The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch. From you had to know a guy to baseball TV announcers giving odds on a home run this inning in less than a decade.
I know this is hard to conceive of, but there was a time when there were no gambling ads on TV! The crazy part? The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!
Some time around 2015 I remember seeing Powell station in SF completely plastered with DraftKings ads and thinking "wait, I thought that was illegal". It seems to have only snowballed since then. In 2020 I was in downtown Philadelphia before the election and saw a massive screen with a Polymarket ad, and at that time Polymarket wasn't even legal in the US.
From nicotine to gambling harmful habits that our society had managed to marginalize have gotten a fresh coat of tech slapped on them and seemingly escaped all constraints.
Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same.
I have a friend who gave up cigarettes for ecigs but he is actually doing it for the nicotine, saves him a fortune, he was smoking a pack a week in NYC.
My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?
> Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same.
You're more likely to get heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, pesticides and toxic industrial chemicals than a surprise dose of THC.
In a society where government is not participating in helping people with their health care, what moral right does it have to make "unhealthy" things illegal?
Medicare and Medicaid represent the largest segments of U.S. federal health spending, consuming over a trillion dollars each. Medicare accounts for 21% of national healthcare expenditures. Medicaid constitutes $1 of every $5 spent on healthcare. The US government is helping the poor and the old with their healthcare
Why do you think that? A cigarette contains 10-20 mg of nicotine depending on the tobacco blend used. The strongest e-liquid is 50-60 g/l so to get 10x nicotine of a mild cigarette you'd need to atomize 2ml of the strongest e-liquid. Coincidently, 2ml is the legal limit of disposable vapes in EU. So, to get nicotine of one pack (20) light cigarettes you'd need to empty two European vapes (provided they are filled with the strongest liquid and at the capacity cap). To get 10x nicotine of a pack-a-day smoker you need to vape 20 disposables a day, which seems like quite a feat to me both physically and financially.
Yes, neither is nicotine from a vape is all absorbed. Seeing they both have the same delivery mechanism (aerosol into lungs) it's quite a leap to assume one of these delivers an order of magnitude more nicotine, IMHO.
That's true, ecigs introduce different types of risks:
Wikipedia: "The recent rise in the use of electronic cigarettes, many forms of which are designed to be refilled with nicotine-containing "e-liquid" supplied in small plastic bottles, has renewed interest in nicotine overdoses, especially the possibility of young children ingesting the liquids."
And not just ingesting, but absorbing it through the skin.
Also: "Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake."
To me that seems to mostly have been an excuse to ban refillable vapes to juice vap manufacturers profits. Refilling your own costs 10-100x less than nonrefillables or cigarettes, disosables give massive profit margins.
Kids can die from getting into all sorts of chemicals, nicotine isn't something especially poisonous or dangerous. They just need proper containers and handling like many other common chemicals and drugs and solvents.
> nicotine isn't something especially poisonous or dangerous.
It's not immediately dangerous, that's for sure.
My concern is more about long-term effects which I don't think we have good data on. Most of our data on the health effects of nicotine are centered on smoking or chewing.
What we do know about nicotine is it's addictive and it can generate a pretty high tolerance. And I think there are studies linking it to an increased risk of stroke.
I'm not trying to take away nicotine. I think it's reasonable to ban the sale of nicotine products to kids but otherwise I don't really care about people accessing it. I also think it's reasonable to research and understand the risks of taking it, even if such research is ultimately just informative.
> Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake.
This is true, but this is also about short term poisoning. I'm more thinking about the long term problems. Alcohol will also stop many cases of acute poisoning through similar nausea and vomiting. However, prolonged use is still bad for your health.
Consuming excess nicotine is a pretty horrible experience. You just feel super ill and nauseous. But you don't have to use an ecig to do it, just buy a stronger cigarette and smoke 2 or 3 quickly. Or you can eat part of a cigarette. Or just smoke a big cigar and inhale it like a cigarette.
Anyone who smokes has experienced feeling sick from nicotine and quickly learn to avoid it because it sucks.
You build a tolerance and ecigs make it easy to climb up that ramp where regular cigarettes are harder. People get to the "10 packs a day" of smoking and to the point where there's just limits to how fast you can smoke.
Vapes make it a lot easier to blow past that amount of consumption.
Way healthier, it’s not even a comparison. Cigarettes have particulates that are not bioavailable and create the black lung tissue. Here in California we have banned any flavors from nicotine vapes so it’s very straight forward. The best vapes anymore are THC, due to psychoactive effects and flavors, similar level of safety to nicotine.
