Replying to @⁨LostWanderer@fedia.io⁩

If we had a sane and functioning government there would be no billionaires, no Elon stealing elections, no Citizen’s United, no nationalized online gambling, etc. There would also be no wars that were not authorized by Congress. No concentration camps. No privacy violation. No spam in your virtual or physical mail box. No spam calls or texts, no ugly billboards or intrusive ads anywhere. There would be clean water, universal medicine, housing, UBI, etc. It would look nothing like the sad doomscape we have right now. I am just scratching the surface.

Replying to @⁨willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩

no nationalized online gambling

This one sticks out. Consider a case where the amount and type of gambling operated was an election detail, as was the amount and manner of addiction response.

Pick which of those two you would move to commercially-managed operations, beholden to shareholders first, and voters second, without making it look like the kind of abstinence or prohibition law that feeds gangsters and crime more than the non-profits currently fed by nationalized gambling.

Public-run operations whose management is entrusted to trustworthy officials keeps control in the hands of the people. If your issue is with untrustworthy managers, that smells like a different problem with solutions that we seem to ignore a little too often.

Edited ⁨⁨Oct⁩ ⁨1⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨13:24⁩⁩en