Stop misinterpreting "my body my choice" as permission for those with infectious diseases to purposefully spread deadly diseases.
If you have AIDS, you do not have blanket permission to spread that disease to anyone else. Thats a violation of consent, bodily autonomy, and inflicting direct harm.
My Body My Choice means YOU do not have the RIGHT to infect ME with your deadly disease you contracted. It's my body, and you do not have permission to take your gunk, and infect me with it. Wear a mask.
And stop spreading misinformation with zero cited sources.
kalshi and polymarket are quite obvious gambling sites. any pedantic arguments to the contrary are strictly financial chaff to enhance their operating margins until the regulations finally catch up.
they were never an innovating marketing play... it was the culmination of a gambling company committing to regulatory capture as evinced by Donald Trump Jr (totally not) sitting on BOTH BOARDS as a "paid strategic advisor" or whatever lie they want to spin.
There are ads on the DC Metro right now that advertise one of these as a source of truth for election polling. The poster says something like "98% accuracy" and in super fine print, specifies something like "within 2 hours of polls closing" and other normal fine print stuff.
To me it's absolutely crazy that the "gamble on anything" apps are being advertised as some kind of polling software. I've already seen at least one race called into question because the gamblers bet on the wrong pony.
They're pure corruption engines designed for insider betting. The top brass of these companies need to be made example of.
this is an answerable question and these markets are generally well calibrated (including on election outcomes), they have a good brier score.
i would not premise an anti-prediction market argument on their accuracy being bad, you are building on shaky foundations. the better argument is the paternalist protecting stupid people from themselves imo.
I've seen those and they are crazy! Many elections are decided by the primary anyway, and then of course exit polls are going to be basically accurate 2 hours before the election. It's not even that fine print, I think they may actually just be stupid.
The LDS church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), which is also based in Utah has provided explicit guidance against participation in Kalshi and Polymarket as gambling.
They absolutely have been the main force behind the timing of this push. It was the main topic of General Conference a few weeks ago and one of the most eyebrow-raising articulations of official church policy.
Given the way that the church has explicitly encouraged state legislators to shoot down recent laws it's not surprising to think they'd be pushing for this.
It has also been the talk that I've seen the most discussion about in both faithful and non-faithful circles.
Also it's the only time I've seen nonaffiliated news articles about a statement the church has made about a topic other than lgbtq rights or abortion - notably much more politicized topics in general. That may be due to my own inattentiveness however.
All that to say that calling it "the main topic" is incorrect in technicality, but not in impact imo.
> Given the way that the church has explicitly encouraged state legislators to shoot down recent laws it's not surprising to think they'd be pushing for this.
And the way they've influenced voters in Idaho and Arizona recently.
I thought it worth posting the stance for those not willing to click
...
Gambling is motivated by a desire to get something for nothing. This desire is spiritually destructive. It leads participants away from the Savior’s teachings of love and service and toward the selfishness of the adversary. It undermines the virtues of work and thrift and the desire to give honest effort in all we do.
Those who participate in gambling soon discover the deception in the idea that they can give little or nothing and receive something of value in return. They find that they give up large amounts of money, their own honor, and the respect of family members and friends. Deceived and addicted, they often gamble with funds they should use for other purposes, such as meeting the basic needs of their families. Gamblers sometimes become so enslaved and so desperate to pay gambling debts that they turn to stealing, giving up their own good name.
>The legislature shall never grant any divorce. Lotteries shall be prohibited except as specifically authorized upon the affirmative vote of sixty percent of the members of each house of the legislature or, notwithstanding any other provision of this Constitution, by referendum or initiative approved by a sixty percent affirmative vote of the electors voting thereon. [AMENDMENT 56, 1971 Senate Joint Resolution No. 5, p 1828. Approved November 7, 1972.]
>NOTES:
Original text — Art. 2 Section 24 LOTTERIES AND DIVORCE — The legislature shall never authorize any lottery or grant any divorce.
