You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or
lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you
advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction.
Good. You should face social stigma for creating products that literally ruin people's lives.
But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction.
Which is a good thing! This is an area full of scammers, if you can't set up your business legally, I'm very happy to hear it's more difficult for you to advertise it.
I mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though. It may actually be more beneficial to allow these things more broadly, because then social safety features can be wedged in between consumers and suppliers more easily and they don't have to deal with a gigantic shadow market that already gets stigmatised to death by the rest of the population. Just accept that a certain percentage of the populations has screwed up dopamine households and try to keep them away from gangsters as best you can. That would probably help society as a whole more than banning everything and pretending the problem goes away if you close your eyes.
I think the laws are written assuming everyone is rational but it's pretty clear from neuroscience than dopaminergic/VTA pathway abnormalities addictions make one anything but rational; and they haven't been updated to reflect the science.
>I mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though.
Making drugs illegal does not eliminate demand, but it absolutely curbs it. The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it [1]. While it's true cannabis use had been gradually increasing for decades prior to legalization, there was a significant spike afterwards which has since levelled off.
> The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it
The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates.
The same link also points out that the legalization happened right before COVID and then you have a major confounder because even if cannabis use is actually up, you don't know if it's because of legalization or people turning to cannabis over stress from COVID. Moreover, the reported usage increased during COVID but started to decline in 2023. This implies that either the apparent spike was COVID, or that it was something like media reports about recent legalization acting as temporary free advertising and causing a non-permanent increase in usage. Neither of those is evidence of a sustained increase in demand.
Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market, and then you get fewer people becoming addicts because the thing they thought they were buying was spiked with something significantly more addictive by a black market seller. Or the black market products have higher variation in the dose and then customers can't predict how much they're getting and then occasionally take more than expected, leading to a higher rate of overdose and stronger dependency-inducing withdrawal.
It isn't true, at least not as a hard and fast rule. Post-legalization changes in demand differ greatly per country. It completely depends on contemporary cultural factors of the country in question.
Your claim is far too open ended to interpret clearly.
A change in demand post-legalization can absolutely be highly variable across different countries/cultures, but unless you can demonstrate a country that legalized cannabis and saw a decline in demand, then your as of yet unsubstantiated claim does not refute mine.
The argument you are presenting is recycled from debates about newly banning things that have been legal for forever, but doesn’t make any sense at all as a response to people bemoaning disasters caused by an activity being newly legalized.
which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and-order, to be a workable, safe and reasonably fair business. Scarne started out his career, as a magician and card mechanic, as a sort of consultant who could keep games fair.
Blacks in New York City, for instance, ran illegal street craps and ran a lottery
quite similar to the "Pick 3" games you see in many states -- the latter got taken over by the Italian mafia.
Gambling has a broad cross-cultural appeal and some people are going to do it no matter how you try to shut it down. In the US we went from having a few centers to widespread "riverboat" and tribal gambling to widespread casinos now to mobile gambling on sports and sometimes the equivalent of video slots.
Of course there is the matter of degree. It's not going to wreck your life to drop $1 on the lottery a week and probably gives you more than $1 worth of fun. If you're addicted though it may be no fun at all. I can totally see where Nate Silver is coming from but I can also see the degenerate who drops 20 bets on a single game on the weekend as well as the person who thinks he is Nate Silver and he isn't. I think the Superbowl is a fair competition by player who are playing their hardest, but it breaks my heart as a sports fan when teams are not playing to win and that's why I can't stand watching the NBA despite loving going to second-tier college basketball games in person.
And for drugs? I remember all the Lester Grinspoon talk about how prohibition is worse than the drugs themselves and that might have been true before 2000 but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me -- but Marshall McLuhan said we are driving by looking in the rear view mirror and of course some people are going to be repeating things that were true in the last century.
Again, what do you think it is? I don't see anything it could be besides what was written. You could call it endocrine imbalance or disrupted hormone household if you wanted to be less precise and skirt around the actual biological problem, but it still doesn't change anything.
Not to mention the entitlement of startups to just flaunt laws and regulations.
