I'm sure they are all bad, but damned if I never encounter them outside of HN.

Btw every ad around the stadium in World Cup is for Kalshi now. Really makes me question the fairness of the games.

But why? Ease of access (ie the Intenret and particularly smartphones) are obviously a factor. There was a time when if you wanted to gamble you had to do it illegally or you had to go to a physical casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (and then riverboats, etc). You can look across to see how ease of access to gambling absolutely increases the amount of gambling and thus gambling addiction. A good example are the poker machines that are available in some states in Australia but not all.

But there's something deeper than that (IMHO). And I think that thing is the increasing inequality [1] and the affordability crisis. People may be talking about affordability a lot now but it's not a new issue. It was a key issue in the 2016 election, for example.

The thesis is that as people become increasingly desperate to have enough money (and espeically if they fall below that level) then gambling increases because people see this as the only way they can get ahead (eg [2]).

I believe gambling is a symptomo and indicator of a deeply broken societ and a deteriorating society.

The sad reality is that gambling is an excellent way of extracting what little wealth poor people have and it makes everything worse on a macro scale. Gambling should be relatively inaccessible. Yet we have the Federal government suing to stop states to ban prediction markets [3].

[1]: https://wir2026.wid.world/

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8643406/

[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/where-the-feds-are-fighting-...

The difficult truth is that as we've engeineered our society over the last 50 years into more and more deterministic outcomes, and began to assign morality itself TO determinism. Where in we've reached a point where when we must face that life is probablistic (i.e. gambling) we assign that space a moral evil

As a person who is deeply entrenched in this way of thinking I find gambing uncomforatable, but when we invented the core AI technology of prediction systems at Google that power LLM tech today, 'gambling' on probablistic outcomes at a super short term and long term level is questining the determinism of life itself.

Gambling is a collective signal on cohort outcomes and wisdom of crowds, which becomes training data itself for long/high dimensional-vectors required to fuel intelligence.

In other words, it turns out EVERYTHING is gambling, some things just have better odds than others, and most of those better odds choices come from OHTERS gambling to make those odds better for you.

Humanity moving forward out of this trap of high odds probability gravity wells and growing as a species will involve a lot of gambling i suspect.