Discussion
Derek Thompson
GenerWork: I'm sorry, but all this handwringing just smacks of moral Puritanism. If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then don't.
cat-turner: Let's make a bet on how bad it can getI can place a bet that by 2027 we will have 1 bet and a payout on a bet that predicts a horrible catastrophe.
tptacek: I agree with Thompson about these kinds of prediction markets, but predicting horrible catastrophes is one of the prosocial early use cases of these things.
3-cheese-sundae: In the prediction markets, there's a fine line between predicting and manifesting.
tptacek: I mean, I'm talking about things like hurricanes and earthquakes and forest fires, not running death pools.
__MatrixMan__: Agreed, as long as it's a catastrophe that the bettors can't cause, but that advance warning can mitigate, such as betting that a certain astroid will strike the earth at a certain time and place.
sghiassy: The amount of suspicious bets around international politics is disturbingOne data point of many: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/politics/iran-war-bets-predic...Fact: Donald Trump Jump Jr is an advisor of polymarket
hydroflame7: 'Predictions' market is the silliest loophole for gambling. Honestly, more surprised Fanduel, DraftKings and the like who have spent millions on lobbying and buying licenses, are not fighting tooth and nail on this.
bko: I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market making which is preferable
cowpig: Just game-theoretically, suppose you bet $100 on some disaster.That disaster causes $10,000,000 of harm, but only causes you $90 of harm individually.You've gained $10, but your $10 gain is a millionth of the harm caused.Generally-speaking, there's an enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy. So now we have a mechanism by which individuals have a financial incentive to cause harm...Don't these markets create a mechanism for society to race to self-destruction?
HWR_14: Search for "assassination markets", which is a longish treatment of this idea. Specifically, people collectively can bet large sums of money that X will not be killed Thursday at 5pm. And anyone can take the other side at insanely good odds...
Jblx2: How is that different from regular old insurance?
kevinsync: Assuming everything physical gets tokenized (as occasionally gets predicted), people could soon literally lose their house on a bet! Maybe even a bet placed by their swarm of agents. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!
testaccount28: as a wise guy once said, "a grown man made a wager; he lost."
amazingamazing: More doomer takes. The world survived two world wars and a cold war. This stuff is nothing. Engagement bait as usual.
yieldcrv: > I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.given that the crypto anarchist papers from the 90s that these markets are built on are very well thought out instruction manuals about how bad it could get, this title implies users are gullible idiots as opposed to the creators and power usersAn individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem. So I take issue with all the flippant comments about this being a "gambling loophole", like, who cares? I don't think any financial game should be seen as a different category than the other.Even the "positive expected value" framework masquaraded as a distinction between trading and a casino game is completely false and entirely a cultural distinction. There are many equities and bond trades that have lower expected value than a casino game, even this forum is populated by people that receive shares and derivatives as compensation, who will earn nothing - even lose money - under positive outcomes. Exhibit A. Not everyone needs to care how a particular financial game is perceived. Not all cultures need any social segregation of gambling versus another way of making money from money. I'd rather be part of those cultures. And in the US/Western gambling regulatory frameworks and prohibitions, prediction markets don't fit, that isn't a loophole to me. They are structurally different and I'm not entirely sure what people want to happen and how it is supposed to be enforced. I don't get the impression they've looked at all, and are just operating on a feeling that I find irrelevant.And on the insiders, yes, that's the point of prediction markets. They are intended to be distributed bounties with plausible deniability. That's literally what Jim Bell's 1995 crypto-anarchist paper was about.In the natural course of finance, every asset, including information, should be tradable, as long as improvements in liquidity continue to come.
warkdarrior: > An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.That ignore the societal influence on an individual. If everyone around you gambles, you are more inclined to take up gambling.
yieldcrv: Not ignoring, deterring the state from involving itself in anything except the individual.
echelon: Assassinations markets are what's next.eg. someone will bet $1M that Elon Musk will be assassinated in 2026.But these don't themselves even have to be legal. Second order wagers will be placed on SpaceX and Tesla stock prices, bets that "a hundred billionaire will die in 2026", etc.A bet that Putin will be assassinated could be encoded in, "there will be regime change in Russia."
