After bankruptcy, he was banned from betting sites. Then he discovered Kalshi

> No, if you won all the time they would use you to set odds. You'd be the single most valuable customer they have.

Good movie plot, perhaps, and some (relatively) ethical old-school brick and mortar sportsbooks work that way but the non-market online gambling apps have an established system that they all follow.

They all just use 'lazy odds' compiled algorithmically by outside third-parties like Sportradar, Kambi, Genius Sports, etc and if you show any true ability to beat these odds you just get instantly restricted from betting.

Only losers are welcome to remain on the platforms. Gotta keep things maximally extractive.

Reality contradicts you. Some academics found a flaw in odds setting which allowed them to win consistently. Instead of using them to set odds, the gambling site limited their maximum bet to $1.

That's more complicated. Basically, the courts have found that inability to pay is not a crime, but unwillingness to is. Depending on the court, and the debtor, judges end up with a lot of leeway as to how to interpret non-payment. It's a fucked enough situation that I hedged in the original comment. In an ideal world, where everyone had access to high-quality legal representation, it would be relatively straight forward to represent the difference to the courts. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world, and the very same pressures that make it impossible to pay your speeding ticket more often that not also deprive you of worthwhile legal representation.

> Possession of CSAM was not a crime until it gave the state a reason to go through every datum you own.

CSAM was not much of a problem for a looooong time and let's be real, the arts and clergy always had a huge issue with pedophilia, hell Polanski still is walking around freely. Only with it becoming widespread and people actually taking care about children getting raped left and right, laws around it became tightened.

I admit that there have been excesses like in Germany that even bans fictional texts or prosecuting minors sending nudes to each other, but in general, it is a good thing to combat organised sexual abuse of children.

> In Europe, we suddenly had laws against "hate speech," which I personally think goes against the Swedish constitution's protection of free speech, but here we are.

I'm German, if you need proof why certain kinds of speech should not be acceptable, just look into what happened between 1933-1945. Your country was lucky enough to not get invaded by us, but virtually every country that was invaded by us or later on occupied by the Soviets now has some sort of restriction on acceptable speech as a direct lesson.

> Possession of CSAM was not a crime until it gave the state a reason to go through every datum you own.

Conveniently, right after communist propaganda ceased to be a threat.

I share this perspective and hate the straw-man from pro-prediction-marketists that those opposed are moralists and puritans who can't accept that people like to bet on sports.

Prediction markets are a way of effectively placing a "bounty" on something you would like to happen. Or capitalizing on one of these existing bounties because you're able to affect the result. It's a way to commodify power (and information of course, which is what these platforms bill themselves for), converting it into money, which can you can build further power with.

I watch a lot of South American soccer recently, and what is the first ad they shove on you on the stadiums? Betting companies, of course! Paraguay, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, you name it.

Good luck getting all these countries banning gambling companies too. (Maybe Brazil did with Lula, but still).

Easy for the gov to do it: make hosting a gambling website in the US illegal, make providing access to online gambling illegal, treat money earned from gambling services like money earned from narcotics trafficking, threaten to punish payment processors if they work with gambling providers, make gambling commercials illegal (like they did with tobacco) etc. Make it where you can't run a billion-dollar company like DraftKings in the US and watch it dry up overnight.

Online gambling was literally illegal in most of the US a decade ago, even on the modern post-social-media internet. You could still do it by jumping through hoops like using a VPN to access foreign gambling sites, but you couldn't get it in the App Store on your iPhone, and you weren't spammed with ads for it every time you watch football.

It's not hard to imagine going back to that world; it wasn't that long ago. I used to support legalizing online gambling back then, but we've run the experiment and seen the results and it's past time to shut it down.

I'll assume you're asking in good faith. You don't have to prevent mutations or scan every cell in the human body to "solve" cancer. You can:

- make detection easier and cheaper (e.g. with less invasive biopsies)

- make treatment easier and cheaper (e.g. more precise targeted treatments, making chemo a last resort instead of the only option)

Among other things. There's even emerging research that certain types of cancers could be "vaccinated" against: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02612-3

It means being able to stop any uncontrolled cell replication.

Solving cancer means invent the technology to ensure no or few people die from cancer. For example you invent a technique for whole body scans that almost always catches cancer and you scan everyone every 6 months. Then cancer is solved technologically although rolling out the scanners is very hard and not solved yet.

Just like all prohibitions, if you take away access to X, people will just find other (often illegal/dangerous) ways to do X. We can make gambling less convenient and push it back into the backroom poker rooms and illegal bookies who break peoples' legs, but it would be more effective to solve the problems of despair, desperation and hopelessness that are driving people to gambling in the first place. That's a lot harder, so here we are talking about bans.