Can we do gambling ads next? We banned tobacco ads and then seemingly forgot the lesson that it's actually bad to let advertisers shove addictive and self-destructive products in the publics face, including to former addicts at risk of relapse.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/28/tory...
India is ridiculously expensive - bribes often amount to 50 lakh rupees to 1 crore + rupees, which amounts to roughly $50k-100k per politician. Not to mention bribery at the lower rungs of the ladder where everyone from the politician's toilet janitor all the way to the politician's chief of staff will demand their pound of flesh, usually in the tune of tens of lakhs of rupees (~$10k).
Why would you agree to stick your neck out for something illegal on the cheap when you can wring the ordinary people to do your job?
All this is based on second hand information so please correct me where I am wrong. Also probably things are different in different parts of the country?
On the other hand, I was a member of the Treasury group and the Leaders group of the Tory party until recently, with just a "paltry" donation of £50k, which got me the ear of a sitting PM and regular meetings with the Chancellor. Good luck trying to get that kind of access in India or the US with the PM.
The cheaper bribes were a tangent, but just to show that doing business in India is actually more expensive than in the UK (where there are no such bribes).
What we actually see is a lot of stasis, refusal to compromise, and politicians locked in with their party, which suggests it is pretty hard to influence politicians.
Where money is effective is using it to get politicians who agree with your view elected.
The only reason all those “issues” are issues is because they’re intended to distract the public from the actual stuff politicians are being bought for. Transferring wealth to their buyers.
80% of the politicians on both sides of the spectrum have the same beliefs about all those issues.
(Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituencies_of_the_Parliame... )
Leaders group puts you in touch with the Tory party leader (who is often the PM if the Tories are in power). Treasury group invites you to meetings with the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
They will often vote in a way that their constituents do not want for ~10k in campaign contributions.
They didn't have to worry about the voters finding out about it (this is changing with alternative media) beacuse the same people bought ads on the major networks.
The real bribery starts at the bottom of the pyramid.
Say you want a water connection. The rate is set on the size of the property, and each layer in the pyramid knows exactly how many square feet were approved and what their individual percentage will be.
And again, you can’t just bribe the fellow directly: you need to go through a trusted agent who acts as a cut-out between the briber and the bribed. This started after the Lok Ayukta started conducting raids. Who says our babus aren’t flexible and innovative?
I suppose the law is an ass.
Pensions are more tax efficient and offer a better option of investments (companies) than what is effectively fiat interest going into a lottery pool.
If you have cash in premium bonds you might die young then pay inheritance tax.
Better give your kids cash earlier to live off or invest to avoid this, and so they can over-stuff their pensions ;). Not many people think that far ahead (60 year horizon)
Annuities maybe, but those aren’t the only kind of pensions
pension
a regular income paid by a government or a financial organization to someone who no longer works, usually because of their age or health> A pension (/ˈpɛnʃən/; from Latin pensiō 'payment') is a fund into which amounts are paid regularly during an individual's working career, and from which periodic payments are made to support the person's retirement from work.
A pension is a financial instrument. There’s no need to purchase an annuity, which means a pension organised correctly can be passed on to your children or spouse, and there’s no lottery or gamble angle.
A dictionary: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dictiona...
The wikipedia definition is strange. A pension is not a fund. A pension fund is a fund! (There is also a wikipedia page for that!)
Apart from that how is “regular income paid by to someone who no longer works“ different from “periodic payments made to support the person's retirement from work” anyway?
The word pension is overloaded. A SIPP is a pension, the state pension is a pension, and people refer to their annuity as pensions too.
> A pension is not a fund. A pension fund is a fund!
The word fund is being used in two different ways here. A pension is a fund, but is not a Pension Fund.
I'm familiar with retirement accounts and pension plans in a number of countries but not in the UK. I see that in the UK "pension" is often used a short-hand for "pension scheme" (it seems a relatively new development which I've not seen reflected in dictionaries).
For what it's worth, the wikipedia page for Personal_pension is redirected to Personal_pension_scheme: "A personal pension scheme (PPS), sometimes called a personal pension plan (PPP), is ..."
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.Err, you could start by not making wild inferences and replying to assertions that weren't made.
A single investment is basically gambling. Where it moves is largely impossible to predict or (for a nobody like me, who wouldn't have the means to engage in market manipulation) control. You can reduce the randomness/risk by spreading out your investment across multiple stocks. That's just the central limit theorem. For the market as a whole, on a long enough timescale, the historical aggregate trends upwards, but is still effectively random.