I see replies that keep repeating the same "it's got no smoke and tar so it must cause far less harm", as if common sense always matches reality. Coating the lungs with cooked propylene glycol and glycerine could cause similar harm to smoke and tar, or even entirely new harms, but I don't really know that. Use empiricism and share reviews, please.
"Conclusion: Smokers or former smokers who switch to e-cigarettes may reduce their exposure to carcinogens and lower their risk of developing severe health issues associated with conventional smoking. However, in healthy individuals who have never smoked traditional cigarettes, the use of e-cigarettes introduces several cardiovascular and respiratory adverse effects. These findings suggest that while e-cigarettes can be a strategic harm reduction tool for smokers, they are not a safe option for non-smokers."
"CONCLUSIONS: After thorough evaluation for other potential etiologies, vaping was considered to be the most likely common causal etiology for all patients due to the temporal association of symptomatic chronic lung disease with e-cigarette use and partial improvement in symptoms after e-cigarette cessation. In this series, we associate the histopathologic pattern of small airway–centered fibrosis, including constrictive bronchiolitis, with vaping, potentially defining a clinical and pathologic entity associated with e-cigarette use. (Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.)"
"Abstract: [cut] With well-known health risks from traditional smoking, e-cigarettes are viewed as a safe way of smoking, appealing more to youth. Additionally, extensive e-cigarette marketing boosted by the internet and fame has resulted in worries that e-cigarettes can lead to a renormalization of cigarette smoking and can be used as a new method to consume vaporized drugs. Although the concern that e-cigarettes are as harmful as traditional smoking has been raised, youth and most healthcare providers remain relatively unaware. [cut]"
The reality is that cigarette smoking was on the way out with young people before vapes came along. Whether it's less harmful isn't the only relevant point, if it's still harmful and has dramatically expanded the market then it's a bad thing.
We do have many decades of inhaled medications that used pg and vg carrier vapors so its not like we have zero idea on their relative safety. It may cause some harm, but it is assuredly less harmful than smoking or else people using asthma inhalers would have shown significant problems from it.
>> My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?
> Use empiricism
> Smokers or former smokers who switch to e-cigarettes may reduce their exposure to carcinogens and lower their risk of developing severe health issues associated with conventional smoking.
Why yes, I want to read research confirming common sense. And more valuable, I can read the nuance of it too (quantifying how much safer compared to cigarettes).
Cigarette smoking causes cancer and emphysema. Inhaling a mixture of propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, nicotine, and flavoring does not.
> Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same.
You finally learned their one weird trick. Instead of just putting nicotine in ecigs, they add some more expensive ingredients like THC and maybe some meth or heroin and not tell people or charge them more than they charge for nicotine. For reasons.
That’s like worrying about Halloween candy being spiked with LSD. It’s irrational and w waste of money for no reason so it doesn’t happen.
> Inhaling a mixture of propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, nicotine, and flavoring does not...That’s like worrying about Halloween candy being spiked with LSD.
The heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic chemicals in ecigs do though. If researchers pulled 64 types of Halloween candy off store shelves and found a bunch of LSD in every single sample I'd say you should be worried. https://refractor.io/health-wellbeing/unknown-chemicals-vape...
Gambling legalization historically happens in waves following economic downturns because society’s tolerance for exploitation increases. It’s fundamentally a regressive tax that healthy societies won’t tolerate.
There's a number of these problems that end up in a cycle because the solution to some problem is so effective that a later generation forgets what the problem even was. So they remove the solutions. Then they rediscover why they were there in the first place.
It's a Chesterton's Oscillating Fence, on a generation time scale.
Is it tolerance for exploitation or are people just realizing that as poor as their odds are while gambling that's still the best chance they have to make the money they need. A healthy society offers the public better ways to have their needs meet, people gamble when they are desperate.
As people start to feel that they have no realistic chance to meaningfully improve their economic situation by any other means they'll grasp at whatever hope for a better future they can find.
I mean, consider the lottery for example. For most people their odds of ever having $100 million is zero. The lottery gives them a 1 in 300 million chance though. Having any chance at all to get that kind of money is worth a few dollars to a lot of people so the lottery remains popular. The problem we have right now is that people feel so helpless that they feel forced to use gambling to help pay for basic things like rent, medication, and education. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/healthcare-students-turn-to-...
Gambling rarely pays off for them, but it gives them a chance, and a small number will get some cash. People still have and use more traditional means to get by when they can't get ahead, like shoplifting, maxing out credit cards, and prostitution. Shoplifting is way up from just 10 years ago, American household debt is at record highs, and Onlyfans is pulling in more revenue and more desperate people every year.
