Couldn't fully read the article though.
If betting wasn't allowed it would be significant income loss for sports teams as well. Maybe you might think that they don't need that much money, but that is subjective.
At the very least, ads should be banned or require nasty images like tobacco products.
When I was going to college I had multiple friends that would compulsively gamble whenever there was down time. They wouldn't have lost half the money they did if gambling only took place at Casinos, or at least at dedicated terminals.
I think it's cruel for us as a society to allow that to be exploited for financial gain.
That being said I only do the 4mg option and usually after work with a beer. I dont think I'm addicted to them because I dont do them compulsively.
I know some people use nicotine to deal with anxiety or restlessness or something. I kind of like the buzz, since nicotine is a poison sourced from a plant.
Sorry tangential rant lol
Opposition to bans is sort of a libertarian dogma, they say bans never work and only make the problem worse or introduce new problems, and usually cite alcohol prohibition in America. But a lot of bans do work, and even that one apparently succeeded in reducing alcohol consumption even if it did empower organized crime. What's more, it's pretty easy to ferment alcohol in your basement but it's a lot harder to hide fields of tobacco. Political dogma never captures the nuance of reality.
But then I remember that so many are counting on the fact that people will stay uneducated so they can rip them off.
let's means test the rich for once
Slight tangent, but I am now of the view the state should not be allowed to tax legal vices. (Drugs, gambling, alcohol primarily). The reason is it keeps pushing amazing conflicts of interest, and the state ends up incentivized to maintain the behavior it supposedly does not want.
Either [vice] is wrong and should be illegal, or is tolerated and regulated but in no way profited from by those that do the regulation.
Many years ago I worked at a company that had Ladbrokes in the UK as a customer. On my first visit to London, I noticed their storefronts and found them appalling. They were some of the sorriest, shabbiest public spaces I'd seen, clearly designed to extract resources from the least well off.
I don't really buy any of the arguments in favor of widespread legalization (and I include state lotteries in this). I could be ok with legalization for a few big events like the NCAA tournament because clearly there is some demand that must be met, but we should not be enabling gambling as a widespread daily habit.
Of course there will always be black market gambling and the state cannot protect its citizens from every evil, but nor should it actively enable them.
Some of the other games that state lotteries are adopting are almost as bad as sports betting in terms of their availability (look up instant-play gaming), but sports betting feels like a game of skill, which certainly makes it worse from a psychological perspective. I still think it should be legal if people are going to do it anyway. Maybe banning the "specials" on combo bets or requiring them to be labeled as "this is still a bad bet" could help.
For the record, I have a vested interest in sports gambling being banned because I sell products involved in instant-play and other forms of gaming that are not involved in sports betting.
How so? Different kinds of gambling have different characteristics that could make them more or less prone to problematic behavior.
With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
It makes no sense, it is the person's money and life, and it is theirs to ruin as they wish. We are not properties of the state. If a person cannot be allowed to do what they wish with their own money, because they might harm themselves or others as a result, then how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?
Every gun sold to a person is a gamble on whether they use it to cause harm on others (same with the things i listed above).
This same logic applies to regulation of drugs in general as well in my opinion. Regulating other peoples lives is not the purpose of the government, especially when they're not harming others or being a nuisance to the public.
I strongly believe it is better to have something legal and well regulated than illegal and left to illegal operators.
This is true for a number of vices.
With legalisation should come strong regulation, including advertising bans.
The UK made this mistake when they strongly de-regulated gambling in the early 2000s, it seems the US did not learn from that when legalising.
Comparing Oranges to Potatoes. People involved in gambling are not stupid. They are either 1. Not quite smart or mathematically smart, so they don't understand the odds or 2. Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco. Of course, there is 3. Having a little fun with a little money; but this is not the audience that's making money for gaming.
3 of these require significant training or at least licensing and the last one is banned in the majority of western nations.
I'm with you that personal responsibility and freedom should be the norm, but active predators (Drug dealers, bookies, social media companies) should probably have limits put on what they're allowed to do.
The largest are probably mobile betting and allowing for instant credit card deposits.
There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.
I'd like to think the emerging prediction markets, like Polymarket, are much fairer systems, especially for winning players, and would be much better than sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.
Reshape the entire industry to be a decentralized/house-edge-free form, where any one player has a net 0% gain/loss outcome over time. Regulate what bets can be placed and their payouts so that winners win less amounts and losers lose less amounts (i.e. you don't get wiped out).
It will feel like gambling, but overtime is no different than coin flipping for lunch money with a coworker every day. Essentially math away the "house always wins" part.
These are all fairly strongly regulated. Did you choose bad examples on purpose?
Thus, your proposal might actually work, except what's in it for the rubes?
Unfortunately, since gambling is only recently more accessible/prevalent, I think it's going to take a few mishaps to produce similar regulations.
People see it as a game of skill where they win money from people who are worse at that skill than they are.
Addictions don't reason. Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.
> or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
Example: a school teacher spending $200 a week on lotto tickets, not life devastating, but do we really want this in our society? This happens a lot.
Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!" It's essentially a hope tax for the lower and middle class. I can think of better ways of collecting taxes.
Either gambling is bad or it's not, but in practice people like to be incredibly selective about it, as here, where as you point out sports betting lacks the positive externalities which for some part of the population offset the negative effects.
Crime goes up, bankruptcy goes up, corruption in sports goes up, etc.
I agree that people should be given freedoms, but we live in societies and people aren't independent, disconnected, autonomous units.
The article is poorly worded -- yes, advertisers spend a lot of money, but were those advertisers to disappear, other advertisers would buy those spots. So the question becomes, to what degree does the induced demand raise the marginal profit for advertising spots. And how that in turn affects how much networks are willing to pay the NFL for licensing, and that in turn affects how much the teams get in kickbacks from the NFL. So likely marginal at best.
The flipside is also how much viewership increases because of sports gamblers watching that would otherwise not watch. Also difficult to confidently assert the value of.
But this submission is about research showing that the legal market isn't just replacing the illegal market. It expands the market and the bad effects.
That is, they're able to track the deposits made to betting sites and other spending. Bets to illegal bookies are obviously not in that dataset. But if the legal gambling had replaced illegal gambling, the money going into legal gambling would appear to be coming from nowhere. Most likely a reduction in cash withdrawals? But that's not the effect they're observing. The money going into gambling is displacing other spending, including spending on +EV investments.
Given there is now evidence that the theory isn't correct, there's probably not much value in talking about it as if there really was a legitimate tradeoff here.
Having the TV blaring gambling commercials at you constantly and having the ability to place a bet from your phone at a moments notice is completely different. You’re comparing having a glass of wine on a special occasion with downing a fifth of whiskey every night.
Negatives aside if you are fine with the losses it could be viewed a bit like donating to the football clubs.
Larger football clubs could be fine taking pay cuts etc, but there would likely be many smaller clubs that can't pay their players on the pro or semi pro level any longer.
A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
I am not from the US and NFL could probably handle it, but I am from a smaller country with smaller clubs. If betting companies sponsorship was banned many clubs, even in the top league, couldn't play on the pro or even the semi pro level.
They gain the most, but in addition they benefit from the sport being popular so they are willing to help invest in making sure that would be the case.
No one pretends one of those isn’t drinking though, whereas everyone pretends raffles aren’t gambling, or churches could hardly go in for it so much.
> That is not going to lead to an addiction.
So while the public described by the person I was replying to consider positive externalities sufficient to get around the “gambling bad” label for you it is all about how addictive you think an individual form of it would be for other people?
There are people that think all drink is addictive, and some people for whom this is true, but suggest banning alcohol and you are considered a crackpot.
I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending. For example, they would show up at the offices and demand to gamble in person because they couldn’t find enough in life to bet on. Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
This sort of black-and-white position basically means either a complete ban (presumably with a harsh penalty for people who participate in the activity) or no regulation at all. A ban will just get circumvented if you don't penalize people for getting around it, so you're going to have to penalize addicts for illegal gambling, not just the people who enable that gambling. If you want to take the other extreme, are laws that force people to put lung cancer warnings on cigarettes "playing nanny"?
In real life, we usually take middle ground positions, and that means doing things that influence behavior, whether they are taxes or restrictions on labeling.
I agree.
> Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco
Addicted people are still responsible for their actions. case in point: drunken driving. I agree with punishing gamblers that cause harm. but gambling itself should not be regulated. Tobacco, alcohol, hard drugs,etc.. they should all be allowed. But to balance that, punishment for crime needs to be severe when you're an addict.
1. A prize
2. Consideration - you must pay to enter
3. A game of pure chance - this differentiates a lottery from a tournament or a silent auction, for example
A raffle fits these definitions, but nonprofits are often allowed to run them specifically because they get an exception to the rules. That is also why many "buy my shit to win a prize" promotions have a way to enter without buying something (getting around the consideration rule) and some of these have a short math test that you need to do to claim your prize (making it a game of not pure chance).
For your last statement, I agree, "active predators" should be restricted or punished because their intent is to cause harm at the cost of others for profit. but if they're just selling the "drug", why should that be restricted? You can force them to inform their customers of the harm,but that's about it.
Labeling of side effects, calories, and similar topics fall into that category of empowering the citizen.
Sin taxes dont educate or empower, they simply punish and try to prevent individuals from acting on their own choices.
The two are very different.
A problem is infection. As Sports Betting is more legal and profitable, Fantasy Sports gain more Sports Bets and pseudoanonymity and lose some of their community spirit for "micro-transactions" and other "extreme gamification" and the line between each blurs. (Including to the point where groups looking for one might be easily confused into doing the other.)
I idly wonder if there is a way to shore up Fantasy Sports against the tide of Sports Betting profit.
So like,what about making gambling work like credit cards: you get a license that allocates a monthly cap based on a combination of credit score and income. It starts very low and scales up to, I don't know, 10% of income?
Suggest reasonable restrictions on alcohol though and nearly everyone would agree that's a smart thing.
> I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending... Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
You can find equally horrific stories about alcoholics. We'd have to deal with greater numbers of "such people" if we didn't actively take steps to regulate addictive substances. Even with alcohol we have limits on where and when it can be used, and how it can be advertised. Gambling is available anywhere at anytime and ads are pushed right to addicts phones night and day to remind them to keep paying and broadcast to everyone during sporting events.
A lot of things are only able to be legal because they are regulated in some way. I absolutely want the state in the position of "playing nanny" when it comes to things like telling companies they can't dump a ton of toxic chemicals into the rivers or how much pollution they are able to spew into our air.
It's legal to sell tobacco, and it should be, but I'm very glad there are rules against selling cigarettes to children. It's legal to drink alcohol, but it's a very good thing when the state influences behavior like drunk driving.
Nobody wants arbitrary laws restricting private individuals for no reason, but communities should have the power to decide that some behaviors or actions are harmful to the group and are unacceptable. Communities have always done that in one way or another. We've just decided that rather than stick with mob justice we would put away the tar and feathers and allow the state, our public servants who are either elected by us or appointed by those we elect, to enforce the rules for us. I'm glad we did. I've already got a job and can't go around policing all day.
Drunk driving is illegal too, for good reasons.
Im not against laws.
What I am against is the state taking things that are explicitly legal, and making your life hard and penalizing you if you do them.
The role of the government should be enforcing law. Enforcing social judgement and incentives on legal behavior should be left to non-governmental society.
Sin taxes are a classic example of this.
I can see taxes and tariffs imposed on corporations being useful to limit the amount of certain harmful goods or to help offset the costs of externalities caused by those products. I'd still rather see companies regulated and held accountable for what they do more directly in most cases.
Bonus for phrases on them like "Play while you wait" and "Win free medical care"
> pattern day traders must maintain minimum equity of $25,000 in their margin account on any day that the customer day trades
> pattern day traders cannot trade in excess of their "day-trading buying power"
> If a pattern day trader exceeds the day-trading buying power limitation, a firm will issue a day-trading margin call, after which the pattern day trader will then have, at most, five business days to deposit funds to meet the call.
In my mind, the government is a heavy hammer, backed by lethal force. As such, it should be used sparingly to prevent concrete damages, enforce laws, and enforce property rights.
If a person or company is causing people real harm, that should be actionable by the government. If they are poisoning someone or killing their land, that is well within the remit.
Inversely, the government should not be a tool for optimizing society, or increasing the subjective efficiency or morality.
Government is a powerful tool, but that doesnt mean it the right tool for everything. Restraint and respecting other people's autononomy is a difficult skill to lean when you have the power to simply force compliance and "know" you are right.
Do you think sales of raw milk, which have been known to cause listeria outbreaks when people drink from an unsafe batch, should simply force labels of "this milk may be unsafe" or do you think that should be prohibited?
Do you think rhino horn should be legal to sell with the label of "this likely came from poached animals"?
I think raw milk should be legal, and the labeling requirement should depend on the actual risk level, not just a vague possibility.
rhino horn is a tricky one. Poaching animals is a form of stealing, so it is clearly illegal. Off the cuff, I think selling recently harvested rhino horn should be legal but required to have evidence that it was not poached.
Do you think think states should be able to ban the sale of meat or specific types of farmed meat?
We should be free to ruin ourselves if we so wish, but if we are set on a track like that, others should be made aware so they can react as they wish.
Same with drugs, if you get a drug use license, then employers can deny you jobs, you may not be allowed to drive, be trusted with loans,etc..
You get rights, but they come with responsibilities and restrictions.
No, that's not what we say. The primary argument for it is because we do not subscribe to a utilitarian morality. If we know that some decision leads to better outcomes from the POV of general quality of life and the like, we still wouldn't support it if it trampled individual freedoms, because we consider the latter to be more important.
It's not a difference of opinion over whether a certain theorem proves true or false. It's a matter of different set of axioms altogether.
I think being born and raised in Naples, I've lived all my life in direct contact with organised crime, but many people live in places and don't make the connection, but I'd suggest everyone who think about regulating or not, to keep in mind that in any place you're in, there are 2 governments, one you can see, and one you can not
I think sports gambling is stupid and has largely ruined sports for me. Most people I know though seem to really love it, gamble completely responsibly and seem to enjoy sports they did not enjoy previously.
Unfortunately, there is no story to click on without some kind of moral outrage or "mistake" that the "smart" people need to correct. Especially appealing if it can bent into some kind of political bullshit narrative .
There is demand it's not clear that it "must be met." The problem is not the betting or oddsmaking, the problem is, how do you handle settlements?
You're presenting the false dichotomy, that we should just allow gambling, because it's inevitable, and we can occasionally use the violence of the state and it's courts to run the settlement racket on behalf of short changed bookies.
> but we should not be enabling gambling
And we have no reason to. We should harshly penalize people who try to collect on gambling debt and they should have no access to the courts or to sheriff's over problems arising from it.
> cannot protect its citizens from every evil
That's why this is all so insidious because it's really only one you need to actually protect them from. Suddenly you'll find the industry self regulating customers with an obvious illness out at the front door. They'll get amazingly good at this.
There has to be a lower class. Not all but most of the people who inhabit it are just where they belong. Interventionist states with paternal social policies can’t magically raise the IQs of the dumbest 20% of their populations by 50 points, alas.
No respectable person goes to a casino except as a gag to throw away expendable income. Some labourer spending 80% of his wages at Ladbroke’s is a symptom of his stupidity, not the cause of it.
It is spreading as a cancer. This month the central bank published a report saying that in August 20% of the Bolsa Família, the largest money transfer program for very poor Brazilians, was spent on these bets.
Out of the 20 million people that receive it, 5 million made bets during that month. This is 2 billion reais (about $450M) spent in a single month by the poorest Brazilians.
It's a cancer. Everywhere you go there are ads. The influencers, the biggest athletes and musicians are marketing it.
Although I tend to be liberal, this needs to be heavily regulated.
The raffles I see have a token amount as a reward, compared to the money raised. I think that makes a big difference, both rationally and emotionally.
My gut these days tells me its probably better for the humans in society if this stuff is left only to black markets because it seems like it destroys lives.
I suspect it's because unlike the lotto and games of chance, people can delude themselves into thinking they "know" the sport. It's not a gambling if they know better. It's also easy to externalize the blame for your loses "they would have won if not for <bad call, bad play, bad management, injury, weather, etc... Or combination thereof>"
You can dip your toe in betting on the obvious mismatched, where it's pretty clear who will win. This is priced into the bookmaking, so the payout is little, but this helps people convince themselves they do know the sport and chase longer odds with better payouts.