IncreasePosts: Someone would need to take the opposite side of that bet. And who would do that knowing someone might try to assassinate him in order to win that bet?
sghiassy: It’s the insider betting that’s the problem. Not the intrinsic nature of gambling
GenerWork: You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks, and quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it in a betting app. This isn't like the stock market which is a vehicle for wealth for hundreds of millions. Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
echelon: > forest firesFire bug> earthquakesDynamite the fault> hurricanesCrazy, but, hear me out: mirrors in space warming the Atlantic, mirrors in Africa warming the atmosphere ("solar power"), Trump wanting to nuke a hurricane, etc.Pandemic? Go harvest bats and put them in a cage with chickens. You don't even need a molecular bio lab.Stock market crash? Bombs. Terrorist attacks.Energy prices? Derail a train carrying fuel cars. Bonus points if it's in a major metro and has a blast radius. Or, I dunno, start a war with Iran.This could get really bad.
tptacek: "Dynamite the fault"? What are you, a Bond villain?
echelon: The Bond villain would be the person running the betting market.
slopinthebag: Is it actually illegal to bet on an assassination?
owlninja: Actually I believe DraftKings just added a prediction market...
nlawalker: Ah, you beat me to it. I learned about assassination markets in a previous post about the overall gambling/prediction markets topic a few weeks ago; the concept is so coherent that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
dash2: You put your own case powerfully, but you don’t seem to have reacted to Derek Thompson‘s case, except to say that you’re not bothered about gambling addiction. (And why not? If people predictably do things that are bad for themselves, that damages the efficiency case for free markets and everything.)
yieldcrv: I did read his article, and there are the geopolitical events and the sporting events he talks about.I don't really understand why sports leagues require faith in their institution. Is the economy overleveraged on collateral debt swaps on league merchandise sells? Is our economy built on preteens in Nebraska believing their only way out of there is a worthwhile pursuit?I'm not sure why I am supposed to care about the sanctity of that market, what are the consequences of it feeling rigged? and the FBI was on those insider trades instantly, so the sports side seems tightly regulated already whether I understand why a segment of that market needs certain assurances.And the non-sporting trades I recognize the danger of, the liquidity in the market altering the outcome as someone in control of the outcome does something selfish. I say do what we can to avoid the death markets and the nuclear ones, but distributed bounties otherwise are very transparent and efficient wealth distribution mechanisms that fulfill other goals of compensating labor more correctly.
nick__m: If someone want him dead, someone have to bet that million on the target being alive at a specific date. Unless someone plan to do the execution themselves, the bet must be lost for the target to be unalive !
jerf: In this scenario, that would be the people paying for the assassination. The people who want it to happen bet that it won't. The people who want to do it bet that it will. The net result is that if one of the people who bet on it happening makes it happen, they are being paid by the people betting against it, in a plausibly deniable way.A country leader seeing someone suddenly take out a $50 million position on them not being assassinated is not the $50 million vote of confidence a naive read on the market might indicate, it's a $50 million payout to the assassin. Albeit inefficiently so, since others can take the other side of the bet and do nothing. But the deniability may be worth it.
smarf: the implied suggestion that we should not seek to remedy anything that is not the worst thing that has ever happened to the species seems more like bait than the article
blitzar: Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries.We also have people under the age of 20 drinking alcohol.I am not suggesting in any way that gambling is good - but it wasnt invented last week in america
esafak: You're joking, right? A hundred million people died in those wars.“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”
cryptoegorophy: And there is a kid’s legal version! They sell them in Walmart - Pokémon packs. I don’t know how any of this is legal in a civilized country.
Jblx2: Don't forget the other children's gambling trainers:https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=claw+machine&ia=images&iax=...
angiolillo: > If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then don't.Three of the "four ways to lose" described in the article are significant harms inflicted on parties besides the bettors themselves. One cannot avoid these harms by not directly gambling.
throwaway132448: That’s a lot of words to tell everyone you don’t know what an “externality” is.
ed_balls: Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your average yearly tax (last 5 years). Prediction market should be banned.
imglorp: That seems to imply concern for the gambler, who at least has chosen to play.A much bigger problem might be when these markets bet on a meatspace event and then a bunch go out and try to influence innocents in meatspace, to great detriment of society. Like this journalist https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-polymarket
unethical_ban: You're waving away the dangers of government officials having a financial incentive to take actions based not on societal well-being or integrity.
