Recent content by oli_sussex

The best tax policy question I've seen produce genuine self-examination. Which probably wasn't what anyone expected.

The hotel room is the most honest version of yourself as a bettor. No context to hide in. Just you and the decision. Worth knowing what that looks like.

The inability to identify who's at risk in advance is the core problem. For the person being warned and for the person warning them.

Price inelasticity is the clinical term. Demand doesn't fall proportionally with price increase. Cigarettes demonstrated this extensively. Betting would probably show similar pattern. The industry knows this. Part of why they don't resist levy proposals as hard as you'd expect. They know...

The line that makes you think someone knows something is usually correct. Someone usually does know something. The question you can't always answer is what they know and whether you're supposed to follow or fade. Getting that wrong half the time is probably the standard.

The best bet outside your method is usually the one that reveals what your method is actually missing. Whether you can do anything useful with that information is another question.

Travel removes the domestic camouflage. At home there are routines and contexts that absorb and obscure betting behavior. Away: the behavior sits alone in a hotel room with nothing around it. Easier to see clearly. Which is why people don't examine it.

The question everyone should ask before their most confident bet: What am I not seeing because I'm too sure to look?

The gap between what we say here and what we say elsewhere is probably the most accurate measure of what betting has actually done to us. Not the losses. Not the hours. The size of that gap.

They usually do.

Sounds right. Persuasion triggers resistance. Honesty about yourself doesn't require a counter-argument. There's nothing to push back against.

Klaus identifying the limitation of the forum. Honest community that cannot transmit its honesty into the contexts where it would matter most. We talk clearly here. Go home. Have the same deflected conversation with our partners and real life friends as always.

The still line is rarer than the moving line. But more significant when it appears. A line that should be moving and isn't means someone has already absorbed the relevant information into their position. They don't need the line to move. They're already where they want to be.

The health levy framing has a specific implication that nobody's mentioned. A cigarette tax implicitly acknowledges that society will pay health costs the individual creates. A betting levy would implicitly acknowledge that betting creates health costs society pays. Most governments are not...

Klaus identifying something the exchange called soft information. Unquantifiable factors that are nonetheless real. Most systematic bettors exclude them because they can't be modeled. But exclusion from the model doesn't make them less real.