If you think about what they are actually trying to measure, it should also be clear that the primary goal of these statistics is to employ economists.
There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.
And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.
Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.
The idea is that they get government funding from credulous civil servants. There is no actual idea here, there is no business. The idea that a country that is unable to supply basic infrastructure is suddenly going to build CPUs in space is obvious bullshit.
Korea, by what metric? South Korea was through the 50 poorer than North Korea, North Korea was considered the roaring growth economy, huge success of planning and leadership.
Park Chung Hee took a country that could not be a functional democracy, provided leadership and put it onto the path of economic success. Iirc, the reduction in poverty through that period is the fastest in human history (when you consider that China, that is an incredible statement).
I think people (still) assume both that democracy is superior economically for every situation and that people who don't have any food care about being unable to vote...neither of these things is obviously true. Indeed, in the latter case, we now have a good test case of poor countries adopting democracy early and they have generally not been successful as power rotates between various quasi-dictators who give massive handouts to the poor to retain power (without doing anything actually useful).
The choice should be free though - everyone should be able to opt out. Restricting people to leave the country is a major red flag that something is going in the wrong direction.
I am not sure what you mean by "control the government had"...they are the same thing. It is like the situation with IRA and Sinn Fein, this bizarre roleplay where people (for various reasons) went to massive effort to imply they were separate when it was obvious they were led by the same people. There is no distinction between the government and cartels...the assumption that there is makes no sense at all given the latitude they have to operate.
There is no unintended consequence. Regime change was the explicit consequence of wars in the Middle East, it was the intended consequence. It went very badly.
The intended consequence here is to demonstrate to an organized crime group that being part of the government does not mean they are safe. There is no other intention, it has worked.
No, it is a business, that business employs millions of people worldwide. There are some books where, for various reasons, that kind of business would destroy their ability to serve retail customers...which is the point: the ultimate point is entertainment, it isn't supposed to be a financial transaction, do people rage at the dead loss from eating food?
The market is moving towards a model that is more similar to financial markets with price discovery from informed participants. It enables higher volume, this business model is used by Asian books such as SBOBet...but the market is where it is now, and most places are also using beards to bet at soft books too, and those books will continue to try to protect their business as it is now.
Btw, one of the major issues that explain why books are soft is the use of marketing to fund growth. If that spending wasn't required, it would change the operating model completely to one where gambling companies took a spread. But the marketing spend is the main avenue of competition, not price.
The analogue that people have of betting is, for some reason, drugs. Addiction is an inherent property of taking drugs. Gambling is not like this in any way. It is not inherently addictive, 99% of people who gamble have no issue with it.
It isn't to chase a couple of bucks either. Billy Walter has made hundreds of millions. A recent court case leaked that Tony Bloom's syndicate was making £200m in profit per year. This activity helps make these markets more efficient.
There is nothing wrong with gambling. Fast food kills tens of thousands a year in the US, hundreds of billions spent on healthcare and life expectancy is still terrible because of obesity. Should we ban fast food? Why? Many other people don't have a problme. The idea of personal responsibility will always be completely abhorrent to some part of the population.
While it’s true that many (most?) people won’t have a problem, a minority have their lives ruined as well as family members, and the risk of that is reason enough to regulate it.
First, most states ban many forms of gambling...so I would call that heavy regulation. Second, whilst the regulatory approach in legal states differs - for example, NJ...for various reasons...is one of the most strict - the overall level is high.
Most states have self-exclude/no-market lists, most states require links to gambling addiction helplines in adverts and within product, responsible gaming features are required in every state de facto (and providers are going beyond this in reality) so this is deposit/wager/loss/time limits, reality checks have effectively become mandatory, some states have hard limits on total wagers or require ACK over limit, deposit alerts are also moving to mandatory, there are limits on some kind of machines and how they operate (this is a massive difference to casino gambling, IGT designed physical machines that only appealed to addicts, that experience can now be 100% controlled online), etc.
I don't think people are aware that state regulatory bodies exist and are doing a huge amount. If you compare with European countries, I would say that providers are probably more aware of their responsible gaming function (afaik, many providers have responsible gaming goals that impact board-level compensation, so in the past year you had providers blanket limiting customers based on certain categories...which, I will add, is not an ideal approach, no regulator asked them to do this). In addition, there are some aspects of regulation that, afaik, don't happen anywhere else: for example, most state regulators are checking code that providers are deploying to ensure it is compliant.
This change in regulatory approach is largely a function of things moving online. To be blunt, when Adelson died then the old approach of functionally limited regulation was over because no-one was being paid to advocate for it. Online gaming also enables far more controls over the experience i.e. you can enforce hard limits (as opposed to a pit boss telling someone to stop). I can only assume that most people are completely unaware that this is happening though.
The difference with Polymarket and co, which are regulated as financial firms, should be quite obvious too. People are gambling on their site, they are doing none of the above.
Ban fast food? No. Regulate it and find a way to re-internalize some of the externalities? Perhaps. The invisible hand is neither benevolent nor infallible.
I didn't mention the invisible hand because the precise point is that this is a non-economic discussion. People who want to ban gambling will always, as can be seen elsewhere, make economic points about how it is an economically inefficient activity. Many fun things are economically inefficient, and economic inefficiency is nothing to do with overall bad or good.
"Regulate" fast food...how? So the government is responsible for deciding how someone of normal weight is allowed to eat? Btw, I live somewhere where this has happened...I pay 30-40% more for some types of food, some products have been removed totally, they don't sell them anymore...why? I am healthy, I run, what did I do? The narrative for this was that obesity is a societal problem, that anyone can be obese...which is false. I am just paying more because someone else is obese, that is it (and, obviously, this hasn't changed obesity...the government has just unlocked a new source of revenue to spend on nonsense).