It's certainly the closest we've come to directly taxing the hope of the downtrodden.
This goes back to my original point, that legalizing gambling happens after economic downturns. There are so many downtrodden in those situations, and monetizing them becomes irresistable to the state.
For a while, we had tons of alcohol and cigarette ads. At some point they were both deemed catastrophically harmful to society. Maybe prediction markets end up there?
unfortunately the dominant ideology right now states that the ability to do catastrophic harm to both yourself and society in general is fundamental to the nature of freedom, and is therefore paramount.
That's the argument we heard back then too. Smoker's rights to spray cancer to everyone around them. Drinker's rights to smash innocents on the roadways. In reality, the tobacco and alcohol industries lobbied hard to protect themselves. Alcohol is still lobbying hard to prevent recreational weed.
I am hard-line on this. Sports betting and prediction markets should be banned. Casinos should be banned. Scratch offs should be banned. Its feeding into the worst tendencies of people and hurts the most disadvantaged families. People playing a poker game with their friends, or buying a super bowl square at their bar isn't great but at least it was off to the side and hidden. We have a large chesterson's fence level experiment in society where all of these good ideas the progressives have had to keep society civil and healthy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, have slowly been removed, to terrible results.
It's a little easier to think about when you ignore people's addictive tendencies in the large.
It also takes a blind spot re the forces that will influence events based on betting. I don't care about point-shaving in college basketball (some great stories there, see the Bad Sports episode [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15402912/]. But other real-world outcomes are too important.
A big difference I think is that Progressivism was based on Christianity and Utopian Socialist ideals in the 1800s and 1900s (at least in the United States). So it was much easier for them to support child labor laws, pensions, banning drinking and gambling, etc. by looking at it from the perspective of protecting the poor and destitute, making the nation strong, etc.. Even the Imperial Germans did progressive programs from a paternalistic conservative approach. People were pointing to the Gospel or Rerum Novarum. Not progressivism is more rooted in anarchism or marxism. Which is why they have a lot more saying to remove property rights. Or they will push for legalizing drugs and abolishing prisons, despite that obviously making society worse, but the state, property, etc are all evil.
A lot of libertarian dogma is based on classic homo economicus 'lets pretend people act perfectly rationally' type theories that just really break down when confronted with how humans actually act.
I'm not completely anti-gambling, but I'm of the mind that if you're going to gamble away your life savings you should at least be required to put on pants and go to a sketchy betting parlor. Online gambling platforms make it too easy.
Yeah, it's terrible. One of the things that struck me (in a bad way) when I visited the UK in my 20s was how there were so many bookies everywhere. Now were basically in the same place here. Organized gambling is a net-negative for society, and should be banned, and the bookies are scum that should be driven back under the rocks they crawled out from.
The ability to bet on the outcome of any event is a guarantee of corruption in any event. We've seen the president's teleprompter operator bet on his speeches, we've seen journalists threatened in an attempt to get them to reword an article in order to resolve a bet differently, we've seen several sports betting scandals. What we haven't seen is any indication that this will get better without regulation, and now we're seeing betting markets fight like hell to introduce their rot into the institutions at the bedrock of our society. It needs to stop.
Doesn't the insurance market have the same moral hazard?
If you are paying for fire insurance it promises you a bundle of cash if your business burns down. At that point if the finances of your company go into the red, your only chance of becoming whole financially might involve a fire, and then you start calling folks like Tony Soprano to find an arsonist
To an extent, but insurance also serves a vital economic function of allowing people to spread out risk.
The counter-parties in insurance are also sophisticated businesses who are highly motivated and capable of tracking down a significant portion of fraud.
The counter-party in prediction markets is other gamblers who usually have no ability to investigate fraud whatsoever. The prediction markets have some motivation to prevent fraud to protect their reputations but they don't directly lose any money from fraud, so they aren't going to do it nearly as effectively as an insurance company.
it does. because insurance is a bet. but it also has legislation and organized investigators behind it to drive up the risk of committing fraud (and, therefore, the necessary reward to justify it) whereas these bets-masquerading-as-financial-instruments don't. take the example from the OP: we have laws about falsifying votes and other obvious things like that, but you can bet on what time the last votes are accepted, what time the last votes are counted, which org will publish results first, will an org publish incorrect results, a lot of things that can potentially be manipulated without violating a law but would still weaken trust in our elections at a time when there is a decade long concerted effort to convince people that elections are being gamed and don't work.