hermannj314: I got into weather betting markets earlier this year since I figured those can't possibly be rigged, it is automated weather station data yet some groups in the market know the truth a few minutes before everyone else based on the way the markets move.BUT, I stopped on the day that the PHL airport preliminary report said the low of the day was 17 and then later than day the low was raised to 18. The way the market was behaving, insiders knew the low would be retracted because normally the markets clear out a tranche of bets that are no longer possible and that wasn't happening that day.So I don't do that. The whole game seems to be based on a group of insiders that know when and what temperature reports will say seconds or minutes before the general public and they have the capacity to play with validation on the back-end (I suspect).I built a few models to predict weather 6+ hours out using blended model forecast data, but that didn't do better than break-even.I don't know my point. It is the wild west, caveat emptor, you need thick skin and ridiculous attention to detail to beat the game, and even then the deck is probably stacked against you.
learn_more: it seems this could be solved by refusing last minute bets?
jbxntuehineoh: > Oh, you think (bad thing) might happen? Why do you even care when (worse thing) happened in the past? Checkmate! I am very intelligent.gr8 b8 m8 i r8 8/8
jackfruitpeel: The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'.I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity. I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
willio58: I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city.It’s always been bad, but in my eyes it’s so much worse now that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas or something to bet (and lose) big.
sam0x17: Especially when the "prediction" part isn't even part of the product, it is an accidental byproduct. No one pays for access to the predictions.And they aren't predictions, they are more like "outcome-shaping" markets, since the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome, and at a certain point it will just always happen if it is billions of dollars.The higher the liquidity involved, the less likely the real world outcome ends up being the same as it would have been if the prediction market had never existed. Very messy.
mhh__: Those predictions are just market data, market data is often very expensive (my data usage at work is probably about $100k a year and i'm not even a trader), I imagine polymarket will be too when they are more established.
saltyoldman: Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you also craft an Etherium contract to do the same thing as these prediction markets. So even without a company "framing all the markets" you could still have gambling based on base eth?
taurath: The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
AStrangeMorrow: I am not sure, but you don’t have to technically bet on assassination. You can bet on an event which would happen as a result of said assassination. X won’t get re-elected. Company Y CEO will change in 2027. This is artist Z last tour. Athlete K won’t participate in this event etc.
paulddraper: They’re the financial equivalent of recreational drugs.Not everyone gets addicted, but many do. Harms your own health/assets. Can destroy lives. Has spillover effects into general society.The libertarian/authoritarian argument is much the same.
tech_ken: Can't speak for everyone here, but I (as a US citizen) am way less bothered by sports gambling specifically than I am by generalized Kalshi-type gambling being abused by powerful insiders in the federal government (or other instituions). Like yeah I don't think it's great that we've enabled yet another route for young men to completely ruin their lives, but civil liberties, personal responsibility, etc. etc. etc.What really is scaring me is how transparently the current US executive branch has been basically running a Black Sox scam for the last year or so. This is not something that I think is really happening with eg. Ladbrokes. Seems more like an even more insidious form of insider trading which is already disgustingly prevalent across the whole political system; except now it's even less traceable, and even easier to exploit for things like military actions.
nick__m: It's the inverse, here how you have to bet (unless you plan to be doing the hands on assassination works) : X will get re-elected. Company Y CEO will not change in 2027. This is not artist Z last tour. Athlete K will participate in this event etc.Like I said elsewhere in this thread the bet have to be lost if you want your target dead.
cowpig: Insurance is usually for things that primarily affect the purchaser?
jbxntuehineoh: > An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.libertarianism is a cancer
Chris2048: > made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hiredAs in, even a dev, HR, etc person having worked for an online gambling company? I feel this may be a slippery slope..
adamandsteve: Prediction markets are far, far more slippery. Anyone working at one of these places had other options & chose to sell their morals so I think it's perfectly reasonable to not hire them.
kakacik: > anyone who has worked on these products should not be hiredRespect for that. Everybody seems to give up to all-powerful corporations and greed for short term profits seem to blind many otherwise brilliant folks into amoral and/or outright stupid shortsighted behavior and moral 'flexibility'. Nice to see good reason to keep some hope for humanity.I do myself just a sliver of this via purchasing choices for me and my family, its a drop in the ocean but ocean is formed by many drops, nothing more.
nimbius: i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid, both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.The real nail in the coffin was watching the Sears in the mall turn into a casino about a decade ago. Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures, politicians turn to the last grift in their arsenal and roll out legalized gambling before packing up and leaving town or retiring.having failed the digital future, ransacked it for every last penny, politicians again in 2025 turned to the supreme court to legalize online gambling and in doing so obliterate a generation of young adults. in another decade i expect a political movement to "hold these scoundrels to account" similar to Facebook, long after any meaningful reform or regulation could have been made and the industry itself is on the decline. just one last grift for the government that enabled it in the first place.
