocket.
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