Still kills me to this day Uber and AirBNB running illegal billion dollar operations. I suppose one can at least say Uber mitigates drunk driving tendencies. As far as AirBNB goes, it can rot straight in hell. My hometown is now 20% AirBNB, they ran illegally for many years, and this completely prices out normal folks trying to live near their families.
I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves; to try to get them changed. Civil disobedience is a long standing practice. However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc. Just because _you_ think the law isn't just doesn't mean it's not a law - it just means you think it should be changed.
And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
Meh. What they are doing is NOT civil disobedience and protest. What they are doing is just normal breaking the law for profit thing.
That being said, I also dont think that civil disobedience means you have to accept whatever harsh punishment whatever authoritarian is using. It is actually ok to avoid those.
If you can figure out a Gig Economy way to get robot/remote/AI pilots into airline cockpits, you will make a mint. "What? I can save ten bucks on airfare if I accept a robot pilot? GIVE ME THAT TICKET"
A mint we will then need to spend on bribes to ALPA. DoT is almost entirely captured now, so that's less of a problem.
In fact, here's a much better get-rich app / scheme: use AI to find regulatory situations that are both easy to break and profitable to break and where enforcement is usually just done to poor people. The Ubermaker. Why dig a gold mine when you can sell the shovels.
This comment severely lacks second-order thinking. The regulations exist for a reason. Removing them because some billionaire wants to make a buck is not a good reason.
Yawn. I think social networks and search engines can do whatever they like, but this kind of histrionic pearl clutching is getting old.
If people choose to seek out entertainment that’s bad for them then there’s nothing wrong with providing a market for it. It’s on the consumer to know their own limits.
There are plenty of other products that literally ruin people's lives: alcohol, tobacco, sugar, pharmaceuticals, credit cards, firearms, timeshares, junk food. Society has them all on very different parts of a stigma spectrum.
Honest question: why is this line so clear for you?
There is a stigma with all of those things except maybe pharmaceuticals (unless you are selling opioids), sugar and junk food (because of their ubiquity).
The line is clear for some people right away. Other people have to see the effects first hand. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and the never-ending line of obviously poor people dropping nearly their entire paychecks on scratchoffs, then buying a case of beer was a formative memory for me. It most states, the lottery is just subsidizing the cost of education on the backs of the poor and uneducated and gambling-addicted so that they don't have to raise property taxes. And that's if the money actually gets spent on education. Sometimes they just turn into slushfunds for pet projects. It's gross.
I know plenty of folks who enjoy a little gambling without letting it get them into trouble, so the product couldn't be "built to make people's lives worse". Why should they have something taken away just because some other people can't control themselves?
> We're talking about a product built to make people's lives worse while extracting wealth from them that get them addicted as well.
That's most of the products being sold today, you think the most for-profit companies sell things and services in order to improve the world? They're selling stuff because they want to make money, if they can make someone addicted + extract wealth from them, then in their world that's a no-brainer.
That's just not true at all. The fruit I buy is designed to make my life worse? The vacuum cleaner? The lawn mower? The workout equipment? The standing desk for my office? The clothing I buy?
Yes, literally all those things are decreasing in quality because the companies producing and selling these want higher margins. Have you not noticed the sharp drop in quality and durability in made stuff compared to 20-30 years ago? Almost all those things are worse and lasts less today than they used to.
Electronics are more likely to be obsolete for technical reasons, but - for example - modern dishwashers and dryers are far more likely to have cheap plastic parts that fail more quickly. Even for brands with premium price tags.
With clothes, fast fashion is designed down to a budget and up to a price. For consumer brands, the more expensive something is the more disposable it is and the shorter its working life.
"Built to make people's lives worse" is an opinion. There are people who gamble without getting addicted and treat it as good fun. Why shouldn't I be able to bet a small amount on a team I like in Fantasy Football? I've never gambled more than I could afford to lose nor have I felt the need to do it habitually. I get that there are some people who are not like me, but you seem to think that there are only people who are not like me that use these types of services.