orthoxerox: I've always said we should just legalize insider trading. Just make it painfully obvious to everyone that speculative trading is the loser's game.
matsemann: In Norway, gambling is controlled by a state monopoly, same as our alcohol sales. Probably for the same reasons.
leflob: Maybe we should build a prediction model of upcoming events based on volume of bets made on polymarket
nlawalker: What's even more interesting is when you consider that A) it doesn't have to be one person taking out a large position, it can be multiple people, over time, and B) the assassin doesn't have to be known or confirmed ahead of time, if someone decides their "reserve price" has been met, all they have to do to receive a payout is place the appropriate bet before performing the act.The end result is a combination of Kickstarter and Doordash for targeted homicide.
GCA10: Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From what I've seen, the level of threats, abuse, etc. is just horrifying. The 30x increase in money bet, sadly, seems to be translating into a 30x increase in betters' hostile conduct.
voxic11: Kids version has been around my entire life (baseball cards) it even used to come with bubblegum!
markdown: Don't forget the janitors. They're all accomplices of the peddlers of misery.
kqr: Happens already. Selling market data is part of how they finance themselves.
1234letshaveatw: The UK? or Ireland? or USA?
kelseyfrog: The real power in prediction markets is creating a market for what you want to occur - it's a tangible method to leverage hyperstition.If you want Polymarket to no longer exist, then simply create a pool for "Polymarket will no longer exist by Jan 1st 2027" on Kalshi, pump the price, and wait for one of these whales to do the job of making it come true for you. When done right, you get the satisfaction of the thing happening, and all of the ROI for entering on the ground floor.Rinse and repeat and you no longer have to sit by the sidelines and view world events as things that unfold without your input. You can be an active participant in making history the way you want it.
mcmcmc: [delayed]
paulddraper: It truly is insane.The CFTC is granting "no-action" exemptions on the basis of....nothing, really.The "educational" value of these markets.
pigeons: On the basis of nothing, or on the basis of gifts and connections?
brendanfinan: the Kalshi legal team is a revolving door with the CFTC
bluetidepro: > I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.Can't say I agree with that specific take (and find it a bit naive to be honest), unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has.
dataflow: [delayed]
Chris2048: How does someone with a mere $10 stake have the opportunity to contribute to the cause of a $10mil disaster?Realistically, they'd have to be far more connected to the event, and as such, far more exposed to some kind of risk.
bombdailer: Inventive markets is a better term for what they will become.
praptak: Attaching payouts to events skews the incentives. A baseball player gets the incentive to fuck up on purpose. Fortunately politicians are much more honest and would never make a decision to profit from a bet in a similar dishonest way.
apt-apt-apt-apt: If you wager in a prediction market, isn't it expected that there will be some insider trading or thrown results? Because there are clearly people who know when and where bombs will land, and financial incentive to throw results.Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
Gigachad: Prediction markets are just inside traders profiting off gambling addicts. If you are not an inside trader, you're the loser paying out.
cubefox: Or you are simply better at predicting the future than most other people.
holoduke: So cyberpunk is a real outlook after all hearing your situation.
alphawhisky: Bold of you to assume we'll get biological immortality and cybernetics before an extinction event.
JumpCrisscross: "where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position"To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to reveal war secretes to our enemies.
kqr: Sure, and pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us. That's exactly the point of these things. Dangle money in front of people who know things we want to know.
JumpCrisscross: > pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to usSomething tells me China has better opsec around such leaks than we do.
whattheheckheck: Taiwan is going to be invaded before 2030
Zigurd: Traders sometimes go to prison for insider trading. The wisdom of the crowd human when the crowd is following someone with insider information is deemed legal.
Barrin92: this is a false equivalence. Amazon and Meta have caused plenty of damage, companies in our capitalist economies are bad etc. But shipping you books or connecting you to other people isn't inherently evil. There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is. It's been a vice in virtually every culture for thousands of years. It's akin to peddling drugs. The practice itself is corrosive and destroys people.It's one thing to acknowledge that any for profit company in some way behaves badly, but you can't change the world. You can choose not to sell poison.
rustystump: Honestly, i think apple is worse wrt gambling then either meta or Amazon . Apple has been allowing and pushing “gamble-lite” products for years on the app store. So much gatcha game slop on there it is genuinely unusable for me. Even worse, they are now optimizing ad revenue for those that pay to push their crap into ads u cannot skip.I seriously doubt mr jobs wouldnt take one look at the app store home screen and puke in disgust at how awful it is.