It seems entirely fair to me that you can't wager against something that you directly had a hand in the outcome of, even accepting the bunk premise that these wagers are legal in the first place.
So much outrage nowadays is driven by a belief that people are entitled to profit off of every possible thing in life, how dreadful.
Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand
> Then there's the potential for insider trading, something that has dogged the prediction market industry, …
From a 2025 article [1]
> Coplan said, “Nobody is under the impression that nobody knows the answer, right? Like, of course, there’s people who are working on it that know when it’s going to come. And I think what’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change, and all of a sudden it’s trading at 95 cents.”
I didn’t know you could be described as being dogged by an issue that you actively courted and espoused. Additionally I remembered that quote but it took effort to find as it appears Kalshi and Polymarket decided the heat on those views was a little too much and have done a PR wave since January of this year to claim that they totally don’t support insider trading despite that being a core of their business concept.
I guess we’ve always been at war with East Asia again, I’ll update my firmware to be a good little drone if even media organizations like npr and apnews are just going to be this blatant with reframing history
There's big money in it, so of course there's going to be a huge PR push to cast it as a great moral and societal good.
The thing that gets me is that the rationalists who were such outspoken proponents of prediction markets (look up "futarchy" and the many positive articles about it) failed to predict the astonishing amounts of corruption that have come along for the ride with them.
Of course they're participating, even driving it. Notably there were large bets placed predicting imminent military actions in Iran and Venezuela. In at least one case it was verifiably placed by one of the individuals planning it. We've reached the point where our country's leaders can profit not by the outcome of the war, but even just by the very act of initiating it.
Same here. I soured on it a bit when I noticed them becoming a bit of a rhetorical stick, "well if you think you're right, go place a bet!". I guess that's good if you want people to only make claims they seriously believe in, but it had a tendency to shut down discussion, and I feel like there's something valuable in being able to discuss and debate without the expectation that being right should be rewarded with money, and being wrong should be punished with same.
The negative second-order effects I expected were more about people concealing information and analysis that they otherwise would have shared, replacing complex but informative discussions with a black-box oracle. Boy was I wrong.
The experience we have of sports betting shows that even extraordinarily well compensated sportspeople will cheat to influence events due to greed. That's not such a big problem for something that fundamentally does not matter (sports outcomes). As you apply it to things that do matter, like political appointments, actions in warzones, and even weather measurements, people will and have changed these outcomes to make money.
Kalshi and Polymarket having to do a wave of publicity to try to take off the heat over insider trading shows that the issue of insider trading is in fact dogging the industry.
The NPR article's level of discussion of insider trading is entirely appropriate for an article that is not about insider trading.
If my friend said they were planning on breaking and entering into homes to steal things for their income, and then complained that they were dogged by accusations of being a thief, I would call them out for being full of shit because they were getting called out for exactly what they planned on doing.
If your argument is that NPR was correct in their description as being dogged by claims of insider trading, then I believe you and I have a difference of opinion on the connotations of the term "dogged" when it comes to describing accusations levied against you for behavior you 100% planned on engaging in.
The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch. From you had to know a guy to baseball TV announcers giving odds on a home run this inning in less than a decade.
I know this is hard to conceive of, but there was a time when there were no gambling ads on TV! The crazy part? The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!
Some time around 2015 I remember seeing Powell station in SF completely plastered with DraftKings ads and thinking "wait, I thought that was illegal". It seems to have only snowballed since then. In 2020 I was in downtown Philadelphia before the election and saw a massive screen with a Polymarket ad, and at that time Polymarket wasn't even legal in the US.
From nicotine to gambling harmful habits that our society had managed to marginalize have gotten a fresh coat of tech slapped on them and seemingly escaped all constraints.
Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same.
I have a friend who gave up cigarettes for ecigs but he is actually doing it for the nicotine, saves him a fortune, he was smoking a pack a week in NYC.
My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?
> Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same.
You're more likely to get heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, pesticides and toxic industrial chemicals than a surprise dose of THC.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nearly-2000-chemic...
In a society where government is not participating in helping people with their health care, what moral right does it have to make "unhealthy" things illegal?
The government does help (to the tune of trillions of dollars per year) with their health care.
Medicare and Medicaid represent the largest segments of U.S. federal health spending, consuming over a trillion dollars each. Medicare accounts for 21% of national healthcare expenditures. Medicaid constitutes $1 of every $5 spent on healthcare. The US government is helping the poor and the old with their healthcare
Option A: nicotine.
Option B: nicotine plus a lot of really bad stuff.
You're seriously questioning which is better?
Dose makes the poison and ecigs enable giving it's users 10x the nicotine you'd get from a single cigarette.
