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!
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.
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?
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?
Consuming excess nicotine is a pretty horrible experience. You just feel super ill and nauseous. But you don't have to use an ecig to do it, just buy a stronger cigarette and smoke 2 or 3 quickly. Or you can eat part of a cigarette. Or just smoke a big cigar and inhale it like a cigarette.
Anyone who smokes has experienced feeling sick from nicotine and quickly learn to avoid it because it sucks.
That's true, ecigs introduce different types of risks:
Wikipedia: "The recent rise in the use of electronic cigarettes, many forms of which are designed to be refilled with nicotine-containing "e-liquid" supplied in small plastic bottles, has renewed interest in nicotine overdoses, especially the possibility of young children ingesting the liquids."
And not just ingesting, but absorbing it through the skin.
Also: "Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake."
> Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake.
This is true, but this is also about short term poisoning. I'm more thinking about the long term problems. Alcohol will also stop many cases of acute poisoning through similar nausea and vomiting. However, prolonged use is still bad for your health.
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.
I see replies that keep repeating the same "it's got no smoke and tar so it must cause far less harm", as if common sense always matches reality. Coating the lungs with cooked propylene glycol and glycerine could cause similar harm to smoke and tar, or even entirely new harms, but I don't really know that. Use empiricism and share reviews, please.
"Conclusion: Smokers or former smokers who switch to e-cigarettes may reduce their exposure to carcinogens and lower their risk of developing severe health issues associated with conventional smoking. However, in healthy individuals who have never smoked traditional cigarettes, the use of e-cigarettes introduces several cardiovascular and respiratory adverse effects. These findings suggest that while e-cigarettes can be a strategic harm reduction tool for smokers, they are not a safe option for non-smokers."
"CONCLUSIONS: After thorough evaluation for other potential etiologies, vaping was considered to be the most likely common causal etiology for all patients due to the temporal association of symptomatic chronic lung disease with e-cigarette use and partial improvement in symptoms after e-cigarette cessation. In this series, we associate the histopathologic pattern of small airway–centered fibrosis, including constrictive bronchiolitis, with vaping, potentially defining a clinical and pathologic entity associated with e-cigarette use. (Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.)"
"Abstract: [cut] With well-known health risks from traditional smoking, e-cigarettes are viewed as a safe way of smoking, appealing more to youth. Additionally, extensive e-cigarette marketing boosted by the internet and fame has resulted in worries that e-cigarettes can lead to a renormalization of cigarette smoking and can be used as a new method to consume vaporized drugs. Although the concern that e-cigarettes are as harmful as traditional smoking has been raised, youth and most healthcare providers remain relatively unaware. [cut]"
>> My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?
> Use empiricism
> Smokers or former smokers who switch to e-cigarettes may reduce their exposure to carcinogens and lower their risk of developing severe health issues associated with conventional smoking.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's the argument we heard back then too. Smoker's rights to spray cancer to everyone around them. Drinker's rights to smash innocents on the roadways. In reality, the tobacco and alcohol industries lobbied hard to protect themselves. Alcohol is still lobbying hard to prevent recreational weed.
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.
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.
A lot of libertarian dogma is based on classic homo economicus 'lets pretend people act perfectly rationally' type theories that just really break down when confronted with how humans actually act.
A big difference I think is that Progressivism was based on Christianity and Utopian Socialist ideals in the 1800s and 1900s (at least in the United States). So it was much easier for them to support child labor laws, pensions, banning drinking and gambling, etc. by looking at it from the perspective of protecting the poor and destitute, making the nation strong, etc.. Even the Imperial Germans did progressive programs from a paternalistic conservative approach. People were pointing to the Gospel or Rerum Novarum. Not progressivism is more rooted in anarchism or marxism. Which is why they have a lot more saying to remove property rights. Or they will push for legalizing drugs and abolishing prisons, despite that obviously making society worse, but the state, property, etc are all evil.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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?
Option A: nicotine.
Option B: nicotine plus a lot of really bad stuff.
You're seriously questioning which is better?
Dose makes the poison and ecigs enable giving it's users 10x the nicotine you'd get from a single cigarette.
I think you are right that cigs are less healthy, but I have to wonder if megadosing nicotine isn't also a pretty big problem.
Consuming excess nicotine is a pretty horrible experience. You just feel super ill and nauseous. But you don't have to use an ecig to do it, just buy a stronger cigarette and smoke 2 or 3 quickly. Or you can eat part of a cigarette. Or just smoke a big cigar and inhale it like a cigarette.
Anyone who smokes has experienced feeling sick from nicotine and quickly learn to avoid it because it sucks.
