Kalshi attacks a Wisconsin law banning election bets as 'voter suppression'

hhn_acker about 2 hours ago 19 commentsRead Article on npr.org

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Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

recursivedoubts•about 2 hours ago

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!

tdeck•about 1 hour ago

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.

giancarlostoro•36 minutes ago

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?

mullingitover•34 minutes ago

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.

jerf•20 minutes ago

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.

imglorp•21 minutes ago

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?

bigbuppo•13 minutes ago

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.

lemoncookiechip•about 1 hour ago

It's not just the USA, it's happening in most of the EU too. Sports betting is especially rampant.

tiffanyh•13 minutes ago

Crypto + Betting is a match made in heaven.

Both audiences are super speculative.

ecshafer•30 minutes ago

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.

grubbs•34 minutes ago

I've mentioned this on HN before. But it's pretty disgusting that the DC Lottery can advertise here on local TV.

palmotea•about 1 hour ago

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.

mwigdahl•about 2 hours ago

And to note, the law in question is from the 1800s -- hardly something novel Wisconsin is doing.

cwmoore•about 2 hours ago

Like building more jails? Could there be a better way?

lovich•about 2 hours ago

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...

mwigdahl•about 1 hour ago

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.

atmavatar•34 minutes ago

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.

LargeWu•25 minutes ago

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.

water-data-dude•13 minutes ago

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.