Kalshi attacks a Wisconsin law banning election bets as 'voter suppression'(www.npr.org)

67 pointsby hn_acker3 hours ago4 comments

recursivedoubts2 hours ago
The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch. From you had to know a guy to baseball TV announcers giving odds on a home run this inning in less than a decade.
I know this is hard to conceive of, but there was a time when there were no gambling ads on TV! The crazy part? The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!
- dctoedt2 minutes ago
  [delayed]
- cogman103 minutes ago
  > The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!
  Not really true in the US. (I take what you are saying to mean there weren't any/many pharmaceutical commercials a decade ago)
  Here's one from the 2000s that ended up maming about 10,000 people. [1]
  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTUoeaQGL1s
- tdeckan hour ago
  Some time around 2015 I remember seeing Powell station in SF completely plastered with DraftKings ads and thinking "wait, I thought that was illegal". It seems to have only snowballed since then. In 2020 I was in downtown Philadelphia before the election and saw a massive screen with a Polymarket ad, and at that time Polymarket wasn't even legal in the US.
  From nicotine to gambling harmful habits that our society had managed to marginalize have gotten a fresh coat of tech slapped on them and seemingly escaped all constraints.
  - giancarlostoroan hour ago
    Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same.
    I have a friend who gave up cigarettes for ecigs but he is actually doing it for the nicotine, saves him a fortune, he was smoking a pack a week in NYC.
    My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?
    dsabanin9 minutes ago
    In a society where government is not participating in helping people with their health care, what moral right does it have to make "unhealthy" things illegal?
    buttercraft6 minutes ago
    Option A: nicotine.
    Option B: nicotine plus a lot of really bad stuff.
    You're seriously questioning which is better?
    31 minutes ago
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    iwontberude11 minutes ago
    Way healthier, it’s not even a comparison. Cigarettes have particulates that are not bioavailable and create the black lung tissue. Here in California we have banned any flavors from nicotine vapes so it’s very straight forward. The best vapes anymore are THC, due to psychoactive effects and flavors, similar level of safety to nicotine.
- mullingitoveran hour ago
  Gambling legalization historically happens in waves following economic downturns because society’s tolerance for exploitation increases. It’s fundamentally a regressive tax that healthy societies won’t tolerate.
  - jerfan hour ago
    There's a number of these problems that end up in a cycle because the solution to some problem is so effective that a later generation forgets what the problem even was. So they remove the solutions. Then they rediscover why they were there in the first place.
    It's a Chesterton's Oscillating Fence, on a generation time scale.
- imglorpan hour ago
  For a while, we had tons of alcohol and cigarette ads. At some point they were both deemed catastrophically harmful to society. Maybe prediction markets end up there?
  - ratelimitsteve21 minutes ago
    unfortunately the dominant ideology right now states that the ability to do catastrophic harm to both yourself and society in general is fundamental to the nature of freedom, and is therefore paramount.
- lemoncookiechip2 hours ago
  It's not just the USA, it's happening in most of the EU too. Sports betting is especially rampant.
- bigbuppoan hour ago
  I'm not completely anti-gambling, but I'm of the mind that if you're going to gamble away your life savings you should at least be required to put on pants and go to a sketchy betting parlor. Online gambling platforms make it too easy.
- ecshaferan hour ago
  I am hard-line on this. Sports betting and prediction markets should be banned. Casinos should be banned. Scratch offs should be banned. Its feeding into the worst tendencies of people and hurts the most disadvantaged families. People playing a poker game with their friends, or buying a super bowl square at their bar isn't great but at least it was off to the side and hidden. We have a large chesterson's fence level experiment in society where all of these good ideas the progressives have had to keep society civil and healthy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, have slowly been removed, to terrible results.
- tiffanyhan hour ago
  Crypto + Betting is a match made in heaven.
  Both audiences are super speculative.
- palmotea2 hours ago
  Yeah, it's terrible. One of the things that struck me (in a bad way) when I visited the UK in my 20s was how there were so many bookies everywhere. Now were basically in the same place here. Organized gambling is a net-negative for society, and should be banned, and the bookies are scum that should be driven back under the rocks they crawled out from.
  - catlover76an hour ago
    [dead]
- grubbsan hour ago
  I've mentioned this on HN before. But it's pretty disgusting that the DC Lottery can advertise here on local TV.
mwigdahl3 hours ago
And to note, the law in question is from the 1800s -- hardly something novel Wisconsin is doing.
- cwmoore3 hours ago
  Like building more jails? Could there be a better way?
ratelimitsteve22 minutes ago
The ability to bet on the outcome of any event is a guarantee of corruption in any event. We've seen the president's teleprompter operator bet on his speeches, we've seen journalists threatened in an attempt to get them to reword an article in order to resolve a bet differently, we've seen several sports betting scandals. What we haven't seen is any indication that this will get better without regulation, and now we're seeing betting markets fight like hell to introduce their rot into the institutions at the bedrock of our society. It needs to stop.
lovich2 hours ago
Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand
> Then there's the potential for insider trading, something that has dogged the prediction market industry, …
From a 2025 article [1]
> Coplan said, “Nobody is under the impression that nobody knows the answer, right? Like, of course, there’s people who are working on it that know when it’s going to come. And I think what’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change, and all of a sudden it’s trading at 95 cents.”
I didn’t know you could be described as being dogged by an issue that you actively courted and espoused. Additionally I remembered that quote but it took effort to find as it appears Kalshi and Polymarket decided the heat on those views was a little too much and have done a PR wave since January of this year to claim that they totally don’t support insider trading despite that being a core of their business concept.
I guess we’ve always been at war with East Asia again, I’ll update my firmware to be a good little drone if even media organizations like npr and apnews are just going to be this blatant with reframing history
[1] https://casinobeats.com/2025/11/20/polymarket-founder-shayne...
- mwigdahl2 hours ago
  There's big money in it, so of course there's going to be a huge PR push to cast it as a great moral and societal good.
  The thing that gets me is that the rationalists who were such outspoken proponents of prediction markets (look up "futarchy" and the many positive articles about it) failed to predict the astonishing amounts of corruption that have come along for the ride with them.
  - atmavataran hour ago
    Strictly speaking, we cannot say for sure they didn't predict the corruption -- merely that they didn't warn about it.
    For all we know, they're participating in the corruption, which is why they were outspoken proponents.
    LargeWuan hour ago
    Of course they're participating, even driving it. Notably there were large bets placed predicting imminent military actions in Iran and Venezuela. In at least one case it was verifiably placed by one of the individuals planning it. We've reached the point where our country's leaders can profit not by the outcome of the war, but even just by the very act of initiating it.
  - water-data-dudean hour ago
    I was never rabid about it, but I thought prediction markets were a cool idea for a while. I didn't anticipate all of the crazy second order effects.
    totallyhuman22 minutes ago
    Same here. I soured on it a bit when I noticed them becoming a bit of a rhetorical stick, "well if you think you're right, go place a bet!". I guess that's good if you want people to only make claims they seriously believe in, but it had a tendency to shut down discussion, and I feel like there's something valuable in being able to discuss and debate without the expectation that being right should be rewarded with money, and being wrong should be punished with same.
    The negative second-order effects I expected were more about people concealing information and analysis that they otherwise would have shared, replacing complex but informative discussions with a black-box oracle. Boy was I wrong.
- rozab26 minutes ago
  The experience we have of sports betting shows that even extraordinarily well compensated sportspeople will cheat to influence events due to greed. That's not such a big problem for something that fundamentally does not matter (sports outcomes). As you apply it to things that do matter, like political appointments, actions in warzones, and even weather measurements, people will and have changed these outcomes to make money.