How Kalshi Infects the News(publicnotice.co) |
How Kalshi Infects the News(publicnotice.co) |
We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
As someone who doesn't pay much attention to traditional news stations much these days, I was kind of taken aback by the over-the-top product placements they do now when exposed to it.
See for example:
https://youtu.be/9BPO-swW5eo?si=vLExNIXfeQmYHIDc&t=340
@5:40 (if your platform doesn't carry over the timestamp)
Polymarket/Kalshi are far more damaging to society than soda, but seeing this I was struck by how we've reached a point where the old Wayne's World product placement gag wouldn't even read as satire anymore, that's just how things actually are now.
The gambling industry has been trying to normalize gambling for decades.
I first ran into this in the mid-90's when the PR woman for a race track told me not to call it "gambling," but instead to call it "gaming."
We see gambling language used everywhere now, if you know what to look for. Terms like "all in" and "table stakes" are gambling terms,† but people use them every day in regular conversation.
† Though "all in" was used as far back as the 1930's to mean "very tired," I hardly ever hear anyone use it that way anymore.
Perhaps our greatest cultural fiction right now is the "rationality" of markets, and people are looking for insight more than ever on our insane world. So that makes perfect sense to me, really.
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.
The bans on gambling were often framed in Christian terms, so as society became more secular, they were undone. Now they probably need to be re-added with practical reasoning.
Just ban or regulate it? It's only a form gambling after all.
isn't without its issues of course, but you know, desperate times call for desperate measures
laws, that's how. push it back down to the dark net where most people can't be bothered to get at it.
You severely punish those involved with prison time for whatever you can find on them. And I'm not talking a few months at Club Fed.
Sounds pretty ridiculous at first, but that's because people know little of the temperance and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century besides "prohibition failed". There was a whole lot more to it than mere anti-alcohol push, it included labour rights and reform (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, etc), Anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, anti-political corruption, consumer protection (food regulation), women's suffrage, etc. The 20th century progressives essentially saw a huge concentration of money and power turning society into a cruel, exploitative machine that ground people up and spat them out. Rampant alcoholism was only one part of it.
A modern version would be different in details but similar overall. Alcohol and cigarettes are not major problems, but corruption, monopoly, and engineered addiction are very real and very problematic. A new temperance movement would be about tackling rampant gabling and addiction (everything from gas station drugs to social media algorithms), political corruption, tech monopolies, misinformation etc.
Big problems need big solutions, but I suspect things will have to get worse before people realize the scale of the problem they're facing.
Stuff like this is all over the place in American life.
From the worker’s point of view, it’s adding a gambling element to every transaction, complete with the usual gambler’s folk wisdom about which ones are going to pay out and how to maximize your luck, which I think is part of what makes it popular.
Everyone who’s ever worked for tips has stories of unexpected “wins” and the biggest jackpots are reported on like big lottery wins.
PS: except for home insurance in hurricane areas, government allows insurance plans to be non-actuarial, so essentially all other taxpayers pay for destroyed homes there. Gov even promotes rebuilding destroyed homes in the same place, instead of people moving out, only exacerbating the problem. Whether it's good or bad I don't know.
Conflating this with gambling is dishonest. I'll grant you that I've always viewed the way FSA is structured is weird, but this is absolutely not gambling unless you're completely unaware.
If you have any regular, annual medical expenses that are out of pocket, or plan to purchase any of the very wide variety of items that are eligible for FSA (e.g. gym equipment, many foods, glasses, contacts, etc. that might not be fully covered), then you can estimate this with exceptional accuracy.
This is not the same as playing roulette.
On a broader scale it can be viewed as part of modern culture going towards "screw everyone else, I'm gonna do whatever to get ahead." Kids on tiktok are teaching each other how to scam people. At this rate we'll have scam call centers in the US by the end of the decade and nobody will do anything about it.
It is just showing you in the clear what propaganda managed to hide from you with regards to the stock market and the bond market , and all the other markets for that matter.
Insiders do trade and it's impossible to stop them or catch them, and the further you are from the information (both geographically and socially) the harder it is to be first in line and more probably you are next to last in line and you gotta pray that you find some bigger fool to sell your bags to.
If anything there are some things on the prediction markets that really give the advantage to the small guy, for example some farmer whose family has been living there for many years could have a big advantage on weather forecasters and those who bet on them. Say they see the wind pick up or a particular cloud formation that gives an expert eye the idea that rain is gonna come whereas forecasters won't see it coming
I suppose that's what those 'Gambling problem?'ads are for.
Well we don't need ads. We need responsible education against the effects of gambling addiction or we need to raise wages, which is it?
Where does raising wages have to deal with this?
Of course that suffers some likely substantial bias from oversampling a specific domain/sub-population
https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-cnn-prediction-market-partn...
I'm sure they are all bad, but damned if I never encounter them outside of HN.
This was a temporary discrepancy that has gone away now that physical prices have fallen.
