7 ms·

It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too simil

• SwtCyber 2mo ago
  That's fair. A lot of regulation seems to work this way: first you recognize a real harm, then spend years arguing over where exactly the boundary should be
• danielmarkbruce 2mo ago
  It's actually somewhat easy... If you are creating financial exposure to an event with no underlying risk to it, and the point is exposure itself, you are gambling. In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those contracts to create risk for it's own sake. It's quite hard to get a market off the ground when there is no underlying risk - people purely speculating generally don't generate enough volume to achieve liftoff. Look at Kalshi and the volume on most bets - it's tiny.
  • vasco 2mo ago
    Having "underlying risk" to something just means you invested in it before. So for you it's not a gambling as long as you... have gambled before in the other direction? Buy bunch of call options? Gambling. Buy a bunch of put options for stock I already hold, somehow honorable investing.
    • hgomersall 2mo ago
      It's all gambling. You can dress it to as having a social purpose, but that's not why most people do it - they want the numbers to go up. The stock market is exactly the same - middle class gambling.
      • Dylan16807 2mo ago
        > You can dress it to as having a social purpose, but that's not why most people do it - they want the numbers to go up. Too cynical. This disqualifies basically anything you can do with money. If you put it in a bank to get interest you are solidly into the not-gambling end of the scale. And I don't think an index fund is that much more to the gambling side.
        • hgomersall 2mo ago
          Not really. The question is are you working for your money or are you hoping the money will provide free rent for you. If the latter, you're gambling. The only reason it's relatively risk free is because the system has been thoroughly stitched up in favour of the rent seekers.
          • Dylan16807 2mo ago
            I'm confused by the ideas you're combining here. Do you think all forms of rent-seeking are gambling or just ones that involve money in a direct way? The only risk in a bank deposit is up at the "societal collapse" level. Are you really so extreme as to say that's gambling, and if so isn't having money at all a form of gambling?
            • deleted 2mo ago
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            • hgomersall 2mo ago
              The point is largely around expectation. Sure, the base case of putting money in a bank is very safe, but the interest on that is not. Factor in inflation and its pretty easy to get negative returns on bank deposits. If you fiddle with "investments" with the intent of making money without doing anything else, that's gambling. Sticking money in the bank with the hope that it's still there next time you come back to it is not really gambling. You're just doing the default thing.
  • throwawayqqq11 2mo ago
    The "for fun" part is really important here. Addictive behavior comes from a hijacked dopamine system, into which you slowly get lured in. This makes it applicable to social media, drugs and if you squint, even to broad obsessions. This doesnt help the gambling distinction though. What activities can take over your neurological reward mechanism? Pretty much everything, like neurotically washing your hands. So you have to factor in societal scale and amount of (potential) harm and this is where the vague debate begins. A key point is a dealer/platform, profiting from your behavior, to exclude neurotics. A striking observation i made was, that gambling machines have deliberate delays between action (eg pull the lever) and reaction/reward for the brain to create tension and to break it with a dopamine spike. This deliberate design is how the machine exploits your brain and makes you an addict. A similar system is the endless social media feed (or even worse brainrot short videos). You scroll, you see new stuff, you identify content maybe emotionally. Its the same fast stimulus-reward cycle. Meassured in 1-2 seconds, same as gambling machines.
  • aqme28 2mo ago
    How would Poker fit into that definition?
    • danielmarkbruce 2mo ago
      Gambling.
  • wpietri 2mo ago
    That definition sounds plausible but breaks down in practice. Every Chicagoan has snowfall-related risk. And conversely, a lot of those guys legally traded where they were not exposed to risk. They were just gambling.
    • danielmarkbruce 2mo ago
      It doesn't break down. If you are creating risk for it's own sake, it's gambling. If you are doing something to hedge risk, it's not gambling. If your position is unrelated to a risk or wildly above the magnitude, you are creating risk for it's own sake. Gambling. The legality of it has zero to do with anything. You can gamble legally and illegally. You can gamble in markets which are made for hedging.
      • wpietri 2mo ago
        I do think it breaks down in practice for the goal of deciding which given trade/bet is gambling. I worked for market makers. Their theoretical job is to provide liquidity. They are required to always give a price. So if the theoretical cereal maker wanted to buy a wheat future to reduce risk, the market maker has to offer to sell them one. Then the theoretical farmer comes along later and the market maker buys a matching future and they're back to even. That by your definition is not gambling. But the fraction of trades that can be justified as actually helping hedge a real risk is very small. Some people trading are pure speculators, pure gamblers. But some of the non-gambler participants will trade in ways that are effectively gambling as well. I think it's effectively impossible to always tell on a trade by trade basis which ones are gambling. We could say it's all related to hedging, as the law does, but I think that's in practice ridiculous. It's a business filled with degenerate gamblers. So I return to my point that even though there's no bright line, it's still worth muddling though and finding some practical guidelines.