There's a difference between betting between your friends on FF versus creating a system of gambling that takes advantage of the least fortunate among us.
Okay sounds like we agree that sugar and junk food should be on the wrong side of the line, but turns out those industries have very little stigma. Who is standing outside the school gates protesting against big cola? My point is it's complicated, ambiguous, sometimes hypocritical, differs by jurisdiction and so on. None of it is clear.
Half of the list by GP shares these same characteristics, unfortunately. The only one that is slowly - but not even steadily - going towards the same stigma is tobacco.
Not the original person you replied to, but as far as I'm concerned there are a few questions that could very easily indicate which side of the line is something.
E.g.
- Is it addictive?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives in seconds?
- Does it have a strong lobbying mechanism behind it? (n.b. things that are good and nice rarely need someone to bribe people to accept them)
or simply:
- Would you be worried if your child did it?
I think the number of "yes" that you get draws a very clear line.
He's obviously talking about alcohol (it takes seconds to consume an amount of alcohol that can result in death, yours or someone else's from a fight or car crash) and firearms (should be obvious).
Sounds like you're implying some sort of mischaracterization of sugar here which minimizes the former in a weird way.
I wanted to draw the distinction between something that destroys lives over a longer period of time (smoking) VS something like gambling where you could lose your life's savings in seconds.
The alcohol mentioned in a sibling comment also ticks the box.
For the sugar, I'd say yes, no, no, yes and "not too much, but I'm keeping an eye out".
Maybe I haven't seen enough of his videos. They seem generally informative? Perhaps a bit depressing but I wouldn't say that watching a Tim Snyder video can ruin your life like gambling can.
Not sure if the history lessons are a joke, but sugar is rightfully taxed or otherwise disincentivized in many countries, because it is highly harmful to society as a whole. Sports cars definitely get some yes answers, and are also rightfully taxed in several countries.
Military technology may be an exception as "necessary evil", but also is a bad example because it id not consumer-oriented.
Just because there's a spectrum doesn't mean that everything on it is indistinguishable. Everybody draws their own lines, some people count more or fewer things as stigmata, some people's lines are fuzzier than others.
No single person can draw that line, that's what Courts and Laws are for. And some of the industries play more dirty and try to manipulate that due process, others failed.
But that's what we have, it's never black & white. Always a process and always evolving.
I live in New York. A very old very famous manufacturer of firearms, Remington Arms, which employed hundreds of people and was the economic engine of its community was forced by the State of New York to shut down. That community cannot replace what was lost when the factory closed. Poverty, crime, drugs have moved in to the void.
You may be right that guns are are corrosive to a democratic society, that's an open debate. But the people who depended on that factory had the rug pulled and real harm was done without any regard to their welfare. And not everyone who depended on the factory worked there, deli owners and dry cleaners, these types of legitimate businesses are damaged when a major employer closes doors.
I suppose I relate this story to you just to show that, there are other people who think like you, guns are stigmatized, and it has a real human cost. We should not be flippant with our neighbor's well being, because we can't predict the turns of fate, one day it might be our turn.
Your statement is not grounded in the truth. Remnington did not shut down because of government interference. They employed a grand total of 100 people in NY. Hardly the "economic engine of its community"
They shutdown because they sold 7.5 million guns that could fire without someone pulling the trigger and 60 minutes exposed it.
And you should know that their building is being converted into a 250,000 sqft AI data center. So it's not like employment is just lost in the area.
straw man argument. This was about social stigma of weapons and you told a story about a factory being force closed and the surrounding community degrading by that.
We should not keep bad things alive just because jobs depend on it.
I was having this discussion the other day with a friend, I do believe as an adult you should be allowed to do anything you want providing you're not harming others.
That said, there is a HUGE need for more regulation around advertising, cut off limits and companies recognising users with a problem.
If you take a Bar for example, most barmen will notice you're already drunk as hell and cut you off, probably kick you out if not get you some water etc. It's actually a legal requirement to stop at some point in countries.
Casinos on the other hand, if you are down 99,000 out of your 100,000 with zero hands of games won, that casino is going to plow you with a good time until it has that last 1,000. It's disgusting.