And then you get sunk cost fallacy, as they lose, they convince themselves they can win it back because they learned from before and their system will work this time.
> Addictions don't reason.
That argument was specifically based on how gambling feels and not reasoning.
> Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.
That sucks, but ease of addiction is a spectrum.
As a libertarian however, I break with the opinion of making consensual activities illegal even if they are self-harming. So I guess my stance is probably the same as addictive drugs. They could be legal, but come with the same labeling, warnings, ID requirements and age restrictions that come with a pack of cigarettes. We should probably be educating kids about the dangers of addictive apps like we once did with DARE on the dangers of drugs.
The sheer amount of advertising for gambling and revenue growth for these companies indicates there is little stigma.
Not to mention the Pandora's box that prediction markets open, when the order book can begin to influence real life events - from match fixing, to assassination markets.
The Progressive ideal, which started as only a faint glimmer in the US at the turn on the 20th Century, has grown to dominate our social mores over the past 50 years. For most people reading HN, it's all they have ever known. But there is a serious cost. We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement.
But at least fewer of them slip through the cracks.
Every football game has an announcer giving his lock of the week pick for DraftKings. Every stadium has a brand new fancy looking sports book attached or next door. Hell they built a draft kings attached to the local PGA course.
Most people do it all via an app, no need to even leave your couch. People openly share their bets with friends. I don’t even do sports betting, but it’s basically all over and constantly in my face.
However the government is a monopoly, and has a monopoly on violence. Giving a mafia that can take your house away or put you behind bars their own casino is an incredibly bad idea.
How do you explain the school teacher spending $200 per week, then? The teachers here collectively own one of the world's largest hedge funds. These are very wealthy people.
"prosperity required permitting unregulated sale of fentanyl!"... sounds nonsensical, because it is.
> We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement.
I played poker professionally for seven years. I've seen the full gamut of responses to gambling on the human brain. Gambling absolutely hijacks the neurocomputational circuitry of some people in a way that it doesn't others. Infantilized? I managed my risk of ruin carefully and rationally, others didn't. They invariably got ruined. Period. Those people should not be gambling. There was no safety net, which you falsely imagine exists. I wish there had been. The consequences to their lives outweighed, by far, the prosperity gained by permitting large-scale high-stakes gambling (which is at best a zero-sum game if the house is included). I do not think my former profession should be openly legal to everyone. Participating in it was an act of willful evil on my part. I am glad to have it regulated, for the sake of the families of the people whose lives I helped destroy.
There was absolutely nothing and nobody "infantilizing" me to induce "anxiety". There was a largely unregulated free-for-all into a brutal, unforgiving world, in which you can lose a fortune in the blink of an eye if you elect to wager it and lose. Sure, I thrived in that environment, but it was at the expense of vulnerable individuals.
Seriously, what the actual fuck are you talking about. If you'd ever taken actual, life-altering financial risks in a society without a real financial safety net (the United States), you'd know that there is absolutely nothing between a foolish series of decisions while drunk (or much worse, in the thrall of a persistent gambling addiction) and complete financial ruin.
We can do better as a society, and we should.
While we're at it, gosh, you know what would have improved the poker economy? Unregulated firearms at poker tables. Hell, let's just make homicide legal if the other person bets their life. Or maybe even if they don't! That would have really let us demonstrate our fully-enfranchised individual wills to power. No one would be confused as an anxious man baby! We could have thrived like real manly men! Letting people blow each other's heads off at a whim during a gambling free-for-all ("between consenting adults!") would surely improve prosperity. Great idea! Agreeing as a democratic society to regulate that behavior would only produce a society of emasculated degenerates incapable of expressing the full range of the human spirit! Think of the sacrificed business opportunities! /s.
At least (very loosely) with the lottery it's kinda random and your odds are "set" or rather your payout is not proportionate to your chance of winning. It's a happy surprise kind of thing as long as you don't overdo it.
But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports. Players throw. They get good at subtly cheating. The gambling apparatus latches itself to the sport, to the teams and players, the umpires and judges, the sporting organizations. With this much money on the line, it's not a matter of if but when games are thrown, cheated -- the bigger the game, the bigger the incentive. It's even easier now because of the amount of side/parlay betting that is available. It exhausts the spirit of competition.
Sports gambling is diametrically opposed to sport itself.
Poor people who trade their grocery budget for gambling undeniably cause trouble for a population. Do rich people who trade their luxury handbag budget for gambling equally cause trouble for a population?
I don't think anyone would call blanket banning "elegant", even if it would be the best solution.
"They estimate that legal sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence."
I'm sure the numbers are probably right, but I can't help but feel some of this is reaching a bit - many population causation studies seembto be more about triggers than true root causes. Just because betting triggered this doesn't mean betting needs to be banned. What this should lead to is better support and treatment for people affected by this type of violence. If it's not betting that set it off, it would be some other stressor (probably also money related or feeling like a loser). Trying to fix the person's behavior such as impulse control and anger management would be much better than progressively banning everything as the next trigger emerges.
Is there really that much betting going on in the "little leagues"?
Professional sports are already and have always been ruined as they, by their very nature of existence, have to appeal to what entertains the crowd, not for what is ideal for the sake of sporting. Betting doesn't really change the calculus there; at most changing what makes for the entertainment, but then you're just going into a silly "my entertainment is better than your entertainment".
And? Should we legislate based on some peoples' belief that the rapture is imminent?
A measure could well be somewhat effective on its own, but then it would require the industry to get creative and work extra hard to still get people hooked, which they will do, but they'd rather not have to do it in the first place.
What's more, opposition to any type of well intended regulation is typical for harmful industries, even if the regulation might be ineffective. They do that on principle, as they don't want the precedent of getting regulated. The mere idea of having regulations for the benefit of society threatens their business models.
For example, maybe gamling can continue being legal but advertising for it be outlawed or severely restricted? Can gambling have the same sort of warnings as on cigarettes, maybe with children going hungry because the parent gambled away all the money for the month? Another way is that some part of the revenue from gambling could go to programs such as Bolsa Família that you bring up? Or to fight gambling addiction in some way?
That's my pragmatic view of these types of thing: try to find what actually works and hurts society the least. You'll never find any perfect system with no harm anyway.
I'm not putting up a straw man - I'm actually in favour of it. I agree that all forms of gambling ruins lives. We would improve society if we agreed that all gambling is bad.
No one was going for any team in particular. They were cheering for their bets to win. I lost all interest in the idea of me ever gambling after that.
There are certains sports I love to watch because I love the game. Gambling would ruin that for me. No thanks.
As a professional gambler (aka farmer) I understand I am biased, but I have a hard time squaring that society would improve if we all agreed my gambling habit is bad. Especially if that means going as far as a ban. What would people eat? If you think Mother Nature is going to give up her bookie position, you're wrong.
Gambling is inherently exploitative and no amount of regulation will align the incentives for commercial operators. You also don't want to ban it outright, as it may descend into the underground otherwise, so this looks like a reasonable area for the govt to take direct control.
It's not "individuals slipping through the cracks of society", it's society and the people who run it consuming people (or animals) as fuel. Progressive politics might only be as old as the Roosevelts but they have surprisingly deep historical roots[0].
The improvement in material conditions from, say, the 1500s to 2024 is a function of changes in the law that made it worthwhile to produce those improvements. Or, in other words, nobody is going to innovate in phone apps when they have to give 30% to Apple and Google. Back then, the "30%" would have been indentured servitude, debtors prisons, and so on. Innovation increased when serfdom ended and more people were able to innovate.
Innovation in an economy is a function of how many people have access to appropriate levels of capital. Which is itself a function of the distribution of wealth. An economy in which five people own everything is one where nobody can innovate outside of that system. An economy with redistributive effects - whether that be through government action or otherwise - is more productive at the expense of the growth prospects of the ultra-wealthy. Economies built to make one participant fatter are eating their seed corn.
I have no clue what you're going on about with infantilization. That seems like something downstream of several social trends.
[0] e.g. western feminism is older than the Declaration of Independence; abolitionism is at least as old as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lay
The point is that reversing a popularly acclaimed law, while yes showing to be a mistake, leads to huge losses in political consensus at elections and an easy win to the other parties.
As for speculation around the "real" economy, in most cases it is widely talked about as the mother of all evil where in fact, the best way to increase the market value of a company is to turn it into a better company. And on the other end, companies go to 0 because they go bankrupt, not the other way around.
My point is that we are denying the entire market structure to punish the < 1% of bad actors, while it is quite useful for the rest.
Crypto is a different beast entirely. I have never believed in it and I still fail to see the value.
People may like it but other than a few even the ones who like it wish it didn't exist.
At any rate every article I see about gambling is about how much it sucks. Probably the gambling industry doesn't have the top level public relations that smoking had once upon a time, otherwise I'd be seeing more ads about how gambling makes you a tough guy. Which, come to think of it, I do see a bit of that in Denmark, but Danes don't do advertising that isn't meant to be funny (laugh with) very well so these ads look ridiculous (laugh at)
People pointing this out often leads me to an impression that athletes should be allowed to bet on their own games. Problem is, that leads to match-fixing.
I've seen a lot of these talking points before by the pro-drug crowd. "It taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have learned about otherwise" is laughable when subjected to scrutiny. You'd have to live under a rock to otherwise not learn about the drugs the DARE program teaches (and they don't get particularly exotic either). The idea is asinine to begin with - you'd want kids to know about exotic drugs and their side effects to know to avoid them in the first place.
The worst part is that the pro-drug crowd, like yourself, touts these talking points in an attempt to end the program - to what end? If I accept your talking points blindly that the program has failed, does that mean we simply stop trying? It seems less that you disagreed with the implementation of the program and more that you don't believe kids, or anyone, should be dissuaded from drugs.
"Whatabout other predatory industries where people fall in a slippery slope to destroy their lives? As long as a solution only addresses some of these industries, should we even consider it?"
The first time I went, people were living off the land, fishing, gardening, children playing ball games, etc.
Here's what I saw last time I went: Gambling, alcoholism, plastic waste, sugary drinks, public advertising, and kids glued to their smartphones. Forests being cleared to raise cattle because now everyone wants to eat burgers.
They've managed to bring in the worst parts of modern society without the good parts (medicine, infrastructure, education, etc.)
I do believe that without a modern education, these people are not equipped to deal with modern vices. They've never taken a math class let alone learned enough probability to know that gambling is a losing bet. They've never had a nutrition class to learn that Coca Cola is disastrous to your health.
It’s heinous.
Black market bookies also would see consequences from getting caught rigging a sports match, anyway. For one, they would be punished by the law for being black market bookies.
If we are hell-bent on forcing people to play this artificial money game against their will, with no opt in or out, they're just born and told they now have to work all their life for this piece of paper that some apes printed, then they should at least have total control over that money, anything less and the entire game is unjustifiably immoral.
Not everyone has their cushy little tech salary like you, the majority of people hate their lives and gambling provides an escape just like drugs, and the slim hope of winning big - something that was taken away from real life. The masses have been drained of any hope of improving their situations the old-fashioned way.
If you want to reduce self-destructive behaviour, make a fairer game, make it a game worth playing, offer decent rewards, make it a level playing field instead of the 1% owning 90% of the game. The average shelter in America costs $500k and the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and you wonder why people are gambling? Fuck me.
As an aside, a lot of smart, high quality people are drawn to the puzzle of sports betting, and are skilled enough to get out of slavery with it, why should those people lose their out? Their intelligence and self-control to beat the game was their birthright, just as an expensive education was likely yours.
Fundamentally, it's an issue of freedom, the right to self-destruct, the right to throw your life away, as an act of protest or otherwise. I wouldn't want to live in a world where I'm not allowed to put everything I have on the line against someone else who's willing to take it on. The government has no business infringing on that basic freedom of exchange between individuals.
And you know gambling will only be the start, eventually they will come for something you like because when it comes to removing freedoms and rights, one thing always leads to another. Outlawing gambling does nothing to change the circumstances that are churning out self-destructive humans, it doesn't fix the root cause, our society is generating broken people and their needs for escape will always be met in any remotely free world.
But to use farming as an example, you undoubtedly apply skill in your trade to get a better outcome. Sure, your results depend heavily on things like the weather, but someone with zero experience and skill as a farmer will have less success at it than you do. This is a skill intensive game.
On the far other end of the spectrum is the slot machine - you pull a lever and wait. Labor is nonexistent, knowledge or skill is irrelevant. This is entirely a game of chance.
So one place where we run into problems and governments need to apply some regulation is when a game of chance gets misrepresented as a game of skill, or its odds are hidden or misrepresented. When any of those things happen it means we are actually looking at a form of fraud. The operator of the game is claiming you can do really great at his game but the matter is actually out of your hands, he's lying about the probable outcome of your participation. That is fraudulent and most members of our society agree that committing fraud should be discouraged and even punished when it occurs.
Amateur sports (college and high school sports) is also much, much bigger in the US than most other places.
Both these trends I would guess have to do with the US's traditional ban on sports gambling.
Either way, I know little about sports so maybe you’re right regarding American sports. But no way is footie rigged. I just don’t accept it; too many people care too much.
How do you propose to solve this problem? Higher fees from club members? or somehow get more gov't funding via taxing?
I don't see the issue with gambling revenue funding a club.
Ok, good, fine. You should have to seek out a black market connect to gamble on sports.
And the natural extension of realizing that professional sport is about delivering entertainment value is: Why not rig the sport if it improves the entertainment value? If people are most entertained by gambling and rigging a sport comes as part of that, nothing is ruined other than maybe your arbitrary personal feelings. But "my entertainment is better than your entertainment" is not a logical position.
so do you believe the olympics are good or bad? because they're zero sum.
IMO there’s plenty of room for hardline stances. Who cares if gambling goes to the black market? There’s a black market for every serious crime - doesn’t mean we should just okay it. And I’m not sure the USA’s halfhearted only-for-the-poor prohibition is proof that the concept of banning things is broken; if it proves anything unrelated to capitalism, it proves that you need societal buy-in and continued, consistent government pressure.
World would be pretty full without competitive games / sports
I don't see how this latest gambling fad ends except for another Black Sox scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal
It's been a hundred years so I guess it's time we learned our lesson the hard way, again.
I admit to not being entirely sure what "Sports Clubs" are over east though or why they need propping up by gambling. In any case, it works fine here.
You CAN get a permit for a few bits of "gambling" that is mostly only for "sports clubs" but it's very VERY restricted, and mostly like actual games with people like Poker, Two Up, etc. It's not really a problem in nearly the same way, and no machines: https://sportscommunity.com.au/club-member/wa-gambling/
Are you sure they did? Maybe they were just OK with programs that didn't actually work.
What does work is restricted access through age limits, closing times, and higher prices (through taxes is what's been studied, but it's safe to say making something illegal also increases prices). These are unpopular policies, and those who profit from alcohol/gambling/etc. have an easy time mobilizing opposition to it.
What has been studied little, but was a big part of historical anti-alcohol movements until total prohibition won out, was profit bans. Government/municipal monopolies were justified in that it took away regular people's incentive to tempt their fellow citizens into ruin, and the idea was that while government may be corrupted by the profit incentive, at least they carried the costs of alcohol/gambling abuse as well. (Some teetotallers didn't think that was enough, and came up with rules that e.g restricting municipal monopolies from spending the profit as they pleased)
Regardless, I think you just misunderstood a bit: the concern here is deceptive practices, which when money is involved becomes fraud. No one cares that WWE is rigged; the difference is that the audience knows it’s rigged, and they don’t have money riding on the outcome with the understanding that it’s a fair match.
Contrary to you, there’s certain sports I find boring to watch as such (eg, American football) — but enjoy in a condensed version focused on bets (eg, RedZone and dailies on American football). The game of predicting individual performance and ensemble outperformance is more interesting to me than the underlying sport — and much more interesting to discuss than any single game.
You don’t have to gamble, but trying to portray it as some grievous fault people enjoy things differently than you is ridiculous.