        • danielmarkbruce 2mo ago
          One side of a trade can be a gamble and the other a hedge. A single transaction doesn't need to be classified as a gamble or hedge - it can be both. As for the market maker themselves - they are definitely not gambling. They are trying to make money while reducing risk to the extent possible. You don't walk into the risk management committee and get an excited response because you increased risk all else equal, right?
• pants2 2mo ago
  It's certainly not well defined today; memecoins, prediction markets, sports betting, and more are all toeing the line of gambling.
  • rglullis 2mo ago
    Toeing the line? There is no underlying risk to any of that except the bet itself. Of course it is gambling.
    • Sharlin 2mo ago
      Not in the eyes of law (in many or most jurisdictions that regulate gambling).
      • postexitus 2mo ago
        At some point it's going to catch up. Legislation is a very hard process.
        • Sharlin 2mo ago
          Sports betting is centuries if not thousands of years old.
  • itintheory 2mo ago
    > toeing the line I'm not sure that phrase means what you intended to say here. From Wikipedia, [1]: "Toe the line" is an idiomatic expression meaning either to conform to a rule or standard, or to stand in formation along a line. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line It's possible I misinterpreted your statement though, and if so: apologies.
    • Hugsbox 2mo ago
      Guess I learned something new today. I've always thought "toe the line" means something closer to "staying as close as you can to the line without crossing it", if that makes sense.
• jbstack 2mo ago
  > What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Legally, it's whether the bet meets the legal definition of gambling as per the legislation applicable in your jurisdiction and any binding case law. There's no universal answer. But from an ordinary language perspective, the difference is whether it involves an element of skill sufficient (at least in theory) to win in the long run if you possess that skill. For example: Roulette - generally gambling Blackjack - usually gambling these days, sometimes not if count counting is feasible Poker - not gambling Stock market investing - not gambling
  • mschuster91 2mo ago
    > Stock market investing - not gambling That entirely depends on the asset classes you invest in. Proper stonks? Sure, that's not gambling. But as soon as you enter the fun world of derivatives and daytrading...
    • jbstack 2mo ago
      It's a common refrain, but I don't agree that it's correct. You're essentially boiling the definition down to the degree of risk: If (risk > some_threshold) then gambling = true; else gambling = false; With derivatives your risk is often greater than with traditional stocks. But that's not universally true. If you invest in a startup your risk is massive, whereas if you invest in a well diversified and low leveraged portfolio of derivatives your risk might be substantially lower. And in any case, so what? If you place a small bet on every number of a roulette table your risk is essentially zero: you'll simply make a guaranteed fixed loss of 5.26% on every spin. On the other hand, if you invest in the Vanguard Total Stock Market index tracker, you might hope to make around 8 to 10% per year, but in some years (e.g. 2008) you might make a big loss (37%), so the risk is significant. Yet I think most people would agree that the former is gambling while the latter is not. The important factor isn't how much risk you take on, it's whether a sufficiently skilled person can achieve a positive mathematical expectation over a series of similar bets.
      • mschuster91 2mo ago
• Dracophoenix 2mo ago
  > My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"? What substance do their claims have beyond conveniently spun moral arguments? Why does betting on an event as common and unalterable as the weather require adoption by an incumbent entity and/or regulation by the state to achieve legitimacy?
  • nkrisc 2mo ago
    > In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"? The jury.
    • Dracophoenix 2mo ago
      A jury is relevant to the legal adjudication of harm, not the institutionalization of a certain ideas, activity, etc. as harmful. There are many so-called harms that are arbitrarily declared by agencies as such long before a lawsuit is conceived. Just the same, there are many legitimate harms that states and societies enact as their "right" at the expense of a person's liberty (i.e. conscription, expropriation of property, etc.).
      • shimman 2mo ago
        You don't need to take an anti-democracy stance regarding juries. Also there is a reason why trust in institutions are lower than Trump's approval, institutions are prone to corruptions and enriching the elites while advocating for policies that do not help worker's material needs.
  • lokar 2mo ago
    We do this in the law all the time. Many here find it imprecise and aesthetically ugly, but it’s how the world works.
  • wpietri 2mo ago
    Those are all questions with a variety of answers historical and current. You could have looked them up. But I take it that you mean them rhetorically, with a point something like, "since I, a smart guy on the Internet can't think of a clear answer in two minutes, there's no point in anybody looking at anything that harms people I don't care about." But again, I say that shouldn't stop us from grappling with harms. A good example is food safety regulation. Are there clear, perfect answers? No. But we muddle through anyhow, doing our best to balance many factors. And we should.
• WarmWash 2mo ago
  > Let me know if you figure it out. If you tell people at a dinner party your wealth came from it, will they be impressed and intrigued, or will they roll their eyes and be dismissive? "I know how to throw dice" doesn't have quite the same intellectual ring as "I know how to trade derivatives contracts" haha