That's true, ecigs introduce different types of risks:
Wikipedia: "The recent rise in the use of electronic cigarettes, many forms of which are designed to be refilled with nicotine-containing "e-liquid" supplied in small plastic bottles, has renewed interest in nicotine overdoses, especially the possibility of young children ingesting the liquids."
And not just ingesting, but absorbing it through the skin.
Also: "Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake."
> Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake.
This is true, but this is also about short term poisoning. I'm more thinking about the long term problems. Alcohol will also stop many cases of acute poisoning through similar nausea and vomiting. However, prolonged use is still bad for your health.
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.
I see replies that keep repeating the same "it's got no smoke and tar so it must cause far less harm", as if common sense always matches reality. Coating the lungs with cooked propylene glycol and glycerine could cause similar harm to smoke and tar, or even entirely new harms, but I don't really know that. Use empiricism and share reviews, please.
Direct health implications of e-cigarette use: a systematic scoping review with evidence assessment https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11317248/
"Conclusion: Smokers or former smokers who switch to e-cigarettes may reduce their exposure to carcinogens and lower their risk of developing severe health issues associated with conventional smoking. However, in healthy individuals who have never smoked traditional cigarettes, the use of e-cigarettes introduces several cardiovascular and respiratory adverse effects. These findings suggest that while e-cigarettes can be a strategic harm reduction tool for smokers, they are not a safe option for non-smokers."
E-Cigarette Use, Small Airway Fibrosis, and Constrictive Bronchiolitis https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10137322/
"CONCLUSIONS: After thorough evaluation for other potential etiologies, vaping was considered to be the most likely common causal etiology for all patients due to the temporal association of symptomatic chronic lung disease with e-cigarette use and partial improvement in symptoms after e-cigarette cessation. In this series, we associate the histopathologic pattern of small airway–centered fibrosis, including constrictive bronchiolitis, with vaping, potentially defining a clinical and pathologic entity associated with e-cigarette use. (Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.)"
E-cigarettes and Vaping: A Smoking Cessation Method or Another Smoking Innovation? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9833272/
"Abstract: [cut] With well-known health risks from traditional smoking, e-cigarettes are viewed as a safe way of smoking, appealing more to youth. Additionally, extensive e-cigarette marketing boosted by the internet and fame has resulted in worries that e-cigarettes can lead to a renormalization of cigarette smoking and can be used as a new method to consume vaporized drugs. Although the concern that e-cigarettes are as harmful as traditional smoking has been raised, youth and most healthcare providers remain relatively unaware. [cut]"
>> My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?
> Use empiricism
> Smokers or former smokers who switch to e-cigarettes may reduce their exposure to carcinogens and lower their risk of developing severe health issues associated with conventional smoking.
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.
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.
It's not just the USA, it's happening in most of the EU too. Sports betting is especially rampant.
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?
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.
That's the argument we heard back then too. Smoker's rights to spray cancer to everyone around them. Drinker's rights to smash innocents on the roadways. In reality, the tobacco and alcohol industries lobbied hard to protect themselves. Alcohol is still lobbying hard to prevent recreational weed.
>Alcohol is still lobbying hard to prevent recreational weed.
It's wild how using the drug I make is freedom and using the drug someone else makes is slavery
> The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch.
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress implicitly predicted this (albeit for Luna, which was obviously modeled on the U.S.).
(Heinlein was right about so many things ....)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
> 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
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.
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.
What blows my mind is how many “progressives” I know who really support this libertarian-style maximum “freedom.”
I’ve been the stodgy conservative of my friend group saying “uh, maybe there was a good reason for banning this stuff?”
Pretty funny, since I actually was a committed libertarian for a while.
A lot of libertarian dogma is based on classic homo economicus 'lets pretend people act perfectly rationally' type theories that just really break down when confronted with how humans actually act.
A big difference I think is that Progressivism was based on Christianity and Utopian Socialist ideals in the 1800s and 1900s (at least in the United States). So it was much easier for them to support child labor laws, pensions, banning drinking and gambling, etc. by looking at it from the perspective of protecting the poor and destitute, making the nation strong, etc.. Even the Imperial Germans did progressive programs from a paternalistic conservative approach. People were pointing to the Gospel or Rerum Novarum. Not progressivism is more rooted in anarchism or marxism. Which is why they have a lot more saying to remove property rights. Or they will push for legalizing drugs and abolishing prisons, despite that obviously making society worse, but the state, property, etc are all evil.
Crypto + Betting is a match made in heaven.
Both audiences are super speculative.
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.
I've mentioned this on HN before. But it's pretty disgusting that the DC Lottery can advertise here on local TV.
And to note, the law in question is from the 1800s -- hardly something novel Wisconsin is doing.
Like building more jails? Could there be a better way?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.