Traded Away

(Note: There are some long quotes here from the original story, as I'd like to preserve the context for my analysis.)

So, to make a long story short, a now 35 year-old man who's only identified by a middle name, Thomas, was a problem gambler racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debts. After bankruptcy, he had himself added to his state's self-exclusion list, so he couldn't sign up with sports books again. NPR relates:

"Then one day, about two years later, I'm scrolling on Instagram and I came across an ad for Kalshi," said Thomas. "I was bored and thought this could be fun, and it ended up turning into something that wasn't fun at all."

You can guess what happened after that... more tens of thousands of debts piled up. Realizing that things were getting out of control...

"I asked a live agent to close my account. I have a gambling addiction and have been self-excluded from regulated gambling platforms for years," Thomas wrote the company in a chat feature of the app, according to a log of the conversation shared with NPR.

An automated response from Kalshi noted that "self-exclusion is a responsible trading safeguard designed to be irreversible." It offered other solutions: "Three different responsible risk-management actions can be taken: trading break, voluntary opt-out, and a personalized funding cap."

Thomas insisted he wanted to be banned from the app. Two days later, he also made three separate requests to Kalshi over email for his account to be permanently closed, correspondence he shared with NPR show.

Kalshi did eventually bar Thomas from betting.

NPR went to Kalshi for an explanation.

Dani Lever, a Kalshi spokeswoman, called Thomas "a cherry-picked case."

She went on: "If you ask our millions of traders, they would emphatically tell you that an exchange model is significantly healthier than a sportsbook model: our profits aren't tied to trader losses, so we don't have the same predatory incentives."

At this point, I found myself wondering, if Ms. Lever claimed that Kalshi didn't have "predatory incentives" to keep Thomas on the platform, why not simply let him sign up for the self-exclusion list? If Kalshi didn't need his business, why the hoops to jump through?

"We've prioritized making Kalshi the safest venue for people to trade on," Kalshi's Lever said in a statement, pointing to features that nudge bettors to take a break, establish limits on what traders can deposit and partnerships with mental health counseling to assist problem traders.

But again, why not immediately allow people who understand that they have a problem to skip the rigamarole and go straight to self-exclusion? Sure, Kalshi isn't a traditional sports book; it's not the counterparty to the trades and wagers that customers make, so they don't have the same incentives to hang on to losing customers exclusively. But it seems that they want to hang on to all of their customers. So why didn't NPR ask about that?

Of course, there's little reason to expect that a company will voluntarily take actions that will damage its own business model and earnings potential. The point of businesses is to make other people's money into their owners' money as efficiently as possible, after all. And Kalshi regarding the NPR story as a hit-piece and not wanting to be fully cooperative and transparent makes perfect sense, given that. But to simply say that Thomas' story was "cherry picked" misses the point; of course the people who wreck their savings by burning through tens of thousands of dollars on multiple occasions are the outliers. If that were the average outcome, there would have been immense public pressure for legislators to become more involved, and people would have been running on it as a campaign issue. And if the stories are rare enough to be "cherry-picked" then it shouldn't be much of a problem for Kalshi to allow those customers to leave.

Because note that the question at issue here isn't why Kalshi didn't detect that Thomas had a problem and bar him from trading sports futures on the site; it's why they didn't immediately allow him to block himself from the site when he came to them and said he had a problem. If Kalshi didn't see Thomas never trading again on their platform as a problem, why decline to allow for immediate self-exclusion and redirect people to "nudges?"

Now, maybe NPR asked those questions, and Dani Lever from Kalshi blew them off. It wouldn't be the first time a company simply ignored questions where the answers wouldn't make them look as good as they wanted to. But in that case, include that in the story, so that the audience has the complete picture?

Granted, it's not difficult to decide that, for all of Kalshi's high-minded rhetoric about their incentives, they're hard up enough for revenue that they keenly feel the loss of every customer who decides they need to cut themselves off, and this explains their reluctance to take problem gamblers at their word. But that's an inference that could have been better supported, with a bit more digging.

Afar

I'm of the opinion that "media bias" (which is really just media outlets seeking to give their audiences what they want) exists more in the realm of story selection and framing than in outright manipulation of facts or making things up. Sure, an outlet might be more or less likely to treat something as credible, based on its political leanings, but this is still, as far as I'm concerned, a function of the audience's desires.

In any event, NPR (which tends to be my poster child for this thesis) recently ran an article on a Wisconsin pastor who was barred from re-entering the United States after having gone to Guatemala to visit his mother, who was ill. In fairness to NPR, this story comes from an outfit called "Religion News Service," so it's likely that it was reported in other outlets as well.

