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We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America
(www.derekthompson.org)
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this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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What is the right interpretation of the graphs? Patriotism for a fascist empire is inherently fascist, and naturally some of the others automatically follow when more of the
of 
is plunged into living paycheck to paycheck. Even community involvement might be explained that way.
Decline in material conditions probably explains a lot, and if you pull out the crosstabs it seems like what's happening is the "very" folks are shifting into the "somewhat" column (only 11% rated patriotism as "not important at all"). The wording of the question might also be weird - it asks "How important are each of the values to you personally" and then the money question is literally just "money," not "having enough money to feed my family" or "having more money than most people". Anyone worried about not having enough money is probably choosing the former interpretation.
"Hard work" also scores a whopping 94 on the very/somewhat important answers, higher than everything else (self-fulfillment is second at 91, followed by money and tolerance for others, tied at 90; it also comes in at 67 on "very important", 9 points ahead of the runner up, tolerance for others), so the conclusion that people are pivoting en masse to scams and get rich quick schemes and screwing everyone else over as central values doesn't seem to hold.
Guess I should've applied more skepticism.
Yep, as the cliche popularized by Mark Twain goes:
Thank you for confirming my skepticism of the interpretation by the author you shared. I think the author is definitely to blame for the bad interpretation, and perhaps motivated by the contradiction of also still wanting to defend gambling even despite the headline.
The author is one of the Abundance libs. He's got Peter Thiel connections.
(Edit:) Embarrassing: Peter Thiel's Zero to One Might Be the Best Business Book I've Read
Peter Thiel connections deserves to downgrade this automatically to !slop@hexbear.net IMHO
Agreed. I figure the only reason Derek Thompson isn't as loathed as Ezra Klein or Matthew Yglesias around here is that he's somehow more forgettable.
Yeah I think those are bullshit. Let me pull up my Graphs that show all the young people are actually evil
to the limited extent i had any community before, one group folded due to covid and the other decided to pretend covid ceased to exist. Followed immediately by 100% of the group who went to a convention coming home sick with it.
Very true,
definitely has changed group dynamics in a way that's quite difficult to reverse, even if people want to pretend nothing happened.