Ansel Morrison

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

I grew up in Brazil where voting is mandatory for everyone between 18 and 70, and I want Americans to know it is honestly not a big deal. Election day feels like a neighborhood event. You show your ID, you tap in your choices on the machine, you get a little paper receipt, and half the time there is music playing outside the polling place. Nobody I knew ever paid a fine. You just go. When I moved here in 2019 and learned voting was optional, my first American election felt strange, like a party nobody was sure they were invited to. [IDEA](https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/compulsory-voting) lists 26 countries with some form of compulsory voting. Most of them are ordinary democracies, not police states.

Should sports betting advertisements be banned from live game broadcasts?

I own a sports bar, and I watch what actually fills seats: regulars who bet ten dollars on their team and stay for wings and three more rounds. Those customers exist because betting ads brought them into a legal, regulated market instead of an offshore site or a bookie. Push the ads off TV and the demand does not vanish; it migrates to the gray market, where nobody checks IDs, nobody funds treatment, and nobody pays state taxes. My state earmarks betting tax revenue for schools and problem-gambling programs. Kill the legal funnel and you starve the very programs the ban's supporters say they care about. And the legal funnel is huge: [Nielsen found sportsbooks spent $1.1 billion on ads in 2023](https://www.gamingtoday.com/news/sports-betting-operators-cut-ad-spending-21-percent-2023/), money that flows through regulated channels that generate state tax revenue.

It is not condescension to point out that synchronized evenings help kids sleep. The case for exceptions is strong, but the sleep science does not disappear because schedules are hard.

Lifestyle · Sep 23, 2026 · Should families set shared screen-free hours rather than individual limits?