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Posted by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

Addiction Markets(www.thebignewsletter.com)
391 points | 451 commentspage 3
TimByte 2 days ago|
What really struck me is how gambling has quietly become infrastructure. That's a deeply unsettling shift.
nextworddev 2 days ago||
Listen kids, your dopamine circuits are beyond screwed up already. All this is designed to aggregate capital… into crypto ecosystem
indolering 1 day ago||
> “21% of sports bettors say they’ve verbally abused an athlete, either in person or online, after losing money on a bet.”

This is exactly what it felt like to work in crypto.

gloryjulio 2 days ago||
There is a Chinese term called 'porn gambling drugs business'. And these businesses will always be lucrative
peer2pay 2 days ago||
Meanwhile Mr POTUS himself wants to introduce prop betting in his social media platform.

Don’t expect anything to change anytime soon

pavlov 2 days ago|
The president wants to let people gamble on election results on a platform he owns.

Which is a fun novel conflict of interest because he’s also ultimately the executive in charge of making sure national elections are properly conducted.

Since this is the direction America is going, why not have judges take bets on the outcome of trials? Would be a nice income stream for them, and it would save taxpayer money when judges don’t need to be paid anymore.

brap 2 days ago||
How about we treat people like adults?
jerednel 2 days ago||
Just ban advertising and let me gamble.
ToucanLoucan 3 days ago||
> A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling.

No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.

supportengineer 3 days ago|
>> addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay

The exact same argument could be used to make social media illegal.

skippyboxedhero 3 days ago|||
Hopefully, the responses to this have highlighted the kind of people you are dealing with.

No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves. Socialise the losses.

gassi 3 days ago|||
You can allow freedom of communication while restricting the algorithms that have poisoned an entire generation of children.

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2025/05/430011/yes-social-media-mi...

ToucanLoucan 2 days ago|||
> Hopefully, the responses to this have highlighted the kind of people you are dealing with.

You know I'm right here, if you have an actual rebuttal and not just dismissive hand-waving.

> No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves.

I think a lot of people would be measurably better off if not for social media that algorithmically fucks with their brains.

> Socialise the losses.

I mean that's kind of the point of a society yeah? We pool our efforts to enable greater labor specialization and to achieve things no individual can. Like an electrical grid or a highway system. And when parts of those systems break down, we all contribute a little to sorting them out.

ToucanLoucan 3 days ago||||
Fuck yeah let's do it.
immibis 3 days ago||||
...Good?
cyberax 3 days ago|||
You're saying it as if it's a bad thing.

Limiting social media to be only used for communication, and not algorithms is a good thing.

jjbigs 2 days ago||
It's quite reactionary to label betting as addiction markets. I see little reason to draw that corollary to other, often detested, vices.

To label such activity as a tax on the poor is nothing more than a euphemism. I understand what is being said by the verbiage "tax" in this context. Although no real tax is voluntary.

Labeling this as an issue that disproportionately affects poor is misleading. This is an issue for a few select individuals who make poor decisions. The correlation for poor decisions and lower disposable income is higher than the contrary.

Wealthy by all means have the ability to wager more than they can afford. Often times, they wager significantly higher than average income individuals; however, they stay within their means

econ 2 days ago|
We should do licenses for gambling that cap betting at some percentage of your income or wealth. For example: you earn 50k annually, you get to gamble 250 or 0.5%.
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