I hate gambling , I've seen its effect on friends of mine and their families. But I would never stop an adult doing what they want, while knowing the risks.
So would an Unlicensed Speakeasy, but I can't include them in the post or else everything would be destructive. I'm not defending Gambling at all, just highlighting there is a difference in how they are allowed to behave, which I also don't agree with.
Asking a casino to behave better is never going to work, adding more regulations and stricter licensing might. The fact that betting companies are now allowed to advertise and sponsor sports is an incredible negative step.
Wow, I'm shocked at the negative attitudes in this thread. Porn and gambling are legit businesses, even if you don't like it. (And some people used to argue that part of the rise of the PC was because some people bought it as a "porn machine.")
It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt.
When I was an intern at a big-name, conservative company, one of my friends came from a porn website.
Also its silly to vilify porn and gambling but not social media and the plethora of seemingly socially acceptable / legal things which are still legitimately destroying the fabric of society. Most haters are just as culpable.
On the topic of operating costs, the annual "high risk" credit card fees just went up to nearly $2k/year. High risk in quotes because even if you have stellar charge back rates you still get hit with it (did you know the charge back rate for adult is way, way less than the chargeback rate for travel?). The card networks have something called virp/bram, which is basically designed to force adult merchants into paying these absurd fees and limiting the banks they can work with to the most predatory ones. It's a huge antitrust issue that results in higher consumer prices but unfortunately no one is litigating yet
It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society.
If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.
I don't like mixing of everything 18+ in the article. I think the author wants to put all the stigma in one basket, and I don't it's as simple. For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale.
I think like you argue, society shaping business is good. And some people should really reevaluate what they're going for if that's too much for them.
> For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale.
Now I'm as as free-minded as people typically gets, but both of those are just "entertainment" for me, one is not more "essential" than the other, what exact "human need" does pornography meet that somehow gambling doesn't also meet, since we're not talking about "fun" or "entertainment" here but something else it sounds like.
> While the porn industry has issue, at its core it isn't constructed to extract money from you.
For what purpose do you think that industry was indirectly created for, if not to make money from people? Even if it might not have been created with that intent (although I'd still argue it was), today it surely is mainly driven and maintain with the (at least) implicit purpose of extracting money from people, that's literally why we call it an "industry" instead of just a "community".
Meta isn’t as blatant about it, but they’re arguably much worse than anything else listed here. I think because it has legitimate uses up front, like keeping up with your friends or selling something on the marketplace, and the true evil is just below that veneer. Gambling and payday lending is right out front.
Do you think payment providers should act like moral police that decide how the customers can spend their money? If so, do you think Google/Apple/Microsoft should have a say in which apps the users can install? Should ISPs decide which sites the users can access?
The author is saying it explicitly, you can’t flex as normal people do so you have to feed your ego finding different ways such as anonymous posts. Or talking to an stranger being drunk.
> When posting job openings, you will always have to beat around the bush, without using direct language. And only then, when the candidate has already agreed to an interview or even after it, do you tell them what kind of content they will be working with every day.
> Employees join such projects for various reasons. Some realize that the pay is better than in legitimate projects. Others come because they couldn’t find a job where they wanted to, or because they are simply interested in working on something forbidden. And then a good company saving the world will come along and offer them a job, and they’ll leave. Building a stable team from people with this kind of motivation is hard.
I think OP made this whole article up. Everyone that applies for Aylo knows exactly what they're applying for. The pay is below-average because (a) there's not actually a lot of money in porn and (b) there's no shortage of dudes that want to work in it.
Had a recruiter reach out to me the other day from a sports gambling website (one of the major ones, as reputable as you can get in this industry). I heard them out, thinking they would offer above market rate but in actuality, they offered significantly below market rate.
Employment at a below market rate might be the only job some people can get due to events in their past i.e someone with a criminal record that puts most employers out of reach.
There is a large talent pool who want to get their lives back on track.
