Also what about SpaceX, Meta and Google? They are clearly still in the game. They are all ahead of Mistral.

No one prevented other people from running their own AT&T phone company in the US. Except the lack of capital, and endless regulations with running telephone polls across the US.

Google even tried more recently to run their own fiber optics and gave up in the end because of entrenched regulations making it impossible to challenge the modern monopolies internet providers have.

It is not, even really stretching the definition, a state sanctioned monopoly.

This is a joke right?

Mix together whatever you want, and then you can fight the feds when they show up to enforce their monopoly.

People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.

Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?

I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.

Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?

Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad?

Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?

The difference between drugs and other addictions is that (certain) drugs greatly increase the risk of death.

So I say let's divide it in two - addictions that can kill you or leave you in financial ruin in a single evening, and those that cannot.

There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.

Also you seem to want to define whether a hobby/form of entertainment is moral or immoral based on how expensive it is. So if a slot machine had a lower max bet it would become moral?

What's a "TV shopping network addiction"? I tried searching it, and I can only find isolated news articles from 5-15 years ago that report on it purely because of how unusual this is. Going to file this under 'people can get behaviorally addicted to anything', what a strange example. Do you even know anyone who has bought anything from a TV shopping network, let alone a 'significant number' that are left destitute?

The reason why people disagree with you is because the hair-splitting between different types of addictions seems very pedantic. Clearly people think that gambling addiction is not even on the same scale of addiction than the other examples. If F2P games are cocaine, then gambling is heroin. There is a reason why gambling is taking over Western economies so rapidly, but not any of those other things - it's just too good at exploiting people's brains. So when gambling addiction is so potent that it goes off the chart compared to any of the dozens of other things that can be psychologically addictive, people aren't particularly interested in finding the exact point where it's too much for society to bear - they just know that gambling is far beyond that point.

I'm not splitting hairs. It seems like we are just talking about outlawing things if we decide too large a % of the population engages with something in a problematic way.

This is certainly pragmatic, but not a framework based on morality or freedom. We're just being a nanny state forbidding the vast majority of people from doing something because a small minority of people don't have self control.

Maybe that sounds harsh, but it is accurate.

I'd prefer people were honest about it instead of trying to wrap it in the clothing of morality, when it has nothing to do with any kind of morality that makes sense.

Most people feel this is deeply wrong at a gut level and I agree with them. Targeting and squeezing addicts is not moral behaviour.

Which is a whole lot like saying your preferences are legal and if you don't like something you can arbitrarily make it illegal because you dislike it and therefore it is immoral. That kind of rationale could be used to ban television or videogames outright.

So if they didn't keep those dossiers would that make them an ethical sports gambling company even if a high percentage of their users showed problematic usage patterns?

People can’t get addicted to practically any type of entertainment. There is a range of susceptibility to gambling, amongst “people”.

We have an extensive range of rules and regulations that apply to gambling, and to things that have odds and payout schedules.

It took a while, but eventually lootboxes in games were recognized as a blight, and regulation is addressing their impact.

Generalizing entertainment from gambling is a huge stretch.

People engage with social media in an addictive manner every day. People sit around watching tv for 5+ hours a day. People do the same with videogames.

There are even people who cluster themselves away reading books in a way that is harmful to their lives and well being.

The only reason we recognize gambling is because the impact is so much more intense and visibly harmful.

All of these things are addictions though, so is qanon and conspiracy rabbit holes and those do have serious and rapid effects, and even that gets a pass.

You can see serious addictions in tons of people, even workaholics, and we just look the other way because it is less immediately harmful to society. Not because any of these addictions are more or less immoral.

Gambling rides on the same pathways that make substances fucking with dopaminergic system addictive.

It's not "addictive", it's addictive.

They don't get physically ill if they stop gambling to the point of needing hospitalization for the extreme pain it causes.

They don't have to gamble even when they don't want to in order to stave off getting very sick.

medications that are addictive for real vs really wanting to play a game and feeling the dopamine urge....

They aren't the same thing at all, because one of them is something you want to do, and one of them is something you maybe don't want to do but you need to do it because the consequences of not doing it are so extreme.

There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.

Also I'm not sure it is correct to define morality by trying to connect how expensive a hobby/form of entertainment to whether it is immoral.

We have an entire science built around gambling, and we know how to titrate the payoffs and reward schedules to get people increasingly addicted.

Our movies/stories aren’t actively (yet) changing themselves to maximize their ability to keep you pressing coins into a slot, or when to string you along.

But is that because you're betting at the repair shop to pull a mint condition replacement engine for your plane, or because people find a way in by paying a bearable upfront cost and then find themselves drowning in unexpected additional expenses associated with these hobbies far beyond the price of a boat or plane? To me it seems like the second one, so it's not a very useful comparison to gambling, it's just a lack of knowledge, foresight and financial literacy.

