Why do the stores have the coin deposit if leaving the shopping cart, even if you circumvented the deposit, is morally more morally reprehensible than urinating in public?
> Is this a US phenomenon
Yeah, you can kind of do whatever you want here. It's sort of our thing
> Promoting cart return might be as simple as setting a new norm
Nobody who does this is not aware that returning the shopping card is the normal, expected, and 'right' behavior. There just isn't a moral hazard that prevents them from doing the wrong behavior.
I think there is a larger philosophical/moral question of WHY should someone do the 'right' thing in the absense of a moral hazard. It's something I've thought a lot about over the last couple of years.
As the 4chan Shopping car theory points out, the cost of leaving the cart is zero. And the benefit is the saved time/energy. Why shouldn't a rational self-optimizing person leave the cart there? Why shouldn't they hold the subway door open to catch the train? Why shouldn't they pull up the very front of the offramp and merge at the last second? Zero cost, all benefit.
I have a self-motto of 'do the right thing' in virtually anything I do. In those examples, I'd return the carts, wouldn't hold a train door open, and would miss an exit and turn around.
But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?
>But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?
You start to skip the little things in life and it creeps up into the big things. "Do I have to return the shopping cart?" "Do I have to cook tonight?" "Do I have to shower today?" "Do I have to acknowledge that chatty neighbor and instead just walk past him?".
When your care starts to slip about participating in society, you start to disassociate with society. And I think times like these are where we need to care more than ever about participating.
> But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?
If I try to dig in deeper for why I also feel that way, I guess it's not about coercion or fear of judgement/retribution. I just have an innate understanding that other people have their own lives, and I don't feel like it's worth it to do things that have a minuscule "benefit" for me while being a far outweighed drawback for multiple strangers. Even though it doesn't benefit me, it does benefit the community I'm in, and is one of many things that make the society I live in relatively nice.
Not returning the shopping cart saves a rounding error's worth of time, but now multiple car drivers are annoyed in a major way when shopping carts are rolling back and forth, ramming into parked cars or taking up empty parking spots. Employees now have to spend more of their time getting all the carts, sometimes in bad weather. Not worth it.
Holding the subway door saves several minutes for me, but makes the schedule tighter for the operator and forces hundreds of people to wait a few more seconds for me. This difference between my benefit and others' drawback isn't as drastic as the shopping carts, so the bar for me to do it is lower (I would probably do it if trains were >10 minutes apart). But it also has a sketchy feeling to it - I'd trust that the train will remain stopped, but the chance of you getting caught on the side of a moving train is >0%. It has happened many times before, especially in older systems.
I don't see what the benefit is for leaving a highway at the last possible second. If anything, this erratic behavior is unexpected and is more likely to lead to an accident. Not worth it, even discounting any feelings you have for other people.
> I don't see what the benefit is for leaving a highway at the last possible second. If anything, this erratic behavior is unexpected and is more likely to lead to an accident. Not worth it, even discounting any feelings you have for other people.
In large metro areas, exit lanes can be back up, usually because there is a light at the end of the exit. For instance, exit 32 on the BQE can backup to the point that you sit in the exit lane for 10+ minutes as batches of cars move through the intersection. To circumvent the wait, some people just pull up to the front of the exit lane and merge in and go through the next next batch of lights. A lot of people will try to prevent you from merging, but someone will always eventually let you through. It's called exit lane jumping. It's illegal but I highly doubt anyone gets pulled over for it.
Interesting! I've seen this happen a few times, though I've never witnessed something as extreme as a 10+ minute wait just for the off-ramp. I still maintain that it seems dangerous regardless of the situation, because while someone stops and tries to cut in line, the non-off-ramp lane they're stopped on can still keep moving, creating opportunities for collisions.
I think the issue is that the long-term decline in social trust—and the accompanying rise in surveillance, authoritarian enforcement, and costs/prices—happens too slowly for people to notice and associate with their own actions. If every time they left a cart out there was a new camera or scowling security officer on their next visit, they might notice and change their behavior. But as it is, they don’t notice their own contribution to the consequences that they so often complain about.
(Just so nobody misunderstands me, this is not to say that I want more cameras and security officers. Quite the opposite, which is why I don’t like casual antisocial behavior and petty crime.)
