After bankruptcy, he was banned from sports betting sites. Then he found Kalshi (npr.org)

The problem about more-heavily taxed is that the gambling companies have spotted this and are registered in off shore tax havens.

Even without the addiction problem, a business that allows you to bet on anything happening in society is bound to be the largest vehicle for corruption in the history of mankind. This is a threat to democracy and stability that actually undermines our freedom. Prediction markets should never have been allowed to exist, and if the US is willing to protect this industry, the rest of the free world should sanction it out of existence.

Any law or regulation has a freedom activists group against it. That's normal, any government has an oppression mechanism that enforces it's will. The whole "civilization" was born when people started restricting somebody's freedom in order to achieve some goals (e.g. water rationing in the Ancient Nile).

So it's not surprising someone would be against restricting gambling. The hard part is to how the gov should do it. But it's not government's job to please every single person.

What does solving cancer mean? Stopping any and all mutations from happening? Seems like a pretty tall order.

I guess being able to scan each and every cell for the cancerous mutation is also a possible solution, but also a tall order.

There aren't too many places where you can order beer from Amazon.

Strange response, do you believe that society has always had access to online gambling, in the same way that alcohol and drugs have been around forever?

alcohol prohibition has always been difficult because it's so tied into food and social culture. Tobacco use has been extremely successfully restricted, harder drugs and gambling also remain prohibited in many countries.

You may not be aware of how rapidly and historically unprecedented gambling has spread in the US in the last few years. More than half of all men aged 18-49 participate in some form of online sports betting (https://futurism.com/future-society/men-aged-18-to-49-hooked...)

So where was this multi billion dollar industry before? This demand is highly elastic and new, which you cannot say about any of the others you mentioned.

Alcohol is older than recorded civilization, while online gambling has existed for about half of one human lifetime, and has been mainstream for less than a decade. We're watching the negative consequences play out in real time. This isn't prohibiting something innate to humanity; you could still go to a casino and gamble before DraftKings existed.

10 years ago I had some friends who were into online sports betting. It required getting a VPN, accessing European servers, signing up for sketchy websites, and linking an online bank account. It was enough hoops to jump through that the average person wouldn't bother. Back then I would have agreed with you: let the people play! But I'm only 33 and I've watched online gambling cripple peoples' lives in just the last few years. It's a huge problem and should be made illegal again.

"Solo Gambling" vs "Social Gambling"

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Maybe Kalshi doesn’t care about this, but if the goal is accurate predictions, prediction markets need someone to lose money to fund the sharps, or the markets won’t be big enough to be worthwhile.

In some traditional markets, a source of funding is investors who are hedging, essentially buying insurance.

KalshiEX, the platform, makes a bit more money from losers because they subsidize sophisticated winners through their market maker program.

Kalshi Trading LLC, the market maker which is fully owned by KalshiEX and has no independent online presence, makes money from losers in the same way as traditional gambling platforms. Kalshi's claims that this is an independent company are obviously absurd. (It's fair, I think, to say that the structure of the market limits their ability to make windfalls from severe mispricing.)