Hacker News Reader

This is a "vice" thing. Vices are things which match this pattern like alcohol or drugs:

    - many people don't indulge at all
    - many people indulge occasionally to no real harm
    - some people indulge in a way that makes a short term recoverable mess
    - a few people get addicted and are unable to stop. May or may not also be harmed at this point, but this tends to lead to cumulative harm
    - a few people really mess up tragically

The people in the first few groups can argue "why should this be banned, it's not harming me" with some validity. But there's also people for whom the vice overrides their self-preservation and they get into a bad financial and/or health position, and can only be saved by abstention. They may require help to abstain, such as the UK "legitimate" gambling industry's "self-ban" mechanism.

One thing that does vary is whether "it's not harming me" works out. Booze in particular has massive social consequences, drunk people harm non-drinkers not just themselves. I've never worried that degenerate gamblers leaving a slot machine parlour at 2am will attack me - but outside the bars that's definitely possible which is why they're required to hire security and have police contact

People with big gambling problems do cause massive social consequences. I know of lost family homes and separation that has massive impacts on the kids. Embezzlement occurred at the accounting firm I use due to an accountant's addiction to gambling.

Some gamblers will inevitably run out of money and resort to crime.

Maybe, surely mostly white collar crime though because of the numbers involved?

Nobody trusts junkies with $100 so it makes sense that shoplifting or burglary can get them the money they need, but a lot of people who have a gambling problem are six figures down, stealing a neighbour's PS5 is a drop in the bucket.

Oh the PS5 isn't to repay the debt. It's to bet so the big winnings can repay the debt.

We have a socially acceptable, predatory, regulated vice: credit cards with 30%. These ruin many lives.

I'm finally almost out and I'm 45. Nobody taught me in school not to use them as they are harmful. Nobody taught me how much money they will actually charge me and how much money I will lose because of them. Whereas if I had just saved my money and bought the thing out right I wouldn't have to pay any extra money.

My school failed me.

At what point should a person be responsible for their own life? I wasn't taught a lot of things; I learned them with some basic googling. You can figure out how a credit card works with a few minutes of critical thinking followed by "I should look this up". Something I would expect a 30-40yo to be able to do, no?

While you're looking things up, check out "predatory lending", and maybe the history of casinos. It's been recognized for centuries that lending money to someone with no ability to pay it back is morally wrong and, rightfully/normally, illegal.

Once you realize what is happening it can take 20 years to get out...

It is predatory. Especially to hook teenagers on them at a young age.

It would be surprising to hear that someone obtained such a high line of credit that it took 20 years to pay off, while not understanding how credit works, but I guess that is possible

Disclaimer: I've never used a Credit Card and have no intention to do so.

I don't really see the complexity/confusion with credit cards and I struggle to see how people get into poor financial positions with them.

Credit Cards are effectively mini-loans. You spend $100 here, $200 there, they get bundled on a credit card which had an interest rate applied to whatever you purchase if not paid back by the defined date.

You can "win" on credit cards by always paying it back and reaping some of the rewards (discounts, points, etc).

You can "lose" on credit cards by paying it back late (incurring the interest+if applicable, late fees).

Am I missing something? That seems like the principal behind credit cards. People who get wrapped up in the credit system likely already are in a poor financial state, since they use credit to "get by".

Apparently some people don't understand some combination of interest existing or that the minimum payment is less than the interest owed or that you have to pay back the loan whatsoever. This is everyone else's fault, they insist.

I think this description is deceptive because it assumes bucket sizes ("many," "some," "a few"). Those bucket sizes work for alcohol and some recreational drugs. But they're tragically wrong for others--very very few people partake of heroin "occasionally with no real harm." You're almost certainly heading towards the last two buckets.

True, but if you start counting codeine as an opiate the bucket gets a lot larger. And includes the Purdue Pharma scandal. Lots of people use opiates under medical supervision, with varying degrees of help and harm.

> assumes bucket sizes ("many," "some," "a few")

I was trying to be as vague as possible here!

