I don't see any reminders in Las Vegas or casino advertisements that all the games are negative-expectation, and repeated play can result in the loss of any amount of money.

In fact there's no paperwork or legal counsel required to play at all!

Can equity crowdfunding be placed under this same "highly regulated" regime that Vegas is under, so that anyone can walk up and participate at any time?

They did that with tulip-bulbs once. It did not work out well.

The securities market isn't a place to have fun, it's a vital machine on which all our prosperity depends.

Treating stocks as a blind gamble means money is not chasing the best investment but is being scattered randomly or by easily manipulated rumors.

Anyone who buys stock as a blind gamble should be deterred. Not to protect them but the rest of us. The same way children shouldn't play with matches; I don't care about burning their little fingers off I care about burning the house down.

So no, it's not like Las Vegas.

> [the securities market is] a vital machine on which all our prosperity depends.

I'd like to see evidence of this.

I am no lover of the current system and would love to see it changed to be more equitable. But for better or worse as things stand right now, stock markets and prosperity, even of ordinary people, are apparently very strongly correlated. Ideally fixing them should not plunge the world into recession (or worse).

Where there are inequality issues, surely the safest thing is to just adjust tax rates and social spending to fix those. Viewing securities exchanges as a possibly useful machine that needs watching is much better than turning it into to a gambler's play ground for no good reason.

Even if you provided evidence of said correlation (you didn't), it still doesn't imply causation. The economy doing well could cause the stock market to do well for all I know.

It was said that our economic prosperity depends on the securities market. Im calling bullshit, and simply repeating the claim doesn't make it more true.

Every table game has the payouts printed on it. If roulette pays out 36:1, and there's 38 slots on the wheel, it's not hard to do the math.

But why is a declared, guaranteed, engineered loss better for the masses than a fuzzy-odds maybe-win?

Well. It doesn't SEEM hard to do the math, but roulette wheels still make money, so clearly some people aren't doing it right.

Wrong. You might be good at math, and still play the roulette; the difference is that you have to play it for variance, not for expected value (i.e. it's OK to lose $100 for a small chance of earning $100 000).

Some people don't mind losing money just for the thrill of possibly making money.

They like to gamble, even if, maybe especially if, the odds are against them.

just because the odds are against you doesn't mean it isn't fun. gambling is mostly fine as long as you know your limits. The problem is that it is an addictive behavior, and if you are addicted it becomes a huge problem.

I'm have a math major. I know that i'm likely to lose money playing roulette. yet i'll put a few dollars down when i'm on vacation on a cruise ship because it's entertaining and fun. the difference is that i view it entirely as an entertainment expense, and limit myself to a reasonable amount of money (that is generally really low). How much entertainment i get (how long i get to play) depends on how lucky i am. if it's gone it's gone, there is no getting more out to play longer (which is where people who are addicted generally struggle).

I play roulette and I'm pretty sure I got the math right.

unless you buy bonds issued by central banks , investment IS gambling.

With a lot lower odds of winning, which are in turn a lot harder to evaluate than the upcoming superball match, for example.