throwaway27448: Yes. The "freedom" people refer to is "the freedom to be an asshole and exploit people without repercussion".
alphawhisky: Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that, I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or gender self determination, obviously).
wizardforhire: Just workshopping some sv vc tech speak…Disrupt being a traitor…The uber of spying…
watwut: All those other countries also have history of regulating it and body of literature (as in opinion pieces and stories) about observed harms of it.
jjcm: These prediction markets shouldn't be allowed for situations where humans can control the outcome.They do have their place however - one I find particularly interesting is weather prediction markets, primary because they end up having a net benefit. Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models and are duking it out. Over time these models get better, and the rest of us benefit.I think these markets could be a net good, but right now they're just enabling insider trading on a scale we've never seen before.
kqr: > weather prediction marketsCan also be used to hedge the risk of rain on the day you've planned an outdoor barbecue!
snaily: Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan[1]:“When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near the bomb shelter; we look at it every day’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really that popular over there?’” he added. “That’s very powerful. That’s an undeniable value proposition that did not exist before.”I'm with Matt Levine here[2]:"There is something particularly dystopian about the idea that:a) Some countries will bomb other countries.b) The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets.c) This will cause the prediction markets to correctly reflect the probability of bombing, allowing the people getting bombed to avoid being bombed."[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/polymarke... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-12/lev...
katzgrau: I’ve seen this too. And with AI, it’s empowered even more people to spam, imitate, steal and remix others’ work, research and artistic expression.The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.
socalgal2: > I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanityThis triggers thoughts. I don't like people being taken advantage of. At the same time, I like my personal liberties.It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics. That sucks and you could spin this has the liquor companies taking advantage, but I have tons of friends that enjoy drinking and tons of good experiences drinking with them (wine/beer/cocktails) in all kinds of situations (bars/sports-bars/pubs/parties/bbqs). I don't want that taken away because some people can't control their intake.Similarly the USA is obese so you could spin every company making fattening foods (chips/dips/bacon/cheese/cookies/sodas/...) as taking advantage (most of my family is obese (T_T)) but at the same time, I enjoy all of those things in moderation and I don't want them taken away because some people can't handle them.You can try to claim gambling is different, but it is? Should Magic the Gathering be banned (and Yugioh Card,Pokemon Cards, etc..)? Baseball cards? I don't like that video games like Candy Crush apparently make money on "whales" but I also don't want people that can control their spending and have some fun to be banned from having that fun because a few people can't control themselves.I don't have a solution, but at the moment I'd choose personal liberties over nannying everyone.
debatem1: You can do this with some forms of trip insurance. I stared hard at arbitrage there a few years ago but it was too hard to get your money out if you were right.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r: Americans coming to the realisation that much of the rest of the world came to decades ago and acting like it’s a massive revelation is…absolutely par for the course for the US. Just hurry up and implode already.
Zigurd: How much of a hurry depends on whether Trump gets his $200 billion to continue the war. Have you checked the odds on Kalshi?
mlmonkey: I was reminded of this bizarre article: https://www.si.com/betting/2023/09/15/fake-indian-cricket-le...
UqWBcuFx6NV4r: This is such a HN comment. Yes, I am not hiring those people either. If that sounds unviable or even uncommon then you’re just too deep in the culture. This is quite common.
littlecranky67: If it is your company then this is fine, it is your money afterall, and can do as you see fit. If you are employed or have co-shareholders, you are managing someone elses money. And you are not supposed to act within your morals, but those of the company. It would be kind of hipocritical to act on your own morals using someone elses money - up to the point where it could be illegal misapropriation. And then taking the moral highground and being judgemental about people because they worked in gambling is probably something one should reconsider.
JumpCrisscross: > It would be kind of hipocritical to act on your own morals using someone elses money - up to the point where it could be illegal misapropriationThis is hyperbole. Refusing to hire anyone out of any of the big tech companies is an own goal. But being silly in management is absolutely legal. The only legal obligation I can think of revolves around disclosure, i.e. you should be open with investors and the company about the fact that you're putting up these moral guardrails, rails which may have effects on the company's competitiveness.
edgarvaldes: Gambling may be bad on its own, but the gambling and advertising combo are a very harmful combination IMHO.