One explanation I've heard that resonates with me is that we subconsciously feel as if we're playing a more complex and less obvious version of the prisoner's dilemma.
We intuitively understand that society experiences the greatest collective benefit when people generally cooperate. We also understand that while defecting (i.e. behaving in a selfish and anti-social way) might benefit us more as individuals, that's only true so long as others aren't also defecting. If they do, not only is society worse off but you personally are worse off as well than if everybody cooperated. And we understand that personally defecting leads to others doing the same.
Leaving your cart randomly in the parking lot, holding the train door open, or cutting across traffic may optimize your personal outcome, but the more people who behave like you the worse your grocery store parking lot experience gets, the more delayed your train is, and the longer you're stuck in traffic.
The nuance here is that modern societies are large enough that you can buy into the idea that your personal behavior does not influence the behavior of others in a way that will come back around to bite you. In a large metro area, what is the probability that the driver you cut off will be in a position to cut you off tomorrow? Ignoring the fact that society is smaller than you think when you look at sub groups like people who regularly drive on a certain road at a certain time, you have to consider second and third order effects. If cutting people off in traffic leads to more people cutting each other off in traffic, the impact spreads until it could easily come back around to your personal traffic experience with a few degrees of separation.
Fundamentally I think rational self-optimizing people realize that shitty personal behavior leads if only in a small way to the overall enshitification of society and that sooner or later this will come back around to negatively impact them personally. The people who engage in such behavior anyways aren't more rationally self-optimizing, they're either too stupid to see the connection or nihilistic enough to not care.
I don't understand this (and I didn't understand the point in the post).
When we discuss someone's net worth, we are specifically discussing their assets less their liabilities. We use it primarily to distinguish their purchasing power and credit-worthiness.
It is not a metric that is attempting to define their worth as a person. What standardized metrics could you possible use to measure that, and for what purpose would you use that metric?
If you're filling out a mortgage application in a Nordic country, are these hypothetical underpaid women and minorities considered more credit worthy regardless of their net worth and income?
> It is not a metric that is attempting to define their worth as a person.
You may not read it that way, but when you've never encountered the question before, the first time you see it being asked in the first place, it's comes across, not as an innocent question on a form that's just a reasonable part of a big process, but as a confrontation of a foreign culture that you've read and heard a lot about your whole life, only to be confronted by in that moment: What are you worth as a person?
That's not a common question to get asked. Okay, fine, the questionnaire is only asking as a business process thing, but the estimate is at about $10 million when broken down for parts, but at the point where someone's asking that question in the first place, you have to ask why are they asking?
Which you also point out,
> for what purpose would you use that metric?
The difference between worth and net worth is only one word, but like "guys" and "you guys", that one word makes a world of difference.
How would you define someone's worth as a person? It's because we don't talk about that at all, that even the question of net worth in the first place comes across as having a slight whiff of eugenics, because we have no other standardized measurements. Net worth is the only evaluation of how much any given individual a human is worth that has a magazine for it and list of all the high scores.
This doesn't seem to reflect the whole story or the gparent post about the word choice of "worth" instead of something closer to what you're describing. Trying to twist the point into credit risk also doesn't fit here.
To paraphrase gp, they found it shocking to have the word for a persons value to be the word used when describing how much money they have access to.
I've personally heard many people many times describe money and income as a way to measure either someone's value to society or how much society values them. This is very much in line with the gp - why would wealth have anything to do with your value as a person.
> “It is not a metric that is attempting to define their worth as a person.”
Yet that’s literally the word being used.
Imagine if a language called men “the better sex.” One could argue that it’s just a word and people don’t take it for its literal meaning. But you’d wonder why people go along with that. Don’t they notice what they’re saying? That’s the feeling I got from “person X is worth $Y” back when I first heard it.
Net worth is purely about assets minus liability. “How many dollars are attached to your tax identity and how many dollars of stuff can be taxed”
It has zero to do with the value of the the life of a person. You can conflate the two if you’d like, you’re picking on shortcut verbiage so we don’t say a paragraph of disclaimer text before talking about net worth.
I’m not conflating the two. I’m describing my experience encountering a culture that uses “worth” to mean the sum of a person’s material possessions. My own cultural background had primed me to think of these as entirely unrelated concepts.
