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points by whimsicalism 5 days ago | 0 comments

Not sure - to the extent to which Kalshi is a nationwide futures market, it is hard to imagine a more clear "interstate commerce" example. Congress should probably just pass a law delegating regulation of "sports futures" to the states to remove any legal ambiguity. Sports gambling is obviously pretty net bad for young men.

[–] saghm 5 days ago

> Congress should probably just pass a law delegating regulation of "sports futures" to the states to remove any legal ambiguity.

Or they could do the opposite, and just say that apps like this are gambling, which they are, and not a "futures market" that has any real value to society.

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

I find value, for instance I speculate heavily on future AI capability advance as a way of hedging my own career. I don't find value in sports gambling.

[–] parineum 4 days ago

You're describing insurance. The distinction between gambling and insurance is basically betting on something you have a financial stake in.

"Hedging" is like insurance but the thing you're insuring against is another bet.

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

Insurance, prediction market, futures market, gambling - imo a lot of these are semantic distinctions.

I support banning sports gambling/insurance/futures because it is a big onramp for foolish people to maneuver themselves into disastrous financial decisions.

[–] saghm 4 days ago

Quite a lot of the law is "semantic definitions" in the sense you're using the term. Things like intent and external circumstances are pretty typical for legal systems to take into account. If you're looking for the law to be mathematically pure, then this might be a problem, but if you're looking for the law to be flexible enough to handle real-world circumstances while still having some enforcement power that can be agreed upon, this is a feature, not a bug.

[–] freejazz 4 days ago

Yeah I'm an attorney and I post here a bit and it's always shocking to me that a lot of people here don't realize this. The idea that society would be better off banning insurance because it's like gambling is a severely incomplete thought. Really getting caught up in the broadest view possible, while disregarding all of the key details. It's entirely opposite to the approach taken by the law, which is to examine the key details to determine what actually is happening, and not get too caught up in labels.

[–] saghm 4 days ago

For reasons I still don't understand, a lot of engineering-minded people seem to think the law is trying to be math and doing a bad job at it, when as far as I'm able to understand, it's actually just very much not trying to be math by design. I have no legal training of any sort, so it certainly doesn't require any sort of specialized knowledge to understand this, just having humility and being open-minded enough to recognize that my own expertise is not necessarily relevant to understanding how a system designed for an entirely different domain works.

[–] JumpCrisscross 4 days ago

> Insurance, prediction market, futures market, gambling - imo a lot of these are semantic distinctions

Guess at which level insurance and gambling are regulated?

[–] saghm 4 days ago

For every bet, there's one person who finds value, and another who doesn't. Neither of those alone are sufficient to determine value to society as a whole.

[–] bethekidyouwant 4 days ago

who decides? (always by definition an authoritarian)

[–] JumpCrisscross 4 days ago

> who decides? (always by definition an authoritarian)

By this measure any regulation of a commons is authoritarian. Fortunately, societies with this attitude tend to bee-line their ways to ecological collapse.

[–] saghm 4 days ago

No, I don't think the common definition of "authoritarian" is "literally every possible form of government ever".

[–] rapind 4 days ago

These platforms are 99% sports gambling though so without the sports, they probably wouldn’t exist.

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

I don't think that's true of polymarket and it is definitely not true of when I first started using these markets.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

AFAIK it's true by betting volume even if it's not their best known feature

[–] soerxpso 5 days ago

Nobody is forcing you to gamble. If you think it's a "net bad" then simply don't do it, it doesn't need to be illegal for consenting adults to make transactions with eachother.

[–] mxkopy 5 days ago

This sort of excuse for unleashing highly engineered weapons of mass mental destruction upon your own citizens needs to be retired

[–] whimsicalism 5 days ago

I'm perfectly fine being nosy and intervening in voluntary transactions between consenting adults - same reason I support taxation.

[–] soerxpso 4 days ago

Please remain amenable to that argument when it's made about abortion, gay marriage, etc, then. There are a variety of transactions people want to arbitrarily regulate based on what they think is "obviously a net bad" and you shouldn't assume that your personal taste is going to be the one catered to by government forever.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

It's not an argument in itself, it's just rejecting a counter-argument. The opposite of "it's never okay for the government to interfere in voluntary transactions" isn't "the government must always interfere", it's "sometimes it's okay for the government to interfere"

[–] soerxpso 4 days ago

Nothing distinguishes your "I want the government to ban this because I think it's icky" from anyone else's. It absolutely is the same argument.