It's another example of the understanding that outcomes should be driven by whether or not the subject is a good or bad person, rather than whether or not the rules point to that outcome. While Reverend Paredes and his family are portrayed quite sympathetically, the article itself notes: "Soon after, he was notified by the U.S. government he was ineligible to apply to return to the U.S. until 2035 because of a 1991 deportation order."

And while the pastor claims that he was unaware of any such order, there's nothing in the piece that notes that no such order actually exists.

This is the sort of advocacy piece that might better serve its intended audience if it focused more on changing the immigration system, so that the rules were clearer and more accessible. And perhaps more broadly publicized. Reverend Paredes seemed to be under the impression that since immigration officials weren't chasing him around, that he had been cleared to stay in the United States; when that wasn't actually the case. He may have received bad legal advice when he consulted with a lawyer before returning to Guatemala, but had he himself been better versed on the rules, he may have understood that something didn't add up properly. Yet this story is more about the outcome, than the process. And I think that this contributes to the idea that the American Left is in favor of open borders.

There are stories to be told about the way that the American immigration system works. More of a focus on making that system better may be of more help then the human-interest stories the seem to dominate the coverage. 

Like Sunday Morning

I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and as I approached an intersection, I noticed an older woman dancing on the other side of the street. There was no music, no-one was singing; she just danced there, near a lamppost by the corner. As I was crossing the street, she stopped dancing, and stood in place, as if she was waiting for me.

"It's not easy," she said to me, as I stepped onto the sidewalk. "It's not easy being homeless. It's not like that Lionel Ritchie song." The old  Commodores' song came to mind almost immediately, and sat in the back of my head, waiting, while the woman continued to speak. She looked older than me, but that's the thing about homeless people; living on the streets ages them, so it's hard to guess their ages from looking at them.

"You be careful out here today, okay?" She then turned away from me, and I walked on. She hadn't asked for anything; which was good, because I hadn't brought anything to spare and my car was a few blocks away.

I walked on; I was meeting a friend. There were a few other homeless people nearby; I presumed that there were services for them of some sort in the building. One corner housed a city office, closed for the evening.

"You see, I've begged, stole and I borrowed," I sang gently to myself as I walked away. I didn't suspect the woman would be there when I came back through that way later. She wasn't. Neither were the others. I wondered if they'd found safe places to spend the night.

Having spent the early part of my adult life in Chicago, I wasn't as acquainted with homelessness as I am now, living here. The climate there was much less forgiving, especially in the winter. I can understand why people here both see the problem as insurmountable, and expect the city and county governments to fix it anyway. It's that desire for someone else to bear the costs, of course, that stands in the way of the necessary trade-offs to reduce the number of people on the street. Such, of course, is the way of things.

Reboot

Leaders in D.C. and Silicon Valley are worried the public backlash against AI and data centers will hamper the development of this staggeringly powerful and existentially dangerous technology. The new label is part of a broader effort to shift the narrative.
Trump and CEOs try to shed AI's toxic branding

Someone, whether that's Jensen Huang or Donald Trump expects this rebranding exercise to work, and I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be right. Because these are relatively intelligent people (yes, even the President) and they wouldn't attempt something like this if they didn't think it had a reasonable chance of success.

I want to call that out as a problem, but it's really just the nature of the beast. In order for this to backfire in people's faces, a fairly large number of people need to, in effect, have nothing else that they need to pay attention to. And that simply isn't the case right now. Schemes like this make people upset when the presumption is that they count on the fact that people are stupid. So any expectation that suddenly going from calling generative automation "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence" will actually change the public perception of the technology becomes a marker of contempt. When it's really simply the realization that most people don't know enough about the topic to understand that the change is, at this point, purely semantic because they have other, more important things, to devote their attention to.

And if I'm going to criticize "leaders in D.C." for anything in this, it's the fact that so many people are too busy keeping their heads above water to have the time to be more conversant in the technology. As for leaders in Silicon Valley, if they weren't trying to snow people about the benefits of their new technologies, then I'd be worried.

Both Ways

The understanding that "no one is coming to save you/us" is that people who are unable to help themselves will not be helped by others. But perhaps implicit in that individualistic ethos is the idea that the same audience will not mobilize to help others who cannot help themselves. And this makes sense; it's the way reciprocity works, and reciprocity is not always a positive thing. It's not uncommon to find people angrily declaring that since they received no outside aid in a difficult time of their lives, they plan to refuse any pleas for any from other people.

But given that, I wonder if the ethos of the individual becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain degree. As people buy into the idea that they are on their own, and cannot rely on the assistance of others, do they also buy into the idea that going to the aid of others is either foolish, or a luxury that they cannot afford. There is a degree to which the focus on sparking feelings of poverty in people may be too central to the way Americans talk to one another. Making it clear that it's everyone for themselves may be useful in fostering self-reliance, but there's a reason why Thomas Hobbes described life a world in which people could not effectively cooperate as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."