His entire working life he was never a sports fan, but in retirement he seems really into it. There have been a lot of changes, and I really hope this doesn't become one of them. I could see him really getting into all the statistics.
If that were true, people would stop paying attention of it. What other criterion would you have for the quality of sports?
But the worst is how easily you brush aside that it "ruins lives". Not that that's your fault. It seems that almost nobody cares about it. It has been known for a long time that gambling is detrimental, to individuals and to society, yet a bunch of Wolf-of-Wall-Street-style financiers use it to get richer without the need for as much as a good idea. There's less ingenuity and skill involved in betting than in drugs. It's bottom of the barrel amorality, bribing and corrupting its way into politics.
And nobody cares.
> Day trading, as defined by FINRA’s margin rule, refers to a trading strategy where an individual buys and sells (or sells and buys) the same security in a margin account on the same day in an attempt to profit from small movements in the price of the security.
(emphasis original)
There are no restrictions on trading with your own money, whether you can afford it or not.
I think we need something like that for all sports here in the US. If you get caught fixing games or coordinating to fix bets in any way, you should be liable, fined, and banned from sports and anything sports related for life. If the entire team was in on it, the entire team gets banned for life. No second chances, no exceptions.
Or we could just make sports betting illegal again.
Basically, as a guy on the street, you don't have a clue and you're up against MIT-tier brains trying to beat you.
It's interesting to me that more people don't realise this is intuitively obvious, though. No-one would look at the Olympics and think, oh yeah, I can run faster than Usain Bolt.
The first people gamblers harm is their own family - long before any formal crime has been committed.
Now, the proportion of people who still take up smoking today do so in spite of all this, which is probably down to them having various specific user profiles that are unaffected by this (IE they live in communities/work jobs where its ubiquitous or are huge James Dean fans).
For gambling, you could possibly go a long way with awareness and labelling, but I think an issue is that gambling is a lot less visible than smoking. Nobody can smell that you popped outside to blow your paycheck on tonight's game. Making gambling deeply uncool might make some people not take it up, but most of the existing addicts would likely carry on in secret. They're already commonly hiding their losses from spouses and friends, so what's one more layer of secrecy?
At any rate, what worked for smoking wasn't making smokers quit, but making fewer and fewer kids start doing it, so making it a pain in the ass to place your first bet might help.
This is the entire gambling industry! Do you think they don't know that their best customers are addicts who are blowing their kids' college fund?
They’re able to use pokies profits to subsidise cheaper food and alcohol to bring in customers, and in turn get them to pump a money into the pokies, while starving other venues of those customers who can’t compete on price.
We have forgotten the deeper reasons that certain things were prohibited or discouraged, assuming that these rules were only there because of a belief in a religion society doesn’t follow anymore. That was a naive view and it turns out that many “old” rules are actually pragmatic social codes disguised as beliefs. This isn’t limited to a particular tradition, either: pretty much every major religion has frowned upon things like gambling.
And so in the absence of any real coherent philosophy that aims to deal with complex problems like gambling, addiction, or excessive interest rates, you’re only going to get an expansion of what is already dominant: markets.
Don’t expect this to change until knowledge of ethics and philosophy becomes widespread enough to establish a new mental model for thinking about these issues.
I think privatisation happened quite a while ago (mid to late 1990s) but my vague memory is that there was some sort of deregulation in the mid 2000s (or at least that's when I remember the ads becoming incessant) and that seems to have coincided with the endless offers of bonus bets, deposit matches, bet returns etc.
That doesn't mean it should be allowed. Not all fun is healthy. It's been known for over a century that gambling is detrimental, to both society and individual.
Okay, sure, let's say there is a "who's the strongest competition". Let's be more specific and say it is a professional arm wrestling competition. One where we find that the competitors are able to hold position for hours on end, which makes for really boring viewership. To combat that, the league starts allowing tickling in an effort to get a participant to fold sooner, and perhaps adding an additional comedic element that makes it more entertaining in general.
If you hold sport as some kind of purity that needs to be upheld (again, I maintain that is a nonsensical take, but bear with me) then the addition of tickling ruins it. Indeed, tickling is contrived, but professional sports are filled with all kinds of similar adjustments to make watching the sport more entertaining. The sports, from this "purity" point of view, were ruined from the get go as a necessity to get people interested in watching them – and thus a willingness to pay.
> No one cares that WWE is rigged
Exactly. I mean, a lot of people were upset when it came out that the, then WWF, was choreographed, and I'm sure that they lost of a lot of viewers over it, but the league has still managed to entertain a wide audience. Like you suggest, it doesn't really matter if a sport isn't held to some kind of purity of sport standard.
And it is pretty clear that sports gambling has brought out a new audience of people who are entertained by the gambling aspect. "My entertainment is better than your entertainment" is not a logical position. Something not to your personal preference is not a ruining.
Sounds ridiculous, but client's neurotransmitters are the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Min....
Prior to that, usury laws existed in most states that restricted consumer loans to something like 5-13%.
Personally I don’t have an issue with the concept of interest itself, but if you look at the huge amount of Americans in debt paying 20-30% on credit cards, it certainly seems excessive and usurious to me.
The only working moral on this mortal coil is a dose of empathy for your fellow human (and if you can bring yourself to it: your fellow animal). It doesn't require a new mental model, just proper stewardship.
Warnings serve to ruin their image in the public eye, which makes opposing further control harder.
As for gambling, there's a simple solution. Ban all advertising of it. If people really need to gamble, they'll find it on their own.
This will dramatically shrink the problem overnight.
In the narrowest view, sure. But, for example, not all casinos, hell not even all machines in the same casino, offer the same odds. What about the work you put into determining which machine offers the best outcome? Is that not a skill? Obviously you can just sit down at any old random machine and see what happens, but that's the same as your "zero skill" farmer throwing some uncertified seeds on the ground and hoping for the best. In both cases there is an opportunity to improve your chances of success if you so choose.
Some aspects of farming lean on skill, but other aspects are pure chance. "Pull the lever and wait" is often all you can do. I'm not sure you are being fair in diminishing slot machine playing down to just one event, while happily considering farming as the sum of all its events.
Gambling, in a colloquial and legal sense, generally refers to putting in money for a game of mostly luck or beyond your control in hopes of getting a payout. The less influence you have over it, the faster the payout (or loss), and the higher the chance is of you coming out at a loss, the more strongly it fits into the understood definition of gambling.
Doing anything that takes a risk isn't gambling. Bending over to tie your shoes is a risk. There's a chance you'll strain your back and be immobile for a week. But if you don't take that chance, you won't be able to work. But if you don't do it stupidly, barring the heavens simply being against you that day, you'll be fine.
Farming is the same. If you're not being careless and the heavens don't decide to destroy your crops, and particularly if you're at a point where you can call it a job, you'll be fine. Once a risk is on a long scale, like farming, it's called an investment.
And yes, most religions have weighed in on gambling as most societies have been shaped by religion. Secularism is a recent thing.
This isn't limited to the third world. The reason sports betting becomes such a problem is that people don't have a solid foundation in basic statistics.
People go bankrupt by thinking they can get out of a small debt by placing even larger bets at a negative expected value.
If you are triggered by something I wrote, that's all on you. I get it, no one dealing with addiction wants to be called out on it. That is less than helpful for either party.
If you have a reliable way to beat the odds (ie. Inefficient betting markets that get the odds of success wrong) you can theoretically make money - but its a similar scenario to daytrading, where you need to do extremely well because you have to overcome the negative drag from the booky take too.
It's not as if the latter are ingrates, but the social ritual of showing gratitude is not there among them, and maybe in some small way, that does breed less thankfulness in the long run...
- lower income families struggle for upwards mobility
- we are moving ever more towards a full material world, where you need to have a lot of disposable income just to keep up (remember the first over 1000 usd iPhone and people saying it was too much?)
- social media keeps reminding us that there are “successful” people who have all the stuff you dream, and can burn money (all a lie, but if desperate and poorly educated you buy it)
- vanishing of social construct: less weight of family in peoples life, less local communities (replaced by only pseudo-communities as twitter or insta) which translates into less emotional support, pushing you to consumerism for solace.
It’s no surprise that the hope of a quick buck (be it sports betting or also damaging scratch cards / lotteries) thrive in the context, and in particular with people desperate or with poor understanding of odds and biases….
Edit: I don’t think is necessary a poor-people-only problem, I think this is a symptom that a new definition of poverty is brewing - one beyond financial indicators… (stale life, no prospects of moving up, disenfranchising of society, resentment for feeling rug pulled from underneath, prone to absorb/consume anything that makes you feel “in the loop” or relevant like fake news or crazy theories, etc). I believe we are seeing this all across the Western world, yet us and our leaders fail to address it.
Either way, you are out to lunch. Your definition is on point, but has nothing do with the discussion taking place.
I do favour a libertarian world view but a lot of people using that moniker believe in discussing a mother-child bond through a libertarian point of view
Success in a modern capitalist society is driven in part by your ability to say no to things.
do you think heroin addicts and cigarette smokers never heard that it was bad for them?
This does not apply to all bookmakers. Also, betting exchanges exist where the players bet against each other therefore there is no incentive for the operator to ban winning players.
I am sure most business owners don't want to be casinos, but would rather be clubs. When the bills are due, they have to find a way to pay up.
the predatory part is the siphoning money off from the lottery to pay for "shools,etc." but if there is inelastic demand for lottery gambling, that also makes rational sense.
golf is boring so i need some action to entertain myself. I suck at golf so i usually lose money, but as long as i go in knowing im risking money for entertainment then its really not unlike any other form of entertainment.
similar to you i prefer placing many small bets in order to keep myself entertained.
There was once a so called fair profit rate of 4% in the middle ages and early modern age, in Hungary. Greek wine traders operating there featured the number 4 on their seals and ornaments of their houses. (They were also often tried for violating this rule)
In those ages of course there was no constant inflation in the current sense, gold standard was used for payments, etc.
source, in Hungarian language, the site of the greek ethnic minority's cultural institute (the pictures feature one such ornament): https://gorogintezet.hu/kultura/2022/07/gorog-kereskedok-sze...
https://gorogintezet.hu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/15264.jpg
A few years ago I had a chat with a mate over in QLD, and mentioned our ludicrous prices in WA. The standard line at the time here was "Beer has to be expensive in WA, because we're not allowed to subsidise the cost with pokies". His reply was there are bars in QLD with pokies, and bars without, and none of them charged anything like what we were paying for a pint in WA (nor did the bars with pokies charge significantly less than those without).
I find religious people passionate about following the rituals of their religion (for many more than the intention), in a similar way as atheists are passionate about other rituals (their sport, their eating routines, etc.).
For me the absence of thankfulness equals more with awareness. Should I be thankful I have a house? I prefer to be annoyed other people don't have, or that I can't do better (ex: have a house that generates less carbon, etc.).
The biggest surprise for me was that the people running the company were gamblers too. If someone beat them, then they wanted to beat them back (which made no sense to me… given that the statistics are running over the group, not an individual). If someone beat them badly, then it was okay because it’s good marketing (and the player would always bring that money back, they’d say). They would also say “all gamblers are addicts”. Rivalry with their players high, respect low… Except perhaps for their “Whales” where the social contract between the two parties was more explicit. Also worth noting that from what is saw, 80% of revenue comes from <10% of players.
There is no differentiation to the company between sports, slots, lotteries and other games.There are no noble games, just ways to extract money from confused or vulnerable people. Crash games seem to be deluding people the most currently.
I don’t believe it’s possible for these companies to behave anything close to ethically. Regardless of regulation, the business model is corrupt.
At conferences anyone I spoke to would say “you can’t leave the gaming industry, the money is just too good”. Which is why I promptly left.
If we ripped out pokies machines then some clubs would be screwed, but I would be seriously surprised if it was more than a handful per league. It would arguably be beneficial for the average team.
> The Illinois D.A.R.E. Evaluation was conducted as a randomized field experiment with one pretest and multiple planned post-tests. The researchers identified 18 pairs of elementary schools, representative of urban, suburban, and rural areas throughout northern and central Illinois. Schools were matched in each pair by type, ethnic composition, number of students with limited English proficiency, and the percent of students from low income families. None of these schools had previously received D.A.R.E.. For the 12 pairs of schools located in urban and suburban areas, one school in each pair was randomly assigned to receive D.A.R.E. in the spring of 1990
https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/uic.htm
Yes, surveys do have flaws but they are a better approach than just giving up and saying any research is impossible.
I’d recommend we don’t simply stop trying, instead we test different programs, and only once we have shown their effectiveness do we role them out further.
Other comments mention how fancy casinos look, theyre still disgusting. Most casinos ive been to are not fancy at all. There are large "fancy" tribal casinos and the Vegas casinos but even those reek of smoke and are mostly filled with morbidly obese.
Id go as far to say people who think theres no stigma in the US have only visited Vegas or seen it on TV and dont play pai gow in Spokane bowling alleys on weeknights.
Still, it really doesn't matter,
After all, who wins the flag.
Good clean sport is what we're after,
And we aim to make our brag
To each near or distant nation
Whereon shines the sporting sun
That of all our games gymnastic
Base ball is the cleanest one!
Take alcohol. It is a drug, a poison, addictive, acute severe health problems are rare - although it can kill via the stupor it imposes but long term health and affects on productivity etc. Really bad.
So society may be better off without it. But then mind altering substances may be good even if they are bad for social cohesion and self medication. It is hard to be sober you have to take life as it actually is.
Make it illegal? Well that is almost orthogonal... why? What does it achieve to make it a moral outrage ... and who is the criminal? The brewer, the distributer or the drinker?
Then even if you decide that incarceration is a good think to do to people who do one of the 3 things - the prohibition shows that people will do it anyway. As a drug alcohol in particular is probably the easier to synthesize. You just need readily available pantry items and a jar. Other drugs need chenistry labs, precursor chemicals or plants. So that effects the affect of criminializing alcohol.
Then mix in its deep root in culture!
Now alcohols is discussed, what next... too much work...
That will have a different set of problems, solutions, unintended consequences of fixing the issue and so on.
So just treat gambling like its own thing. Even then casino poker vs. Slots vs. Lottery vs. Physical Bookie vs. Online booke vs. Crypto vs. Backstreet all have different subissues and may need to be legislated individually.
When I was six, my father burned me with a lesson. We were at a fairground, and I saw a pyramid of cans. The standard game: throw a ball and knock em down. At six years old, I was already a good throw. I knew I could win. My father made me an offer. He gave me the money for the game and told me that was my lunch money. If I won, I'd get both lunch and the win otherwise .....
Of course, even the best six-year-old has a very low chance of knocking over those weighted cans. The house wins. I went hungry that day.
Since then, I’ve had a terrible reaction to gambling. Casinos make me feel ill just walking through and seeing all the sad faces. I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life. I always feel that hungry belly when I think of gambling and it turns me right off.
But the solution is not forbidding them, but educating people and families on how to deal with them.
Alcohol consumption is even more dangerous than sport betting, however several cultures after generations have been able to develop a healthy relationship towards its consumption. You can clearly see that by comparing deaths in Mediterranean countries against other northern countries or other parts of the world.
I can feel that difference also directly in the way my Mediterranean cultural background has driven my relationship with alcohol. Me and my family love to drink wine or beer, but we despise getting drunk. The moment our heads get light headed we stop drinking. We enjoy the social aspect of it and its flavor, but we do not enjoy being incapacitated because of it. However the moment I started traveling north I noticed the difference in how people relate to alcohol:in a lot of cultures people just drink alcohol to get drunk or to disconnect from their every day lives. They have not learnt to stop on time and they develop a very unhealthy relationship to drinking.
Same could be said about sports betting. If it’s part of our culture or our individual interests we need as a society to be able to develop a healthy relationship towards it and not forbid it (with the exception of minors).
Without alchohol social scenes may be more creative. Karoke. Board games. Social games. Deep conversatiobs. Challenges. Parties like you had as a kid.
I run a pub. We'd never have any gambling (machines or otherwise) in it, and we charge less than most pubs for locally sourced beer/cider.
If you're running your business to extract value from people rather than to create community with them, you're a bad person.
It ruins lives, funnels money to terrible people, makes sports worse for everyone, and has no positive impact on society. The benefits of the "freedom" to let manipulation of your lizard brain drain you of your past and future earnings is not worth it.
