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Cake day: February 2nd, 2026

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  • Great article. The rise of sports betting and other gambling has been hard to watch as someone on the outside who doesn’t have an interest in gambling.

    I think one side of the story that this article didn’t touch on that separates modern gambling such as Polymarket from the life insurance gambling of old is the participation of youth gamblers in today’s market. I think for me and many others it is especially alarming to imagine that children are the ones gambling on whether people will die. And I think that the normalization of children in betting sits in its own context of rising “loot crate” schemes in video games (not that it is completely normalized for children to gamble yet, but it is gradually becoming so).












  • “Miners with black lung disease, meanwhile, have had to the Trump administration’s move to roll back safety protections for the coal industry…”

    From OSMRE website:

    Each year, OSMRE transfers more than $1 billion to the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds to support health care and pension benefits for eligible coal miners and their beneficiaries.

    The US spends billions every year subsidizing coal and paying for the toll it takes on coal workers’ health. And yet, the MAGA folks I know seem to be more supportive of coal than they were 5 years ago. Like a lot more.

    I don’t get how this plays in MAGA favor when the coal miners themselves are getting shafted and when coal energy represents a complete and total grift - exactly the same type of stuff that had these same folks so excited about Trump and Musk cutting government programs. Any argument for coal falls apart immediately because natural gas is better in almost every way.

    Why are these “coalfare kings” getting away with it?