Egregoros

@cell the us government sued tobacco companies while subsidizing tobacco farms

@cell people reply to this "the us goverment is so big that of course it will have disagreeing parts that contradict each other on policy" without a hint of irony or understanding that this is a sign of a bad situation

@cell >government runs alcohol stores
>government also has health ministry which tries to spread awareness of the dangers of drinking

@eal @cell it feels like "drinking is a thing that people just want to do, it's not inherently bad but it in practice causes problems" but the lottery thing is literally just "we could ban this, but there is so much free money we have to get in on this" which is despicable

@sun @cell do you think those people don't realize that.
have you considered they consider that a given and so don't bother saying it.
show me a single unironic status quo enjoyer alive today. i don't think you can find them.

@HatkeshiatorTND @cell I think they want the stuff that the giant government gives and they don't really care about abstract values or if the thing even really works overall

@HatkeshiatorTND @cell everybody knows you can't do anything about it and I admit you can't be mad all the time but

@sun @cell people have a drive to do both, banning either of gambling and drinking will spawn a criminal industry of it unless you have a sufficient police state

I guess in the case of gambling the urge can be satiated via other ways like stocks/buttcoin/gacha games

@eal @cell I am not sure that a state lottery pushes out illegal lotteries, but I really don't know and could be totally wrong. they would know better than me

@sun @eal @cell Both are better than legal Polymarket, which is the gives government officials a turn spinning the rigged roulette wheel. Them starting the war with Iran on February 28th was such a disgusting move

@mrsaturday @cell @eal I never had super strong feelings on "everything prediction markets" but we're seeing it play out and the externalities are huge and obvious

@sun @eal @cell @mrsaturday
to me seems like stonks are the same thing with the same negative effects

@ageha @eal @cell @mrsaturday there is a case to be made for this, for example you could mitigate this by adding a mandatory delay to purchases so it still gives market liquidity but doesn't facilitate gambling. but I think there's a big difference between buying stocks and just like, gambling if a presidential speech is going to end by a particular minute mark and the president then abruptly ends his speech to beat that mark and somebody sweeps up a million dollars

@sun @eal @cell @mrsaturday
true there's a scope difference, but not sure "market liquidity" is a good thing even. feels like stonking yields too much hopping around, so everyone building façades one after another to draw money rather than investing in making anything-that-doesn't-suck.

@ageha @eal @cell @mrsaturday of course it's a good thing, price discovery is good and there has to be a way to do that. it just doesn't have to have microsecond-granularity, that is just for skimming

@sun @eal @cell @mrsaturday
what i see is "company builds garbage and lies about it to get good valuation, cash out, move to the next thing

and without that avenue for turn-around maybe they'd have to actually sell something to get money

@ageha @eal @cell @mrsaturday day to day you could even get granularity down to like, daily or hourly. if the goal is really just "respond to market conditions" rather than "arbitrage"

@ageha @eal @cell @mrsaturday thats a different problem entirely imo