Global warming suffers from "but it rained yesterday" and other misleading small scale variations making people disbelieve.
"More fires, more hurricanes: Climate change" then rebrands it as scary: need to take seriously.
Alcohol certainly does not preclude it.
The government is marketing it.
Public concerts hosted by the municipality will have gambling ads posted all over, sponsored by the latest scam.
Sample size: Alagoas/Pernambuco. Cannot say anything about the gambling ads in the other states.
Competition is essential to competitive sports (the only ones we could be talking about), so removing competition ruins the sport, independent of the idea of entertainment
My uncle gambled away a successful business, a beautiful house, his family, his friends. In my early memory he was a giant who carried me in the ocean, flying just above the breaking waves. Later on, when I was in elementary school, he lived with us for a bit. Some time later he lived in his Buick. He died alone and with nothing.
In my mind, we all should not allow a man to do that.
But now you're back to the original, curiously unanswered, question: Is there really that much gambling going on in the "little leagues"?
If not, for what reason do you think they are going to start rigging it? Hell, not even the WWE's explicit rigging has motivated high school wrestling to move in the same direction. This idea you have that sports are going to lose their competition seems to be completely unfounded.
Professional leagues may choose to rig or otherwise modify their events as they prioritize entertainment over sport, but they've always done that. In that sense, their play has always been "ruined". But that entertainment is not the sport.
Likewise, running a business for a profit doesn't mean exploiting people to their ruin. If you can't make money ethically, you should do something else.
1) In Brazil there's an entire industry of athlete's from lower divisions and agents that sells transient results that is taken in consideration in the bets.
For instance, number of corner kicks, number of fouls, yellow cards and so on. It's hard to trace it back the intention and there's a player from the National Team being investigated due to betting patterns [1].
With 80% of players earning less than USD 300 [2] when someone have the offer to take USD 10000 to receive 3 yellow cards in 5 games, it's hard to say no for those guys.
2) The problem that I see with the regulation is that not only in the sporting and social aspects (that is bad) but the money laundering and the lack of tracing in the money that goes in bet houses.
For instance, Germany has some regulation around the topic [3] but the reality if you go in some Tipico or some small bet house you can carry EUR 10000 and bet in anything, no questions asked; that's the reason why a lot of people around the world come to Germany for sports betting [4].
Anecdotally speaking, an old colleague used to manage some players in Brazilian 3rd division and he had some connections with folks in places like Germany. Before the game he already knew the bets and then just told to the players what needs to be done (e.g. I want a penalty kick after 80min, or a yellow card before 70 minutes) and after the bet being payed the agent just passed the money to the players (more or less 30%).
[1] - https://onefootball.com/de/news/fa-want-to-ban-lucas-paqueta...
[2] - https://g1.globo.com/trabalho-e-carreira/noticia/2022/12/04/...
[3] - https://cms.law/en/int/expert-guides/cms-expert-guide-to-onl...
[4] - https://n1info.rs/biznis/fatf-nemacka-raj-za-pranje-novca-go...
The amount of money especially young people have to fork off of their paychecks just to have a place to live is outright insane.
For instance, Portugal had a crisis 25 years ago with sky high number of drug related deaths, HIV infections etc. The solution was decriminalization and education, e.g. about sharing syringes. And it worked, they went from the worst I drug related deaths to best. Heroin is still bad for you and I guess people still use drugs, but at least the outcome is not catastrophic anymore.
So yes, I do think education cures a lot of problems.
How can we regulate what a person does with their hard earned wages from their labor and precious time and then still claim that person has liberties of any kind? If you think about it, this is the one and only fundamental liberty that is foundational to all other liberties.
Even slaves get food and shelter as well as some freedom of movement and expression. What they don't get is to be able to buy what they want and own it.
You don't deserve any rights or liberties if you can't accept the rights of the drug addicts,gamblers, homeless people and many more types of people out there.
It is a fundamental aspect of the human experience to self-determine one's fate.
I was dead for what we assume to be billions of years since this universe popped up, and soon I will be for what we understand to be far, far longer. These moment are precious, and those meals and the people we share them with are too. It makes so much sense to express gratitude for them.
That little moment to remind yourself that it’s all borrowed from the universe and will need to be given back is, I think, essential to actually living. Without that appreciation, does any of it really matter at all? Without it you’re only seeking the next thing to desire. Eventually there won’t be a next thing to desire, and you’ll have never had a chance to savour any of it.
> Secularism is a recent thing.
Sokrates and Buddha would like a word.
If you, hypothetically, banned it outright in the US, then you go from having few levers on what you can mitigate in the industry to none, because if it's all banned and has more than a slap on the wrist punishment, there's no reason not to charge 200% interest on gambling debts, or other absurd things.
I'm firmly of the belief that the only thing you can really do is tightly regulate it to the point that there's still enough gambling, with controls minimizing as much unexpected harm as you can, to avoid most people feeling tempted to seek out the unregulated illegal avenues with more exploitative arrangements.
I think history has shown that you can't effectively ban a lot of vices, you just wind up with them underground and even more destructive to people involved. The best you can do is try to minimize how easily one can destroy themself - look at Japan's reactive regulation around the most predatory gacha mechanics. Whether you think they strike the right balance or not, that's rather an example of what I mean - you can't really stop someone from deciding to deliberately spend their life's savings on things, you can just do as much as you can to avoid it being an impulsive choice.
I've made a ton of bad decisions in the course of my life. And I'm all richer for it. Don't take that away from me.
I despise the nanny state policies of my homeland Finland. I've been a nomad for the past decade and a half due to it because I don't want to settle down in a place where people think they should be able to force other people to not make what they (or "the majority") think are stupid decisions.
You will always find justifications once you start going down the rabbit hole of "what's best for them".
I run a restaurant with the same idea - we pay our staff way more than anyone else is outside the Michelin places for example.
Still, you might be a bad person if you're running an exploitative business, but very likely the system will reward that kind of person more than you or I. In fact I find it difficult to compete with those sorts of people because they get away with it and make more money so can do more marketing, expand more aggressively etc. The classic annoyance I face is other restaurants in the area giving away free french fries for a 5 star review on Google maps.
Now there are customers who spot the fraudulent review restaurants and come to ours instead, and the discerning customer is our market segment anyway (we do many other things that normies would miss but discerning customers notice and reward with their loyalty) but a restaurant lives and dies on the whims of hordes of normie customers that are delighted to get free fries and don't mind creating a Google account for the first time in their lives to get'm.
If you want to do it for fun then use fantasy points for it.
The comparison needs to be in terms of typical use, otherwise engineering for addictiveness gets a free pass because it often hinges on frequent small rewards and can have a near unity return on a single shot basis yet be a big money maker for the house.
Of course there are probably 'safer' forms of gambling that some addicts are presumably able to use to maintain their addiction at a level which isn't disruptive to their life. ... but single shot EV isn't the right metric. Some weekly state lottery usually has pretty poor EV, yet is seldom ruining anyone.
Ban advertising for gambling, tax the hell out of gambling companies... possibly create some sort of regulation for actual gamblers, i.e. check their ID against a national database everytime they bet to ensure they're not over-doing it... seems more likely to fix the issue than outright prohibition, which, at least for other things like drugs and prostitution, doesn't really seem to solve much.
However people should know what regulating ethics to this degree looks like: the modern PRC. In the PRC you get a government mandated timer on your MMOs to ensure you don't spend too much time playing videogames. In the internet cafes there's 24/7 a CPC bureaucrat prowling around keeping an eye on your chats - plus automated mandated filters which depending on the implementation can auto kick you from a multiplayer match, hence the entirely viable strategy when playing against PRC players to spam "FREE HONG KONG REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES CCP COMMITS GENOCIDE AGAINST UIGHUR MUSLIMS XINJIANG" into chat to get them kicked from the match.
There's industry level morality controls as well such as not being allowed to make a tv show featuring "feminine men" and the implicit ban on showing LGBT couples.
Personally I don't trust a State to choose the correct morals, be it aesthetically communist or aesthetically capitalist. We can look at America's history of moral laws to see another example, such as prohibition.
There’s a meme/“theory” in retail options trading about “max pain”. Wherein, the stock price will move as to maximize the total amount people lose on options.
None of that applies to gambling though. Not only is there nothing to learn from failing that you couldn’t have learnt before placing a bet, but success could mean addiction and the eventual ruination of your life and the lives of those you love.
Banning addictive things isn't as straightforward as people love to believe. Even during the worst theocratic times, you could get alcohol in Saudi Arabia by asking the right people; and Saudi Arabia had way harsher means at its disposal than democratic countries do.
(For the complete picture, my grandpa drank himself to death at 57 and even though he used to have a good income, on the order of 3x as much as an average Czechoslovak worker of that time, he left almost nothing behind. All "liquefied". Other people were able to build family houses for their kids with less money.)
Even with a modern education this is a losing proposition for many people...
But if you really think about it, yes there might be a tiny portion that wins overall, but they only win because there are a lot of people emotionally invested that ruin their lives. So yes, please ban.
Edit: While yes, it can be fun and I personally can have a lot of fun when I put 50 bucks into a slot machine once or twice a year, no matter the outcome, it doesn't really justify to keep that business alive
There's a false dichotomy between prohibition and laissez-faire, which the US seems particularly prone to. You've seen similar issues with the decriminalisation of cannabis, where many states seem to have switched abruptly from criminalisation to a fully-fledged commercial market. There is a broad spectrum of other options in between those points that tend to be under-discussed.
You can ban gambling advertising, as Italy did in 2019. You can set limits on maximum stakes or impose regulations to make gambling products less attractive to new customers and less risky for problem gamblers. You can have a single state-controlled parimutuel operator. Gambling does cause harm - whether it's legal or not - but it is within the purview of legislators to create a gambling market in which harm reduction is the main priority.
Socrates and Buddha were 2,500 years ago and I don’t think I’d describe them as being secularists. Secularism is something that came out of the Enlightenment, in the West at least. It is absolutely a recent thing for the purposes of the discussion.
Casinos exist, but are basically a regulated service (possibly private, but as far as I know there's only a single operator).
That's why UK Conservatives turned most of English education into for-profit businesses.
People here are always harping on about how the only reason for coordinating people (companies) is to make profit for the owners/bosses.
What pains me is that people are saying "the local club couldn't survive without {an external party taking a proportion of the gross income}". The maths means that without that external entity there would be more money.
Of course without addiction ruining lives people wouldn't give so much of their money away to these particular sports clubs. But, that just means the sports club is running off the destruction of people's lives in the local community. I mean, that's perfect capitalism, but absolutely inhumane.
After all, client's neurotransmitters are the same.
Because that shit is legal in all 50 states and is worse for society in my opinion. No hysteria against this.
Where it goes wrong though is if we take it too far and start connecting this to some non-existent deity, which in turn makes us construct an incorrect model of the world (such as if we’re not thankful for the food, then next year there will be a drought as a punishment).
I suppose codifying beneficial practices into religion or spiritual beliefs is just part of being human.
It’s not that casual bets between friends should be banned, but this insidious industry that spends 100s of millions on marketing, and uses every tactic available to lure people and then get them addicted. That is such a far cry from not wanting people to gamble at all. Those who want to be a nanny and say boo hoo gambling bad are in a totally different category to the people who reasonably think that there’s a serious issue with this industry.
Are you sure about that?
> Not only is there nothing to learn from failing that you couldn’t have learnt before placing a bet
Just look at investing with fake money portfolios vs. making decisions with real money. Or playing poker with play money. It's a whole different game mentally and some lessons you just don't learn unless you got a real stake in it.
> but success could mean addiction and the eventual ruination of your life and the lives of those you love.
In my case my success (in poker) led to a prosperous career playing professionally. No lives ruined. YMMV.
Poker, or sportsbetting, is not gambling any more than investing in the stock market is, or choosing a spouse. Sure, you can gamble and YOLO your life savings on either of them. But you can also learn to make better decisions, the hard way. Or try and fail and lose money in the process. Rather than having a small set of "safe" pre-chosen options laid out for everyone.
Disclaimer: Games where you play against the house (that has an edge) like slots or roulette is gambling. But again, just because there are people playing slots to make a profit doesn't mean that we should ban being an idiot. Life is dangerous and you will eventually die from it. This is more of a personal philosophical opinion than a "what's best for people" one (which I think is wrong).
Surely the reason prohibition failed so badly was that it wasn't democratic. You can't mandate against vice unless you have the support of the majority.
Yes, investing on the stock market can be gambling, unless you have inside information or are extremely knowledgeable, you’re not going to beat a monkey. Investing in a diverse portfolio where you’re basically betting on the entire market growing is different.
It's soul-destroying.
For example, this ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0-pKS_zx5E is made by "LOTTO 6aus49", which is "LOTTO.de", which is "Toto-Lotto Niedersachsen GmbH", which is the lottery company of the state Lower Saxony.
To me this is as if the state would place TV ads for wine which a state-owned winery produces, like "Landesbetrieb Hessische Staatsweingüter" also known as "Hessische Staatsweingüter GmbH Kloster Eberbach".
And the lottery numbers are then presented in the prime time news in the publicly funded television.
unlike more complex policy areas where vested interests may be hidden behind layers of bureaucracy or decades of refined pseudo-moral talking points, gambling legalization is straightforward: the flow of money into lobbying, the rapid legislative changes, and the immediate establishment of large-scale betting operations make the influence unmistakable. It's a tangible, almost irrefutable sign that decisions are being made in favor of profit at the expense of public welfare.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-stakes-gambl...
Lotto and sports betting in its modern incarnation are very different.
Lotto was created so that people’s desire for gambling is diverted towards charity.
It is literally taking money from the poorest and most gullible Indians to the owners.
The sooner we get rid of money, the sooner people will just bet their imaginary internet points on internet gambling instead of their real life right-to-live-points, and everybody will be better off.
When I was a cashier the state owned lottery monopoly had a training session for us on how to operate the lottery machines, and it was really dystopian how most of the time was spent on encouraging us to make upsells with sales pitches and being happy about gambling.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto#Verwendung_der_Einnahmen
50% for is the gamblers
23% is diverted towards the charity you mention.
16.7% is taxes
7.5% is commission
2.8% is for running the business
In other words, the "Aktion Mensch" gives around 1/4 to those in need.
* Correction, "Aktion Mensch" give close to 1/3 to those in need and less to gamblers (also 30%). But they keep more to themselves.
The desired force vector varies in magntitude and orientation, but can, in the extreme include removal of independence / imprisonment or less extreme banning and fining etc
Because a single or group of people believe it, it must be for everyone, equally.
Gambling, however has previously in the U.S. shown to be the leading cause of suicide attempts (20% in total) among all forms of addiction [1]. A body of evidence has also demonstrated it leads to divorce, bankruptcy, poor health and sometimes incarceration. Worth noting many of these studies centered around machine gambling and all forms of gambling are unique in terms of tendency for compulsion. Considering the landscape it is quite difficult for me to see a way of regulating out of this, not in the U.S. at least.
[1] Zangeneh and Hason 2006, 191-93
The comment above tragically is true for most of the country.
<cough> buy here pay here car lots <cough>.
Alcohol consumption is currently dropping in many (not all places) in Europe (some ref: https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/08/21/dry-january-where...), without any bans, so compared to the prohibition episode I would claim that it would be better to insist on finding and implementing "efficient stances".
The Quran, which id consider among those as a "Holy book" condemns gambling pretty outright multiple times.
My thought is it being more expensive is not going to stop gambling addicts since they are already willing to lose heaps of money by making the bet in the first place.
I agree about banning ads 100%.
Contrary to popular belief, running a sportsbook is a terrible business. Look at draftkings for instance. They’ve gotten gambling legalized nearly everywhere yet are still wildly unprofitable.
I guarantee you that they will never be profitable unless they are granted a monopoly which will never happen.
It’s fairly obvious. If you travel to Vegas and go to the Aria, one of the premier casinos on the strip, you will have to walk around to find the sportsbook. When you do you may be surprised to see that it’s not out in the center of the floor inviting people in, it’s in a dark remote enclosed corner that feels like a large coat room.
Now ask yourself why that would be? And why do casinos devote so much floor space to slot machines and table games?
