Yes. Gambling goes a long way. I just recommended Natasha Dow Schüll and Addiction by Design.

That leads us to BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab at Stanford and the addictive software design.

Tobacco industry owners figured out their time's out and bought food stock and put their addiction department to design food to be addictive.

Where should we head next?

Nah, people at DraftKings either are forced to drink the koolaid or worse.

Every DraftKings employee I've met get extremely upset when you call it a gambling company or ask them how they feel about enabling gambling to the masses.

When you have to lie to yourself about the actual effects of your work, maybe you should just clock out.

Not just mobile games. Roblox is basically an online child casino, powered by child laborers being compensated in Robux scrip. Fortnite isn't much better. We'd do a lot of good by regulating these games better too. The gambling addicts who got hooked with these games will move on to DraftKings when they're older. DraftKings knows this is their pipeline and has been investing in esports and video games like Call of Duty.

Would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever board room in the world has somebody saying “yes, we could increase profits by doing X, but that would be unethical so of course we won’t”

Prevously on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765288

Passive income? I need massive income.

Anybody seen those billboards? It’s disgusting.

and also blasted into your face at any opportune moment (TV, billboards, print media, in person conversations)

Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug

Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.

On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)

Imagine having a gambling addiction and trying to watch sports! I swear every third commercial is for gambling.

Legalizing targeted advertising was a massive mistake too.

We didn’t legalize it. These people are criminals.

"poor tax" framed by the state to help fund things education.

Well, aren't they though, technically?

Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?

When widespread sports gambling was illegal before, there were not rich and powerful people whose ability to maintain and grow their wealth and power was tied to keeping sports gambling legal.

Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.

I worked with a heroin distributor as well. They had very clear training for the dealers they worked with to identify and stop problem heroin use. There was space reserved in every text and on every dealer’s coffee table for stop heroin assistance.

Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.

I'm shocked. Shocked!

Ban this shit. Fuck anyone who works at these companies.

Why regulate the AI bit instead of the behavior itself? If you don’t want people to exploit addiction, then outlaw that, rather than saying you just can’t use AI to exploit addictions.

Cool, but you're not running people's finances at scale. It does not compare.

This should come as no surprise

We need a better way of responding to journalism evidencing what was previously suspected and accepted.

Hooray capitalism!

I frequently get DraftKings ad on YouTube featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas, they're pushing the information that it is now legal in every state.

I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.

Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.

Really this is the entire economy now, giant companies that have billions invested in mass surveillance and heavily min-maxed dark patterns targeting the wallet of the average unsuspecting consumer. Nonsense subscriptions that are impossible to cancel, replacing ownership with "license", customized pricing, endless advertising, zero customer service, shrinkwrap licenses that change daily, etc etc etc.

Back in my day this was called machine learning.

"In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, a natural person must have a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence, or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year, or must otherwise be a holder of a specific license in good standing."

Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.

The accredited investor standard is higher then a basic test.

"You show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"

They actually don't. That's the problem.

https://prospect.org/2026/07/07/economic-hit-men-for-gamblin...

Except online poker (here in the states)! Gotta keep that one prohibited. Now, betting on every freethrow Joe BBall takes in a game ... we're morally good there. It's those pesky immoral cards we have a problem with!

Some betting company made a partnership with my area's public bus system to put their ads on the side of the bus. There is no recourse for this, it seems, and this explosion of gambling ads is only going to get worse.

If you are vetting a romantic partner or a business partner, I would strongly urge you to check their phone. If they have DraftKings or FanDuel installed... run. Some might even say they lose some but it's for entertainment. I'd still trust them less than a social heroin user.

You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).

Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.

What do you expect? They thrive on addicts. No different than NYSE:META, and NYSE:RDDT, and NYSE:BUD and NYSE:TAP and NYSE:(fill in whatever proven-to-be-addicting product you want)

I would be genuinely surprised if they weren't.

My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.

Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.