- many people don't indulge at all
- many people indulge occasionally to no real harm
- some people indulge in a way that makes a short term recoverable mess
- a few people get addicted and are unable to stop. May or may not also be harmed at this point, but this tends to lead to cumulative harm
- a few people really mess up tragically
I'm finally almost out and I'm 45. Nobody taught me in school not to use them as they are harmful. Nobody taught me how much money they will actually charge me and how much money I will lose because of them. Whereas if I had just saved my money and bought the thing out right I wouldn't have to pay any extra money.
My school failed me.
Nobody trusts junkies with $100 so it makes sense that shoplifting or burglary can get them the money they need, but a lot of people who have a gambling problem are six figures down, stealing a neighbour's PS5 is a drop in the bucket.
> assumes bucket sizes ("many," "some," "a few")
I was trying to be as vague as possible here!
Those pills are actually similar to heroin, yet all of that happened legally in real life, with profits flowing through legitimate financial institutions on a very large scale.
__ ¹ coincidentally what my Dad always used to say about black tar heroin.
Just like the failure of the war on drugs, trying to ban crypto and arresting anyone that owns it would almost certainly be a dismal failure.
Presuming you want to 'kill' cryptocurrency, starving it of interactions with the real economy seems a much easier way to do it.
Well, propaganda or not, hard drugs are bad for you.
About 100,000 die annually from drugs in the US alone.
And people "high" on bleach never killed or injured anybody.
> About 100,000 die annually from drugs in the US alone.
A single substance vs all drugs including prescription, over the counter, and hard drugs while including suicide etc is hardly the support you think it is.
Further actually using the correct numbers and then trying to justify US drug policy based on hard drug overdoses fails when you look at hard drug overdoses in other countries. US numbers are high not because it’s an hard problem, but because our policy is bad.
So you agree that hard drugs are poison (or even worse than poison, about 75K vs about 100K deaths / year).
>A single substance vs all drugs including prescription, over the counter, and hard drugs while including suicide etc is hardly the support you think it is.
"but, hey, poison also kills people" is is hardly the counter argument you think it is...
The point of DARE was to be a cover for getting cops into classrooms talking to kids after the LAPD "Public Disorder Intelligence Division" KGB-esque organization was brought to light and dissolved. Daryl Gates, the head of that program, was the one who approached some academics as a cover. It was immediately discovered that kids who went through the program were more likely to do drugs, but Gates didn't care. Because it wasn't about keeping kids away from drugs.
The entire point of the program was to turn kids into informants on their parent's gang activity. Kids were regularly coerced into narcing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzrGCk-F7FY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPD_Public_Disorder_Intellige...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Educatio...
or meaningfully richer as the case may be
While I do get your point about the FUD it generated, a better parallel might be the rise (and eventual fall) of the tobacco industry. There was a lot of fraud and deception in the 20th century about the health effects of smoking. There were ads touting that more doctors preferred brand X. The idea was to correlate something genuinely dangerous and lethal with good health.
Crypto and betting markets, to the author’s point, are repeating this pattern again today in terms of personal finances.
You can say buying crypto is like gambling sure but it literally is not. It's investing in an extremely risky asset that can go to 0. But it is very different than placing a bit on Kalshi or a sportsbook.
I actually have bought CumRocket before but I also bought a lot of crypto and sold it at a profit. I did not use Kalshi later or sportbooks to gamble. I moved to invest in stocks later in life but bought boring etfs and index funds. Trading bitcoin actually taught me risk management and stocks seem much easier to handle in terms of strategy.
Sure I could've turned into a degenrate gambler but that's literally not crypto's fault
But he's not, that's a big issue. If you download DraftKings, it's obvious you are gambling. If you download Robin Hood, and buy shares of Apple, it's obvious you are investing. If you then open Robin Hood and trade oil futures? 0 DTE options? What about when the same app shows you US commodities markets where they are binary options on if the US FIFA team make it to the round of 16?
Buying a bond from the issuer is investing. Buying an IPO is investing. Buying a rental property is investing. Investment implies possible productive result from the action. When you buy shares or bonds already on the market this just exits the previous holder, it does nothing productive.
I would define it differently. If you are putting money in something with the hope that the price goes up, that's speculating. If you put money in something with the hope that it generates income then that's investing.
So buying stocks could be either one.
And using it to generate income, maintaining it for the customers (renters) etc
Scenario 1: I hold all the stock for decades until I die. Under your terminology, I am the sole "investor". Fine.
Scenario 2: 1 millisecond after my purchase I sell everything I bought in the IPO to thousands of market participants. Under your terminology they are not "investors". I can't be an investor either, since I hold no more of the stock. Does the company no longer have investors?