These founders should be in prison for promoting illegal gambling. Same federal charges mafiosos get caught on for a "friendly card game".
Thankfully that part of the law didn't stand under closer inspection. As anyone on this website should know, it's technically impossible to identify all VPN users or geolocate VPN users behind their VPN. Anyone can set up a VPN on a raspberry Pi and leave it at a friends' house in another state. Under the law they tried to pass, adult websites would be liable for this.
The legislation in my example wasn't a hypothetical slippery slope. It actually passed. This was part of what they were trying to regulate.
You don’t even have to read the article, the headline says it all…
As far as what the current state of the world tells you, what would you have done then? Should Utah have dispatched assassins? They are taking the leaders of the company to criminal court. I can't believe I have to stand up for Utah here.
There are many more steps in the justice system where they could get off easy, and there’s plenty of precedent for that.
We play this game on HN every time anyone is charged. When Holmes was being sentenced there were still folks on here who were convinced (with zero research or evidence, of course, just vibes) it was a scam.
I would amend your “breaking the law” comment to “willfully ignoring all regulation, taxes, and labor provisions” perhaps but, same sentiment.
As for the gambling bits I guess if I had to answer it would be property investors that bought thinking they could rent on AirBnB - speculation but also driving up prices in popular areas to price out locals.
On the other hand, I've come around to the view that sports betting is a net unqualified bad -- and I didn't necessarily feel that way before the Kalshi/PM explosion.
Which has led to the interesting phenomenon that a sequence of Pareto improvements (each of which makes everyone better off) has seemed to leave everyone worse off.
How the hell is that leaving everyone worse off?
A lot of these companies have taken this approach. Break laws until someone finally notices AND does something about it. The runway to a slap on the wrist is often times more financially beneficial to companies - there is no incentive to stop if you run a billion dollar company and breaking the law gets you a $50M dollar fine you make back in a single month.
I thought SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) was supposed to prevent a lot of this, but I guess companies just continue to find loopholes to exploit.
You might want to look up Barcelona and the issues airbnb causes there. Basically it follows out the cities as you can make way more money doing Airbnb than renting to people living/working there.
As to Uber, I'm not sure if the driver experience is unambiguous good. For some, sure. For the ones that depend on it, I'm sure they'll disagree
Uber drivers are welcome to no longer drive for uber if they don’t enjoy the experience.
This is obviously a fallacy under our current economic system; workers are not "free to choose whatever job/occupation" they'd like. Their circumstances (material conditions) dictate what they can and cannot do for work, and in some places, driving for Uber is about it, at least for a part time gig that can fit around a primary job (since many Americans at least must work in excess of 50 hours a week to afford food and rent).
So, instead of punching down and saying "man, just get a better job" we could recognize the realities of the world and hope we can make the conditions of drivers better. Uber, or a system like it, at least if we are forced to have car-centric infrastructure, should be a net good. At the moment it is not.
It should have more protections too, I'm not arguing against those. I just think "it's the only job some people can get" is often a bad argument. And it's often used to perpetuate bad systems.
(Competitive doesn't mean the same price per night - there's also factors of cleaning and occupancy rate)
Are they?
The drivers have a certain set of capital and skills, and Uber (and to a lesser extent, Lyft) have created a near-monopoly on the market to buy services produced using that capital and skills. Since the ability to execute a transaction in that market is severely compromised if you don't work by Uber's rules, you are effectively outside of the marketplace if you no longer drive for Uber. You make no money. You go broke. You don't have the capital necessary to effectively compete in the market for giving rides in exchange for money. They own your skills and capital in all but the legal sense.
If there were either real, multi-company competition for Uber's market share, or a larger amount of regulation upon their monopoly, it'd be a different story.
Of course, there are people who think that monopolies are good, but that seems to be counterintuitive to anyone with a basic grasp of human nature and history.
The skill of knowing all the roads stopped being important a decade or two before Uber even started.
This isn't a rhetorical question. As far as I know there are only two globally - Uber and Lyft. If most of what you need is a web server and a lawyer, shouldn't there be ten of these in every city?
Uber is a major driver of the gig economy and all the lack of worker protections that that includes.
They’re also arguably a major driver/originator of DoorDash and Uber Eats, a company that famously takes an enormous percentage of every restaurant’s order fee, compounding either the increase in costs of restaurant food, or causing restaurants to struggle further or both.
They’ve done good - they’ve made it easier to get a job when you otherwise can’t, and they’ve reduced car reliance for some people; but “unambiguous good” is too far a bridge.
If a restaurant doesn’t like the cut taken by DoorDash they’re welcome to not participate in DoorDash. As far as I know, neither company has ever forced a restaurant into participation.
DoorDash got sued by In-N-Out for doing this. https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...
The parent comment was complaining about the fee that DoorDash charges the restaurant.