BowBun: Then go bet on it! Why are you telling us?
nitwit005: Americans would definitely not be shocked at the idea of gambling being legal, and I don't know why you'd think they would be. The US has gambling tourist destinations.
pixl97: >Those predictions are just market data,Any kind of fraud is just market data when you pay enough for it.
JumpCrisscross: > unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app hasIt depends on the role. If you were doing something deeply technical, or facing customers who loved your work, I think you get a pass. If you were building features nobody outside your company is thankful for, you need to do a convincing repentance act. If you worked on Instagram for Kids or whale optimization, fuck off.
RyanOD: Completely agree with this. I watch many commercials on television targeting elderly folks and I just cringe. They seem to be doing everything they can to separate the viewer from their money for a dubious product or service.
rustystump: Wow. Glad i wont ever work for/with you. Not because i worked at any of those “bad bad” companies but because your take is a horrible sign of what to expect.Like, if it was a pm or leadership person i can kinda understand it. They are the ones pushing direction. But what, some call center support guy is sol because his resume has kelshi on it? Not everyone is in a position to have luxury beliefs.
ggggffggggg: But if you are hiring people that have had that luxury, and yet have chosen immoral paths, what does that say about them and about you?
barbazoo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
toraway: Well, we were able to observe in the impact of legalization of online betting in real time, watching every other ad slot during sports games turning into gambling app ads designed to hook 20 something men into lighting their paycheck on fire for a brief dopamine hit.Plus, prediction markets going from a harmless novelty where people would bet a few bucks on an election into a massive offshoot of gambling industry incentivizing manipulating outcomes/insider trading, once again leaving the average gambler left holding the bag and poorer.You honestly couldn't design a better experiment to test the theory of whether open and legal vs. banned but underground gambling leads to better outcomes. So I'm not sure why it matters that other countries have different laws (that likely were more thoughtfully designed than basically just saying "it's legal now" out of the blue).
adamandsteve: Being good at predicting the future will give you only a slight edge, so even a small amount of inside trading can make you unprofitable.
cubefox: Being good at predicting is a broad skill which is applicable widely, while insider information only works for the specific thing the information is about. Far from every market will have insiders with special information. E.g. on who will win an election.
throwaway7679: Sibling comments are right. Refusing to hurt people is a crime against money.
pants2: Couldn't that be said of stock markets and any markets?United Healthcare stock dropped 10% immediately after its CEO was killed.
cowpig: Well, there are laws against insider trading.
kqr: Is shorting a company and then murdering its CEO considered insider trading in your jurisdiction?
brailsafe: [delayed]
AnimalMuppet: Dynamite the fault? I presume you haven't seriously thought about how much dynamite it would take and how deeply you'd have to plant it.Mirrors in space? Again, have you done the math? How many thousands of acres of mirrors would you need, how many rockets would it take, and how much would they cost? Could you make enough on the betting market to break even?
matt_daemon: Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year) has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during live sports events.It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.As for sportspeople throwing games, well that’s been happening for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless examples from football (soccer) and cricket.
joe_mamba: >Same in Australia and only recentlyAFAIK Australia is most gambling addicted western country, loosing the most money per capita at the pokies.>It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.I remember how Henry Ford was giving his employee great benefits to attract the best workers so the Dodge brothers bought Ford shares to become shareholders, then sued Henry Ford and won because he wasn't doing what's good for the shareholders.Similarly, I feel like if you'd try to regulate these anti humane businesses and practices you'd get sued because you're doing something that hurts shareholders.
Gigachad: I’m sure that’s what the gambling addicts like to tell themselves.
Ferret7446: Actually, prediction markets are closer to stock markets (insofar as you consider stock trading to be gambling). Insider trading is the bigger issue
beejiu: Prediction markets are nothing like stock markets. Maybe they are more like binary options markets. In the UK for example, these were for a long time regulated as a gambling product, and for the past 7 years have been banned to retail consumers.
zug_zug: Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"It'd actually be quite easy to set certain sane limits on gambling like you can't gamble more than 1% of your annual income per year, but I bet gambling platforms would fight that like the plague because those are their whales, the true addicts.
Aurornis: > If that sounds unviable or even uncommon then you’re just too deep in the culture. This is quite commonIf you think banning ex-FAANG employees from hiring pipelines because you think those companies are bad for society is common, I think you are the one who is too deep in that bubble.Having FAANG on your resume is a boost to most hiring pipelines
comprev: Gambling and weapons (or "defence" depending on perspective) are two industries I refuse to work on principle.On my deathbed I want to look back on life and feel I've made a small positive impact on the world.
