(Controversial take) The way I look at it, let's say 20% of users are addicts and who will jump through any hoop they need to in order to gamble. Very difficult to help this group. Banning won't stop them from betting.

The other 80% probably aren't addicts. They're people who like placing a fun $20 now and then. Which is fine. But let's not accidentally turn them into addicts by gamifying every aspect of betting. It shouldn't be so easy. And it shouldn't feel like I'm playing a video game.

And we really don't need push notifications from Kalshi reminding us to place bets every single day. (Not an exaggeration, I'm currently getting daily push notifications)

I think this is a reprehensible industry with no upsides. I'm also against banning it, out of principle - who says I'm right when I say there are no upsides? But:

* any sort of advertising should be banned * it should be regulated so that excluding yourself actually works and is easy to do

Seeing 'official prediction market partner' on the news is something else <barf>

> The way I look at it, let's say 20% of users are addicts and who will jump through any hoop they need to in order to gamble. Very difficult to help this group. Banning won't stop them from betting.

I think this position is fundamentally incorrect. Banning gambling reduces the volume of money in gambling, making it hard to make big bets. You will never stop all gambling, but you can reduce how many people ruin their life with it.

The industry makes nearly all it's money from problem gamblers.

Know that these companies internally have models to predict how profitable you will be as a customer, so that they can best nudge those customers who are likely to be profitable.

This model is identical to if you trained a model explicitly to find problem gamblers. They are purposely building systems to find and exploit problem gamblers.

Because that is what the industry does. It finds and milks addicts. It is impossible for a for profit company to exist in this space and not somehow optimize towards finding and exploiting addicts. It's just more profitable. The people who drop a few hundred on a few hands of blackjack once a year cannot sustain an industry.

Extracting all possible wealth from 20% of the significant fraction of the population that plays has enormous negative consequences for all of society.

The only reason you don't ban gambling outright is that it's just too easy and straightforward to run an underground book, so it's a trivial market for organized crime to own. And that isn't good.

So you should have a state run institution that exists entirely to just barely serve the literal addicts, does absolutely nothing with the "income" (preferably just pays it all out, zero sum), and is rather unattractive to people who haven't gambled before. You make betting as boring as possible.

Those push notifications are tuned to trigger someone who might become a problem gambler. They are actively trying to get you addicted.