Is that link going tell me that DoorDash was charging restaurants non consensually? That would be very tough for me to believe
That being said, they weren't effectively offering unregulated gambling on any difference of opinion. Gambling is a vice. We've made it a regulated vice, but it's very much still a vice. If you get rid of the "regulated" part, people, including those with the ability to present a case in front of a grand jury, are going to see you as a 1980s cosa nostra capo and act accordingly.
The problem lies in the legal gray area of what constitutes gambling, and therefore "illegal" gambling. That's what the courts have to decide.
I think most people would say this is gambling. But our legal system has to rule on that before we can start putting people in jail for it.
We should! Finally incentivize rich people to not screw over the rest of society for a quick buck.
Yes. This is what we do in the United States and most of Western Europe. This is how countries like this function
I doubt that you would be happy with the outcome, certainly not if you had to actual deal with such a legal system. Plain language laws sound great in theory, but in practice the result is a rigid system that is easily manipulated by bad actors and which becomes oppressive to honest people.
"No, I am not marketing a tobacco product, I am marketing a product that produces nicotine from other chemicals, then vaporizes it to be inhaled!"
"If I had not done it, my children would have been seriously injured, are you really going to imprison me for protecting them?"
In general, whenever a society tries to apply its legal code, it will begin to develop judicial law by necessity -- at some point you will have to deal with borderline cases where it is not clear if the law was broken, no matter how clear the language of the law might appear. Here is an ancient example taken from the bible: the death penalty shall only be imposed on the basis of testimony from two witnesses. OK, seems pretty clear, but we know from the Talmud that questions arose when the law was applied -- who counts as a witness, what counts as testimony from a witness, etc.
Also keep in mind that no matter how plainly laws are written down, over time you will wind up with a large number of laws as society deals with changing conditions and unforeseen circumstances. Inevitably you wind up with contradictory laws and you do need some process for resolving the contradiction and determining which law should be applied.
The rigidity concept you talk about effectively exists in our current system, too, it's just a matter of perspective. If the law is written in such a poor way so as to need review, and the legislators and executives in on the bill know where the jurists who will review it stand, theyve effectively got the different, rigid law they wanted until someone decides to review again. Review, with no particular cadence, or urgency, etc. I actually do think review is good, but it shouldn't stand in for actual legislation (which since about the 80s it has, largely due to Reagan era deregulation)
Maybe the breakage is somewhere else -- I talked about Citizens United elsewhere, which effectively lets corporations buy votes from legislators, and we know at least 2 of the current justices are flat-out corrupt, getting gifts and financial help from millionaire and billionaire friends.
Until a judge says it's a crime, it isn't. Innocent until proven guilty etc
Yes, we wait for the courts or the legislature rather than resorting to mob justice. There are good reasons for it. The most obvious is to ensure that the corrupt politicians do not use the power of the state to arbitrarily oppress and persecute people. Another is to ensure that there is no doubt about guilt when we convict someone, and to avoid arguments about the penalties being arbitrary and unfair.
Really though, establishing courts to deal with accusations of people breaking the law is something most societies converge on at some point. "Joe was only ordered to spend 5 years working the fields, so why should Jim be executed for doing the same thing????" amounts to a rudimentary form of judicial law -- pointing to a precedent from a previous case to argue the current case.
But if you know better then maybe you should just decree from the courtroom in your house and send your ruling to the AGs of all 50 states.
Like, do you have any actual argument as to why it's not gambling, or are you just going to hang it on this plausible deniability? It's not like they knew the 3rd circuit would decide in their favor anyway, so I don't really think your point is the slam dunk you're acting like it is. They knowingly engaged in activities that most states consider to be gambling. They aren't even really denying that. They are just saying it falls under federal regulation, but the argument for that is so shockingly poor, it's hard to imagine how the 3rd circuit's decision could stand, but its only on a preliminary injunction anyway, so it's still not quite a merits decision. The third circuit said that by its own logic, Congress must weigh in on whether or not "bingo" is a swap regulated by the CFTC. If you can't understand how facially stupid that is, I don't know what to say.
Yes I think what they are doing is illegal and they should not be permitted to operate outside the gaming regulations of individual states.
But it doesn't matter what I think. I was trying to have a conversation about the gray areas and why we don't just send people straight to jail for trying out a new, novel, (and potentially illegal), business model.
The courts are figuring it out.
>I was trying to have a conversation about the gray areas and why we don't just send people straight to jail for trying out a new, novel, (and potentially illegal), business model.
Actually we do. If a court finds your activity was illegal, you get the according punishment. The court doesn't say "oh gee golly, you're guilty but we'll let you off for this one because who could see it coming!"
>The courts are figuring it out.
The courts figured it out. It does not matter in Utah state court, what the 3rd circuit thinks. It is not binding precedent in Utah state courts.
Why are casinos operated by Native Americans legal but casinos operated by black people illegal?
I don't think "illegal gambling" is illegal for the reasons you want it to be illegal.
You might want to look up what the reservations are, legally speaking