I’m on the fence on whether or not I’m going to bother to try and game another temporary free subscription trial for SiriusXM upon hearing about how Howard Stern is changing his format yet again, dropping down to now just one show a week, along with the news that there have been a large number of layoffs within his camp, including some notable personalities that I’ve gotten to know throughout the years. Change is inevitable, especially over a long period of time, Howard’s not getting any younger, and the finish line is inching ever closer, and without the King of All Media, I don’t see much point in indulging SiriusXM, even if I’m not paying for it.
That being said, when I feel the need for streaming music, I’m still an old head using Pandora, and much like most other streaming mediums, Pandora is no exception to being filled with gradually more ads, bringing their medium, one step closer to being no different than terrestrial radio.
One of the ads I’ve been hearing a lot of lately is for a sports betting service, because gambling available to everyone is totally not problematic in the world. I’ve documented multiple times my lack of success in sports gambling and why I don’t imbibe in it anymore, and I should feel fortunate that I’ve taken such lessons to heart, because otherwise I’d probably be absolutely fucked in today’s world, where the persuasion to get into gambling is being inundated to the people like it were clean air and water.
The interesting thing about this particular ad is the boiler plate legal they blab out 1.75x speed at the end of the commercial about the dangerous risks of gambling, but the thing is how they’ve transformed the word “betting” into “predictions.”
The “prediction market” sounds a whole lot less scary than “sports betting,” as if one agency doesn’t have loan sharks, bookies and shady types behind it as much as the other does. Also the prediction market doesn’t contain terminology that pigeon holes it solely to sports, because people can make predictions on all sorts of things that aren’t just sports, like betting on new Popes, what cities will land a large corporate client, what car manufacturer will release their new model next, etc, etc.
And therein lies the increasing dangers of the world of gambling, because the prediction market name has opened the door for all sorts of official betting on things outside of just sporting events. I had no fucking clue to what was being advertised throughout the World Cup with all those weird Kalshi ads starring Timothee Chalamet but when I remembered at one point to actually Google the name, that’s when I learned that it was just a betting service but being called predictions.
I’m not above gambling by any means necessary, I’m just way more cautious with my money than I used to be, primarily on account of the fact that I have a family that depends on me continuing to make it, and not piss it away betting on shit like a real degenerate. If I were younger and still unattached and uncommitted to anything would be a different story, but as a generally risk-averse person in nature, I probably would’ve been able to resist, but in this day and age where the masses are usually still like gambling = bad, but the market has like 100 different gambling services being advertised down our throats.
It’s just funny that in spite of the negative stigma that comes along with excessive gambling, a rebranding of the whole concept, simply by calling it ‘predictions’ seems to have reinvigorated the whole industry, and I predict that there are going to be some seriously broken families and people in the near to distant future, whose lives are going to be completely ruined by, predicting problems.
There are probably predictions on such metrics available on some prediction platform, for people to bet predict on.