You can argue it’s just a word, and that’s fine. There’s a whole another philosophical argument about if / how much words affect beliefs and actions.
One can be very wealthy and have zero net worth. Wealthy in family, security, etc. The net wealth of a toddler in perfect living conditions is almost infinite. Their net worth however, is 0.
> Generally, someone’s wealth level can be inferred from their net worth.
> But also, “assets minus liabilities” offers some large shadows to hide behind.
> So a better quantity to measure would be: the amount of money someone could bring to bear on a problem if they had to. If someone they loved fell deathly ill, but the treatment would cost some large amount of money, how much could they pull together in a month or two? How much could they borrow, and from whom, and on what terms?
The following breakdowns are largely just people's net worth (assets minus liabilities) with the credit they can tap because of their assets.
Not sure I entirely understand the point. Yeah, people with assets are generally more credit-worthy and can tap lines of credit.
One of the main points of Mag World is that different orders of magnitude are qualitatively different. Yes, of course, with more assets you can get more credit. But the types of credit are so different as to be incomparable. At ^2 wealth, without greater wealth around you, you probably can only get a usurious payday loan. At ^5 wealth you can take out a HELOC against property you hold title to. At ^10 wealth, a person can apparently buy and control a social media platform, without even "spending" any of their own money!
As they say, quantity has a quality all of its own.
The problem with this analysis is that at the lower levels the relationship breaks down completely. There is a large cohort with a zero or negative net worth that also has plenty of income, and therefore credit access. e.g. I have a family member who is ↑-5 Wealth by your scale who just bought a $700K house earlier this year.
At the very beginning of the article, the author immediately states that they're not using raw net worth (and explains why they chose to do so). The actual metric is
> the amount of money someone could bring to bear on a problem if they had to. If someone they loved fell deathly ill, but the treatment would cost some large amount of money, how much could they pull together in a month or two?
> The following breakdowns are largely just people's net worth (assets minus liabilities) with the credit they can tap because of their assets.
> Not sure I entirely understand the point. Yeah, people with assets are generally more credit-worthy and can tap lines of credit.
Liquidity is a useful concept to think about when evaluating your risk levels. Having 500k in stocks is different than 500k in your primary residence. Same net worth but if you need to tap into 500k of stock, you can do that tomorrow. Liquidating your primary residence takes a few weeks (or months) and you’re then homeless.
I think that’s what this article is getting at. Net worth + resilience to risk. You can take bigger bets (with higher rewards) when your risk is losing some paper money vs your car or house.
edit for everyone suggesting helocs: yes you can also take a margin loan against stocks. This lowers your net worth and is a great choice if you expect inflows to continue or come back soon. It is not a good choice in all scenarios. Again back to different risk profiles :)
> Liquidity is a useful concept to think about when evaluating your risk levels. Having 500k in stocks is different than 500k in your primary residence. Same net worth but if you need to tap into 500k of stock, you can do that tomorrow. Liquidating your primary residence takes a few weeks (or months) and you’re then homeless.
This is well said and the main reason why when calculating if someone is an accredited investor they always exclude the value/equity of a person's primary residence.
Someone who is renting but has a large pile of cash is in a better position to repay than someone who has their equity in their home as selling equites vs selling their primary home have far different stresses on the person, all other things being equal.
Liquidity can be broken down further into volume profile and net proceeds.
1) There is a good likelihood that a house and a stock portfolio can both be sold tomorrow, no problem. But you may have to offload the house at “fire sale” prices , vastly lower than the price it would bear if you had it on offer for 30+ days.
2) T-bills and stocks can both be sold tomorrow, but if your stocks have cap gains then the net proceeds after tax are going to be much lower from the sale of stocks than the t-bills.
These are some of the ways “paper gains” and “market price” fundamentally lie to you (irrespective of bubbles etc), that are seldom broken down in too much depth in personal financial discussions.
——
Another dimension that is missing is financial freedom. The author says:
> These wealth levels have existed throughout human history, even though the unit of currency changes.
↑-1 Wealth: Destitute (less than $3)
At the bottom-most level, a person can’t even scrape together a few bucks for some food. Societal services aren’t accessible unless they are completely free. Finding a toilet and shower may be difficult. They have no possessions; their shoes and coat are probably decrepit and dirty.