Actually there's been studies that show the majority of heroin users self limit their use to, yes, no real harm. The idea of the heroin user that's immediately thrown into an addiction where they start pawning Grandma's TV is propaganda.

yeah - this is a flawed example, post-Purdue opioid epidemic. Brief tidbits include: real pharm science showed that pain killing effects of opioids are not as effective as some existing, non-opioid medications; sales agents were paid in commissions and bonuses for sales objectives; laws were changed at a Federal level just before the epidemic; the top of the sales pyramid financially benefited in the billions of dollars.

Those pills are actually similar to heroin, yet all of that happened legally in real life, with profits flowing through legitimate financial institutions on a very large scale.

...which is definitely an improvement over their previous slogan, "when the fun stops, stop"¹.

__ ¹ coincidentally what my Dad always used to say about black tar heroin.

>tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then.

Well, propaganda or not, hard drugs are bad for you.

So is bleach, that doesn’t inherently justify anything past a warning label.

People rarely die from taking bleach (except when they want to).

About 100,000 die annually from drugs in the US alone.

And people "high" on bleach never killed or injured anybody.

In the US, “unintentional poisoning deaths numbered 75,761 in 2023”

> About 100,000 die annually from drugs in the US alone.

A single substance vs all drugs including prescription, over the counter, and hard drugs while including suicide etc is hardly the support you think it is.

Further actually using the correct numbers and then trying to justify US drug policy based on hard drug overdoses fails when you look at hard drug overdoses in other countries. US numbers are high not because it’s an hard problem, but because our policy is bad.

>In the US, “unintentional poisoning deaths numbered 75,761 in 2023”

So you agree that hard drugs are poison (or even worse than poison, about 75K vs about 100K deaths / year).

>A single substance vs all drugs including prescription, over the counter, and hard drugs while including suicide etc is hardly the support you think it is.

"but, hey, poison also kills people" is is hardly the counter argument you think it is...

A flawed argument doesn’t mean the position is incorrect, only that the person making the argument failed.

> So you agree that hard drugs are poison (or even worse than poison, about 75K vs about 100K deaths / year).

Read my first post. I never said hard drugs were good for you, just that being poison alone does not inherently warrant anything past a warning label. And again that 100k number you want to use isn’t limited to hard drugs.

>A flawed argument doesn’t mean the position is incorrect, only that the person making the argument failed.

But let's skip the generic/philosophical pedantry and stick to the discussion at hand? I mean, I already argued against the position, which implies I consider it incorrect. So a failed argument doesn't do anything to convince me, on the contrary...

>I never said hard drugs were good for you, just that being poison alone does not inherently warrant anything past a warning label.

Inherently maybe no. Practically? Given the outcomes we want to see practically, and also from the moral standpoint of what's "good" i.g. regarding things a society should encourage vs discourage?

> And again that 100k number you want to use isn’t limited to hard drugs.

It includes what else, weed overdoses?

> It includes what else, weed overdoses?

People intentionally committing suicide is one of the big issues, but also people who die from any drug from Tylenol to prescription drugs.

That 75k includes accidental poisoning from drain cleaner etc and OD on hard drugs but excluded cases believed to be suicide.

> Given the outcomes we want to see practically, and also from the moral standpoint of what's "good" i.g. regarding things a society should encourage vs discourage?

Given those things are important you need to look at strategies that actually work, clearly the US fails here by an almost comical degree.

https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/...

And not being pedantic that’s an actual argument you can attack on the merits of that argument. Such as using rates rather than absolute numbers when America is such a large country and adjusting for age related risks etc.

Propaganda always works best when it's true, but selective. People that ended up homeless heroin addicts 2 years after smoking cannabis exist, the propaganda just neglected to mention that they are a minority.

Just like the failure of the war on drugs, trying to ban crypto and arresting anyone that owns it would almost certainly be a dismal failure.

That's why the on and off ramps should be regulated, heavily, instead.

Presuming you want to 'kill' cryptocurrency, starving it of interactions with the real economy seems a much easier way to do it.