The gambling industry keeps refining their strategies all the time, new technologies have been a godsend to them. So I wouldn't rely on statistics all too much, because their goal is to use all psychological tricks that can be exploited in our brains to make us make the wrong decision and head down that path. Their effectiveness increases, and so are the depths to which they can get people to sink in their addictions. If you can engage with it safely right now, that is no predictor of how you'll react to the state of gambling in 3, 5 or 10 years. It's like as if the alcohol industry was allowed to invent brand new drugs and sell them without any oversight, targeting maximum potency and addiction and constantly refining their formulations.

No, you probably won’t get anyone to admit to that here.

There's a super easy line to draw actually and it has nothing to do with art

Are you selling a product or an experience?

If you're talking about someone addicted to fantasy novels or video games, they are addicted to products.

If you're talking about someone addicted to opening Magic the Gathering booster packs, or videogame loot boxes, or sports gambling, or prediction markets, they are addicted to experiences. In the case of loot boxes they are experiences shaped like products but the addiction is about the experience of opening the box, not really whatever is inside

So.. easier than you seem to think

Of course once lawyers get involved they'll quibble over this shit until the sun goes out

If you paid for world of warcraft by the hour does that change if it is an experience or a product?

This doesn't really work because products and experiences have too much overlap.

What you are really against I think is the different ways in which we are gift wrapping a skinner box, but there are an infinite number of ways to wrap it that will bypass your specification system.

Which will matter to no one except lawyers

When most people smell shit they don't care if it's rat shit or cat shit, they just know it smells bad

Does the prompter sit there with the llm all day answering the 1000s of questions necessary to make what he wanted, and the prompter then spent days testing it to make sure what he initially thought he wanted is actually what he wanted?

Then for every additional feature and integration the prompter will do this again?

Are we going to make a new job title for that? Should we call that job a programmer?

Tools are tools. Better tools let us do more faster, but they are still tools.

Works for me! The most popular programming languages in 2030 will be English and Mandarin. You don't have to like it, you just have to deal with it.

There are people who play video games to excess or watch tv to excess and it is harmful to them, but that really needs to be balanced against the vast majority of users that exercise reasonable restraint. Its just not a fair justification to ban things that 99.9%+ of users are about to operate responsibly.

Secondly, let's take this out of percentages: That 60%-ish slice is 150 million people, so your conservative 5% number of people who will have problems amounts to 7.5 million people. So like, if you were being a bit hyperbolic but not terribly, you could say your fun hobby of gambling which you do responsibly, is still responsible for 7.5 million people's addiction. Which I agree isn't a reason to BAN it, but I would say is a reason to, I dunno, not make it so you can do it on your phone? Which was the status quo for the majority of the time we've had smartphones. Like a major deterrent to sports gambling being addictive, even where it's permitted, was that you had to actually go to a bookie's and place bets, and collect your winnings there, not just sit on your sofa doing it on your phone.

Thirdly if you want to expand this into video games, I think addiction there is pretty problematic too, and has gotten substantially worse in the last ten years or so, specifically with the advent of micro-transactions. When I was a kiddo if you were "addicted" to something like Grand Theft Auto, the worst thing that would probably happen to you is your parents taking away your XBox and telling you take a fuckin shower and/or go outside. Or coworkers telling you you smelled, if you happened to be older. The worst thing you could say from that era would be something like WoW subscription fees, and while that's definitely ethically gray for me, I think they can make an argument on the fact that you just buying the game can't offset the costs they face in keeping it updated, maintaining the online services to enable it, the moderation of that platform, etc. etc. etc. However modern Gacha games especially have taken a LOT of heat for flagrantly predatory monetization practices that greatly affect people with certain kinds of neurodivergencies, who spend tens of thousands of dollars on them, oftentimes against the wishes of their carers or spouses. That certainly sucks, and I don't think there's any kind of ethical argument one can make in favor of it, it's just straight exploitation of vulnerable people.

TV addiction is gonna be it's own paragraph but most of the people in my parents generation think the Democrats are communists and are so utterly brain-rotted from the idiot box that they can't even answer basic questions about the reality they live in, so I'm gonna say that's kind of "enough said" there.

There's always going to be an element of addiction in anything, you're correct, because addiction is really just getting hooked, to a problematic degree, on the sense of pleasure you get from doing or consuming a thing, and that thing can be basically anything. That said, a whole lot of very large, very valuable businesses, including many that are owned and operated by the State, take advantage of that to push predatory products onto vulnerable populations, and that's kinda fucked, no?