"Prediction markets" (which is just gambling) are not an isolated phenomenon. It's simply a natural step is the financialization of every aspect of our lives and everything that's touched by this gets worse.
Can't afford your rent? That's decades of financialization of the housing market, which is just a wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. tIt's stealing from the next generation.
Hate your health insurance? That's the profit motive in healthcare, a business model designed explicitly to make money by denying people life-saving care.
Hate your ISP? They've lobbied for exclusive access so they can gouge you. It's absolutely no coincidence that every good ISP in the US is a municipal ISP.
Awhile ago I read "hobbies are a luxury" and it's stuck with me. Because it's true. Now "side hustles" and the "gig economy" are part of the lexicon because one job is no longer sufficient. If you had a hobby instead, well you're not creating shareholder value for some already-billionaire. We can't have that. That's like stealing from Jeff Bezos.
A big problem with Covid is that it broke the dam on retailers, particularly supermarkets, raising prices. This is something they were afraid to do. Now, just like airlines, we have dynamic pricing on everything. Instacart got caught doing it. Pricing AIs are just the latest version of anticompetitive behavior eg RealPage. Make no mistake: all of this pricing is designed to do nothing more than make things more expensive.
And who is meant to protect us from all this? The government of course. But they don't. Because they don't care. Neither party does. This isn't a partisan issue. All of the politicans are just looking out for jobs after they quit politics, jobs for their children and so on. All of the systems to select politicians are designed to filter out anyone who bucks the system. If there are such people, it's because that system has failed, which it occasionally does.
Another quote I read while ago that's stuck with me is that companies increasingly resent having to go through you to get to your money. I think tha's true.
So back to gambling: many people don't realize if you consistently win you get kicked off the platform, particularly sprots betting. Consistent winners are bad for business because the losers need to occasionally win to keep losing. So if you ever encounter someone in the wild who boasts about how much money they make on FanDuel you know they're lying, either to you or themselves.
But do you get it yet? Polymarket is just more financialization.