[–] cowlevel 3 days ago

You seem to be rejecting the premise that different things are different. If someone believes that cleaning chemicals should be locked up in supermarkets for child safety, that doesn't mean they believe bread should be locked up in supermarkets. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.

[–] cucumber3732842 4 days ago

Government intervention into what is essentially private consumer behavior (not like this is a deal between MSFT and Intel or whatever) is dangerous, incompatible with the values of personal freedom and should be invoked only in extremely rare and narrowly scoped circumstances.

Now, I'm willing to accept that people will disagree about what deserves intervention and how much is acceptable. We can bicker about how much retail sports betting, guns, drugs, adult content, etc, etc, should be curtailed, that's fine.

But the hill I will die on is that people, such as yourself, who use a situations like this, where the overwhelming majority will probably want some amount of intervention as a soapbox to peddle intervention into people's private behavior for it's own sake like it's some sort of good default policy are evil at their very core and should be ridiculed, shunned and marginalized for the benefit of us all.

[–] freejazz 4 days ago

A bit dramatic, no?

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

Evil at my very core for favoring sports gambling regulation? Christ, the libertarians on this site are histrionic.

[–] ToValueFunfetti 4 days ago

You did say you're perfectly fine intervening in a way that appeared general- that is, I don't think it's wildly out of line to read you as saying 'there is no tradeoff' rather than that 'the tradeoff is worthwhile in this particular case'.

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

I don't think it is on face impermissible to intervene in voluntary transactions. I'm not saying government should intervene just for the fun of it.

[–] stickfigure 5 days ago

Great! I'm sure you won't mind if our Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice goes through your financial transactions, browser history, messaging, friends list, and geolocation records looking for signs of improper behavior. We're here to help you avoid impure thoughts!

[–] saghm 4 days ago

I don't believe you actually have trouble understanding that the opinion that some private transactions are worth making illegal is equivalent to thinking that literally no privacy rights exist. I think you're smart enough to know that people can think that it should be possible to prosecute a company nationally advertising that they provide a service without thinking that it should be possible for the government to arbitrarily decide to force a citizen to turn over all of their private communications without a court order.

[–] ozgrakkurt 4 days ago

Banning drugs, smoking and gambling is not the same as a dystopian government.

I know several people that had their lives severely impacted by these things and they were all regular people.

[–] soperj 4 days ago

they already do

[–] wat10000 4 days ago

I know it's difficult for the libertarian mind to comprehend, but one can be in favor of some government intervention without being in favor of all.

[–] pixl97 4 days ago

The libertarians and housecats saying rings true for a reason.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

The saying in question:

Libertarians are like house cats. They’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.

[–] _vertigo 5 days ago

Unfortunately, gamified gambling on your phone is so bad for society that I think it should be banned or heavily limited even at the expense of the freedom for consenting adults making transactions with each other.

Same argument around banning hard drugs. They just make society worse. Obviously hard drugs are more clear cut and definitely worse for you, just saying, similar situation in principle.

[–] buriram 4 days ago

Ok, then we are going back to Prohibition era again. How about making the 28th Amendment (and the 29th Amendment for repealing it)?

[–] preg_match 4 days ago

Gambling has been largely prohibited for most of recent US history.

You think they were fucking gambling on their iPhones in 1890? They weren’t even doing that in 2012! Get real.

[–] buriram 4 days ago

But US has to pass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Internet_Gambling_Enf... in 2006 to outlaw PokerStars and all sort of online casinos, so clearly a state gambling regulation is not sufficient. Now tell me why does that not cover Kalshi / Polymarket?

[–] JumpCrisscross 4 days ago

> why does that not cover Kalshi / Polymarket?

Because our regime is corrupt and bought [1]?

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/kalshi-re...

[–] stickfigure 5 days ago

Oh yeah, banning drugs has gone so well. What a great example.

