I mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though. It may actually be more beneficial to allow these things more broadly, because then social safety features can be wedged in between consumers and suppliers more easily and they don't have to deal with a gigantic shadow market that already gets stigmatised to death by the rest of the population. Just accept that a certain percentage of the populations has screwed up dopamine households and try to keep them away from gangsters as best you can. That would probably help society as a whole more than banning everything and pretending the problem goes away if you close your eyes.

I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves; to try to get them changed. Civil disobedience is a long standing practice. However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc. Just because _you_ think the law isn't just doesn't mean it's not a law - it just means you think it should be changed.

And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.

If you can figure out a Gig Economy way to get robot/remote/AI pilots into airline cockpits, you will make a mint. "What? I can save ten bucks on airfare if I accept a robot pilot? GIVE ME THAT TICKET"

A mint we will then need to spend on bribes to ALPA. DoT is almost entirely captured now, so that's less of a problem.

In fact, here's a much better get-rich app / scheme: use AI to find regulatory situations that are both easy to break and profitable to break and where enforcement is usually just done to poor people. The Ubermaker. Why dig a gold mine when you can sell the shovels.

There is a stigma with all of those things except maybe pharmaceuticals (unless you are selling opioids), sugar and junk food (because of their ubiquity).

The line is clear for some people right away. Other people have to see the effects first hand. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and the never-ending line of obviously poor people dropping nearly their entire paychecks on scratchoffs, then buying a case of beer was a formative memory for me. It most states, the lottery is just subsidizing the cost of education on the backs of the poor and uneducated and gambling-addicted so that they don't have to raise property taxes. And that's if the money actually gets spent on education. Sometimes they just turn into slushfunds for pet projects. It's gross.

Honest question, why isn't the line so clear for you?

We're talking about a product built to make people's lives worse while extracting wealth from them that get them addicted as well.

Not the original person you replied to, but as far as I'm concerned there are a few questions that could very easily indicate which side of the line is something.

E.g.

- Is it addictive?

- Does it have the potential to destroy lives?

- Does it have the potential to destroy lives in seconds?

- Does it have a strong lobbying mechanism behind it? (n.b. things that are good and nice rarely need someone to bribe people to accept them)

or simply:

- Would you be worried if your child did it?

I think the number of "yes" that you get draws a very clear line.

Just because there's a spectrum doesn't mean that everything on it is indistinguishable. Everybody draws their own lines, some people count more or fewer things as stigmata, some people's lines are fuzzier than others.

No single person can draw that line, that's what Courts and Laws are for. And some of the industries play more dirty and try to manipulate that due process, others failed.

But that's what we have, it's never black & white. Always a process and always evolving.

I live in New York. A very old very famous manufacturer of firearms, Remington Arms, which employed hundreds of people and was the economic engine of its community was forced by the State of New York to shut down. That community cannot replace what was lost when the factory closed. Poverty, crime, drugs have moved in to the void.

You may be right that guns are are corrosive to a democratic society, that's an open debate. But the people who depended on that factory had the rug pulled and real harm was done without any regard to their welfare. And not everyone who depended on the factory worked there, deli owners and dry cleaners, these types of legitimate businesses are damaged when a major employer closes doors.

I suppose I relate this story to you just to show that, there are other people who think like you, guns are stigmatized, and it has a real human cost. We should not be flippant with our neighbor's well being, because we can't predict the turns of fate, one day it might be our turn.

Unlicensed casinos and betting apps harm others.

Always keep 900 for emergencies.