Betting apps offer the terrible aspects of running a book- relatively unwealthy gamblers with the inability to cross subsidize more profitable games and alcohol along with the added drag of attracting disloyal users who can and will easily use other books to compare lines or take advantage of promos.
Of course that won’t happen, it’s too ingrained in society. But it really is a scourge.
And I say this as someone who enjoys my beverages responsibly.
Legalizing heroin or the like will destroy parts of our society of nothing else changes.
We could solve that by banning/restricting gambling.
But it seems that's just a patch on the bigger problem: That our citizens are insufficiently educated to see what is ruining their life and stay away from it.
Sure, some people waste all their money on gambling. But others waste all their money on drugs. Or theme park rides. Or model trains.
Would it not be better to have better training not to waste all your resources on something that doesn't benefit you?
I think you could raise money and then sustain a lean business.
> Some aspects of farming lean on skill, but other aspects are pure chance.
Absolutely not. I don't really have a solution, but in general it seems distributing power to more local level forms of governance works well for many things, so perhaps something along those lines?
I also know plenty of failures who are addicted to gambling and drugs.
Gambling, like all drugs, is a mental health / attitude problem.
Life is shit for most people and they think winning big is the only way they'll escape that - and if I lose some money, oh hey, I was poor before, I'm still poor.
We need to put the blame on education and society raising mindless zombies good only to be employees for 40 years and pay off their mortgage (in the best case scenario).
If you read some papers on the subject it should be plenty apparent that it has adverse effects on the development of young adults, as well as long term use by anyone, particularly of recent high-potency strains.
It's not as bad as other drugs (heroine), and it's worse than others (coffee), but it's not harmless. I'm far from being a prohibitionist, and live somewhere that has (I think) sensible policies (The Netherlands), but to simply put that it's "fairly harmless" as something most physicians agree with is not true. I'd say it's similar to alcohol in terms of its moderate use being possible in a working society - albeit with some negative outcomes for people that overdo it, or do it too early in life.
Edit: there's lots of discussion below about if the studies that exist are trustworthy or not, but since anyone can google for studies, I'll leave a different recommendation to check out the r/Leaves subreddit, and read some first hand accounts of long term and heavy users. It's at least a different type of source and you can make up your own mind about what real users say about it, in case you never encountered it before.
No doubt it was. Workers were alienated before the industrial revolution too, and we were already emitting CO2 before the 1950s, but the scale of the problem changed in a very impactful way.
Of course I doubt we can get reliable statistics from 1920s, but I don't think you should disregard their argument just because it was happening before. Gambling is as old as numbers, and it's not going to go away, but we can still look for the factors that drastically increased the magnitude of the issue.
Also, economists would not term the stock market as zero sum game. All boats can and do rise together. Look at the S&P 500 index since the 2008 GFC. Spectacular success that reflects the wider US economy.
The upside of prediction markets is that it incentives people with information to make their honest estimates legible to society. E.g. an opinion piece in a newspaper has little skin in the game, other than the author's reputation.
Worth noting our current overdose crisis and general lack of health care in many parts of the country, now the under-prescription of controlled medications- which all helps shift a lot of these dynamics in a direction that might not be seen in other parts of the world.
> most religions have weighed in on gambling as most societies have been shaped by religion
It's the same with the prohibition of alcohol.
> You can ban gambling advertising, as Italy did in 2019
this has been widely sidestepped, betting companies now advertise something like "sport-results.com" and then that one has a prominent link to the betting site.
It's a recreational drug. Unless a patient needs it to counter some other malady such as for pain relief, most doctors will say that less is better and none is best.
Where we fall on that spectrum is generally a matter of culture, rather than regulation. American culture is one of maximalism, especially when it comes to commercialization.
Regulation, however, might be OK. In the UK we are now at a stage where bookmakers have to do Know Your Customer (KYC), checks to do identity validation, you can't gamble with credit cards (debit cards are fine), and "VIP Schemes" to incentivize those who gamble the most to gamble more are not allowed. All sites have voluntary limits for players on deposits or timeouts, and a lot of TV ad spots are about staying in control of your gambling.
What's interesting is that most of this (except KYC and CC deposits), are not government-mandated - the industry has gone down a path of self regulation to try and keep the government out of it.
There's expected to be some announcements in this space in coming months, and there is a fear of "affordability checks" being mandated - to bet above, say £100/month, you'll need to show bank statements that indicate you can afford a higher level of betting. The fear is that this will just mean rich business for the offshore black market guys on WhatsApp and Telegram who are ready to move in.
I think what might actually be a better solution is for us to talk more widely about "value", and educating bettors. There is little value in slots or casino games - you will rarely, if ever, be in a place to get +EV on those, and when those situations do arise it requires an incredible amount of expertise and insight to exploit them, far more than Hollywood or the books you may read suggest you need (Ed Thorpe invented the World's first wearable computer to get +EV on roulette).
However, sports betting is different. Value is often there, waiting to be found. Particularly on prop bets. If you're prepared to do the work in figuring it out, you will either win, or lose more slowly.
As such, I'd argue more education and more controls around bad habits seems a better way to go than banning it outright.
But then, I'm happy to do that work, I enjoy it, it's fun. Most people don't, and they're losing money to me and people like me via a commission agent (the bookmaker).
So I just wanted to add that for a subset of the population, the risks are several orders of magnitude more serious than "lost a few IQ points", as many people are not able to resume normal life (nor indeed, a normal experience of reality) after a psychotic experience.
That being said, I do support legalization, since the alternatives are worse. I just also support people being well informed, and aware that while they're probably not in that 2%, there's only one way to find out, and you really, really don't want to find out.
I don't know if it comes verbatim from the Bible, but there are many denominations that find that gambling is sinful. Direct prohibitions from the scripture aren't the only source of religious rules - especially for secular questions.
As another example, many denominations have strict rules against alcohol - despite the many positive stories about alcohol in the bible and the role of wine during communion.
Indeed, allowing this to occur has wrought orders of magnitude more death and destruction than sports gambling or drug use or prostitution.
no victim == no crime
But legalizing advertising for sports gambling was definitely a mistake.
"The [Hindu] text Arthashastra (c. 4th century BCE) recommends taxation and control of gambling."
"The Buddha stated gambling as a source of destruction in Singalovada Sutra. Professions that are seen to violate the precept against theft include working in the gambling industry."
Instead of asking a lazy question as a challenge, you could have spent 3 seconds looking this up. It wasn't particularly hard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling#Religious_views
American culture is not one of maximalism. Going overseas I was surprised to see tobacco products and beer legal at 16 or 18, people drinking alcohol in the open at parks, soft-porn on late-night broadcast TV, and newsstands with uncovered porn magazines.
All of which are commercialization.
Further, a maximalism interpretation can't be used to understand American culture pre-1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited banks from preventing women from getting a bank account, nor pre-1964, when the Civil Rights Act prohibited most businesses from preventing blacks from exercising the same commercial maximalism as whites.
Reincarnation, the soul, karma, etc aren't exactly compatible with materialistic secularism.
Horse racing. All over the world there are tracks where horses run, and people bet on the horses, but that isn't why they exist. The track's gambling license, something first granted back when the track was built, is now used to facilitate an attached "casino". The horses are cover for the casino and the casino is just cover for the real money makers of the enterprise: an arcade of slot machines. Corruption for sure, but the "sport" of horse racing probably wouldn't have survived absent that corruption.
Very, very few people spend $200 a week on lottery tickets -- they spend a few dollars here and there a week. (Spending $200 is just silly and barely increases the chance of winning or return -- if someone can't see that, well, can't stop them from wasting money) Of course, I would like state lotteries to be further restricted, but that's still much much better than online sports betting -- people can lose six digits of wealth quickly, and that has a much bigger and immediate impact on lives than state lotteries.
"
There is substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and:
The development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, with the highest risk among the most frequent users (12-1) There is moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and:
Better cognitive performance among individuals with psychotic disorders and a history of cannabis use (12-2a) Increased symptoms of mania and hypomania in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorders (regular cannabis use) (12-4) A small increased risk for the development of depressive disorders (12-5) Increased incidence of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts with a higher incidence among heavier users (12-7a) Increased incidence of suicide completion (12-7b) Increased incidence of social anxiety disorder (regular cannabis use) (12-8b)"
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: The Current State of Evidence and Recommendations for Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24625.
I would warrant that these summaries should be a concern for anyone using cannabis and that blanket statements regarding the overall tone and summation of the report negating health effects of cannabis is somewhat misguided.
Yep. Solved. Next question please.
There exists a deeper question here regarding “why do these clubs require so much money that they need to bleed it out of the community in the form of poker machines?” I’d posit a good number of them probably don’t need that much cash, and most of it is just profit.
9pm, and it's wall-to-wall.
Ironically, this is around the same time as bans on smoking in pubs, and tobacco advertising became draconian.
But gambling doesn't do any first-order physical harm, so it's all good, right?
Seeing betting firms on the front of football teams' shirts offends me.
> When Tony Blair's Labour government introduced the Gambling Act in 2005, it allowed gambling firms to advertise sports betting, poker and online casinos on TV and radio for the first time.
One regulation would be banning gambling advertising, for the same reason why smoking ads are (I think?) banned. It is especially nefarious how companies lure in new customers with free bets, often with unscrupulous cash-out conditions, in order to get people hooked. It’s the equivalent of ads providing someone a coupon code to get several boxes of free cigarettes, at which point they get hooked.
Another change I’d like to see is the end of mobile gambling. I’ve never done it, but from watching friends do it, it was far too easy to deposit money, or borrow money on credit, and bet it frivolously. At least if such behavior is confined to a casino, there is some larger barrier to entry for people.
I do not know if this is true in other states, but certain states have the ability for an individual to self-institute a gambling ban at all facilities in the state. I’m not sure if this applies to gambling online. If not, then it should. And if other states don’t have it, then they would greatly benefit from it.
It also seems somewhat fair to me to tax the casinos and other companies profiting from gambling and using that money to fund services for people who become addicted. If you’re going to help create a problem, you should have to help clean it up.
I would very much like to believe that. But see what happened in Oregon after decriminalizing drugs.
Normalising it? Yes.
Unfortunately, our culture seems to have two settings: legal ban; full celebratory embrace. We don’t seem to be able to handle tolerating and discouraging (see smoking, which is slowly being banned across the once-civilised world).
Should the awesome power of the State be deployed to wield violence against people who bet money on sports? No, that’s insane. Should there be half a dozen betting ads every hour on primetime TV? No, that’s crazy too.
Also, I think it depends on how you come to these rituals. If it's just something you grew up with there's a good chance it's just some words you stumble through before a meal.
Gambling revenue hurts society more than it profits the club. The answer is that if we absolutely need these clubs, we should more explicitly subsidize them with govt money. It'd be stupid, but less stupid than what we're already doing right now.
If what we’re going to have is a society where I’m paying for the housing and health care of other people, I’d like to be able to dictate with an iron fist what the other people are allowed to do and be.
For example http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/426092.stm is why british people of a certain age all know the phrase "Malaysian gambling syndicates" and associate it with random blackouts.
But these commercial gambling halls, it's not some well of person who decides to pop in Friday afternoon and maybe lose €20 on a crazy sports bet or the slot machines and then go home and have dinner with the family. It is the some of our weakest and loneliest people who line up, waiting for the place to open and then spend the next 10 hours there. There are places who will provide free food for their best "customers", to ensure that they don't leave. We're transferring money from social welfare to private companies, using addiction and loneliness.
As for sports, I don't think professional soccer would like a ban on sports gambling. The revenue and salaries it have generated are to high for them to walk away now. It is hurting the sport though, in the sense that the community and local fans have been pushed out long ago. A local football club had to leave the premier league a few years ago, as a result they could no longer charge insane prices for tickets at the stadium. The result: They had more fans come to every single game, they sold more season passes, because the fans still wanted to see the games, and now they could afford it. Sure, they made less money, but the connection to the fans and the city grow.
In the end these things are a trade-off: a very large part of the population has no problems with them and enjoys being able to gamble/drink or eat. A small portion does have serious problems.
Should these people be protected against themselves, at the price of forbidden most people their little pleasure? Personally, I think not.
Clinicians aren’t the ones to go to for harms anyways, they’re largely not doing the research at any level.
In September, the central bank released a report revealing that in August, 20% of Bolsa Família — the largest cash transfer program for Brazil's poorest citizens — was spent on betting.
Out of the 20 million recipients, 5 million placed bets during that month, amounting to 2 billion reais (approximately $450 million) spent in just one month by the most vulnerable Brazilians.
Every day we are reading reports of family loosing their cars and saving because kids were betting, which is crazy.
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/business/2024...
If something is legally banned, there's generally a black market for it. Once it's legalized, the bar for consumers to enter the market is nearly eliminated; large companies can pour a ton of money into gaining new users in the legal market and moving users from the black market to the legal market.
>> Should there be half a dozen betting ads every hour on primetime TV? No, that’s crazy too.
It's even worse than that. There are betting ads during the actual game broadcast. Commentators read ads listing various odds on the current game. Betting companies sponsor a ton of stuff related to the teams and leagues. ESPN (Disney) both broadcasts games and runs its own sportsbook. You can't watch a sports game without hearing about betting on that game itself, much less sports in general.
Some people are going to gamble, but it should be dangerous. You should have to deal with the mob. It should reflect the risk inherent in gambling. It should be understood as a kind of shady and degenerate thing to do, not like a normal hobby.
The largest Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, teaches that, while games of chance aren't intrinsically evil (ie running an MC simulation), and low stakes gambling is allowed (raffle), gambling must be
- fair. That's obvious
- even odds for all participants
Presumably, no house advantage
- not be pathological
You cannot play if you're addicted to gambling, have an addictive personality, or often that an addiction could arise
- not involve very high stakes as the money would have been better spent on the poor
No $10 000/hand table.
If we want less money around college sports there need to be a lot more rules all over the place to make sure there is less profit to be had. Or we could just let people get paid for labor even though they are also students, which is the fair things to do and it's something we do in just about every other context.
But yeah, gambling should also be heavily regulated (as alcohol) and it is far from a "little pleasure", it can easily become an addition even without throwing around ads, free first bets and gamification.
Million dollar salaries for the coach, hundreds of millions poured into the administration all on the backs of kids who were ruining their health (bad hits, concussions) had no benefits, and nothing to show for it after the left [1].
It was abusive
[1] their college tuition was free, but they weren't given an education since they were expected to train 40 hr and TAs were expected to give free passing grades.
Then, in the Middle Ages, Catholic theologians added nuance introducing a concept of time value of money - ie when you lend out $100 you also lose the ability to use that $100 for the time of the loan. The concept of a small interest rate was adopted.
Which is fine, except it opened the flood gates until we eventually got the high interest rates we have today.
What makes our rates usurious? That they are issued with the issuer knowing the principal will never be paid off.
Also, the deflationary effects of high interest rates are not because it causes unemployment, but because it reduced the rate of increase of the money supply.
Of course, lowered money is recessionary, which leads to unemployment which puts downward pressure on wages; but wages aren't the reason for inflation - the increase in monetary mass is.
I don’t know how HN views horse riding, but “no more horse racing” probably would have resulted in a lot less dead and injured horses, so maybe horse-racing should have died out.
It has the advantage that it is compatible with most (all?) preligions, certainly the Abrahamic ones.
Try it as a therapeutic. To release all the angst and problems before going to bed.
(If you recall your catechesis, that's laying your your problems at the feet of the cross)
Here in the Netherlands we had TV advertising for gambling, using semi-celebrities, those were outlawed again within a few months and have not come back. 20-30 years ago, there were a lot of 'call in to win' shows on TV that were of course basically a scam. They too were made illegal and have not returned.
But, what's the alternative?
Going to a live event, for two bad teams, for four people, cost me over $500 a year ago. I can't afford that.
Youth sports?
I live in Florida, and was hoping Jai Alai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_alai) would be a weird respite, but that was the original gamblers refuge.
People don't lose their life savings redeeming D&B tickets. You have an uphill battle convincing me the Chuck E Cheese model is worth banning when it's mostly seen as harmless kids' fun.
