I guess being able to scan each and every cell for the cancerous mutation is also a possible solution, but also a tall order.
10 years ago I had some friends who were into online sports betting. It required getting a VPN, accessing offshore servers, signing up for sketchy websites, and linking an online bank account. It was enough hoops to jump through that the average person wouldn't bother. Back then I would have agreed with you: let the people play! But I'm only 33 and I've watched online gambling cripple peoples' lives in just the last few years. It's a huge problem and should be made illegal again. You should not be able to access it in one click from the App Store.
You may not be aware of how rapidly and historically unprecedented gambling has spread in the US in the last few years. More than half of all men aged 18-49 participate in some form of online sports betting (https://futurism.com/future-society/men-aged-18-to-49-hooked...)
Prediction markets are a way of effectively placing a "bounty" on something you would like to happen. Or capitalizing on one of these existing bounties because you're able to affect the result. It's a way to commodify power (and information of course, which is what these platforms bill themselves for), converting it into money, which can you can build further power with.
So it's not surprising someone would be against restricting gambling. The hard part is to how the gov should do it. But it's not government's job to please every single person.
Many of the ideas that later became the United States were discussed in a bar while drinking, the same cannot be said anywhere for solo gambling. Whether you like it or not, alcohol and tobacco are woven into the social order.
Gambling is a bad addiction but the long term impact is much lower if you can't possibly spend more money in this addiction. How in hell can someone accumulate 75k$ of debt through credit cards and loans spent in gambling. No financial institution should be allowed to open a second credit card account or loan to someone who hasn't shown ability to timely reimburse its current debt.
How much did legalization contribute to making it mainstream-casual? What about the ads?
I think it's time for a modern Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act which banned cigarette commercials on TV and radio starting January 1, 1971.
It's my opinion that gambling be reserved for Atlantic City (or your town). But legality aside, we ought to at least stop advertising it.
Using https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html i got "He was banned by betting sites. Then he relapsed on Kalshi."
The other way you can self-exclude or ban yourself from the traditional gambling apps is just win too often.
By definition if you use traditional (non-'market') gambling apps and aren't banned by the owners of them then you're statistically a loser or at best neutral over time.
If you were a winner over time they would ban you to stem their own losses. They are legally allowed to do this and do it all the time.
Really wish the author had pushed back more on this. They have different predatory incentives, benefitting from encouraging people to make a large number of slightly stupid bets rather than a smaller number of very stupid ones. I would love to hear Kalshi explain what non-predatory value the 15 minute crypto markets have.
In some traditional markets, a source of funding is investors who are hedging, essentially buying insurance.
Kalshi Trading LLC, the market maker which is fully owned by KalshiEX and has no independent online presence, makes money from losers in the same way as traditional gambling platforms. Kalshi's claims that this is an independent company are obviously absurd. (It's fair, I think, to say that the structure of the market limits their ability to make windfalls from severe mispricing.)