Thanks for reading! When writing this essay, I drew solely on my own experience. I’ve often noticed that startups post job listings with misleading job descriptions, especially in stigmatized industries. It’s only after the interview that they reveal what the work will actually entail. Perhaps you simply haven’t noticed such job listings.
This article puts "we pinky swear its not gambling" apps, I'm thinking Robinhood here, but some crypto and prediction market apps would qualify too, in a new light.
If you don't appear to be a casino at first glance, it's a lot easier to find employees, payment processors and advertising networks willing to work with you.
Brick-and-mortar companies (notably Walmart) used the same trick to get tech talent. Having Walmart on your tech resume doesn't look great, having an e-commerce startup called jet.com looks much better, even if Walmart is that startup owner and sole customer.
A well written and thoughtful article! Thanks for sharing.
It's been a while since I've read article on something like online gambling without feeling like the author was trying to proselytize.
Edit:
I appreciate the human perspective shared by the article, and get the feeling that OP offers a warning of the consequences of working in stigmatized fields. Ofc online gambling (and gambling in general tbh) is a terrible thing that ruins lives.
Thank you very much for reading! Yes, the purpose of this essay was to shed light on the challenges of launching startups in stigmatized niches and the consequences of working in them.
I worked as a tech in porn in my very early 20s. My experience was the opposite, interviewers later on remembered my CV because I was transparent about it. In 2009-2011 weren’t many places where a junior developer could work on code that served 100M ad impressions
/month and 3-5M requests on the pages. Gambling and porn both hook into your dopamine systems, but mixing them together does not make sense at all. The consequences of watching pornography are two orders of magnitude milder than a gambling addiction.
I didn’t expect him to describe his own field as illegitimate. Somehow knowing you are doing bad things is even worse than a rationalization. Why spend your time with people who don’t believe in what they do?
I cannot care less what (legal) porn content people consume in the intimacy of their room. I cannot understand being prude about this. Like all things, over-use is unhealthy, but I have yet to see studies proving the societal damage caused by porn. Before you ask: the loneliness epidemic (which intuitively translates to more porn consumption) is just a symptom of people losing a "third place" to socialize, or not having their own place. Those are rooted in the shitty economic landscape we're in, and uncontrolled urban sprawl with no public transit.
Gambling/betting though? Overwhelming societal damage with basically no upside beyond the ghouls in charge. Regulate this shit to death, tyvm.
And yet I can buy a Premier League soccer shirt with a casino brand sprayed across the front. I wish it would stop, advertising gambling via sports sponsorships should be banned. It literally prevents me from buying the shirt.
> A regular provider charges a regular commission but will not work with you, while another will want a commission 10 times higher and will agree, but may stop working with you at any time.
I know I will get downvoted for this because it is an unpopular opinion, but this exactly the reason why we need bitcoin as a means of payments without any middlemen involved.
The miners are the middlemen, and they can chose to take your transaction or not. Should bitcoin ever be actually used for payment, it's not to too far fetched to think miners could be forbidden to validate transactions involving a blacklist of addresses...
Partly true, the miners decide. However, "the miners" is not a single person or group, but are distributed world wide under control of different people and pools having different incentives - albeit, making money is the far most common incentive. I.e. a miner can reject your transaction, but you can gradually increase the fee (replace-by-fee) until someone picks it up.
Plus, on-chain transactions would NOT be used to pay 10€/Month subscriptions. The lightning network (a bitcoin layer-2 network) handles transactions instantly and with lower fees. No miners involved in individual payments here (only for channel creation).
But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction.
Which is a good thing! This is an area full of scammers, if you can't set up your business legally, I'm very happy to hear it's more difficult for you to advertise it.
Making drugs illegal does not eliminate demand, but it absolutely curbs it. The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it [1]. While it's true cannabis use had been gradually increasing for decades prior to legalization, there was a significant spike afterwards which has since levelled off.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/231016/dq231...
The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates.
The same link also points out that the legalization happened right before COVID and then you have a major confounder because even if cannabis use is actually up, you don't know if it's because of legalization or people turning to cannabis over stress from COVID. Moreover, the reported usage increased during COVID but started to decline in 2023. This implies that either the apparent spike was COVID, or that it was something like media reports about recent legalization acting as temporary free advertising and causing a non-permanent increase in usage. Neither of those is evidence of a sustained increase in demand.
Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market, and then you get fewer people becoming addicts because the thing they thought they were buying was spiked with something significantly more addictive by a black market seller. Or the black market products have higher variation in the dose and then customers can't predict how much they're getting and then occasionally take more than expected, leading to a higher rate of overdose and stronger dependency-inducing withdrawal.
It isn't true, at least not as a hard and fast rule. Post-legalization changes in demand differ greatly per country. It completely depends on contemporary cultural factors of the country in question.
A change in demand post-legalization can absolutely be highly variable across different countries/cultures, but unless you can demonstrate a country that legalized cannabis and saw a decline in demand, then your as of yet unsubstantiated claim does not refute mine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scarne
which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and-order, to be a workable, safe and reasonably fair business. Scarne started out his career, as a magician and card mechanic, as a sort of consultant who could keep games fair.
Blacks in New York City, for instance, ran illegal street craps and ran a lottery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game
quite similar to the "Pick 3" games you see in many states -- the latter got taken over by the Italian mafia.
Gambling has a broad cross-cultural appeal and some people are going to do it no matter how you try to shut it down. In the US we went from having a few centers to widespread "riverboat" and tribal gambling to widespread casinos now to mobile gambling on sports and sometimes the equivalent of video slots.
Of course there is the matter of degree. It's not going to wreck your life to drop $1 on the lottery a week and probably gives you more than $1 worth of fun. If you're addicted though it may be no fun at all. I can totally see where Nate Silver is coming from but I can also see the degenerate who drops 20 bets on a single game on the weekend as well as the person who thinks he is Nate Silver and he isn't. I think the Superbowl is a fair competition by player who are playing their hardest, but it breaks my heart as a sports fan when teams are not playing to win and that's why I can't stand watching the NBA despite loving going to second-tier college basketball games in person.
And for drugs? I remember all the Lester Grinspoon talk about how prohibition is worse than the drugs themselves and that might have been true before 2000 but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me -- but Marshall McLuhan said we are driving by looking in the rear view mirror and of course some people are going to be repeating things that were true in the last century.
Because its an addictive product. See also: gambling.
Still kills me to this day Uber and AirBNB running illegal billion dollar operations. I suppose one can at least say Uber mitigates drunk driving tendencies. As far as AirBNB goes, it can rot straight in hell. My hometown is now 20% AirBNB, they ran illegally for many years, and this completely prices out normal folks trying to live near their families.
And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
That being said, I also dont think that civil disobedience means you have to accept whatever harsh punishment whatever authoritarian is using. It is actually ok to avoid those.
A mint we will then need to spend on bribes to ALPA. DoT is almost entirely captured now, so that's less of a problem.
In fact, here's a much better get-rich app / scheme: use AI to find regulatory situations that are both easy to break and profitable to break and where enforcement is usually just done to poor people. The Ubermaker. Why dig a gold mine when you can sell the shovels.
If people choose to seek out entertainment that’s bad for them then there’s nothing wrong with providing a market for it. It’s on the consumer to know their own limits.
Honest question: why is this line so clear for you?
The line is clear for some people right away. Other people have to see the effects first hand. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and the never-ending line of obviously poor people dropping nearly their entire paychecks on scratchoffs, then buying a case of beer was a formative memory for me. It most states, the lottery is just subsidizing the cost of education on the backs of the poor and uneducated and gambling-addicted so that they don't have to raise property taxes. And that's if the money actually gets spent on education. Sometimes they just turn into slushfunds for pet projects. It's gross.
We're talking about a product built to make people's lives worse while extracting wealth from them that get them addicted as well.
That's most of the products being sold today, you think the most for-profit companies sell things and services in order to improve the world? They're selling stuff because they want to make money, if they can make someone addicted + extract wealth from them, then in their world that's a no-brainer.