If this is seriously bothering you, you probably spend way too much time at Dave & Buster's. And I would guess you do not have children.
The thing that bothers me the most is that they know a lot of poitential employees have issues with the whole sector, so they try to give it a false veneer of acceptability. A good example of that was that both Paddy Power and Boyle Sports referred to themselves as suppliers of "risk-based entertainment" in their recruitment literature, something I found to be very sleazy.
I also know people who work for some of these companies and they tell me that all their talk about caring for problem gamblers is complete nonsense and that they actively seek ways to lure back problem gamblers who were able to quit.
It's also very weird that as governments around the world are cracking down on alcohol poromotion at the same time they seem to be encouraging the promotion of gambling. I would say gambling can do as much harm to a family as alcohol addiction can. I'm frankly shocked at the amount of gambling adverts there are these days. And so many of them carry the subtle sub-text that if you don't bet on your team then you aren't a true fan.
The problem is that people will gamble no matter what, so providing a safe way to do so is better than banning it. I agree with you that it's all about to what degree you allow gambling. At the very least I would ban advertising as it's effectively normalising something that most definitely should not be normalised.
It's not a choice between prohibition and selling it in the grocery store. There are many nuances in between.
I've known several gambling addicts down through the years, the damage they did to their financial and family lives was tragic. Divorce was almost a given, homelessness occurred on several occasions. Being shunned by their parents and siblings sometimes followed after money was borrowed and never paid back.
Two things I never could understand after all the above. First, I couldn't get any of them to attend GA meetings after I offered to attend with them and second, why they ever thought they had a chance to win consistently in any gambling endeavor when the gamble itself is connected to a computer. (Yes, I'm saying cheating can be involved. Imagine!)
The C language may not help you much with clean memory allocation, but at least they are not using A/B testing and emotional appeal to coerce you into doing deadly memory management.
These two are not at all the same, and one is much more dangerous and asocial than the other.
Prediction markets are the best way we know of to synthesize the opinions of many parties. They should be protected as a class of economic free speech, but in the US there is an effort to eliminate prediction markets on the most important issues (like the outcome of an election).
Think about what it implies for the government to be against a kind of organized assembly that causes citizens to become more informed and allows individuals to de-risk the outcome of events.
I would also guess that banning an ad is cheaper than banning something like “dancing in public.” One is easy and affects few people or entities directly (basically the companies that want to advertise their sports betting business and those that can host it), while the other is impossible to truly ban because you’d need an army of police or a high tech surveillance state (which probably still cannot institute a full ban).
(Incidentally, the restaurant in your analogy would probably not be viable without that bar!)
The US already has plenty of legislation regulating advertisements of other vices, so I think a similar ban is totally appropriate here.
Probably explained by chance.
Gambling "systems" don't work unless there's a flaw in the game.
Your post made me think more about sports betting vs a lottery. To me, they really are different. With a lottery, you need to wait days to get the result (mostly). The chance for multiple quick dopamine hits is exceedingly low. (Scratch tickets and high speed lottos are another matter.). Now think about sports betting: So many simultaneous events or races, so the customer (user?) has many more chances for multiple quick dopamine hits. Maybe a potential framework to talk about gambling harm is opportunities for for multiple quick dopamine hits. If very low, then many tolerate it in their community, especially if a significant portion goes to social causes.
One thing I am absolutely sure about: Advertising for sports betting should be banned. I put it in the same class as cigarette ads as a child. Damn they looked so cool and fun. What a terrible message to spread!
I don't think many other countries' private markets act as extreme in this regard.
>All of which are commercialization
I feel like those are just cultural norms as opposed to commercialization pressure.
> Further, a maximalism interpretation can't be used to understand American culture pre-1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited banks from preventing women from getting a bank account, nor pre-1964, when the Civil Rights Act prohibited most businesses from preventing blacks from exercising the same commercial maximalism as whites.
I am failing to draw a line from your point to your argument here. I was referring to commercial maximalism, not sexual and racial equality maximalism.
This part I have small nitpick about:
> Also, the deflationary effects of high interest rates are not because it causes unemployment, but because it reduced the rate of increase of the money supply.
This is a thing physicians say but often don't heed themselves, and I don't think it singles out cannabis in particular.
The thing that horrifies me the most is physicians who smoke. There's an activity of which there is no safe level of doing other than "none", plus they've definitely seen what a smoker's lung looks like, and yet I've seen plenty of doctors who smoke regularly.
from sugar, cigs, to alcohol
from netflix, pornhub, to onlyfans
where do we draw the line
And, specifically about the few remaining hunter gather tribes in the Amazon, Brazil has a dedicated govt dept to keep these people safe from outside influence. As I understand, they have made great strides in the last 30 years to keep these tribes safe.
It has also been confirmed that heavy use of marijuana has negative effects on cognitive performance and short-term memory even in adults, although these symptoms go away after you stop using.
Edit: down voted, ok
I think the “all it takes is the right information” model lacks a nuanced understanding of human behavior.
Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive.
This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry and I think "we the people" need protection from these forces
They are not the same thing. One causes huge amounts of murder and violence, and the other is simply people destroying their own selves, as is their right.
Almost all of the gun crime in the US is the direct result of the prohibitions on the sale and manufacture of drugs.
"Don't get high on your own supply" is a law that covers much of Asia's stance on gambling. Macau has stricter gambling laws for citizens than tourists, for example.
Winning sports betting players often go on to set odds.
With so many things, finding the right balance takes trial and error, and what the right balance is may change as other variables change as well.
And many jobs involve taking risks. Investment houses. Sales. etc. We reward those who take risks because society (often) benefits.
I find it much easier to argue against standard casino games because it's pretty easy to mathematically prove that the gambler will end up broke. With sports, it's a bit harder. As long as the vig is small enough, smart gamblers who know the teams can eke out a profit. If anything, sports gambling rewards study, thought, and focus, all things we should celebrate. THat doesn't mean I like. I would like to see it banned. But it means I have trouble arguing against it with any vigor.
> that's why newer languages like Go and Rust force you to check errors in return values
Go doesn't require you check return values though, no? I can get a return of type (*Model, error) and just completely ignore the error portion of it and never check it. Rust doesn't let you access the value until you deal with the Result/Option wrapper, requiring that you at least acknowledge the potential for an error.
How well do you know about what happens in other countries? To me it sounds like everywhere, once limitations to the flow of global capital are dropped.
> I feel like those are just cultural norms
My observation is that commercialization pressure is subordinate to cultural norms. The capital vultures did not swoop in to provide full services to women and blacks until the laws changed, even though providing those services was legal.
Commercialization can shape those norms, certainly, but that is not specifically American either.
It would have a positive effect if I went around summarily executing everyone accused of child exploitation, for example, but it would be insane and unjust. There’s a reason we don’t do it that way.
Threatening people with violence for what other people view as misapplication of their own resources is incredibly unjust.
If you don’t have the freedom to destroy yourself or your own resources, you don’t have freedom.
It isn’t the legal system that causes this wreckage (although you might disagree, “lifting” a ban isn’t an action - it’s cessation of the threat of future enforcement action), and it isn’t the legal system that is the appropriate solution to the problem. All bans are, practically, are the threat of someone pulling out a gun to force you to stop. If you personally aren’t willing to go to that length, you shouldn’t vote for or support such policies.
Are you willing to pull a gun on an addict to stop them from indulging in their addiction? If not, what possible moral justification do you have for instructing a cop to do same?
There is zero risk associated with the result.
Apples, Apricots (Fresh, Processing), Avocados, Bananas, Blueberries, Caneberries, Cherries, Citrus (Grapefruit, Limes, Oranges), Cranberries, Figs, Grapes, Kiwifruit, Lemons, Mandarins/Tangerines, Nectarines (Fresh), Olives, Papaya, Peaches (Cling Processing, Freestone Fresh, Freestone Processing), Pears, Plums, Pomegranates, Prunes, Raisins, Strawberries, Tangelos, Tangors, Tomatoes (Fresh, Processing).
Maybe you meant Agricorp? None of the following are fruits?
Apples, Grapes, Peaches and nectarines, Pears, Plums, Sour cherries, Sweet cherries.
It's hard to see how that's not synonymous with increased unemployment, particularly given the oft quoted Phillips curve and the NAIRU.
On one hand, this is actively bad for people. You can make the argument that some people win, but the vast majority do not (over any extended period of time). People are hurting themselves and the people around them. I personally know so many young guys who have lost thousands of dollars that they really didn't have the opportunity to lose on sports betting in the last few years.
On the other hand, why would I restrict someone's freedom to choose to make a poor decision?
I find this so hard to make a personal judgement on because I see myself going both ways in my own life. I drink alcohol despite it being bad for my health, but I scoff at smoking cigarettes for the same reason. You can actively justify either of these, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. I just don't know where we begin to restrict people's choices when it primarily affects them - the obvious exception being their friends and family who are affected as well.
Do we step in and prevent this transitive negative effect? I'm really not sure.
I've seen some other comments mention having heavier regulation. That idea makes sense as a middle ground to me, I guess (although I'm really not sure).
I think the "all it takes is a government ban" model lacks a nuanced understanding of human behavior. Cannabis is a prime example.
To be clear, I'm not advocating a solution for all of society's ills. I'm advocating a path toward the goals we all share. That path may be longer and more difficult to traverse, but it's my belief that it'll lead us closer to where we want to go.
I think everyone agrees the name should not be damnatio memoriae nor should you be able to link to a click-wrapper, but people will always push the gray area in between as far as they can for that kind of money.
Had his gamble failed, you would’ve been addicted at a young age to that rush, and his authority on many life matters would’ve been diminished in your young eyes.
> (such as if we’re not thankful for the food, then next year there will be a drought as a punishment).
It's funny that you mention this, because two thousand years ago, a new religious movement came up that believed exactly that (Christianity).
Including GaTech, a top5 eng school, that requires an A average to get in.
Source: dealing with undergrads complaining about their grades and their effect on their scholarship.
EDIT: I agree with what you maybe claiming that "education" does not justify legal gambling. And you're certainly right that most states abuse this argument and the fungible nature of money to just slosh money around.
EDIT: the lotto money is put in a fund that goes to pre-K programs and scholarships. The average required to keep the scholarship is set by the fund's size.
There's however also a problem with too much agency. It breeds anxiety, discontent, unhappiness. Not everything in your life is under your control, and expressing undirected gratitude is one way of acknowledging that.
Don't forget social media. I mean, we have some of the smartest, best paid people on the planet incentivized to use every bit of data they can to hack your evolutionary biology to keep you scroll, scroll, scrolling.
I think one reason I've sadly become quite disillusioned with technology is because I see it less and less as a tool for improving the human condition, and more about creating addiction machines to siphon ever increasing amounts of money from the system.
Gambling is a vice, no doubt, but honestly Americans are too puritanical about it.
The alternative non-usurious loan would require you to post some other kind of security to receive the money, such as giving the lender the use of some other productive land until the principal debt is paid. More like pawning something at a pawn shop and then buying it back when you get paid.
> foreign interest in US sport is limited.
You’re negative here — and I think you know it.
> I get it, no one dealing with addiction wants to be called out on it.
Wowza, calling me “triggered” and an “addict” because I enjoy something differently than you and thought your comment was negative isn’t appropriate.
I think your response here confirms my initial impression that you have issues with this topic.
Hard to say what indirect support is out there. What is and isn't an indirect subsidy is always debatable. The government brings in temporary workers from foreign countries to work at the coffee shop in town, which perhaps, if you believe such action reduces the price of labour, makes life around agricultural areas more affordable. Would you consider that an indirect subsidy to farmers?
The roads are maintained which helps get our product out. Is that a subsidy to farmers? Or is that a subsidy to those on the receiving end? Or is it really a subsidy to the “city folk” driving on those roads to get to their cottage?
The government recently paid a privately-owned ISP to put in a second fibre line in the rural area alongside where the cooperatively-owned ISP already placed one a decade earlier. That is a clear subsidy, but do you consider that a subsidy to the farmer (We theoretically gained some redundancy, although I doubt anyone is making use of it. Internet service to the farm isn't usually that critical, especially when you also have wireless – both mobile and fixed – service available as a backup. Frankly, it was a complete waste of money), or to the ISP?
No thank you, I can protect myself.
Games of skill with money wagered have always been a significant part of Western European society, starting with the Equestrian Aristocratic classes and funnelling all the way down to the 'Football Pools' and the national pastimes of putting a wager down for the Grand National or Cheltenham festivals, legitimised by social events like Ladies Day or Student Race Week.
There are multiple ways of 'fairer' gambling - exchange markets like Betfair rather than sportsbook being the current epitome. The main issue is lack of legislation around targeting vulnerable demographics and those suffering from addictive traits - and that's an advertising rather than a gambling issue.
Then there is junk like every slot machine ever, 98 % of online casinos, etc.
Lotteries would belong to that category if they weren't such a useful way to sell something few people can afford, or to finance projects with an opt-in taxation.
I'm not an expert on this - how does this idea differ from that of 'seigniorage' where the sovereign can profit from the creation of money?
Your example only addresses the buying power of the sovereign; it's not obvious that it should affect the prices of goods between private parties.
In many ways you actually cannot, in any reasonable way:
- You cannot escape surveillance unless you completely (and I do mean completely) withdraw from modern society
- You cannot protect yourself from subconscious manipulation by advertising and marketing firms that pay billions of dollars to find and exploit subconscious weaknesses that we all possess
- You cannot protect yourself from sweeping changes made (e.g. to legislation) made in response to the interests of lobbyists or bad actors, and in consequence from changes in the behaviour of others, in response
Honestly, I would expect the opposite. I wouldn't care who wins between the Cowboys and the Giants, but if I put a $10 bet down on the Giants, all of the sudden and find myself rooting for them. You should tell your buds to bet on a team and forget all the prop bets. ;)
There's surely some ways you're unprepared to protect yourself. Since you're unaware, you wouldn't be able to thank them. Ignorance is bliss.
Many people can responsibly enjoy alcohol. Some can’t. But there are some drugs that are so effective it would be difficult for any human to responsibly use for any extended period of time. It becomes less about philosophy and more about physiology.
Of course any individual bet can win but casinos stack the deck by only taking action from players they know will lose over the long run.
if it had been up to me, sports gambling should have been restricted to physical locations, and marketing prohibited or highly restricted (perhaps only print advertisements in local markets informing people where they can gamble). perhaps also allow an existing customer to place bets via a telephone call.
the way I think about it is, the main reason you want to legalize a vice is to prevent criminals from selling it.
so you want legal operators to have an easier time doing business than the criminals, so they can outcompete them -- but just barely.
app on your phone and unlimited marketing on the internet and primetime television goes way too far.
It's such a waste of a generation's talent. I think about this from time to time.
What problems could we be solving? How much further would the cutting edge of innovation be? It's kind of depressing.
IMHO That's the spontaneous action and unless curated carefully it happens everywhere. It's the spontaneous way because all the bad things about the Western culture are about getting rich or happy quick. I'm sure the outer civilizations also desire to get rich or happy quick and that's why they end up trying when exposed to the Western ways but unlike those cultures the west is very good at oiling the machine to run very productively. Maybe its something about being an industrialized high throughput individualistic culture, I don't know.
Let ads and content feeds exist, but make it illegal for them to be casually viewed by anybody who hasn’t given explicit consent to be exposed to deceit and manipulation. I’m dead serious. It’s a sham that you can cannot drive on public roads without viewing billboards, or get to municipal service announcements without traversing twitter or FB.
If you win a lot, they'll effectively kick you off the platform, or make it non-economical to "play" by reducing your max bet sizes down to $1.
Even more diabolical, and clear evidence this shit should be outlawed completely: if you lose a lot, they will increase your maximum bet size
Should be outlawed and any politician who's advocating otherwise should be (at least) journalistically investigated.
It is so unfathomably antisocial that there is effectively no morally sound reason to advocate for its proliferation.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736715/#:~:tex....
* If apps detect compulsive behavior, they could go dark on your phone for a day/week/month/year
* All bets could have delayed payoffs (e.g. greater than 10 minutes [0]) to avoid optimizing for a quick dopamine hit
* Apps could be linked to a credit score/measure of financial health and allow larger bets for people with higher credit scores, or they could stop you from placing bets if there's evidence of negative impacts on your overall financial situation.