It is easy to regulate gambling, which the US does btw, because the experience is controlled. So you can remove products, unlike with fast food, that are explicitly designed for addicts (for example, many countries have regulations that rank casino/machine/slots gambling into categories). And in many countries, again like the US, you have government-maintained self-exclude lists, no-market lists, etc. Again, this only impacts addicts. The problem is that people who want regulation want to go further, they have these bizarre notions of economic efficiency with embedded social norms they don't appear to acknowledge, and (ultimately) this will impact people who just enjoy gambling. The premise of the original point was that gambling is inherently addictive...this is not the case, it isn't infallibility...some people find this activity fun, they should be allowed to have fun even if some other people shouldn't do it.
> The idea of personal responsibility will always be completely abhorrent to some part of the population.
The idea of personal responsibility is also way overrated by some part of the population like you, gambling is addictive and a net negative to society. Problem gamblers ruin not only their life but of their families as well, it's an addiction with a very high rate of suicide.
Allowing it to be done through your phone is like supplying opioids at the candy store. Not everyone gets addicted but you certainly increase access to the ones in most danger of becoming one, and for what purpose?
Personal responsibility doesn't ever solve systemic issues, you are defending the increase of a systemic issue and blaming the victims which it's the actual abhorrent thing...
Okay, so you believe there is nothing that anyone can do...so logically, you would also believe that any form of gambling addiction treatment is pointless? The issue with your point of view is that it defies any sense of understanding about what addiction actually is, there are no possible solutions apart from the government just banning everything in sight.
The purpose is that gambling is fun. That is it. Eating fast food is fun. Drinking alcohol is fun. There are people who are addicting to shopping, so we can ban that too? It is a net negative to you (again, the classic contradiction: YOU believe gambling is wrong so you characterise it is a society wide problem...individual agency doesn't exist though? everyone agrees with something because YOU think it) because you don't enjoy it. It is like saying food consumption is a net negative because it is a sunk cost...in reality, people enjoy eating food, they will spend money on food that is more expensive than basic sustenance for enjoyment, and people enjoy gambling because it is entertaining. No crazy theories required, it is fun, people should be allowed to have fun.
Also, they supply very addictive things at the candy store...candy. Not everyone gets addicted, but you think we should also ban them? Eating candy is clearly a systemic issue, right? Nothing to do with personal feelings, it is a systemic issue with insufficient government intervention in the supply of candy. Candy exists, and for what purpose? Lol, it is like talking to a robot.
Because there is no systemic issue. You are saying that people are just mindless drones who have no control over their actions. Again, ban gambling therapy...must be completely pointless? There is nothing that anyone can do?
No victims are being blamed, I just don't have the arrogance to call people who do something I don't like or behave in a way that I wouldn't a "victim". They aren't victims. Gambling addiction will exist no matter how much we ban, there are gambling addicts in your paradise of Saudi Arabia, and they get no help because they live within a system that denies individual agency replacing it with religious agency. Some things are addictive, those things can also be enjoyable to other people without harm, it is okay for people to enjoy things that aren't enjoyed by other people, it is okay to have fun.
I've gone down that route already with Roo/Kilo Code and then OpenCode, but OpenCode with the z.ai backend and/or the CC z.ai Anthropic compatible endpoint although I've been moving to OC in general more and more over time.
GLM 4.6 with Z.ai plan (haven't tried 4.7 yet) has worked well enough for straightforward changes with a relatively large quota (more generous than CC which only gets more frustrating on the Pro plan over time) and has predictable billing which is a big pro for me. I just got tired of having to police my OpenRouter usage to avoid burning through my credits.
But yes, OpenCode is awesome particularly as it supports all the subscriptions I have access to via personal or work (Github Copilot/CC/z.ai). And as model churn/competition slows down over time I can stick which whichever end up having the best value/performance with sufficient quota for my personal projects without fear of lock-in and enshittification.
Xiaomi, Nvidia Nemotron, Minimax, lots of other smaller ones too. There are massive economic incentives to shrink models because they can be provided faster and at lower cost.
I think even with the money going in, there has to be some revenue supporting that development somewhere. And users are now looking at the cost. I have been using Anthropic Max for most of this year after checking out some of these other models, it is clearly overpriced (I would also say their moat of Claude Code has been breached). And Anthropic's API pricing is completely crazy when you use some of the paradigms that they suggest (agents/commands/etc) i.e. token usage is going up so efficient models are driving growth.
Decisions made in 2008 were also a huge part of this.
The UK had a framework to liquidate financial institutions that was similar to the US, and this was deployed in early 2008 with Northern Rock and B&B. The end result was a multi-billion pound profit to the government.
Gordon Brown then decided that he needed to lead the global economy (and he has written, at the last count, two books which explain in significant detail that he was a thought leader and economic visionary through this period) by bailing out banks that were large employers in his constituency. With RBS, this involved investing at a very high valuation and then shutting down all the profitable parts of the bank, the loss was £20-30bn. With HBOS, he forced the only safe bank to acquire them, this resulted in the safe bank going bankrupt a year after the financial crisis ended in the US, and another multi-billion pound loss.
The US benefitted massively from having one of the most successful financial executives of the period, Hank Paulson, running the economy rather than (essentially) a random man from Edinburgh who have never had a job in the private sector (apart from law, obv) but held a seat with a huge number of constituents working at the banks he should have been shutting down (Brown himself had never worked in the private sector at all, parachuted into a safe seat after his doctorate). Geithner nearly suffered from that same fault, but did well with TARP (again though, iirc, this was Paulson's plan).
There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.
And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.
Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.
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