Don't let it take hold! They will absolutely dominate the political lobbying scene and you'll never get rid of it. Sports betting being allowed makes Australia's recent social media ban to U18s clear that the priority is to support traditional media rather than prevent harm to youth.
Sports betting ads and apps are everywhere in Australia with practically no restrictions. You cannot avoid it, every free to air channel is basically now sponsored by sports betting ads, every traditional newspaper is kept alive by sports betting ads and every second billboard and poster is for sports betting. Children are now exposed and normalised to it from birth.
Absolutely nothing is being done from a regulatory point of view. It enables traditional media and it seems traditional media still call the shots in Australia.
Gambling is one of the worst things and the unfettered spread of gambling is a attempt to further squeeze the middle class. A16z and YC should be shamed for investing in them but line goes up so who cares.
We had a deal. The US has to deal with awful prescription drug ads, and the UK has to deal with awful sports gambling adverts.
Legalized sports betting has broken the deal! Now we get the worst of both worlds.
>"Last month, Mansour, the C.E.O. of Kalshi, said that the “long-term vision” for the company “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
Sounds wonderful...
Legalized gambling is fine. It takes away a revenue stream from criminals.
Gambling advertising is an awful, terrible, no-good idea. Gambling is a zero-sum activity that doesn't increase productivity or happiness. There's no reason to create demand for it.
Gambling apps, or any kind of online gambling for that matter, is the same. Allowing online gambling is like piping whisky into every alcoholic's home.
Keep all gambling in meatspace. Don't allow it to be advertised.
I'm starting to feel like I'm living in some weird simulation...
It isn't just about the money or whether some corporation rakes in a few more dollars... It's about the way this stuff rewires people's brains. I read a piece about sports betting apps driving anxiety and depression in young men recently. And there was another report pointing out that kids as young as eleven are tempted to gamble when their favourite influencers promote betting codes...
These little hits of dopamine condition people early... It's not enough to say 'buyer beware' if the buyer is twelve. The normalization of gambling as just another entertainment product is insidious. I REALLY worry that we'll look back at this moment like we do with tobacco ads. People knew something was off, BUT it took decades for the laws to catch up.
ALSO the pressure for growth means the industry will keep pushing into new spaces... There are serious public health consequences here and some countries are starting to treat it like that. I hope we don't wait until the damage is everywhere before acting.
I didn't realize how bad it is until the Emmanuel Clase case. People are betting on niche stuff like "first pitch is ball or strike" and the volume is enough to make bribery profitable?
As sports betting became mainstream in the US, it was only a matter of time before major news networks joined the orbit. The problem is that betting partnerships pull journalism away from public-interest reporting and toward a monetized probability show. When information is framed as odds rather than insight, trust erodes. It’s one more step in turning newsrooms into promotional surfaces instead of watchdogs
Betting is an evil problem. Intellectual-level bets such as the bets on https://longbets.org/ and betting via the stock market feels very right. I think we should even encourage this kind of behavior to keep ourselves in-check and in-line with reality. Social gambling is some level below this, but society does not have a big problem with it in general. Where it becomes evil is gambling on random and very unpredictable events. At this low level, it should be heavily regulated due to addiction. Putting big money on lottery numbers, sports scores, and even the weather is downright addiction. Addiction is an evil thing. It certainly should not be left unchecked for biased news networks to experiment with.
Maybe I'm too liberal here, but I have no issues with betting/gambling being legal, though I think it should be somewhat regulated.
The only exception is betting on anything political or legal, because once you can take bets on those, you'll be incentivized to influence the result in the favor of your bet. And that will mess up the free markets and the free world of ideas and opinions, and seems like a problem for democracy.
Example mentioned recent Time Magazine Person of the Year ..which ended up being "Architects of AI". People bet on simply "AI" and are told that's incorrect....(debatable variation of meanings of course)... but it just seems so sketchy to me and crazy that anyone would get involved with this when the win/loss comes down to such slim arbitrary differences in language etc.
This feels like a nascent form of what Nick Land describes as "hyperstition" ... feedback loops where the presence of it's idea within peoples mind brings it into realization.
Worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition
Sports betting ads should be banned, full stop
I'm not sure at all if it is relevant because hardly anybody watches broadcast TV but I was thinking how the interactive features in ATSC 3 could be used to add on-screen sports gambling and that might be the only thing that motivates the industry to go down that road -- and of course news gambling is the same.
I'd pass a law that you can only lose in a year .1% of your current retirement savings (at which point you're cut off from gambling for the year). It may sound crazy to spend even a 10th of a % of your retirement on gambling, but that means if you have 1mm saved you can gamble $1k a year.
The line between betting, investing, and insurance is blurring. For example, if I want to hedge my exposure to tariffs on copper wire, I can now "bet" that new tariffs will be implemented on metals.
That's a good thing? But it opens up a Pandora's box of bad things, too.
Kalshi Reaches $11B Valuation as App Takes over America https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132609
Deregulation and the general decay of governance are the major drivers but it should also be pointed out that inequality is a huge driver of gambling. Charlie Munger had a whole speech once about how dumb poor people are for playing the lottery, but thats spoken like a true rich person - from the poor persons perspective, the lottery is one of the only realistic ways out of your current predicament, saving $5 a week will do nothing and just get eaten up elsewhere.
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/dmp0m
I'm not making any kind of statement as to whether or not these prediction markets should exist - but one thing that irritates me is a fundamental error people make when evaluating them. It seems like people conflate "25% of the money is on a yes outcome for xyz event" with "xyz event yes outcome is 25% likely."
It isn't. It's merely a measure of people's confidence in the event's outcome, and even if in aggregate people are 99.9% confident of something, they can be wrong (and often are). Yet often, when I get into debates about the likelihood of some event, people will often point to these markets as a refutation of the argument or in support of theirs. It probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does, because there's a lot of money to be made from delusion .
An associate recently racked up $300k in losses from sports betting. They are obviously struggling greatly now.
Has anyone else heard horror stories since sports betting became legal?
The general playbook in the US seems to be "do something that's bad for society but makes money, and eventually the people in charge will get enough FOMO that it'll be officially sanctioned as long as they get a cut".
Broadly speaking I'm a "whatever goes" kind of person. Don't regulate too much, let people do what they want. But this recent rise in gambling is making me feel like a censorious pastor or something. It's so obviously damaging. I don't even know that anyone was really asking for it. But there was money to be made, so of course it had to be legalized. And countless lives will be ruined.
One stat that gives me hope: young people aged 18-29, one of the prime targets for this gambling push, were asked if legalized betting is bad for society. In 2022 only 22% did, in 2025 41% do:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans...
The damage is clear, everyone sees it. Only question is whether anyone will actually do anything about it now that the cat is out of the bag.