In general, the question of: how can we let consenting adults take risks that they find pleasurable (drugs, sex work, gambling, free diving, etc.) while also limiting the worst harms and/or protecting the most vulnerable people, is under-discussed relative to its importance, IMO.
Last week in the NFL there was a player that went down at the one yard line and his team ran off the rest of the clock to win. The game was under the O/U but would have been over if the player had gone into the end zone. The player made the choice so that his team could run out the clock without giving the ball back to the other team, and if he had scored then they would have had to kick the ball back to the other team who could potentially (although unlikely) scored a touchdown on the kickoff or in the last few seconds after the kickoff which would have given the other team the game. It was, objectively, the right thing to do in the circumstance.
The NFL analysts (who shill gambling apps) spent more time talking about if the player was responsible for everyone who lost on the O/U, and it just really killed it for me. Every. Single. Aspect is filtered through the lens of gambling. Games show the betting line on the screen and the analysts try to map out potential good parlays for the viewers. It's absolutely nuts and a very (in my mind) clear conflict of interest. It also blurs the line, in my mind, between objective reporting, analysis based on statistics, and paid promotion, and while I realize that sports reporting is probably the least important field in journalism, it's frustrating to see this unholy confluence and to see the impact it has on the ability for non-degenerate gamblers to enjoy the game.
I think allowing the betting houses and websites to advertise as prolifically as they have been (with very little restrictions) was a massive mistake. Advertising for sports betting is fucking EVERYWHERE.
And athletes, such as LeBron James, who while already a billionaire, decided to take the money and advertise for betting companies. When you've got enough money to convince a billionaire with a pretty good image to advertise for you, something is amiss.
Or maybe the odds do matter, as does the existence of a house that manipulates them.
edit: Also yes, I would use physical violence to stop someone I cared about from destroying their lives with gambling if it would help. I would hope for the sake of your loved ones you would be willing to do the same
Ok, let's ignore the individual. But gambling losses that lead to bankruptcy hurt creditor, for instance. Since creditors can't really easily separate out gamblers from non-gamblers, those defaults get spread across society as costs.
The linked article asserts that a large proportion of government welfare funds in Brazil are gambled away.
The linked article asserts that losses inspire domestic abuse. Consider that net winners may only win 51% of the time-- that's a lot of losses even if the individual makes out better in the long run.
> isn't risk taking a part of most people's lives?
Do you not see how these things are different? Leaving the house contains a risk of an accident, but the "you don't stand a chance of winning" certainly does not apply.
Many comments in this thread seem blind to this nuance, yet I wonder how one can go through life without understanding that not all risks are the same. I imagine one would die pretty fast.
A similar argument can be made with healthcare (especially the US insurance system). There is all sorts of information asymmetry, not only from available treatments/procedures, but then also providers
Kenneth Arrow wrote about this (in 1963), "Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care" (see §II. generally, and perhaps §II. B. specifically):
* https://assets.aeaweb.org/asset-server/files/9442.pdf
Some disagree with the above assessment:
* https://archive.is/q1nSN / http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/liberals...
Because there's a societal cost that goes beyond just the individual
The line at the gas station of people buying scratchoffs and lottery tickets is proof.
The part we likely need protection from is the marketing.
Why extract so many resources to run gambling and adtech servers? Why doom infants abroad to mining? Why invade international boundaries to get their resources?
E.g. Dana White of UFC appears to have a gambling problem, but maybe with how much money he earns it actually isn't a problem - but what if it at some point it gets out of control, and that is hidden from friends or people that care about him - and where that loss of control could be hidden from sight, kept secret until it's perhaps too late - however that looks?
By learning the techniques they employ, a subconscious manipulation by them, becomes a conscious observation by us. Education defeats these methods. An argument could be made that more money will be spent to continually find deeper subconscious manipulations. I would wager, the ROI would diminish quickly.
I would rather be manipulated by private industry than controlled by government. I cannot out vote a majority, but I can out wit a billboard.
24 legalized states, and not one chose this approach which is a shame.
Also I probably talk to my father more often about fantasy football than for any other reason, despite not caring about football.. the gamification and having stakes can be a compelling social experience.
[1]: (PDF) https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=501...
[2]: (PDF) https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/18/HHR2018-fergus.pdf
It does not. For example young women and girls, even when knowing that an image of a fashion model is photoshopped, still exhibit drops in their self body image.
>I would rather be manipulated by private industry than controlled by government.
In many cases these two things are the same, due to the prevalence and efficacy of lobbying
>I can out wit a billboard.
Lots of people believe this, but it is false.
any business with variable prices works this way, if some mysterious person shows up to your car dealership and seems really excited to unload a bunch of used cars on you, you should feel nervous that you’re overpaying or something is wrong with the cars.
in my view the diabolical part is the predatory marketing tactics, and making gambling platforms ubiquitous.
i say this as someone who, like you, thinks legalizing sports betting is an ongoing disaster, but wants the strongest arguments against it.
Yes: Sal Culosi was shot and killed by police in Virginia for wagering more than $2,000: https://reason.com/2011/01/17/justice-for-sal/
I am certain that there are more — that’s just one which leaps to mind.
Gambling in some of those same countries is now very aggressively advertised.
For my part, I was horrified. I couldn't find a way to see some of these tricks the use as anything but a form of highly evolved confidence artistry. Legal con artistry, sure. But a legal scam is still a scam. Even if the people getting scammed never wise to the scam, it's still a scam.
The arguments about tax revenues and suchlike don't make me feel any better about it. All I see in their success is a demonstration that a great many people will happily turn a blind eye to abusive behavior if they believe they can materially benefit from doing so. And, of course, they never do, anyway. The promises of professional con artists that our communities will benefit if we grant them imprimatur for their operations turned out to also be a scam. Con artists pulling a con; quelle surprise!
Google creates its search engine and its meaningfully better. Even their creation of contextual text advertising was meaningfully better. But then they start pivoting: the ads have a different color background to distinguish them as ads; what if we got rid of that so that they looked like regular search results?
YouTube brings video to people. Ads might be necessary to cover costs and make some money, but then you start pivoting to see exactly how much pain you can inflict with those ads before people turn away.
Smart TVs allow people to stream content...and then they pivot to injecting ads everywhere and spying on what you're watching.
For the companies, they pay someone $250,000 and that person makes $350,000 for the company and it's a net win for the company. However, sometimes people are employed creating additional value for society and other times people are employed redirecting value from one group to another.
What you've hit upon is that we're having so many of the smartest, best paid people working on redirecting value rather than creating value. And this isn't limited to technology. Companies and people have been trying to do this forever. Kings would seek to figure out how they could extract the largest cut from nobles without getting dethroned. A ruler certainly can create value by ensuring wise governance, encouraging good use of public funds, and encouraging good investment in the future. They can also scheme to take a larger cut of the current pie.
And that's a lot of the negative things that we notice: scheming to get more without really creating more value. We set KPIs (key performance indicators) for people who are used to ace'ing tests and they'll hit those marks whether it's useful for the customer (or even the company). One of the best examples of this that comes to mind is Facebook Messenger. For a while, anytime I added a friend on Facebook, I'd get a push notification on my phone from Facebook Messenger telling me that I could now chat with that person on Facebook Messenger. That little red "1" would stare at me until I opened the app to clear it. I can't be sure, but I'd bet that some PM had a KPI of increasing weekly active users on the app. They knew that if people had to clear a notification, more people would open the app each week. They probably crushed their numbers and got a big promotion - despite not actually creating value for users or for Facebook (since it wasn't real activity, just people trying to clear a notification). It's not always even companies redirecting value to them, sometimes it's individuals who have found a way of redirecting value from the company to themselves.
Another way of saying this is that you would rather be controlled through methods which are subtle, novel, and difficult to put a finger on than through methods which are overt and fit traditional narratives of control.
Apparently exactly this. The people that I knew where always discussing the fitness of certain players and how that'd impact the game and stuff like that. Though it could've also been that they were on a long long lucky streak, because they minimized the risk with such considerations. At least t hey were not ruining their own lives
I've NEVER liked sports gambling because it's so hard to predict and I also believe that it's rigged by Vegas and the Mafia. The NBA has already been outed as rigged via referees and the insane actions of refs in last year's Super Bowl by ignoring obvious penalties makes it even worse. The games are obviously tainted as this point. And the fact that none of the leagues want to implement rules that correct wrong penalties only solidifies the fact that they want these things to occur.
I think a very good first step legislation would be to require disclosure of this behavior. Public appetite would probably be very strong and it wouldn't run afoul of any of the other "people should be free to play games" arguments. You can play the game, but the owner of the game is required to disclose the rules of it.
These sorts of inefficiencies, and often even true arbitrage bets, show up in sports betting because the bets you need to make are so complicated. There is a team at Susquehanna that does sports gambling as their form of trading, and they will sometimes play these sorts of arbitrages against bookies. I remember hearing about a perfectly-hedged arbitrage of 8 different bets from one member of that team in a specific gambling forum, but the bets were all so arcane that very few other players were playing each one.
I remember this being said about NYC investment bankers (often Ivy League grads) during the 2007/2008 Great Recession.
Around that time, Silicon Valley upstarts were seen as the altruistic alternative. Google, Facebook, whoever else was getting started around that time, were giving you a "free" service. Whereas Goldman Sachs and company were being broadly (and appropriately IMO) castigated for ruining lives and crippling the economy.
It is interesting to have lived long enough to see the heroes turn into villains.
If murder was legal we'd have a lot more of it. We still have them despite it being a crime, but nobody would ever suggest making it legal because some people do it anyway.
Generally, a law that made it illegal to advertise age-restricted activities to audiences where a significant portion of the audience would be under-age should be a workable solution. Let the courts decide what that gray area of "significant portion" is on a case by case basis.
Can you propose a universally acceptable formula or philosophy? Shall we just consult you on a case by case basis to determine when and where a putative power differential exists, and exactly when such a differnetial becomes large enough to verge into "unfair"?
edit: like how we've managed to do with literally every single other law?
So much of advertising is pushing stuff that is exploitative of some hope -- wealth, health, etc. -- the makes people susceptible to things with questionable efficacy.
Its at a smaller scale, but it can be seen with counterfeit currency today. Cash-heavy businesses have to absorb whatever amount of counterfeits they accept, so they are really valuing your dollar at $0.99 if they might have to throw it out.
By that standard, we're done, the matter has already been concluded in favor of "allow gambling."
Gambling, smoking, drinking, drugs, risk taking behaviours, crime.
We can either ban everything, or accept that certain groups of people will just abuse literally anything
Yes exactly. Well not "me" or "you" but case by case yes.
It's not necessary that someone be able to articulate and defend a universal moral philosophy consistent with a given policy in order to enact it. Having systems in place to evaluate specific cases as they come up is sufficient.
Sports betters really only allow losers to do it. There's a bit of a different ring to "We only let losers choose to play".
The whole puritanical notion that anything pleasurable is dangerous and needs to be strictly regulated/outlawed is not a good reality, doesn't really do anything except make people lie about what they really want to do (which causes obssession and addiction), and honestly needs to be buried with all the other outmoded concepts.
I'm getting tired of "addiction" being used as a justification to reduce freedoms. If you want to fix addiction, fix the underlying causes instead of banning shit. This involves designing societies where everyone's basic needs are easily met, where people who run into problems can get help easily, where people are encouraged to treat each other equitably, and lowering anxiety and panic. It's hard and doesn't make anyone any money which is why it's not the default state in many societies, but it does prevent these societies from collapsing
But all this howling in this whole topic about how gambling hurts the poor, yet no one is actually talking about how to stop creating poor in the first place - is just sanctimonious virtue signaling. Even if you have a poor friend or relative who got bit by a gambling loss - why is he/she addicted - what did you or society do to address that?
Note that I am not agreeing or disagreeing with the merits of that outcome; I am just noting that the process you describe has already been done, and has determined in this case that "gambling is OK."
Why should we revisit that process simply because a few people dislike the result? By what right do you suppose your personal views ought to overturn this social process -- simply because you and a few others personally disapprove of the outcome?
Should social processes always yield results that you personally like, and be considered invalid when they don't?
edit: things can improve, women can open bank accounts without their husband approving it now! We decided something, re-evaluated and made a better decision
Society has already spoken on this matter. It seems that your criteria amount to nothing more than "when I personally dislike the results of the social process, the social process has failed, and we ought to revisit it."
So I ask again the question you've begged: by what formula or philosophy are we to determine when a social decision such as "allow gambling" is bad? Is there anything beyond your personal feelings on a topic that we can turn to as a criterion?
This is different from speculation (or bending over to tie shoes) in that a risk is being assumed with an outcome in mind.
no, business history is full of selling addictive products, using force against labor, and using trick language in agreements, to name a few examples. In other words, there is plenty of business history that starts from maximum exploitation. "pivot" is more like a gravitational attraction to maximum exploitation, not "pivot" IMO
But sports books pitch themselves like brokers, giving fair access to bets. A brokerage-style betting market would be perhaps more fair (or at least, the sharks would take the rubes’ money instead of the casino robbing them) but doesn’t exist.
By advocacy and persuasion and some level of agreement through democracy.
>By that standard, we're done
Laws can change, so we're never done.
Society is a never-ending churn of social forces. There will always be a matrix of people who are good and bad and indifferent, who think similar and different to one another. It will never settle.
To answer your question about sports gambling in particular (though you did not ask me): I think the bets on specific things happening in a game are more manipulable and thus damaging to sports in general, as well as to the addictive properties of gambling, than simply betting on an outcome of a game.
So yeah, some aspects of gambling are bad enough that, now that we've seen the impact it's having, we should consider some more guardrails.
Even the college kid libertarian I used to be would say that the government should enforce "an informed consumer": That people should know what mechanisms gambling companies use to entice and addict people.
[edited for tone]
Why ought we revisit and overturn that process in this case? Is there any objective criterion beyond "it seems bad to me, I don't like the result of our lawmaking process?"
So yes, I "and a few others" disapprove of this outcome and are acting to change it within the constraints that we have. You oppose that or not that's your business.
The hypocrisy is amazing, many states ban gambling, but have scratches. Online scratchers, state owned digital slot machines. How is that fair when online casinos are banned.
The State has a much lower Return to Player.
Reminds of the quote from Joshua the computer in War Games: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
No ongoing rational standards, logic, or objective argumentation is required or even relevant -- just might makes right, anything goes, whoever convinces the most people to agree through sophistic "advocacy" wins?
I suppose that such a system could exist in theory, but it seems to be heavily at odds with the constitutional legal system that the United States uses.
Vermont is a great example, which banned billboards, and is adjacent to New Hampshire, a similarly sized and situated adjacent state. Driving into NH after being in VT for a while, it is immediately jarring just how offensive and ugly even a few billboards make the place.
It is a damn reasonable regulation, and more states should have it. No one is going hungry because they can't put up a billboard (especially the damn bright flashing digital billboards).
In the natural world traits that are wasted on futile efforts are eventually not selected. In the human world, traits that are ripe for manipulation in a free market would result in lower purchasing power. Thus, less ability to afford children and pass on the traits. Subsidizing via regulations or direct support prolongs the subterfuge we are discussing here. Perhaps, in perpetuity.
> In many cases these two things are the same, due to the prevalence and efficacy of lobbying
The reason there are lobbyist is because we have granted those being lobbied control. Take away the control and the lobbying is pointless. More rules and regulations = more lobbying.
This most recent comment has shifted the topic entirely, and I'm not going to address it because it's obviously either written in bad faith or just painfully unthoughtful.
That's not really an A/B scenario, there are a variety of outcomes there.
Imo this should apply to addictive apps as well. The damage here is mostly the time that is wasted.
This is a poor justification for making something illegal. Chocolate and cocaine operate on the same neural pathways, but one is clearly more detrimental than the other. Following this reasoning, we should ban chocolate, and being able to see comment scores on hacker news, and like counts on Instagram photos, and reach on Twitter, and retirement account balances because they produce the same effects in the brain as illegal drugs do.
The result? I definitely find it's helpful navigating the ups and downs in life. Like any other skill, if you practice gratitude you can be grateful even when you've had a significant loss, and it really helps you pull through that. Vice versa you can remain humble through significant improvements in life.
