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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.

Feels like we’re the ones being put in a bottle as rational thinking, integrity, consideration of the greater good on all things big and small are interpreted as being weak and/or arresting people’s freedoms. When you forget hard learned lessons, they have a way of reminding you eventually.

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

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.

I try to run YouTube in librewolf with adblockers stacked to the tits but every so often I have to use Chrome. The volume of gambling ads is repugnant.

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

> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle

Just ban or regulate it? It's only a form gambling after all.

Even something that should be as fun as collecting and trading cards (baseball, pokemon, etc.) revolves around "pull odds" for rare cards. There are people spending thousands of dollars monthly just to rip a desirable card they could flip for money that in most cases would never make up for how much they spent just buying packs and boxes of the product.

> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).

You severely punish those involved with prison time for whatever you can find on them. And I'm not talking a few months at Club Fed.

It's both a key driver and symptom of societal disintegration and ultimate downfall.

"I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle"

laws, that's how. push it back down to the dark net where most people can't be bothered to get at it.

You are 100% free to not gamble

This has an outsized impact on young men.

Here's an answer for you: we need a new temperance movement.

Sounds pretty ridiculous at first, but that's because people know little of the temperance and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century besides "prohibition failed". There was a whole lot more to it than mere anti-alcohol push, it included labour rights and reform (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, etc), Anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, anti-political corruption, consumer protection (food regulation), women's suffrage, etc. The 20th century progressives essentially saw a huge concentration of money and power turning society into a cruel, exploitative machine that ground people up and spat them out. Rampant alcoholism was only one part of it.

A modern version would be different in details but similar overall. Alcohol and cigarettes are not major problems, but corruption, monopoly, and engineered addiction are very real and very problematic. A new temperance movement would be about tackling rampant gabling and addiction (everything from gas station drugs to social media algorithms), political corruption, tech monopolies, misinformation etc.

Big problems need big solutions, but I suspect things will have to get worse before people realize the scale of the problem they're facing.

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 lose it, or (b) realize you haven't spent all of it and spend it on random shit you wouldn't have otherwise bought, handing over profits to some suppliers who are in on the whole game, or (c) underestimate your medical needs and the tax man gets to tax some more of your money.

Stuff like this is all over the place in American life.

Its just another symptom of the silicon valley startup "do something illegal, scale fast, and dare the government to do something about it" business model. It is an absolute cancer to society, if there is such a thing as late stage capitalism that is it, and we need to vaporize companies that do it with fines and jail time.

On a broader scale it can be viewed as part of modern culture going towards "screw everyone else, I'm gonna do whatever to get ahead." Kids on tiktok are teaching each other how to scam people. At this rate we'll have scam call centers in the US by the end of the decade and nobody will do anything about it.

> > 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).

It is just showing you in the clear what propaganda managed to hide from you with regards to the stock market and the bond market , and all the other markets for that matter.

Insiders do trade and it's impossible to stop them or catch them, and the further you are from the information (both geographically and socially) the harder it is to be first in line and more probably you are next to last in line and you gotta pray that you find some bigger fool to sell your bags to.

If anything there are some things on the prediction markets that really give the advantage to the small guy, for example some farmer whose family has been living there for many years could have a big advantage on weather forecasters and those who bet on them. Say they see the wind pick up or a particular cloud formation that gives an expert eye the idea that rain is gonna come whereas forecasters won't see it coming

It's really terrible. Gambling addiction is a serious issue that needs to be educated towards people first before any 'Kalshi' mention.

I suppose that's what those 'Gambling problem?'ads are for.

Well we don't need ads. We need responsible education against the effects of gambling addiction or we need to raise wages, which is it?

Painfully obvious when you realize how heavily involved the current administration is with both Paramount Skydance (CNN owner / Trump has equity) and Kalshi (Trump Jr has equity).

Not for those of us around in 2018 when they became QVC for sh*tcoins

Not really? It's an interesting proxy for public opinion that requires zero investment from the news org. They don't have to pay a polling agency or wait for someone else to.

Of course that suffers some likely substantial bias from oversampling a specific domain/sub-population

Not really. It's easy "content"for them and adds a veneer of quantitative rigor to what would otherwise be pure vibes.

I mean, it only feels weird if you missed Kalshi becoming a CNN partner 6 months ago. Media is entirely captured by capital, so I wasn't even surprised when they did that.

https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-cnn-prediction-market-partn...

>You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.

This was a temporary discrepancy that has gone away now that physical prices have fallen.

This means the future traders were right; the $150+ prices for a physical barrel of oil were a short-term situation that would resolve in a few months. It was correct for futures to be priced substantially lower.

What's absurd is internet commentators thinking the market is broken because they see something they don't immediately understand.

> discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices

If you see mispricing, trade the hell out of it and pocket the cash before some hedge fund does. The system is rigged against us normal folk and given any opportunity to take money legally from the system, I absolutely would.

(Now sometimes, there are good reasons for paper and physical to differ, most particularly if the paper is structured in a high-risk way, and you need to be aware of that.)

They blocked gambling ads from in stadium ads for the world cup, but Kalshi was still able to get one in because it's "predictions" and not gambling.

> 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

I have plenty of cash (let's just say over a half-mil), so well ahead of the poverty level. I find myself nearly falling into this trap often. I used to work in FAANG as a developer making big bucks and earning far more than I spend. I left FAANG a couple of years ago and now I feel like I'm just breaking even with the lower salary. Quality of life has improved, but I miss having that "cushion" in each paycheck, so I look to things like the stock market to determine if I can get ahead again somehow. The fact that the tech market is absolute trash right now makes me fear for my future which in turn drives this "gotta find a way to get ahead" line of thinking even more aggressively. It's definitely not just impacting the poor.

There's 3 kinds of crypto buyers: The investor, the criminal, and your weird libertarian uncle

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.

Same thing happened in the early days of Uber, with taxi licenses

Some states are trying to fight against Kalshi. One of the problems is the President's family has a financial interest in these markets and so the Republican party does their best to say "hey, these are clearly "swaps" and not bets!!!1!"

https://www.yogonet.com/international/news/2026/06/29/125136...

Not defending Kalshi but stock market has been gambling lite for a while now. It is pretty wild how blatant it is now though.