And I’m saying there’s no evidence for that. Illegal gambling arrest rates haven’t significantly changed since before Kalshi and Polymarket existed, so there’s no reason to believe that banning them would change that. Combined with other states’ examples wherein banning gambling outright didn’t cause significant social harms (e.g. organized crime), and I think the burden’s on you to show why CA is special and would suffer from a gambling ban.
Like, are there some gamblers who, if it were made illegal, would do it illegally in harmful ways? Yes! Are there enough such people that the social harms of banning gambling would be significant? I don’t think the data bears that out. This isn’t prohibition; this is something that has already been widely proscribed by law in the past without serious negative consequences (other than missed opportunities for riches on the part of the gambling companies that pushed to relax those prohibitions over the last decade).
Ehh I wouldn't try to appeal too much to what the LDS church thinks about this. They require members to give 10% of their annual income to the church, while already having close to $300 billion in the bank.
Everyone knows the state of Utah is largely run by the church.
> Everyone knows the state of Utah is largely run by the church.
Surprisingly few people know this ime. It's worth pointing out as one of the few areas [0] where the church has as much pull as its members think it does.
While I wouldn't look to the church as a bastion of morality for So Many Reasons, it's worth looking at a hard example of how it is able to manipulate politics in Utah, and by extension nationwide.
[0] Other areas worth being aware of are Idaho and parts of Arizona of course.
I don’t see the clear difference between something like Kalshi and, say, Robinhood. I do see a clear difference between Kalshi and casinos or sports gambling sites like Fan Duel; in the latter, your counterparty is the institution itself. This creates a lot of perverse incentives on the part of sports gambling sites to maintain their edge, such as banning bettors that are too good at playing the odds. Kalshi, on the other hand, is never your counterparty in any transaction.
Now, Robinhood is a brokerage, regulated by FINRA, and has been fined for misbehavior in the past. So I am more than willing to believe that there is daylight here that I’m not seeing. But anything that lets you speculate attracts a certain clientele, and I think the most important distinction is whether or not the platform itself is an interested party.
If the differentiating factor is just who you’re betting against, how are Kalshi et al any different from online poker? It’s still gambling, the house just takes a rake
Because you can easily collude and cheat at poker so it needs to be heavily regulated or outright illegal to prevent theft. You can't really cheat at prediction markets, unless you have insider information which they can litigate after the fact.
Surely you’re being facetious, insider trading is obviously a huge problem that is rarely enforced and we’ve already seen instances of people actively influencing events or using false information to fake the result of a bet
How can you collude and cheat at poker? If there are 4 people playing, and 3 of them "collude", its litterally no different than one person just playing 3 hands at once which shouldn't make any difference. The fact that you would win more hands is offset by the big losses you would take when the 4th person wins.
The edge comes from seeing more cards. That gives you better information than your opponent about who's ahead, meaning both your raises and folds have higher EV than theirs.
The one I remember is from Polymatket, about whether Trump would end the Gaza war by a certain date. I bet no, and it resolved to yes on the basis that Trump said that he ended the war.
I agree that whether the house has a stake in the outcome is (probably, I haven’t read the statute) not relevant to the definition of what is and is not gambling under Utah state law. Online Poker is very obviously a game though in a way that Kalshi and online brokerages aren’t (even if they share game like elements, such as random rewards). Important to caveat that prediction markets do allow you to speculate on the outcomes of games occurring off the platform, and maybe that is the distinction here between Kalshi and Robinhood, but then is Kalshi still “obviously” a gambling site if they ban markets on sports outcomes but leave everything else?
If Kalshi is not a gambling operation then it is an unregulated futures market, which is still illegal. There are perverse incentives in futures markets too, which is why they are regulated.
Also speculators serve an important purpose: hedging strategies require speculators on the other side. It is not just a "certain clientele," there are people who run profitable businesses on speculation (it amounts to collecting insurance premiums from people who want hedges).