I think you are right that cigs are less healthy, but I have to wonder if megadosing nicotine isn't also a pretty big problem.
Why do you think that? A cigarette contains 10-20 mg of nicotine depending on the tobacco blend used. The strongest e-liquid is 50-60 g/l so to get 10x nicotine of a mild cigarette you'd need to atomize 2ml of the strongest e-liquid. Coincidently, 2ml is the legal limit of disposable vapes in EU. So, to get nicotine of one pack (20) light cigarettes you'd need to empty two European vapes (provided they are filled with the strongest liquid and at the capacity cap). To get 10x nicotine of a pack-a-day smoker you need to vape 20 disposables a day, which seems like quite a feat to me both physically and financially.
A cigarette contains 10-20mg, but it's not readily available. On average, of those 10-20mg, you absorb only 1mg. [1]
My assumption, which could be faulty, is a lot more of the nicotine in the vape gets absorbed vs a cigarette.
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-much-nicotine-...
Yes, neither is nicotine from a vape is all absorbed. Seeing they both have the same delivery mechanism (aerosol into lungs) it's quite a leap to assume one of these delivers an order of magnitude more nicotine, IMHO.
That's true, ecigs introduce different types of risks:
Wikipedia: "The recent rise in the use of electronic cigarettes, many forms of which are designed to be refilled with nicotine-containing "e-liquid" supplied in small plastic bottles, has renewed interest in nicotine overdoses, especially the possibility of young children ingesting the liquids."
And not just ingesting, but absorbing it through the skin.
Also: "Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake."
To me that seems to mostly have been an excuse to ban refillable vapes to juice vap manufacturers profits. Refilling your own costs 10-100x less than nonrefillables or cigarettes, disosables give massive profit margins.
Kids can die from getting into all sorts of chemicals, nicotine isn't something especially poisonous or dangerous. They just need proper containers and handling like many other common chemicals and drugs and solvents.
> nicotine isn't something especially poisonous or dangerous.
It's not immediately dangerous, that's for sure.
My concern is more about long-term effects which I don't think we have good data on. Most of our data on the health effects of nicotine are centered on smoking or chewing.
What we do know about nicotine is it's addictive and it can generate a pretty high tolerance. And I think there are studies linking it to an increased risk of stroke.
I'm not trying to take away nicotine. I think it's reasonable to ban the sale of nicotine products to kids but otherwise I don't really care about people accessing it. I also think it's reasonable to research and understand the risks of taking it, even if such research is ultimately just informative.
> Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake.
This is true, but this is also about short term poisoning. I'm more thinking about the long term problems. Alcohol will also stop many cases of acute poisoning through similar nausea and vomiting. However, prolonged use is still bad for your health.
Consuming excess nicotine is a pretty horrible experience. You just feel super ill and nauseous. But you don't have to use an ecig to do it, just buy a stronger cigarette and smoke 2 or 3 quickly. Or you can eat part of a cigarette. Or just smoke a big cigar and inhale it like a cigarette.
Anyone who smokes has experienced feeling sick from nicotine and quickly learn to avoid it because it sucks.
You build a tolerance and ecigs make it easy to climb up that ramp where regular cigarettes are harder. People get to the "10 packs a day" of smoking and to the point where there's just limits to how fast you can smoke.
Vapes make it a lot easier to blow past that amount of consumption.
Way healthier, it’s not even a comparison. Cigarettes have particulates that are not bioavailable and create the black lung tissue. Here in California we have banned any flavors from nicotine vapes so it’s very straight forward. The best vapes anymore are THC, due to psychoactive effects and flavors, similar level of safety to nicotine.
I see replies that keep repeating the same "it's got no smoke and tar so it must cause far less harm", as if common sense always matches reality. Coating the lungs with cooked propylene glycol and glycerine could cause similar harm to smoke and tar, or even entirely new harms, but I don't really know that. Use empiricism and share reviews, please.
Direct health implications of e-cigarette use: a systematic scoping review with evidence assessment https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11317248/
"Conclusion: Smokers or former smokers who switch to e-cigarettes may reduce their exposure to carcinogens and lower their risk of developing severe health issues associated with conventional smoking. However, in healthy individuals who have never smoked traditional cigarettes, the use of e-cigarettes introduces several cardiovascular and respiratory adverse effects. These findings suggest that while e-cigarettes can be a strategic harm reduction tool for smokers, they are not a safe option for non-smokers."