Hard disagree here. An indentured servant in the 17th century, with a negative net worth, might have a very decent standard of living. Nice shoes, coat, bountiful table, etc. But they are not free to leave the land and move somewhere else. They are not free to pick up a different occupation.
It sounds like you may simply be misinterpreting or assigning different values to wealth levels than the author?
There were unquestionably many people in the 17th century who fit the description there. Just because you can come up with an example of someone who might plausibly fit the basic "has negative personal net worth" criterion who doesn't fit the rest of it doesn't refute that.
>> Having 500k in stocks is different than 500k in your primary residence. Same net worth but if you need to tap into 500k of stock, you can do that tomorrow. Liquidating your primary residence takes a few weeks (or months) and you’re then homeless.
I have a HELOC. I've never used it. Hopefully I won't need to, but it was free to apply for and a good thing to have in case you do need it. I can tap into about 50% of my house's value any time I want instantly by writing a check or transferring money to one of my other accounts.
I am not even close to the richest of the richest but I have done this before when I needed to use the cash but didn't want to trigger a capital gain from actually selling the stock.
It is a slightly more complex trade using both available margin and a stock option which effectively results in the "interest" showing up as a capital loss, and helped keep the risk minimal of actually being forced to sell. When the transaction was all done, then I sold enough of the stock to have a capital gain to offset the capital loss.
The purpose? Moving very quickly to buy a property which required 10% of the purchase price in cash on a specific day (buying property at auction). The auction house offered to "wait to deposit the cheque" until a Tuesday for an auction on a Saturday... which coincidentally is how many days it takes a cash-out transaction from a brokerage account to clear, after making the trades at market-open on a Monday morning. We showed the auction house the brokerage account and the trades (which they were not unfamiliar with) and they were quite agreeable to sit on the cheque until the funds cleared.
All entirely legal, and all why savvy 4's, most 5's, and every single 6 are able to use their wealth to acquire property whereas the 3's and below are perpetually mired in poverty, despite working very, very hard.
Most brokerages will offer you a margin loan if you have say $100k of stocks held through them. Not pocket change, but easily available to magnitudes 4-5 on this scale.
Mainstream brokerages will do this starting at $2,000. You just apply for margin and take out the cash. Of course if the value of your stocks drops below $2,000, they will start selling stocks out from underneath you and triggering capital gains.
The real use of margin is that it enables the holder of the stocks to use them with the broker to take on cash obligations in the form of other stock options, or to take on obligations which require holding certain shares which create cash, such as a short call option.
The interest rates often make those unattractive. You also expose yourself to the risk of a margin call with its many implications. It isn’t something the average person should be doing casually.
> The interest rates often make those unattractive. You also expose yourself to the risk of a margin call with its many implications
FWIW my brokerage gives me a margin loan at 4.9% up to 30% of the portfolio. The interest is literally lower than the mortgages I see advertised these days.
IBKR will loan you vs your stocks at a cheaper rate than pretty much any place will for a heloc on your house. Not like a lot cheaper, but maybe 0.5%-1% cheaper if you have <<$1M, and a little better at higher amounts.
Most other brokers, even Schwab and Fidelity, will not.
Agree it's probably not a good idea for most people. (I might argue the same for a heloc, depending on what for, what emergency savings, what level of job security, etc)
I was unable to use a HELOC to pay for renovation costs. The banks wanted basically the same assurances as you'd need with a conforming mortgage. I had investment assets several times the loan amount, and a fully paid off house. I ended up having to go private money at a higher cost in order to not liquidate more investments than I wanted to.
Liquidity matters. Net worth is a notional value in most cases. Without an extremely liquid market it will not be realizable. There can be very large gaps between notional value and realizable value.
A non-liquid asset may effectively be unusable as a security for credit, which is the point being raised. You can have a large net worth on paper and literally no way to leverage those assets into cash should the need arise. In financial economics this is commonly called a "liquidity crunch"[0].
I recently read somewhere that in the US something like two-thirds of assets are non-liquid. Startup founders should understand this pretty intuitively.
Can't you borrow against relatively illiquid assets though? Like a house? It's only when you max out the line on those that you might hit a liquidity crunch
A house is a liquid asset outside of rare cases e.g. towns that have been severely hollowed out.