> Kalshi is very clearly a licensed futures market regulated by the CFTC
As an excluded commodity. Based on the CFTC's own rule making. Based on this logic the SEC can go back to deciding it gets to regulate anything as securities fraud.
Describing an organization with a license from the CFTC as an "unregulated futures market" is just flat wrong, I'm not really sure why you're motte-baileying here.
They offer contracts that are almost certainly outside the scope of regulation, an appeals court has already ruled that some of their contracts are indeed subject to state laws and not CFTC regulation, and they are continuing to push the envelope. How is it wrong to call them an unregulated market under the circumstances?
Bernie Madoff's operation was also subject to a regulator and was properly registered as a broker-dealer; that did not somehow make it a regulated operation, at least not in the sense of actually complying with the regulations. Boiler rooms are also subject to a regulator (the SEC) and obviously are not regulated brokerages.
Really it sounds like this is a disagreement about what it means for a market to be "regulated" -- I draw the line at compliance, you seem to draw the line elsewhere.
Not to go prescriptivist, but yes I think your "line" for regulated is just semantically incorrect, a non-compliant organization can still be regulated.
The CFTC was created to hedge real risk. Onions iirc?
Kalshi creates risk where there was none before. The 'future' on the 'commodity' of 'number of dunks by an aging shaq at a halftime show'.
Courts have taken the dimmest possible view of this legal fabrication and I expect their losses in courts to continue without direct intervention by the Trump scions.
People will say (including in this thread) that it allows them to hedge against negative outcomes. What negative outcomes are experienced by someone hedging against whether LeBron flies his helicopter to practice or not?
basically, does the government have its thumb on the scale makes it legal. Gambling is so bad and illegal, except when the pennsylvania lottery does it. Alcohol, bad and illegal, except when the state monopoly sells it.
That's such a poor argument. Illegal building is bad because it's illegal; illegal gambling is bad because it's illegal. This is just how laws work. Heck, in the US even homicide is bad because it's illegal, when you consider that there is a legal version of it.
It's really the worst of both combined. There is ample gambling like options and behavior on Kalshi
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policy makers, assistants, journalists, and the like are insider trading - and the president of the united states is intentionally market manipulating for profit
A week ago if you dared to say anything critical of polymarket you would be drowned out in replies talking about the "wonderful societal benefits" of gambling on daily life and how it "informs decision making" and helps the "common people".
I liked it for political races as an alternative to polls. Was terrible for several other things. 99% of it was really just sports betting, which I can't see being a good thing.
The law can always distinguish the intent, which might be hard to prove, but not impossible. For instance, a PAC making large bets would raise a lot of suspicion. One Brazilian fugitive currently in the US has injected about a billion dollars in the form of bets on a Brazilian betting company, and that has caught regulators' attention.
Not really. I can recall countless threads where everyone said that this improves information availability. Do you want me to go through my post history to find them?
Not really. American Corporations have successfully changed the culture to a point where asking about salary is considered a flaw to the worker. It somehow demonstrates a lack of loyalty.
Things are getting better, but HR still routinely preaches that you should never share your salary with anyone else. A lot of times they infer you will be fired for it.
Salary negotiations are sort of constrained to cost of annual living increases, or promotions. outside of that, you are not expected to ever talk about salary. ever.
i would intentionally drag my old crt tv to rock band sessions in college because it had zero latency compared to the lcd flatscreen in the commons area.
As i sit here listening to the diablo 2 soundtrack while working (lol), i dont recall a ton of D2 issues... Most of the time the problem was my dial-up connection.
Stop misinterpreting "my body my choice" as permission for those with infectious diseases to purposefully spread deadly diseases.
If you have AIDS, you do not have blanket permission to spread that disease to anyone else. Thats a violation of consent, bodily autonomy, and inflicting direct harm.
My Body My Choice means YOU do not have the RIGHT to infect ME with your deadly disease you contracted. It's my body, and you do not have permission to take your gunk, and infect me with it. Wear a mask.
And stop spreading misinformation with zero cited sources.
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