I think what's different is that we actually have democracy, yet for whatever reason, the masses of poor people keep voting for governments that overtly and openly only care about rich people.
I'd argue that, while a portion of this rise obviously consists of troubled/problem/addicted gamblers, a huge part of the rise of gambling is from desperation: The public's growing belief that the traditional wealth-producing ladders have all been pulled up, and that gambling is the last remaining hope that normal people have of making decent money.
"Work hard all your life and retire with a pension." - fantasy in 2026.
"Invent something new and capitalize on it." - not realistic in the face of gigantic, powerful, all-owning corporations who will squash you.
"Buy an existing business and live off the proceeds." - impossible without existing wealth.
"Become a famous pop star or sports hero." - as improbable as ever.
People have no hope anymore, and hopeless people turn to random chance as the last and only remaining option.
> while a portion of this rise obviously consists of [...], a huge part of the rise of gambling is from desperation
Is that really so? It's a get-rich-quick scheme and absolutely no one is under any illusions otherwise, including the people gambling their rent money. They know it's a very long shot and that most people lose, but they hope it'll be different for them.
WallStreetBets (just a different form of gambling) is filled with posts of people losing everything but it doesn't seem to stop "newbies".
I think the gap between "troubled/problem/addicted" and those you describe as "desperate" is vanishingly thin, if it exists at all.
> "Become a famous pop star or sports hero." - as improbable as ever.
It's even more improbable. For both of those, your starting to see more and more of the current generation that are children/nieces/nephews of the already famous. They have the financial comfort to pursue it, and the family connections in the industries.
And for sports, the level at which you have to be competitive is getting younger and younger. So much more sports science/nutrition going in at the middle school/high school level.
Those were two fields that seemingly were still meritocratic, but that is fading fast, if it ever existed at all.
I think "huge part ... is from desperation" needs a citation. Gambling has been known to be a vice for millenia. There was an article on here not long ago where a reporter did sports gambling for a year for a story; he started off Mormon, disinterested in gambling, with $10k from the company, and after he lost it, he put himself on the state self-exclusion list because now he had a problem with gambling. The null hypothesis is that gambling is a vice, so to make it about desperation needs some evidence.
Also, "traditional wealth-producing ladders have all been pulled up" is nonsense. The stock market is available to all comers, and long investing is a traditional path. There was a story here a few years ago about a black janitor in NYC who died and left $7 million to the MoMA (or some such); he had invested $10k a year in the stock market. People in the trades still make good money. People on this site also tend to be in the making good money careers. I saw a bunch of young couples--and not the techy-looking ones, either--at the open houses this spring in the midwest. Also, one should not extrapolate one's situation at 25 to be the same at 45; if you've done reasonable savings, 45 should looking wealthier.
One of the few things I do kind of like about LLM-assisted coding is that it's helping to bring back "lone wolf" programming. We currently default to using massive teams to build massive software because of all the work involved, but teams have a huge communication/documentation cost, and a lot can leak and be lost the more communication has to happen to get things done. Code assistants cut down on the "all the work involved" part, and I think will help to bring one-man shops back into fashion.
I don't think "What the hell is going on with California?" is a great example. I've lived in many states throughout my life, from deep red to navy blue, and now I live in California. It's definitely the best place I've ever lived, and neither me nor anyone in my family wants to leave any time soon. Is California a flaw-free utopia? No. Does it have its shit together in more ways than most other states? I'd say yes. Also, being a few hours drive from the ocean, a few hours from a city that's a major cultural center, a few hours from the beautiful Sierras and winter sports, and a few hours from many other pristine and interesting outdoor amenities is and added bonus. Extra bonus, year round decent weather, relatively clean air, clean water, a great university system. Extra extra bonus, nobody in my house has to worry about being hunted down because of the color of their skin or their national origin or their sexual preferences, or because they had a miscarriage.
Not exactly the hell hole red staters make it out to be.
Totally, like I said right there, it is a great state!
But the governance is not great. That was actually the whole point I was making. And getting back to that: The getting things done is abysmal. Taxes are high. Spending is loose. No progress is made on things the state takes on as priorities (housing costs, high speed rail, homelessness). It's just not well managed. But from the "one side good, other side bad" POV it should be great, no pesky republicans to get in the way. I don't know if there's a lesson there but it's an intersting question to ask.
Is there any example of good State governance to point to, though? Every State is on the spectrum of dysfunction. I'd argue (and I am aware that it is a blatantly partisan point of view) that every additional republican you add to the mix will increase dysfunction. The party's entire M.O. currently is to increase chaos wherever possible, grief the other side, and generally troll everyone not like them; and I say this as someone who voted (R) decades ago. The (R) of today have no governance principle besides sowing chaos and ending effective governance, and CA would be even worse if Sacramento had to deal with having a significant number of them around gumming everything up.
What we need to push back on is making a phone a requirement to do routine banking and conducting other necessary business. There is no reason I should be required to have a phone in order to query my balance or transfer money to someone, when I have a perfectly good computer sitting here.
The physical keys, like Yubico, help with that. However, I have not been convinced that a password manager with unique, strong passwords on all my accounts shouldn't suffice. I don't know why I have to be penalized because other users don't use best practices.
In my mind, Vibe-anything means "some slop carelessly thrown together to ship as fast as possible." Wild that it's being used in a serious product name!
In a sane world, this would just be a case of fraud between the IRS and the fraudster, and the person whose information was used would have nothing to do with it. It's unfortunate that we have this need to call it "identity theft" in order to try to shift the responsibility to some unrelated third party.
Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies. Somehow we have adopted this corporate mysticism that tells us that people with CxO or SVP in their titles are somehow smarter, more skilled, more qualified than the rank-and-file, but I don't think it's true. They eat and shit just like we do.
> Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies.
I'm not so sure about that.
When I do a thought exercise and put myself in our CEO's shoes, I think "ok, which decisions do I need to make today to keep the company thriving in the next 3 or 5 or 10 years?"
For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
Here's the trick: the CEO doesn't know either, but they make decisions anyway. Knowing that they don't know is a good skill for a CEO to have, it freezing when they don't know is not.
You would also have a whole team of consultants, advisors, lawyers, and VP+ people specializing in each area telling you what the problems and possibilities are if you actually had that job. They're not operating in a vaccuum.
I do agree here. Being a CEO is in fact stressful. I think as someone pointed out, your first problem is you're thinkin 3, 5, 10 years. Unless you're a founder building your company, my observation is think in quarters. A year at most. You just need to survive long enough to move on to bigger things. The mess you leave is the next guy's problem. And I don't know how to live like that.
Nah, even if you fail miserably, you'll still get a nice payout and retire comfortably. Hell, you can even commit crimes and the company will pay the fines for you!
> For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
I guess my response to this would be that not everyone is the same. You might like to ship more useful software. I got into writing code and made a long career out of it because I like writing code. Not "making products." Not "shipping things." Yes, making products and shipping things were necessarily a small part of my career, but that's not what got me out of bed in the morning.
It's like telling a writer "your job is now to bind up books and place them on the store shelves." OK, but it's a totally different job and not exactly one the writer is going to like.
I think it was a mistake to apply a label to the normal, default case of food that comes from living organisms. We should have just called it food. The label should have been "inorganic" or something, for the unnatural, non-default case.
Same for software. We don't need to justify a new "human made" label. Just call that stuff software. They should need to differentiate their "AI made" software with a label.
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