Non-liquid assets are typically small businesses or physical assets with no market. This can be because there are no buyers e.g. there are some asset markets where there might be a single transaction per decade on average. This can also be because there are contractual or statutory restriction on salability, which often extend to use of the asset as a security for credit purposes.
Another common reason is that the value of the asset is inextricably connected to who owns it. Selling the asset doesn't convey the value because that value is conditional on the current owner owning it, rendering it nearly worthless unless it is never liquidated.
> So Tesla is charging $8000 to activate full safety software features in their vehicles?
I think you're being obtuse, but to be clear, many car manufacturers offer trims don't include features that would qualify making the car 'safer' - blind spot detection, back up cameras (I think these are legally required now but were a premium feature for over a decade), parking assistance, crash detection, etc.
I have a Tesla and use FSD every day, and while it is a safety feature, it is _the_ pinnacle 'luxury' feature that a car can have today and they honestly do not charge enough for it.
Well, I think that is also morally reprehensible in all other cases where it's also a matter of activating software safety features.
Most of the things you mentioned aren't software locked behind a paywall, hopefully, you don't swipe your credit card and get those features added via OTA in minutes. If your car doesn't have back seat airbags it's hopefully not because you haven't paid for the back seat airbag in-app purchase.
Okay you are correct. If they are going to market FSD as a safety feature and it's just a software update, they need to include it by default and adjust their price.
I didn't realize how much they market it as a safety feature.
> but I'm of the opinion that CEO's don't do a whole lot.
Rather, you just don't understand what CEOs in large public companies actually do. You're comparing them to earlier stage CEOs, who can be more hands on.
When running a public company of a quarter million people, the CEO's responsibility starts to look more like an asset manager responsible for a $4 trillion dollar book.
And no - nobody wants that role replaced by an LLM.
Just invest in a reasonably diverse index fund ( or a few). This is actually the optimal drama free way to go for most.
In the long run nobody out performs consistently anyway. We all get hit due to market events.
You may be giving CEOs much more credit than is due. And for all that they actually do, the outperformer is a rarity not the norm.
LLM could certainly fit this. Particularly when trained with all the MBA nonsense education in the world. It wouldn’t be the end of the world and it wouldn’t be substantially better/worse. But it would be cheaper.
I'm sorry, I must be missing something. Which companies make up the index funds if (most) CEOs liquidated their companies and invested in index funds? And how would they liquidate at anything close to their valuation without being priced based on their future expectations?
I don’t think they meant it literally. They were responding to the comment that their job was “like” managing a portfolio of investments. And in that respect the strategy of diversifying “like” with an index fund seemingly appealed to the commenter.
> Looking to make it to the front page of HackerNews?
Nailed it. I read the original post earlier this week and was very impressed with its technical detail. But the point of the the post was incongruent with the post's title. But the post got way more attention because of that title.
But if you think about the effort it took to write that post, the title was a really good bet on ROI.
Has society ever addressed an underlying psychological problem successfully?
Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.
Do all of these occur with equal proportion in every country/culture?
I am not sure what you are saying with homelessness...it isn't some massive baffling issue, someone who doesn't have a house, needs a house so build a house? School shootings...I don't understand how anyone can believe this is normal?
The US has fairly obvious social problems, these essentially inhibit the functional resolution of most of these problems you list. However, gambling is not like this, the solution to problem gambling is (obviously) regulating gambling so that it is possible for the government to control people's behaviour. Simple.
Homelessness? Build houses. Drug addiction? Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing. School shootings? No guns. Violent extremism? Jail. These aren't real problems. Most of the world does not have issues with this stuff (I will accept through drug usage in the US appears to be so ingrained in culture, that it would never be possible for anyone to do anything to fix it...the solutions are known however). It is only over the last ten years or so where government has appeared totally unable to do anything because of paralyzing social discord.
It's a classic way of sweeping problems under the rug. Imagine you're a cynical politician.
A school shooting happens. You don't want to ban guns. So you say "switzerland doesn't have this problem, we need to address the mental health issues that are driving these young men to kill" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing - which is what you wanted to begin with.