E-Cigarette Use, Small Airway Fibrosis, and Constrictive Bronchiolitis https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10137322/
"CONCLUSIONS: After thorough evaluation for other potential etiologies, vaping was considered to be the most likely common causal etiology for all patients due to the temporal association of symptomatic chronic lung disease with e-cigarette use and partial improvement in symptoms after e-cigarette cessation. In this series, we associate the histopathologic pattern of small airway–centered fibrosis, including constrictive bronchiolitis, with vaping, potentially defining a clinical and pathologic entity associated with e-cigarette use. (Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.)"
E-cigarettes and Vaping: A Smoking Cessation Method or Another Smoking Innovation? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9833272/
"Abstract: [cut] With well-known health risks from traditional smoking, e-cigarettes are viewed as a safe way of smoking, appealing more to youth. Additionally, extensive e-cigarette marketing boosted by the internet and fame has resulted in worries that e-cigarettes can lead to a renormalization of cigarette smoking and can be used as a new method to consume vaporized drugs. Although the concern that e-cigarettes are as harmful as traditional smoking has been raised, youth and most healthcare providers remain relatively unaware. [cut]"
The reality is that cigarette smoking was on the way out with young people before vapes came along. Whether it's less harmful isn't the only relevant point, if it's still harmful and has dramatically expanded the market then it's a bad thing.
We do have many decades of inhaled medications that used pg and vg carrier vapors so its not like we have zero idea on their relative safety. It may cause some harm, but it is assuredly less harmful than smoking or else people using asthma inhalers would have shown significant problems from it.
Well, I have no clue about their relative safety and would like to read more.
>> My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?
> Use empiricism
> Smokers or former smokers who switch to e-cigarettes may reduce their exposure to carcinogens and lower their risk of developing severe health issues associated with conventional smoking.
Why yes, I want to read research confirming common sense. And more valuable, I can read the nuance of it too (quantifying how much safer compared to cigarettes).
Cigarette smoking causes cancer and emphysema. Inhaling a mixture of propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, nicotine, and flavoring does not.
> Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same.
You finally learned their one weird trick. Instead of just putting nicotine in ecigs, they add some more expensive ingredients like THC and maybe some meth or heroin and not tell people or charge them more than they charge for nicotine. For reasons.
That’s like worrying about Halloween candy being spiked with LSD. It’s irrational and w waste of money for no reason so it doesn’t happen.
> Inhaling a mixture of propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, nicotine, and flavoring does not...That’s like worrying about Halloween candy being spiked with LSD.
The heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic chemicals in ecigs do though. If researchers pulled 64 types of Halloween candy off store shelves and found a bunch of LSD in every single sample I'd say you should be worried. https://refractor.io/health-wellbeing/unknown-chemicals-vape...
Gambling legalization historically happens in waves following economic downturns because society’s tolerance for exploitation increases. It’s fundamentally a regressive tax that healthy societies won’t tolerate.
There's a number of these problems that end up in a cycle because the solution to some problem is so effective that a later generation forgets what the problem even was. So they remove the solutions. Then they rediscover why they were there in the first place.
It's a Chesterton's Oscillating Fence, on a generation time scale.
Is it tolerance for exploitation or are people just realizing that as poor as their odds are while gambling that's still the best chance they have to make the money they need. A healthy society offers the public better ways to have their needs meet, people gamble when they are desperate.
> or are people just realizing
It's a stretch to say that gambling is truly anyone's best option, so 'realizing' isn't the right word here. I'd go with "delusionalizing."
As people start to feel that they have no realistic chance to meaningfully improve their economic situation by any other means they'll grasp at whatever hope for a better future they can find.
I mean, consider the lottery for example. For most people their odds of ever having $100 million is zero. The lottery gives them a 1 in 300 million chance though. Having any chance at all to get that kind of money is worth a few dollars to a lot of people so the lottery remains popular. The problem we have right now is that people feel so helpless that they feel forced to use gambling to help pay for basic things like rent, medication, and education. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/healthcare-students-turn-to-...
Gambling rarely pays off for them, but it gives them a chance, and a small number will get some cash. People still have and use more traditional means to get by when they can't get ahead, like shoplifting, maxing out credit cards, and prostitution. Shoplifting is way up from just 10 years ago, American household debt is at record highs, and Onlyfans is pulling in more revenue and more desperate people every year.
It's certainly the closest we've come to directly taxing the hope of the downtrodden.
This goes back to my original point, that legalizing gambling happens after economic downturns. There are so many downtrodden in those situations, and monetizing them becomes irresistable to the state.
It's not just the USA, it's happening in most of the EU too. Sports betting is especially rampant.