That's just not true at all. The fruit I buy is designed to make my life worse? The vacuum cleaner? The lawn mower? The workout equipment? The standing desk for my office? The clothing I buy?
"The proportion of devices which had to be replaced within five years due to a defect rose quite sharply, from 3.5% in 2004 to 8.3% in 2012."
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/obs...
Electronics are more likely to be obsolete for technical reasons, but - for example - modern dishwashers and dryers are far more likely to have cheap plastic parts that fail more quickly. Even for brands with premium price tags.
With clothes, fast fashion is designed down to a budget and up to a price. For consumer brands, the more expensive something is the more disposable it is and the shorter its working life.
https://irispublishers.com/jtsft/fulltext/analysis-of-qualit...
* fruit - I can get any fruit anytime in the year, and it seems fine
* vacuum cleaner - my Miele is still running ten years later and still available new
* The lawn mower - the M18 mower cuts great and uses no gas and just works - much better than the previous PoS
* workout equipment - I don't have much here, but my rowing machine is still going strong
* standing desk - the uplift desk seems quite good quality
* clothing - this might be the only one, but even the walmart crap I get is better than the walmart crap from a decade ago
Is the line still clear?
E.g.
- Is it addictive?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives in seconds?
- Does it have a strong lobbying mechanism behind it? (n.b. things that are good and nice rarely need someone to bribe people to accept them)
or simply:
- Would you be worried if your child did it?
I think the number of "yes" that you get draws a very clear line.
Sounds like you're implying some sort of mischaracterization of sugar here which minimizes the former in a weird way.
The alcohol mentioned in a sibling comment also ticks the box.
For the sugar, I'd say yes, no, no, yes and "not too much, but I'm keeping an eye out".
Military technology may be an exception as "necessary evil", but also is a bad example because it id not consumer-oriented.
A large number of these literally save people's lives. Anti-biotics, statins, anti-depressives, anti-psychotics, insulin, anti-histamines.
But that's what we have, it's never black & white. Always a process and always evolving.
Insurance is a tool for spreading risk, and modern society could not operate without it.
What about pharma and for-profit healthcare employees?
You may be right that guns are are corrosive to a democratic society, that's an open debate. But the people who depended on that factory had the rug pulled and real harm was done without any regard to their welfare. And not everyone who depended on the factory worked there, deli owners and dry cleaners, these types of legitimate businesses are damaged when a major employer closes doors.
I suppose I relate this story to you just to show that, there are other people who think like you, guns are stigmatized, and it has a real human cost. We should not be flippant with our neighbor's well being, because we can't predict the turns of fate, one day it might be our turn.
They shutdown because they sold 7.5 million guns that could fire without someone pulling the trigger and 60 minutes exposed it.
And you should know that their building is being converted into a 250,000 sqft AI data center. So it's not like employment is just lost in the area.
Haven't the locals suffered enough already?
Could you expand on this a little bit? Are you referring to the NY SAFE act? I'm seeing a few lines in their wiki page that suggest otherwise:
* In June 2007, a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, acquired Remington Arms for $370 million, including $252 million in assumed debt.
* Remington filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 2018, having accumulated over $950 million in debt
* In July 2020, Remington again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Any reasoning that can justify even an absurdly evil employer's existence is flawed.
We should not keep bad things alive just because jobs depend on it.
That said, there is a HUGE need for more regulation around advertising, cut off limits and companies recognising users with a problem.
If you take a Bar for example, most barmen will notice you're already drunk as hell and cut you off, probably kick you out if not get you some water etc. It's actually a legal requirement to stop at some point in countries.
Casinos on the other hand, if you are down 99,000 out of your 100,000 with zero hands of games won, that casino is going to plow you with a good time until it has that last 1,000. It's disgusting.
I hate gambling , I've seen its effect on friends of mine and their families. But I would never stop an adult doing what they want, while knowing the risks.
Asking a casino to behave better is never going to work, adding more regulations and stricter licensing might. The fact that betting companies are now allowed to advertise and sponsor sports is an incredible negative step.
It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt.
When I was an intern at a big-name, conservative company, one of my friends came from a porn website.