This means the future traders were right; the $150+ prices for a physical barrel of oil were a short-term situation that would resolve in a few months. It was correct for futures to be priced substantially lower.
What's absurd is internet commentators thinking the market is broken because they see something they don't immediately understand.
If you see mispricing, trade the hell out of it and pocket the cash before some hedge fund does. The system is rigged against us normal folk and given any opportunity to take money legally from the system, I absolutely would.
(Now sometimes, there are good reasons for paper and physical to differ, most particularly if the paper is structured in a high-risk way, and you need to be aware of that.)
Btw every ad around the stadium in World Cup is for Kalshi now. Really makes me question the fairness of the games.
But why? Ease of access (ie the Intenret and particularly smartphones) are obviously a factor. There was a time when if you wanted to gamble you had to do it illegally or you had to go to a physical casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (and then riverboats, etc). You can look across to see how ease of access to gambling absolutely increases the amount of gambling and thus gambling addiction. A good example are the poker machines that are available in some states in Australia but not all.
But there's something deeper than that (IMHO). And I think that thing is the increasing inequality [1] and the affordability crisis. People may be talking about affordability a lot now but it's not a new issue. It was a key issue in the 2016 election, for example.
The thesis is that as people become increasingly desperate to have enough money (and espeically if they fall below that level) then gambling increases because people see this as the only way they can get ahead (eg [2]).
I believe gambling is a symptomo and indicator of a deeply broken societ and a deteriorating society.
The sad reality is that gambling is an excellent way of extracting what little wealth poor people have and it makes everything worse on a macro scale. Gambling should be relatively inaccessible. Yet we have the Federal government suing to stop states to ban prediction markets [3].
[1]: https://wir2026.wid.world/
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8643406/
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/where-the-feds-are-fighting-...
The difficult truth is that as we've engeineered our society over the last 50 years into more and more deterministic outcomes, and began to assign morality itself TO determinism. Where in we've reached a point where when we must face that life is probablistic (i.e. gambling) we assign that space a moral evil
As a person who is deeply entrenched in this way of thinking I find gambing uncomforatable, but when we invented the core AI technology of prediction systems at Google that power LLM tech today, 'gambling' on probablistic outcomes at a super short term and long term level is questining the determinism of life itself.
Gambling is a collective signal on cohort outcomes and wisdom of crowds, which becomes training data itself for long/high dimensional-vectors required to fuel intelligence.
In other words, it turns out EVERYTHING is gambling, some things just have better odds than others, and most of those better odds choices come from OHTERS gambling to make those odds better for you.
Humanity moving forward out of this trap of high odds probability gravity wells and growing as a species will involve a lot of gambling i suspect.
910,000 in prime time hours in April, which is 909,999 more than you.
https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-the-cable-news-rati...
I have plenty of cash (let's just say over a half-mil), so well ahead of the poverty level. I find myself nearly falling into this trap often. I used to work in FAANG as a developer making big bucks and earning far more than I spend. I left FAANG a couple of years ago and now I feel like I'm just breaking even with the lower salary. Quality of life has improved, but I miss having that "cushion" in each paycheck, so I look to things like the stock market to determine if I can get ahead again somehow. The fact that the tech market is absolute trash right now makes me fear for my future which in turn drives this "gotta find a way to get ahead" line of thinking even more aggressively. It's definitely not just impacting the poor.
Most gas stations I go into now have "gaming" machines and there's always some soul sitting at them at any time of day.
I'm mostly on team let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them but it's disheartening to watch a dad sitting there totally sucked into it and just ignoring their kid in a stroller behind them.
We entered this era a long time ago, where psychological insight and computational or chemical power can combine to override people's ability to make free choices. But I'm still not sure there is a widely shared philosophical or ideological framework that has fully digested and responded to these new realities yet.
aside: recreational gambling should require a federal ID with losses tracked online, and if you're down more than 10% of last year's after-tax income you're cut off for the rest of the year, but I assume the Canadian and especially US constitutions rules against doing good things federally make that impossible.
I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.
https://www.yogonet.com/international/news/2026/06/29/125136...
Some politicians are crooks. They should be voted out, investigated, prosecuted and publicly scorned.
"Everyone cheats" is something cheaters say to (a) feel better about themselves and (b) try to get other people to ignore their cheating when they get caught. Don't believe their lies. Most people don't cheat.
In studies of cooperative behavior, most people choose to cooperate, and the key predictor of whether someone will cooperate is whether they believe other people will choose to cooperate. Cynicism is permission to defect.
Defectors must be punished.
Now everything is either gambling or a scam or both.
Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story.
You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to).
Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up.
This runs counter to your internal narrative as a self made person I’m sure, but have you ever worked for 40 hours a week and not had anything left after paying for your share of rent, food and utilities? This is the reality that doesn’t seep into forums like this, where the majority is wealthy, college educated, and broadly privileged in some way either through exceptional talent or background.
> let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places
I will bite - homeownership is indeed higher in the rust belt, but many folks struggle to find jobs that meet the median without giving up their health and bodies, if they can find steady work at all.