There are lots of rough sleepers. You don't want to build more houses. So you say "many homeless people are estranged from their support network by mental health issues and addiction, we need to address this underlying cause" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing.
I'd rather we actually deal with the issues causing these things than sweep them under the rug and pretend like it's an actual solution.
> Build houses.
That doesn't solve homelessness, as we build many houses in America but they aren't being filled with the homeless. You need to apply social services in a complex systematic approach to provide housing that people can afford sustainably, and rehabilitate and integrate people into society. You might think that is a bit of a bad faith "gotcha" like, of course you have to make the housing free and ensure homeless people know it's available. But it's not a small detail to elide, even in context, and doing so is exactly why your thinking is off-base. You haven't even begun to unpack it properly, putting aside the falsehoods. Think about it, what do you do if someone doesn't want to accept the housing for complex reasons like pride or embarrassment? What if it's some crust punk kid riding suicide as a rite of passage? You have to deal with a lot of that! You can't just ignore it!
> Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing.
Punitive measures have proven to be a complete and total failure globally. Even in Asia, where penalties on all sides of the drug trade are high, drug usage is very easy to find and rising. I say this as someone connected to Asia and with a fair amount of "street smarts" that some seem to lack. Japan and Korea don't even try to hide it anymore. Chinese cities are kept clean through a complex system of travel controls and consistent policing to sweep things under the rug. It's easy to score if you pass as Chinese outside of the tier 1 and 2 cities though. Even Saudi Arabia is flooded with black market drugs if you know where to look. Punitive measures empirically do not work.
> Violent extremism? Jail
Where is that not the case? Like what are you talking about? Do you know how common attempted domestic terrorism was against the US power grid and cell towers in 2020/2021? No, you don't. Almost nobody does, and certainly nobody has an exact number. That's because it was kept very quiet and the thousands of incidents were suppressed from the media cycle while the people involved were quietly thrown into the maximum security incarceration hole never to be seen again.
The person you're replying to is right. These issues are solved, and it means looking at why people want to do any of this to begin with and addressing that. You cut it off at the behavioral source. Think of it like this, do you check every pointer before you dereference it? No. You avoid bad pointer dereferences primarily through proper structure of your code.
You almost tap into this with being cognizant of the fact that it's not universal. It depends greatly on the country and culture. Because some countries and cultures have done a much better job at building worthwhile, healthy societies than others.
Yes, building houses actually solves homelessness. Housing prices are the best predictor of homelessness and of course increasing supply of a good decreases its price. Why does the law of supply and demand not apply to housing? Sometimes the solution is very very simple and not at all complicated. Just build more.
> Why does the law of supply and demand not apply to housing?
Who said it doesn't? How well do you understand the law of supply and demand when you don't know what a price floor is? Ignoring that, do you think someone on the street can afford even a $1000 home? That's before we set aside that this of course only works if the houses being built are being done in a way that actively encourages prices to go down, rather than feed real estate speculation and continue to float a culture that sees a home as a capital asset.
So no. Building houses alone does not solve homelessness, again as evidenced by the fact that houses are built all the time in America, and homelessness is not getting better. How did you miss that?
I'm not aware of any good reading material on it, and that's probably intentional. The FERC mentions the rise in power grid attacks somewhat in their annual report of 2023[1]. The incidents are underreported officially, and don't include police/FBI raids intercepting conspiracies, nor do they include the wave of attacks on cell towers. I only know about it because I spent quarantine in a community that had a nationwide dragnet of scanners listening exclusively for this stuff.
Absolutely. A lot of it is upsettingly simple; make a given population wealthy, well-educated, with a strong community and you will slash rates of these issues tenfold. My home state of New Hampshire is one of the wealthiest, best-educated states in the US and despite easy access to tons of dangers (unlimited gun access, some of the cheapest vodka prices in the Western world, legal gambling, et cetera) we have low rates of the associated disorders. The NH homicide rate is on par with much of Europe, for example, nearly unheard of for a US state.
Housing prices are the strongest predictor of homelessness. Therefore, homelessness is not a moral failure of homeless individuals but of the NIMBY vetocracy that is the housing market.
I'm an optimist at heart, but this subject is dear to me, and my opinion may seem pessimistic: the short answer is, no, it cannot be fixed at any large scale, at least not in a lifetime.