[–] _vertigo 4 days ago

Evaluate the counterfactual

[–] QDwQ1 4 days ago

Yeah we should totally just sell heroin OTC at CVS. That would be much better for society overall

[–] scarecrowbob 4 days ago

Probably?

I have given out a certain of points and bubbles in my life under harm reduction programs. These efforts (which I've worked at but not been central to) have had a measurable and positive impact on syphilis rates in rural Colorado among a number of other metrics.

While I think it's not great folks use, the worst parts of many of these things are created by states sanctioning things. People mess their lives up all kinds of ways and creating a black market pretty much just changes the incentive structures. It just makes it more likely folks will do fent because that's what they can find, but if they can't find that they'll drink hand sanitizer.

Unless you think that these folks should kill themselves off using tainted drugs (which was a policy pursued by the US government during alcohol prohibition), then legalization program makes some sense.

Introducing a government monopoly on things like heroin would have a lot of up-sides with the downsides largely being slightly skewed versions what we have right now.

I don't think that marketing heroin in social media apps the way gambling does is a sane idea, but I also don't think gambling apps should be allowed to market themselves.

Like a lot of things, I believe having a government undercut the market for things would have a positive impact, but depending on your view of the relationship between the DEA and the CIA you might think that is already happening but in the worst of all possible ways,

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

Harm reduction is a double edged sword and should be assessed on the actual merits of the evidence - I am skeptical that legal heroin would be net mortality reducing.

There's already causal inference evidence out there indicating that needle exchange programs reduce rates of HIV and other bloodborne infections, but increase the risk of fatal overdose. If simply making fresh needles more accessible increases overdose rates, I suspect legalizing heroin would have a much larger effect.

[–] scarecrowbob 4 days ago

Harm reduction could be mortality neutral and still be an improvement on other metrics.

But I personally am not sure what the causal relationship between access "clean needles" and "fatally overdosing" is, though I would be interesting in hearing that account.

[–] stickfigure 4 days ago

I would expect consistent potency to lower accidental overdoses.

[–] mcmcmc 4 days ago

The Sacklers already did that (not quite OTC) with opioids

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

And it was bad, but it went from bad to terrible when they stopped getting their OTC opioids and had to switch to black markets.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

You used to - like a century ago - be able to buy things like cocaine and methamphetamine OTC at pharmacies and they were not as big of a problem as they are today. A lot of today's problems come from things outside the drug itself. Most overdose deaths, for example, come from the drug user being wrong about the amount they're injecting because their dealer lied to them, or didn't know themselves because their dealer's dealer's dealer changed supplier, and didn't notify those downstream because reliable communication is difficult because of the police.

[–] stickfigure 4 days ago

How do you know it wouldn't?

[–] QDwQ1 4 days ago

> hOw do You kNOw iT woUldn'T?

jfc this is just terminal contrarianism. do we really need to debate whether it's harmful for extremely addictive drugs to be widely available? the Chinese literally fought wars over this

[–] stickfigure 4 days ago

Extremely addictive drugs are already widely available. People at the lowest rungs of our society have very little difficulty obtaining them.

If we can create a situation where those people aren't breaking into cars, stripping the wire out of buildings, or dying in the street - that would be a net positive.

Prohibition has five decades of abject failure under its belt. Try something else.

[–] solyin 4 days ago

The War on Drugs people aren't actually serious. They think too small or are kids wanting to play with toys. Fighting the supply side gets you narco subs and secret passageways and cartels. Fighting the demand side with housing and jobs and hope for the future and families and therapy and happiness just doesn't look as cool on tv as rolling up with a SWAT team with GUNS mowing down bad guys.

[–] JumpCrisscross 4 days ago

> banning drugs has gone so well

Straw man. Nobody is calling for banning gambling nationally.

For hard drugs, the expert consensus around harm reduction is supervised injection. Casinos are, in one sense, supervised injection for gambling. Kalshi, on the other hand, is the local dealer selling fentanyl to teens [1].

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/polymarke...

[–] yfw 4 days ago

Because gambling has no externalities right?

[–] mcmcmc 4 days ago

Nobody is forcing anyone to do heroin either, but it’s also banned as dangerously addictive

[–] ApolloFortyNine 5 days ago

It does (or at least arguably should be) if you also want to have a social safety net.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

But they don't want a social safety net