Well it's not wrong, the solution isn't abstinence though, it's proper education, help for those who struggle with it, and making it legal and regulating it.

Just because the methods used by the war on drugs failed doesn’t mean that drugs are somehow good for you. It just means that the methods were ineffective.

Not just ineffective, but counterproductive. Kids saw through the propaganda and that made many of them discount all warnings about drugs. That’s why we shouldn’t abide well intentioned propaganda.

That's because DARE wasn't propaganda. It was a program that never meant to teach kids anything. It wasn't even meant to try

The point of DARE was to be a cover for getting cops into classrooms talking to kids after the LAPD "Public Disorder Intelligence Division" KGB-esque organization was brought to light and dissolved. Daryl Gates, the head of that program, was the one who approached some academics as a cover. It was immediately discovered that kids who went through the program were more likely to do drugs, but Gates didn't care. Because it wasn't about keeping kids away from drugs.

The entire point of the program was to turn kids into informants on their parent's gang activity. Kids were regularly coerced into narcing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzrGCk-F7FY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPD_Public_Disorder_Intellige...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Educatio...

> and he is meaningfully poorer at every stop along the way.

or meaningfully richer as the case may be

Exactly. 90% of gamblers quit just before hitting it big.

Yeah like why is Mike thinking he is investing if he is betting on a literal sportsbook? That is delusion and has nothing to do with crypto. I am not pro crypto but the logic here doesn't make a lot of sense.

You can say buying crypto is like gambling sure but it literally is not. It's investing in an extremely risky asset that can go to 0. But it is very different than placing a bit on Kalshi or a sportsbook.

I actually have bought CumRocket before but I also bought a lot of crypto and sold it at a profit. I did not use Kalshi later or sportbooks to gamble. I moved to invest in stocks later in life but bought boring etfs and index funds. Trading bitcoin actually taught me risk management and stocks seem much easier to handle in terms of strategy.

Sure I could've turned into a degenrate gambler but that's literally not crypto's fault

> why is Mike thinking he is investing if he is betting on a literal sportsbook?

But he's not, that's a big issue. If you download DraftKings, it's obvious you are gambling. If you download Robin Hood, and buy shares of Apple, it's obvious you are investing. If you then open Robin Hood and trade oil futures? 0 DTE options? What about when the same app shows you US commodities markets where they are binary options on if the US FIFA team make it to the round of 16?

Honestly I blame the stock market goons for normalizing calling "betting on the stock market" investing. The stock market isn't investing it's gambling. Same for the bond market and most asset markets.

Buying a bond from the issuer is investing. Buying an IPO is investing. Buying a rental property is investing. Investment implies possible productive result from the action. When you buy shares or bonds already on the market this just exits the previous holder, it does nothing productive.

Buying a rental property is just exiting the previous holder too.

I would define it differently. If you are putting money in something with the hope that the price goes up, that's speculating. If you put money in something with the hope that it generates income then that's investing.

So buying stocks could be either one.

> Buying a rental property is just exiting the previous holder too.

And using it to generate income, maintaining it for the customers (renters) etc

Thought experiment: suppose company C does a small IPO. I'm rich and buy all their offering.

Scenario 1: I hold all the stock for decades until I die. Under your terminology, I am the sole "investor". Fine.

Scenario 2: 1 millisecond after my purchase I sell everything I bought in the IPO to thousands of market participants. Under your terminology they are not "investors". I can't be an investor either, since I hold no more of the stock. Does the company no longer have investors?

The war on drugs, due to its targeting of specific socioeconomic and racial groups, is probably not the best analogy here.

While I do get your point about the FUD it generated, a better parallel might be the rise (and eventual fall) of the tobacco industry. There was a lot of fraud and deception in the 20th century about the health effects of smoking. There were ads touting that more doctors preferred brand X. The idea was to correlate something genuinely dangerous and lethal with good health.

Crypto and betting markets, to the author’s point, are repeating this pattern again today in terms of personal finances.

I read it as another verse of Eminem's "Guilty Conscience".