Or they could do the opposite, and just say that apps like this are gambling, which they are, and not a "futures market" that has any real value to society.
By this measure any regulation of a commons is authoritarian. Fortunately, societies with this attitude tend to bee-line their ways to ecological collapse.
"Hedging" is like insurance but the thing you're insuring against is another bet.
I support banning sports gambling/insurance/futures because it is a big onramp for foolish people to maneuver themselves into disastrous financial decisions.
Guess at which level insurance and gambling are regulated?
And then they rant about patents! Like it should be easy to come up with a pithy statement that is meant to delineate what should be protectable from what shouldn't for EVERYTHING that has yet to be invented! Like that's a trivial task!
I know several people that had their lives severely impacted by these things and they were all regular people.
Libertarians are like house cats. They’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.
Now, I'm willing to accept that people will disagree about what deserves intervention and how much is acceptable. We can bicker about how much retail sports betting, guns, drugs, adult content, etc, etc, should be curtailed, that's fine.
But the hill I will die on is that people, such as yourself, who use a situations like this, where the overwhelming majority will probably want some amount of intervention as a soapbox to peddle intervention into people's private behavior for it's own sake like it's some sort of good default policy are evil at their very core and should be ridiculed, shunned and marginalized for the benefit of us all.
Same argument around banning hard drugs. They just make society worse. Obviously hard drugs are more clear cut and definitely worse for you, just saying, similar situation in principle.
jfc this is just terminal contrarianism. do we really need to debate whether it's harmful for extremely addictive drugs to be widely available? the Chinese literally fought wars over this
If we can create a situation where those people aren't breaking into cars, stripping the wire out of buildings, or dying in the street - that would be a net positive.
Prohibition has five decades of abject failure under its belt. Try something else.
I have given out a certain of points and bubbles in my life under harm reduction programs. These efforts (which I've worked at but not been central to) have had a measurable and positive impact on syphilis rates in rural Colorado among a number of other metrics.
While I think it's not great folks use, the worst parts of many of these things are created by states sanctioning things. People mess their lives up all kinds of ways and creating a black market pretty much just changes the incentive structures. It just makes it more likely folks will do fent because that's what they can find, but if they can't find that they'll drink hand sanitizer.
Unless you think that these folks should kill themselves off using tainted drugs (which was a policy pursued by the US government during alcohol prohibition), then legalization program makes some sense.
Introducing a government monopoly on things like heroin would have a lot of up-sides with the downsides largely being slightly skewed versions what we have right now.
I don't think that marketing heroin in social media apps the way gambling does is a sane idea, but I also don't think gambling apps should be allowed to market themselves.
Like a lot of things, I believe having a government undercut the market for things would have a positive impact, but depending on your view of the relationship between the DEA and the CIA you might think that is already happening but in the worst of all possible ways,
There's already causal inference evidence out there indicating that needle exchange programs reduce rates of HIV and other bloodborne infections, but increase the risk of fatal overdose. If simply making fresh needles more accessible increases overdose rates, I suspect legalizing heroin would have a much larger effect.
But I personally am not sure what the causal relationship between access "clean needles" and "fatally overdosing" is, though I would be interesting in hearing that account.
Straw man. Nobody is calling for banning gambling nationally.
For hard drugs, the expert consensus around harm reduction is supervised injection. Casinos are, in one sense, supervised injection for gambling. Kalshi, on the other hand, is the local dealer selling fentanyl to teens [1].
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/polymarke...
You think they were fucking gambling on their iPhones in 1890? They weren’t even doing that in 2012! Get real.
Because our regime is corrupt and bought [1]?
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/kalshi-re...