It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society.
If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.
I think like you argue, society shaping business is good. And some people should really reevaluate what they're going for if that's too much for them.
Now I'm as as free-minded as people typically gets, but both of those are just "entertainment" for me, one is not more "essential" than the other, what exact "human need" does pornography meet that somehow gambling doesn't also meet, since we're not talking about "fun" or "entertainment" here but something else it sounds like.
Boiling Gambling down to just being "entertainment" is a bit too reductionist in my opinion.
The problem with gambling is that people often get addicted and ruin their lives due to it.
While that probably can happen with porn I think the likelihood is a couple of orders of magnitude lower.
For what purpose do you think that industry was indirectly created for, if not to make money from people? Even if it might not have been created with that intent (although I'd still argue it was), today it surely is mainly driven and maintain with the (at least) implicit purpose of extracting money from people, that's literally why we call it an "industry" instead of just a "community".
I mean yes, it is; It’s not a charity. I guess you could argue it tends to do it slower than gambling?
Stigma and regulatory pressure don't always mean the company is evil.
Cause it's made with dill dough :D
(gotta at least have a joke for a friday. its rough for a lot of us.)
(edit: seriously, tough crowd. hovering between -2 and -4. Like, this is a light-hearted joke. Not even insulting anyone, either.)
Talking about good and evil in tech is a slippery slope.
What's worse, working at Meta building products causing addiction in kids, or building an adult content site?
I think there's an argument that Meta is morally worse, yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume. I find that interesting.
You think so?
Do you think payment providers should act like moral police that decide how the customers can spend their money? If so, do you think Google/Apple/Microsoft should have a say in which apps the users can install? Should ISPs decide which sites the users can access?
The author is saying it explicitly, you can’t flex as normal people do so you have to feed your ego finding different ways such as anonymous posts. Or talking to an stranger being drunk.
> Employees join such projects for various reasons. Some realize that the pay is better than in legitimate projects. Others come because they couldn’t find a job where they wanted to, or because they are simply interested in working on something forbidden. And then a good company saving the world will come along and offer them a job, and they’ll leave. Building a stable team from people with this kind of motivation is hard.
I think OP made this whole article up. Everyone that applies for Aylo knows exactly what they're applying for. The pay is below-average because (a) there's not actually a lot of money in porn and (b) there's no shortage of dudes that want to work in it.
Had a recruiter reach out to me the other day from a sports gambling website (one of the major ones, as reputable as you can get in this industry). I heard them out, thinking they would offer above market rate but in actuality, they offered significantly below market rate.
There is a large talent pool who want to get their lives back on track.
Thanks for reading! When writing this essay, I drew solely on my own experience. I’ve often noticed that startups post job listings with misleading job descriptions, especially in stigmatized industries. It’s only after the interview that they reveal what the work will actually entail. Perhaps you simply haven’t noticed such job listings.
If you don't appear to be a casino at first glance, it's a lot easier to find employees, payment processors and advertising networks willing to work with you.
Brick-and-mortar companies (notably Walmart) used the same trick to get tech talent. Having Walmart on your tech resume doesn't look great, having an e-commerce startup called jet.com looks much better, even if Walmart is that startup owner and sole customer.
It's been a while since I've read article on something like online gambling without feeling like the author was trying to proselytize.
Edit:
I appreciate the human perspective shared by the article, and get the feeling that OP offers a warning of the consequences of working in stigmatized fields. Ofc online gambling (and gambling in general tbh) is a terrible thing that ruins lives.
Gambling/betting though? Overwhelming societal damage with basically no upside beyond the ghouls in charge. Regulate this shit to death, tyvm.
It doesn't necessarily have to be harmful for it to be stigmatized by society.
I know I will get downvoted for this because it is an unpopular opinion, but this exactly the reason why we need bitcoin as a means of payments without any middlemen involved.
Plus, on-chain transactions would NOT be used to pay 10€/Month subscriptions. The lightning network (a bitcoin layer-2 network) handles transactions instantly and with lower fees. No miners involved in individual payments here (only for channel creation).