¹ Terms and conditions apply.
College never guaranteed anything.
A college education may still be (statistically) a good investment:
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/04/is-col...
Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).
Gambling is the closest we've come to figuring out how to directly tax hope.
This is exactly right. Widespread gambling has a fundamental nihilism baked into it. If you believe hard work and frugality are the best path to success, then gambling doesn't feel like a good use of your income and energy.
But if you feel like your dreams are falling out of reach despite your hard work, if it starts to look like even big investors are really just playing a game (often with loaded dice) rather than acting on fundamentals, if grift seems like a more reliable path to success then hard work and ingenuity, then all of a sudden gambling seems a lot more sensible. Even if the odds aren't in your favor, you can at least get lucky when you gamble. When the game feels rigged its easy to believe that hardwork is destined for failure, whereas even loaded dice have some probability of landing in your favor.
...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses.
But it does fit the ultralibertarian mindset best, I guess. The right to the pursuit of happiness, not to actually getting it.
It is crazy to me that even when faced with the most irredeemable industry, one that is predicated on abusing addiction and human irrationality, one that takes and gives back nothing, the first reaction to this is to brush all of that off and go "but what about the construction permits?"
The American adoration for anything 'private' knows no bounds. When our corporate overlords will be scamming, poisoning and forming quasi-governments to rule over us all for profit, they'll still be cheering that at least it's not one of those pesky governments.
Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs. They should just be allowed to tax deduct everything when the need arises.
You ARE almost-guaranteed to lose the FSA game, basically. You'll either bet too much or too little, and the collective house wins either way.
In my opinion, it's even more sickening that the system is designed to scalp a few extra bucks off of peoples' medical situations in this way. The gambling on sports, I could care less about.
Your entire argument sounds very much like how certain religions are against insurance because they view it as gambling.
It's led to the rise of an even riskier practice of shared health benefit pools, which market themselves as not being insurance even though they're pretty much the same thing as "mutual insurance," except that when you need them most, suddenly they're not insurance at all.
It also sounds very young. When you get over a certain age, you WILL use up that FSA. Every. Single. Year.
And if you're young enough not to, there are plenty of over-the-counter everyday goods that qualify for FSA, like Tylenol.
My planning is now wrong. Likewise I can only do FSA for planned procedures if I know close to a year ahead of time, which isn’t super likely. What portion of procedures are serious enough that insurance won’t call them elective, but also tame enough that you can put it off for a year for your FSA?
I don’t think I’ve ever had my FSA be completely correct. I’m always either over-stocked and losing money, or under-stocked and paying with post-tax dollars when I don’t have to.
I hate FSAs. Anyone have a good argument on why we should have them instead of just making HSAs open to everyone regardless of healthcare plan?
Optimal (maximizing your benefit... and also cost in lost tax receipts) use of HSAs requires not touching the money until retirement. You pay medical bills with non-HSA money and keep the HSA money invested and growing tax-advantaged, like an extra retirement account. Spending the money you put in every year offers relatively tiny gains compared to keeping it in those accounts for decades.
Your options to mitigate this are to limit access, or to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term, approaches to which look kinda FSA-like.
We could just continue to enforce the 20% penalty indefinitely to get rid of the concept of these accounts turning into retirement accounts.
FSAs benefit the upper-middle-class and wealthy more than poor people as well. You'll see quite a bit more savings when your top end tax rate is 35% than 12%. They're also far more likely to be able to plan on setting aside some portion of their incomes into a FSA at enrollment time rather than the bigger effects of the gamble with lower income earners; the outcomes of the risk of overfunding is way more impactful for someone making little money.
The tax benefit helping the wealthy more seems to me to move more towards eliminating the tax advantages of healthcare spending entirely.
Fortunately it was the latter for me. I'd love to keep buying the stuff but it's such a waste. Better to buy singles I actually want. It's just not as fun as me being the one who pulled the card.
We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing. A ton worse than a proper jobs program building public infrastructure (the CCC or something) or dumping that money into doctor training or whatever. Extremely poor ROI, but we can't touch them or GDP craters (nominally only—these aren't producing much in the first place, the P part of GDP, of course, which is probably part of why the US doesn't feel as rich as it looks on paper)
Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation.
About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing people, and the rest is everything else.
That's what they are. Three big industries are net-losses to the economy by definition: banking, insurance and gambling.
That leads to some game theory and math, with things like some form of ranked-voting, uncapping the House of Representatives, and maybe even proportional-representation rather than lots of just-one-winner races.
Others have offered contrived rules for solving it through policy, but these don't account for how to get those with power over us to institute such rules to bind their own hands and then to follow the rules to their own detriment
Candidates themselves and the way they campaign matters more. Cuomo had 3x the warchest than Mamdani had, for example.
Small dollar donations can also level the playing field for candidates that can gain some national appeal (this does come with its own set of problems and perverse incentives, though)
> I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.