They sold their souls.
moreover people go to great lengths to try to avoid trading with winners.
there have been cases where people’s banks refuse to do any more foreign exchange trades with them when it becomes clear they are just arbitraging. it’s exactly analogous to the sports book case.
Then you said "there is no point at which the process is 'complete' for a given policy and must be merely accepted..." This sounds very much like you believe it is both possible and correct to revisit any policy topic at any time, and with no particular criteria for when it is valid to do so -- it is always valid to do so, under that statement.
Thus, I asked for clarification -- it sounds like there are no possible objective standards for the lawmaking process in your formulation above; any law or policy can be revisited at any time, and without any objective criteria that leaves purely emotional arguments and whoever successfully gathers a bigger band of followers to their side as the main determining factor in what policy we get.
Why insist on broadening the premise with "regular people like us" and "we the people". If your message is potent you wouldn't need to try to speak for a crowd.
I don't need protection from those supposed forces. In a functioning market economy - which essentially all developed nations possess - I can easily control what food I consume and I can easily control whether I gamble or not. That was true for the years when I was poor as an adult and it was true for my parents who were lower middle class / poor while I was growing up.
I don't personally like prostitution, and it should absolutely be legal.
I don't personally like cocaine or marijuana, and they both should be legal.
I don't personally like late-term abortion, and late-term abortion should absolutely be legal.
I find it disgusting when people glug glug glug 72 gallons of soda while they sit there 250 pounds overweight. It's grotesque. And they should absolutely be allowed to do it. It is a freedom issue.
It's either their body or it isn't. The same goes for abortion as it does what food you get to consume and whether you get to sleep with prostitutes, snort cocaine or gamble (with your brain/body and the money from your labor).
Who does your body belong to?
The moment you start dictating that the state owns your body and what you can do with it, you have started down the path of authoritarianism (whether fascism or other). You'd have to have an extreme authoritarian society, to follow your premise to its logical conclusion in terms of what it implies about the culture and the restraints to be imposed.
Economically, there are major differences in who pays them, There are differences in impact/cost. There are also huge moral differences between subsidizing desired behavior, and penalizing undesirable behavior.
But using programs like these just turn the most vulnerable into revenue for the state -creating wild conflicts of interest. Additionally these types of revenues tend to replace other sources of funding rather than supplement.
Like sports betting I know that lottery players skew low income - making the state effectively tax low income households at a higher rate.
The cat is out of the bag with sports betting, any teenager can open up a Bovada account with no verification.
I’m happy to talk about advertising and reasonable regulation but banning sports betting at this point seems silly.
What sort of stuff are they pulling? Like sending down a five dollar cocktail to keep someone spending 20 bucks a hand at the craps table?
However, they aren't wrong. They do in fact make about 50% more than he does just working part time on weekends.
That goes for gambling, smoking, prostitution, drinking, drugs, et al.
Education, therapy and taxation are about the only things that have been shown to work reasonably (eg not spurring massive crime outcomes) to introduce effective limiting forces or properly respond to the consequences of excess.
Outlawing gambling is just as insane as outlawing alcohol, smoking, drug use.
The last time our great minds were put to a task that most people agree bettered humanity was in the 60s, when working as a government scientist in the space program was considered the best job you could get.
That way gamblers can continue to bet their betting-coins like crazy, show off their big wins, and maybe even exchange large amounts of "earnings" for non-cash prizes, arcade style, depending on what the betting platforms decide to offer to the market. However, win or lose, there must never be a way to top up or increase token wins by spending more money on said platforms.
Edit: Maybe, with effective regulation ensuring gamblers cannot open (and thus spend) more than X simultaneous gambling subscriptions across the market, large betting-token earnings could be allowed to be exchanged for cash prizes, to the extent the gambling platform may consider it profitable. Of course by its very nature this would make top cash winnings orders of magnitude lower than when betting actual money, given the flat income stream. But that would itself be the point, providing no incentive for gambling business to encourage addiction for greater profits.
I think this would result in some sort of credit score, which would be used by countless institutions. At least people wouldn't be able to hide it from their family. When a person wins the lottery, their name is supposed to be public although there's ways around this.
Obviously, it would create a black market for anonymous gambling, and lots of people would use an intermediary.
This is mostly nonsense
There is a healthy argument going on with compelling points on both sides about the tradeoff between freedom (spending your own money how you please) and social harm reduction (preventing people from ruining their lives). You can look at another of my comments in the thread above this, I take a pretty clear position on the matter.
My statement wasn't that none of that stuff is important, my statement is that gambling is unequivocally bad for the sports themselves and goes against the spirit of sporting regardless of its broader harm to society. I'm saying, there is no strong argument that gambling is good for the spirit of competition in sporting; there is no such debate. Unlike the broader topic.
While I have found few people to think this acceptable, I believe it better than the wanton passing of social laws to appease a voter base in order to keep a job. (How many people did DOMA[0] practically harm in order to appease the metaphysical sensitivities of a majority of voters)
Laws should be to prevent[dissuade] harm __to others__. If someone wants to recklessly use drugs, then we have laws that punish them for the harm they did to others, with an added under-the-influence charge. There is no reason to punish a consenting adult doing no harm to another, only possibly themself. The problem with this, is politicians don't get re-elected for creating education and other services that would help those addicted/using it to escape their life or those with trauma/mental instability inflicting trauma on others. But using "moral" arguments to rile up majority population voting bases is low hanging fruit; which the system rewards one for going after. Laws that are publicly passed are usually done by exploiting the emotions of group-type majorities. instead of using funds on analysts to find the current emotional trigger to poke, use it to find the best ways to help those that are a higher risk to cause harm towards others (ie, addicts, mental health - including those with trauma that are not as easy to treat with medication and basic security needs). And honestly, I find it unethical to exploit a persons personal faith for job security.
At some point people have to take responsibility for themselves, their actions, and stay out of your neighbor's business until your neighbor begins harming other humans (whether in their house or outside of it). Laws don't prevent harm to others, they establish (or should only establish) societal time-outs(rehabilitation) and damage/cost/etc retribution/repayment (the word I want to use escapes me in describing this exactly), the same way police are law _enforcement_ officers, not crime prevention psychics.
TL;DR: "The right to swing my arms in any direction ends where your nose begins." (This also encompasses the non-physical assault or harm - stealing etc)
However, if you want to gamble, more power to you. However, I don't want protection enforced by the government here. I want the government to protect the air, water, military, forces of nature, etc. I do not want them regulating and optimizing every facet of my life.
Drinking is objectively a drain on society, but you can see how well banning that in America went.
You know why you think like this? Because you are, by accident, on the side which benefits most of libertarianism.
You really think a human becomes homeless because of 'poor life choices'? No. They become homeless because they never got a chance, have neurological issues, bad parents, bad upbringing, whatever.
Its a lot easier to be a libertarian when you won the birth lottery... Man you are ignorant
Guessing that is "disposable" income. Sad when you think of people doing the same thing for whom their income is not disposable.
Also the local conscience store I frequented at one job in newton, the owner put up a sign saying “people here have won $500,000 in the lottery last year”. I noted that seemed like a lot, she looked at me and said, I know what they spend, it’s not a lot, then proceeded to go on a little talk about gambling being bad. When another customer came in that ended. I bought my snack and moved on.
That said, I’ll loose 100$ every couple years gambling in person. I do enjoy it as entertainment. I can’t see how it’s enjoyable online though..
When you win something, it’s a little thrill. I can see how it can overwhelm you.
Also people only tell stories of “winning”. It rare to hear the loosing stories.
No one said that, and it's a very extreme interpretation of the comment you're replying to
> you have started down the path of authoritarianism
That's an example of the fallacy of infinite progression - that a societal trend will continue forever once started
In a complex system like a society, it's perfectly possible for a trend for e.g. regulation of the personal sphere to give rise to countervailing forces that end up in a steady state
There are plenty of societies e.g. the Nordic states, that have much higher regulation than the USA, yet have remained stable for decades and show no sign of descending into authoritarianism
I did speak of people who enjoy wine (that contains alcohol) and don't have an alcohol problem. Their enjoyment of wine is not ruined by winos on the curb drinking out of paper bags.
I used to date someone whose father had a rather severe gambling addiction, and this is exactly what kept him coming back. When he talked about it, it was clear that what he was hooked on was the feeling of being a winner. Someone surprising you with a free drink and telling you it's because you're part of an exclusive club for winners gives some people that feeling even when they're objectively losing.
And that is the textbook definition confidence artistry: tricking people into thinking you're their special friend as a means to extract money from them.
Nicely put
I took a marketing class in the course of my CS degree, and my main takeaway was that a lot of marketers are aliens in people suits. Their ethics and priorities are utterly disconnected from anything human.
You really start to understand how e.g. IBM could knowingly and cheerfully supply the Nazis with the punchcard hardware they needed to keep the Holocaust running smoothly. The client's satisfaction is the only relevant criterion. "But they're killing millions of people" will be met with the same blank, uncomprehending stare as "But the paint you chose clashes with my sweater."
I don't want to outlaw gambling as such but I think it needs to be far more strictly regulated because gambling corporations massively exploit people and the industry borders on scamming.
If the person loses their first bet, and it's against another player, then not only have they potentially hooked in a new player but they also rewarded an active user.
If the person loses their first bet and it's against the house then they just attracted a potential new player while paying $0.
I am calling bullshit here. There's a popular narrative that we've somehow hacked the code of the human brain and can program people to do anything we want, against their will. Nonsense. The best you can do is move the needle a few percentage points across a statistically large number of humans. This is not something to worry about.
Pretty well.
> To me it sounds like everywhere, once limitations to the flow of global capital are dropped.
Its a matter of degree, hence "maximalism". Just look at investment capital stats. There is a pretty objective way to confirm that money moves faster and in greater volume into new private industries in the U.S. The only foreign investment arms that come close are multinational conglomerates or authoritarian governments.
> The capital vultures did not swoop in to provide full services to women and blacks until the laws changed, even though providing those services was legal.
...how much profit do you think there was to be made off of people who were previously blocked from capital accumulation?
>Take away the control and the lobbying is pointless.
This social anarcho-darwinism nonsense doesn't refute my point that you are susceptible to influence and coercion.
You cannot "protect" yourself as the previous poster baselessly asserted.
> This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry
ive been fiercely libertarian most of my life but, like you, im starting to realize its just not practical.
libertarianism made sense 100 years ago; you still needed a limited but powerful government to monopoly bust, but the consumer was close enough to the source of all information. smart people could invent products and whole industries from the ground up. you could know whats going on.
this is no longer the case. god help me for the pseudomarxist thing im about to say (and believe), but individual people are helplessly separated from the source; everything is insulated by layers of abstraction. the gift of reduced margin via capitalism and globalisation has cursed us with powerlessness.
how many information wars are you prepared to fight? teflon, ddt, pfoas, bpa, bpb, bps, bpf, bpaf, lead, asbestos, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, psychedelics, birth control, opioids, hormones, climate change, plastic waste, electronic waste, landfilling, recycling, antibiotics, urban planning, housing development, GMO food, monocropping, wastewater, topsoil, algae blooms, overfishing, deforestation, AGI, LLM, ad tech, social media, diet (sugar, cholesterol, fat), msg, processed foods, radiation (cellular, microwave, electromagnetic power lines), conflict minerals, 3rd world labor and global supply chains, slavery (theres 10s of millions of literal slaves in the world, remember?), human trafficking, israel and palestine, north korea, china, Uyghurs, russia and ukraine, ongoing gender apartheid in parts of the middle east, war torn africa, local state and federal politics.
plus the hundreds i didnt think of and the thousands i dont know i need to care about.
The most addictive item on that list by a long shot is almost certainly nicotine, but even then, there are people who maybe have a cigar on special occasions every couple of years, but otherwise don't smoke.
Black-and-white thinking is a plague on modern society.
You mean, by starting a big casino, hiring thousands of people, advertising all over, etc.? A small investment like that?
> The best you can do is move the needle a few percentage points across a statistically large number of humans.
That may be true, but a "few percentage points" is enough to create enormous profits, if you do what I said above. Giving the house a 54% advantage instead of 51% makes a big, big difference.
The idea that governments may not be able to (completely?) protect people does not invalidate the the idea that people cannot protect themselves.
There is one and only one limit on freedom which I believe in: when one individual (or group) begins to infringe the freedoms of others.
The problem which I see in a lot of ideologies which purport to value freedom, is a naive idea that government is the only organization which can infringe on individual freedoms, and this is blatantly and obviously false. Corporations and religious organizations can and do infringe individual freedoms all the time, and a society which fails to address this problem becomes less and less free as these organizations become the de-facto oligarchy.
We don't need to set aside our belief in freedom to fight against these organizations, and I think when we do that, we're making a huge concession we don't need to make. Casinos and advertisers manipulating people to take their money and provide little value in return absolutely is a freedom issue: casinos and advertisers are manipulating us to give up the freedoms money allows us. When we make concessions like,
> This isn't some "freedom" issue
I think we lose a lot of the people who care about freedom, when we could be explaining to those people how these companies infringe their freedoms.
Of course there is logic and standards. Such as my logic that sports betting on individual plays is more conducive to corruption and more numerous than whole-game outcomes, thus more appropriate for regulation.
The constitution was written in the aftermath of a might-makes-right event called a war. Among other things, it puts in place certain rules more protected than others, to add some order to the chaos and protect minoruty interests.
With Sports gambling the entertainment doesn't come from actually placing the bet, it comes from watching the game that now has higher stakes.
My main gripe is that it seems like a strangely weird place to decide where we need protection.
I would think a similar article could be written about, just off the top of my head:
* Junk food
* Participating in dangerous sports (Football, Boxing, etc)
* All forms of gambling
* Alcohol, cigarettes
* Pornography
All of which are also dangerous, potentially addictive, and probably has a larger net negative impact than sports gambling.
What principles could be adopted to not turn this into a larger and larger bureaucracy that decides which of these industries gets preferential treatment over another?
I know myself, and I know if I gambled on my one sport where I follow one team, it would ruin the game for me. I would no longer watch for the intricacies of the game. I get worked up enough without the extra dopamine hits of gambling added into the mix. I hate the fact that half the advertisements are now for a product that ruins lives. My kids are being target with gambling ads when they watch with me.
These are still my old college roommates. Not good friends though. More like drinking buddies. And that's okay. I don't hop on airplanes to go see them anymore because I can get the same quality of interaction from our text message group. I'm at a place in life where I value deeper human connection, and its not there anymore.
That's all on me. I know plenty of people content to watch sports all weekend, with or without gambling. Good for them. It's just not my thing, and both perspectives can coexist just fine. One doesn't invalidate the other.
> You’re negative here — and I think you know it. > you have issues with this topic.
I absolutely have issues with this topic. It's a cancer on society, as the article confirms.
Some in people can gamble and not ruin their lives. Same with drinking. If you are one of those who can moderate in dopamine fueled areas of life, congrats. I can't, so I chose not to participate.
Its basically the same as smoking/vaping for me. Allow people their choice. It should be illegal to market it in 'cool' / 'sexy' ways, which is what I am seeing in todays advertising.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/348346/coercion-by-...
How about evidence based policy? We've seen what happens with drug prohibition and we've seen what happens with gambling prohibition. The former leads to an extensive underworld and tons of negative consequences but the latter wasn't nearly as bad.
What were the downsides of the prohibition on sports gambling? How many fewer people lost their savings to a blackmarket bookie versus the number of people who lose money now on the easily accessible mobile apps? I struggle to think of any net-negative effects of the prohibition on gambling - all the negative effects of gambling get worse when it's legalized.
I will never forget the day in fifth grade when a DARE representative came to our class with a briefcase full of samples of esoteric (to me at least) drugs. The way they were presented made them extremely appealing to me, similar to perusing the choices at a high-end candy store. I don't know for sure if this had any effect on me but I strongly suspect that it did.
If I don't, then the bookmaker is powerless as regards my money.
If I do, then I also gain some power over the bookmaker's money.
I don't expect many to see it the same way. Most people are more concerned than I am with the problems suffered by those whose decision making does not interact well with the existence of the gambling industry. