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).
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game_the0ry
Did anyone else think it was strange how fast legitimate news orgs (cnn for example) integrated prediction markets into their businesses?
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btbuildem
The "best" part of this is all the trading algos that scrape the news act on it. They 1) can't vet sources all that well and 2) absolutely cannot discern lies (eg, anything coming out of the official admin channels) from facts. You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
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frollogaston
Reminds me of news articles that are just Twitter screenshots, except now there's money directly involved.
Btw every ad around the stadium in World Cup is for Kalshi now. Really makes me question the fairness of the games.
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josefritzishere
This is all gambling. It should be heavily regulated.
com2kid
It's funny, the only place I see Kalshi mentioned is here on HN for articles about how bad Kalshi is. Same for all the sports betting sites.
I'm sure they are all bad, but damned if I never encounter them outside of HN.
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jmyeet
Over the last 2+ decades gambling has increased massively. By "gambling" I include sports betting, prediction markets, online casinos and crypto (including NFTs). Yes, I'm including crypto under gambling. When ordinary people buy crypto it's mostly because they saw the stratospheric rise of Bitcoin, don't really understand why and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin.. Straight up. That's gambling.
But why? Ease of access (ie the Intenret and particularly smartphones) are obviously a factor. There was a time when if you wanted to gamble you had to do it illegally or you had to go to a physical casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (and then riverboats, etc). You can look across to see how ease of access to gambling absolutely increases the amount of gambling and thus gambling addiction. A good example are the poker machines that are available in some states in Australia but not all.
But there's something deeper than that (IMHO). And I think that thing is the increasing inequality [1] and the affordability crisis. People may be talking about affordability a lot now but it's not a new issue. It was a key issue in the 2016 election, for example.
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 (eg [2]).
I believe gambling is a symptomo and indicator of a deeply broken societ and a deteriorating society.
The sad reality is that gambling is an excellent way of extracting what little wealth poor people have and it makes everything worse on a macro scale. Gambling should be relatively inaccessible. Yet we have the Federal government suing to stop states to ban prediction markets [3].
It's amazing how naked it is that laws just don't apply to certain people. Kalshi et al are obviously gambling, and yet somehow all the laws about gambling have been politely forgotten by law enforcement.
It seems CNN fails to put their mouth where their money is.
tsunamifury
We are reaching a new post-rational or neu-rational stage of our society which i think many HNers and educated people will find deeply uncomfortable
The difficult truth is that as we've engeineered our society over the last 50 years into more and more deterministic outcomes, and began to assign morality itself TO determinism. Where in we've reached a point where when we must face that life is probablistic (i.e. gambling) we assign that space a moral evil
As a person who is deeply entrenched in this way of thinking I find gambing uncomforatable, but when we invented the core AI technology of prediction systems at Google that power LLM tech today, 'gambling' on probablistic outcomes at a super short term and long term level is questining the determinism of life itself.
Gambling is a collective signal on cohort outcomes and wisdom of crowds, which becomes training data itself for long/high dimensional-vectors required to fuel intelligence.
In other words, it turns out EVERYTHING is gambling, some things just have better odds than others, and most of those better odds choices come from OHTERS gambling to make those odds better for you.
Humanity moving forward out of this trap of high odds probability gravity wells and growing as a species will involve a lot of gambling i suspect.
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DavidContext
This is a really interesting piece. It's weird seeing Kalshi adverts in the World Cup. Not sure how I feel about the whole thing in general.
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).
Did anyone else think it was strange how fast legitimate news orgs (cnn for example) integrated prediction markets into their businesses?
The "best" part of this is all the trading algos that scrape the news act on it. They 1) can't vet sources all that well and 2) absolutely cannot discern lies (eg, anything coming out of the official admin channels) from facts. You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
Reminds me of news articles that are just Twitter screenshots, except now there's money directly involved.
Btw every ad around the stadium in World Cup is for Kalshi now. Really makes me question the fairness of the games.
This is all gambling. It should be heavily regulated.
It's funny, the only place I see Kalshi mentioned is here on HN for articles about how bad Kalshi is. Same for all the sports betting sites.
I'm sure they are all bad, but damned if I never encounter them outside of HN.
Over the last 2+ decades gambling has increased massively. By "gambling" I include sports betting, prediction markets, online casinos and crypto (including NFTs). Yes, I'm including crypto under gambling. When ordinary people buy crypto it's mostly because they saw the stratospheric rise of Bitcoin, don't really understand why and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin.. Straight up. That's gambling.
But why? Ease of access (ie the Intenret and particularly smartphones) are obviously a factor. There was a time when if you wanted to gamble you had to do it illegally or you had to go to a physical casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (and then riverboats, etc). You can look across to see how ease of access to gambling absolutely increases the amount of gambling and thus gambling addiction. A good example are the poker machines that are available in some states in Australia but not all.
But there's something deeper than that (IMHO). And I think that thing is the increasing inequality [1] and the affordability crisis. People may be talking about affordability a lot now but it's not a new issue. It was a key issue in the 2016 election, for example.
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 (eg [2]).
I believe gambling is a symptomo and indicator of a deeply broken societ and a deteriorating society.
The sad reality is that gambling is an excellent way of extracting what little wealth poor people have and it makes everything worse on a macro scale. Gambling should be relatively inaccessible. Yet we have the Federal government suing to stop states to ban prediction markets [3].
[1]: https://wir2026.wid.world/
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8643406/
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/where-the-feds-are-fighting-...
It's amazing how naked it is that laws just don't apply to certain people. Kalshi et al are obviously gambling, and yet somehow all the laws about gambling have been politely forgotten by law enforcement.
Felt this video I saw this morning was relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV3rpuf8iAk
It seems CNN fails to put their mouth where their money is.
We are reaching a new post-rational or neu-rational stage of our society which i think many HNers and educated people will find deeply uncomfortable
The difficult truth is that as we've engeineered our society over the last 50 years into more and more deterministic outcomes, and began to assign morality itself TO determinism. Where in we've reached a point where when we must face that life is probablistic (i.e. gambling) we assign that space a moral evil
As a person who is deeply entrenched in this way of thinking I find gambing uncomforatable, but when we invented the core AI technology of prediction systems at Google that power LLM tech today, 'gambling' on probablistic outcomes at a super short term and long term level is questining the determinism of life itself.
Gambling is a collective signal on cohort outcomes and wisdom of crowds, which becomes training data itself for long/high dimensional-vectors required to fuel intelligence.
In other words, it turns out EVERYTHING is gambling, some things just have better odds than others, and most of those better odds choices come from OHTERS gambling to make those odds better for you.
Humanity moving forward out of this trap of high odds probability gravity wells and growing as a species will involve a lot of gambling i suspect.
This is a really interesting piece. It's weird seeing Kalshi adverts in the World Cup. Not sure how I feel about the whole thing in general.
Kalshi is a virus