Large-scale societal change requires generations of work, indeed. That may be disheartening, but it is the way it is, and we should continue to work toward those changes.
Vaping is counteracting that somewhat. (There's the perception among many kids that vaping is deeply uncool – and they'd be correct – but that's not something we can rely on.)
Yep. Generational memory is short. Eventually our kids or our kids kids will try whatever smoking’s been rebranded to just to spite the adults. And the cycle begins anew.
These gambling businesses specifically target that 25M. You absolutely can make that much harder for businesses to do, and it will significantly reduce downstream misery.
This is the logic behind the war on drugs and we all saw how that turned out. Obviously there's nuance to be had as I think some vices, in both type and magnitude, are worse/more destructive than others. But crusades against vice rarely turn out well. Instead you'll see the same people huddled around in underground betting rooms and backroom card game tables where organized crime or just other muscle-for-hire are ready to break your knees for not paying your debt back.
Using ideologically charged words like "corporate gambling" and "neoliberal origins" are fun ways to get the moral outrage going of market skeptics but they don't lead to good policy.
The boring answer is you need to look at how the owner of these instruments (since that's what most of these are) are making money. In the same way that a regulated exchange makes sure you're not dumping garbage onto order books, you need to make sure that the bets are fair and that there's generally positive EV. Prediction markets are a good example of this that isn't predatory but sports books are. Unfortunately this article, as is usual for most of the moral outrage genre, doesn't make this distinction.
Dude, the war on gambling was going fine before it was legalized nationwide like 2 years ago. We don't have to have long memories to remember a time before omnipresent sports betting! It was fine!
Sports betting is only one form of gambling, so I have no idea what you're talking about. This article, like your post it seems, is conflating the two and mixing in vague assertions of corporations and whatnot to add a layer of emotion that serves more to manipulate than to elucidate.
There's always been gambling in my lifetime. There's been legal ones like Indian Casinos and Vegas. Then there's been the below board ones, the private blackjack games, the mahjong parlors in shady parts of town, lottery players (it's okay if the government profits off the losers I guess lol), etc
If this article were talking about banning sports books and adding in regulation around retail betting then sure that would be a fun discussion. But hyperbole like the article and your copious use of exclamation points doesn't inspire confidence.
That's not what the article and a lot of commenters here are saying though. The article makes vague insinuations about "corporate gambling".
If you're just targeting sports books I think other than the folks making money from the industry, you'll find few fans. They offer predatory parlays with often outright negative EV or very high variance returns. They kick sophisticated money out they can find edges. They leave no room for above board players like market makers providing liquidity through efficiency.
I think a better article and discussion could emerge from just tackling the harms of sports books.
I would entertain the possibility that there are at least some who cannot or will not avoid that kind of destructive behavior. The only thing you can do for them is deny access. I know that nobody asked for a lecture on 12 step, but number one is an admission that you do not have control.
Do you enable the majority who can manage risk, knowing some will be destroyed by it or deny it to everyone to protect the minority who can’t?
I believe there are studies which show men are more likely to have problems with sports betting, but women are with slot machines. My anecdotal evidence (and it's bordering on statistically significant...) is that these studies are correct.
In 30 years they'll be a huge liability for the state. In the past, they used to send them to meat grinders (wars). Somehow later it was figured out that a mandatory cut of their paycheck will give them a small payment later in their retirement years. But now that social security is broken (both in the US and Europe) and short-term thinking is the norm, every "business men" is salivating at the opportunity.
In a couple decades, they'll be a massive drag on society and could even collapse countries. France is kind of a good example of how that future will look like.
> These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.
You should address that too, but gambling is frankly a parasitic business meant to exploit such people, and we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good by avoiding the re-abolishment of such a pernicious industry.
sure, and that should be addressed. But in the meantime, we shouldn't be making it easier for them to engage in that behavior and we shouldn't be making it easier for people to encounter industrialized gambling for the first time who would otherwise find the process too laborious to seek out on a whim.
This would infuriate me. You have to index that guid to something yourself. Why wouldn't you at least give yourself some help (your name, issue number, type of change, area of project, etc). Why make your job harder than it needs to be?
> Is this a US phenomenon
Yeah, you can kind of do whatever you want here. It's sort of our thing
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