For a while, we had tons of alcohol and cigarette ads. At some point they were both deemed catastrophically harmful to society. Maybe prediction markets end up there?
unfortunately the dominant ideology right now states that the ability to do catastrophic harm to both yourself and society in general is fundamental to the nature of freedom, and is therefore paramount.
That's the argument we heard back then too. Smoker's rights to spray cancer to everyone around them. Drinker's rights to smash innocents on the roadways. In reality, the tobacco and alcohol industries lobbied hard to protect themselves. Alcohol is still lobbying hard to prevent recreational weed.
>Alcohol is still lobbying hard to prevent recreational weed.
It's wild how using the drug I make is freedom and using the drug someone else makes is slavery
I am hard-line on this. Sports betting and prediction markets should be banned. Casinos should be banned. Scratch offs should be banned. Its feeding into the worst tendencies of people and hurts the most disadvantaged families. People playing a poker game with their friends, or buying a super bowl square at their bar isn't great but at least it was off to the side and hidden. We have a large chesterson's fence level experiment in society where all of these good ideas the progressives have had to keep society civil and healthy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, have slowly been removed, to terrible results.
What blows my mind is how many “progressives” I know who really support this libertarian-style maximum “freedom.”
I’ve been the stodgy conservative of my friend group saying “uh, maybe there was a good reason for banning this stuff?”
Pretty funny, since I actually was a committed libertarian for a while.
It's a little easier to think about when you ignore people's addictive tendencies in the large.
It also takes a blind spot re the forces that will influence events based on betting. I don't care about point-shaving in college basketball (some great stories there, see the Bad Sports episode [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15402912/]. But other real-world outcomes are too important.
A big difference I think is that Progressivism was based on Christianity and Utopian Socialist ideals in the 1800s and 1900s (at least in the United States). So it was much easier for them to support child labor laws, pensions, banning drinking and gambling, etc. by looking at it from the perspective of protecting the poor and destitute, making the nation strong, etc.. Even the Imperial Germans did progressive programs from a paternalistic conservative approach. People were pointing to the Gospel or Rerum Novarum. Not progressivism is more rooted in anarchism or marxism. Which is why they have a lot more saying to remove property rights. Or they will push for legalizing drugs and abolishing prisons, despite that obviously making society worse, but the state, property, etc are all evil.
A lot of libertarian dogma is based on classic homo economicus 'lets pretend people act perfectly rationally' type theories that just really break down when confronted with how humans actually act.
That's almost all economic dogma, too.
I'm not completely anti-gambling, but I'm of the mind that if you're going to gamble away your life savings you should at least be required to put on pants and go to a sketchy betting parlor. Online gambling platforms make it too easy.
Couldn't agree more. Allow gambling in casinos or sports betting shops. Strictly ban online gambling and any form of gambling advertising.
Ban alcohol advertising too. I love alcohol myself. People who want it can find it without being told.
i am now complete anti-gambing and anti-pharma ads
> The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch.
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress implicitly predicted this (albeit for Luna, which was obviously modeled on the U.S.).
(Heinlein was right about so many things ....)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
> The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!
Not really true in the US. (I take what you are saying to mean there weren't any/many pharmaceutical commercials a decade ago)
Here's one from the 2000s that ended up maming about 10,000 people. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTUoeaQGL1s
Crypto + Betting is a match made in heaven.
Both audiences are super speculative.
Yeah, it's terrible. One of the things that struck me (in a bad way) when I visited the UK in my 20s was how there were so many bookies everywhere. Now were basically in the same place here. Organized gambling is a net-negative for society, and should be banned, and the bookies are scum that should be driven back under the rocks they crawled out from.
[dead]
I've mentioned this on HN before. But it's pretty disgusting that the DC Lottery can advertise here on local TV.
And to note, the law in question is from the 1800s -- hardly something novel Wisconsin is doing.
Like building more jails? Could there be a better way?
The ability to bet on the outcome of any event is a guarantee of corruption in any event. We've seen the president's teleprompter operator bet on his speeches, we've seen journalists threatened in an attempt to get them to reword an article in order to resolve a bet differently, we've seen several sports betting scandals. What we haven't seen is any indication that this will get better without regulation, and now we're seeing betting markets fight like hell to introduce their rot into the institutions at the bedrock of our society. It needs to stop.
Doesn't the insurance market have the same moral hazard? If you are paying for fire insurance it promises you a bundle of cash if your business burns down. At that point if the finances of your company go into the red, your only chance of becoming whole financially might involve a fire, and then you start calling folks like Tony Soprano to find an arsonist
To an extent, but insurance also serves a vital economic function of allowing people to spread out risk.
The counter-parties in insurance are also sophisticated businesses who are highly motivated and capable of tracking down a significant portion of fraud.
The counter-party in prediction markets is other gamblers who usually have no ability to investigate fraud whatsoever. The prediction markets have some motivation to prevent fraud to protect their reputations but they don't directly lose any money from fraud, so they aren't going to do it nearly as effectively as an insurance company.
it does. because insurance is a bet. but it also has legislation and organized investigators behind it to drive up the risk of committing fraud (and, therefore, the necessary reward to justify it) whereas these bets-masquerading-as-financial-instruments don't. take the example from the OP: we have laws about falsifying votes and other obvious things like that, but you can bet on what time the last votes are accepted, what time the last votes are counted, which org will publish results first, will an org publish incorrect results, a lot of things that can potentially be manipulated without violating a law but would still weaken trust in our elections at a time when there is a decade long concerted effort to convince people that elections are being gamed and don't work.
Same playbook used by BNPL and neobanks…
It seems entirely fair to me that you can't wager against something that you directly had a hand in the outcome of, even accepting the bunk premise that these wagers are legal in the first place.
So much outrage nowadays is driven by a belief that people are entitled to profit off of every possible thing in life, how dreadful.
Probably because the grift never stops.
Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand
> Then there's the potential for insider trading, something that has dogged the prediction market industry, …
From a 2025 article [1]
> Coplan said, “Nobody is under the impression that nobody knows the answer, right? Like, of course, there’s people who are working on it that know when it’s going to come. And I think what’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change, and all of a sudden it’s trading at 95 cents.”
I didn’t know you could be described as being dogged by an issue that you actively courted and espoused. Additionally I remembered that quote but it took effort to find as it appears Kalshi and Polymarket decided the heat on those views was a little too much and have done a PR wave since January of this year to claim that they totally don’t support insider trading despite that being a core of their business concept.
I guess we’ve always been at war with East Asia again, I’ll update my firmware to be a good little drone if even media organizations like npr and apnews are just going to be this blatant with reframing history
[1] https://casinobeats.com/2025/11/20/polymarket-founder-shayne...
There's big money in it, so of course there's going to be a huge PR push to cast it as a great moral and societal good.
The thing that gets me is that the rationalists who were such outspoken proponents of prediction markets (look up "futarchy" and the many positive articles about it) failed to predict the astonishing amounts of corruption that have come along for the ride with them.
Strictly speaking, we cannot say for sure they didn't predict the corruption -- merely that they didn't warn about it.
For all we know, they're participating in the corruption, which is why they were outspoken proponents.
Of course they're participating, even driving it. Notably there were large bets placed predicting imminent military actions in Iran and Venezuela. In at least one case it was verifiably placed by one of the individuals planning it. We've reached the point where our country's leaders can profit not by the outcome of the war, but even just by the very act of initiating it.
I was never rabid about it, but I thought prediction markets were a cool idea for a while. I didn't anticipate all of the crazy second order effects.
Same here. I soured on it a bit when I noticed them becoming a bit of a rhetorical stick, "well if you think you're right, go place a bet!". I guess that's good if you want people to only make claims they seriously believe in, but it had a tendency to shut down discussion, and I feel like there's something valuable in being able to discuss and debate without the expectation that being right should be rewarded with money, and being wrong should be punished with same.
The negative second-order effects I expected were more about people concealing information and analysis that they otherwise would have shared, replacing complex but informative discussions with a black-box oracle. Boy was I wrong.
The experience we have of sports betting shows that even extraordinarily well compensated sportspeople will cheat to influence events due to greed. That's not such a big problem for something that fundamentally does not matter (sports outcomes). As you apply it to things that do matter, like political appointments, actions in warzones, and even weather measurements, people will and have changed these outcomes to make money.
What are you talking about?
Kalshi and Polymarket having to do a wave of publicity to try to take off the heat over insider trading shows that the issue of insider trading is in fact dogging the industry.
The NPR article's level of discussion of insider trading is entirely appropriate for an article that is not about insider trading.
if an analogy would work for you,
If my friend said they were planning on breaking and entering into homes to steal things for their income, and then complained that they were dogged by accusations of being a thief, I would call them out for being full of shit because they were getting called out for exactly what they planned on doing.
If your argument is that NPR was correct in their description as being dogged by claims of insider trading, then I believe you and I have a difference of opinion on the connotations of the term "dogged" when it comes to describing accusations levied against you for behavior you 100% planned on engaging in.