> What the fuck are you investing in for retirement if not stocks?
I can be critical of something and still acknowledge the reality that I am effectively forced to engage with it. I generally invest in a few index funds to reduce the variance and mental overhead, but it's still there.
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In one way it's much worse than "mainstream" gambling: its value depends on society holding the shared delusion that stocks (both in general and yours in particular) are actually worth something. That leads some people to become incredibly invested in maintaining that delusion, since they know what's at stake for them. This thread could be considered an example of where that mentality leads.
And as you said yourself:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Thank the power of the horse racing/gaming/gambling lobby.
Many years ago when I lived there, I had an IG Index account - who market themselves as a "financial spread betting" service. At the time, you could buy/sell futures and options with them but it was presented in a way that emphasized that you were "spread betting" - but the mechanics were the exact same and expiries all lined up with the obvious counterparts in the liquid futures space.
So because you were NOT investing but gambling, "winnings" were tax free.
I just googled and they're still going - presumably still offering the same betting "service".
It's funny to see the efforts that scam and pure gambling services go to to try and present themselves as staid and serious "investment" business while IG Index offered access to well-regulated financial markets but kept reminding you that you were betting.
In theory, all the money wagered is money that has already paid income tax at some point so why tax it again?
Most obviously, it doesn't cost to enter. So the most you can "lose" is a missed interest income from putting the money in another source.
After that, it's definitely the fact that the algorithm is designed to both pay a certain percentage of people and always have specific return. [1]
You are also limited to how much you can enter to 50k.
With all that in mind, at the end of the day it feels like many small wins over time, with the super random chance of occasionally having a big-ish payout.
It's definitely designed to feel like a lottery, but in reality is way more akin to normal savings than a lottery.
Also tax man: Oh did you get that money by luck? Good for you, man.
Also tax man: Did you get inherit money by having been born into a wealthy family? Gimme some of that money.
Also tax man: Were you born into the royal family? Good for you, man. Pardon me, I mean, your highness.
So, Casper mattress wants to have an ad spot in a podcast or a YouTube video in the video itself? That's ok.
YouTube wants to include an ad about a mattress in a video about home renovation? Also ok.
Stack overflow wants to show an ad for GitHub? Is ok to me.
YouTube wants to show an ad about Casper mattress based on whether someone has clicked on an ad about mattresses before? Banned!
This alone would be a great start.
As long as we ban ads for stock trading platforms (i.e. gambling for the professional classes) at the same time.
We've got a century of data showing laissez-faire approaches to advertising results in maximum harm to a society, and ample recent data from the internet age showing how dark patterns in psychology are exploited by advertisers to drive outcomes.
We have to do better, and the UK's step is at least an attempt to stem the harm. I can't fault entities from at least trying to do better.
Still not as bad as those weird country which advertise prescription medicine
Do you feel like your knee itches sometime? You may have BSitis, ask your doctor if our product is right for you...
Replace all these with a generic, if you feel sick, go see a doctor, that's what they are for if needed.
Of course, crypto speculation is something different altogether. Maybe you were thinking about all the poor schleps buying Bitcoin for $100k?
Even then, your chances of winning are around 50/50 and no one is forcing you to cash out.
You can still lose all your money on stocks, with a combination of bad choices and bad luck. But it is much easier to lose it on the horses.
My stock ISAs have gone up pretty much every year (after inflation and fees).
You're getting ripped off, you should be paying a small fraction of that.
Plus a 0.15% account fee: https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/what-we-offer/fees-explai...
Most others charge more.
That's not what the ads for the stock trading platforms want you to do
> The punter does not win on average with stocks due to fees and spread.
Literally 100% of my investing is the stock market. I have so much faith in the stock market that I rent because I don't want to waste the opportunity cost on equity in property.
A punter is informal slang for a person who gambles. I buy and hold a diversified portfolio of index funds over decades. I am very much not a punter.
Not really. There just seems to be more than one meaning, and we were each aware of different ones. The meaning might vary by country (I am in the UK).
I am from the UK but moved to Australia about 35 years ago
I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
;o)
ban gambling companies from sponsoring sports teams, from being associated with sports teams etc.
I grew up near a gambling shop. You would see the punters desparately trying to eek out every last puff on their roll-up cigarettes, while the gambling shop owner would drive up in his Rolls Royce.
Like what would anyone think of a smoking warning of “when the fun stops, stop”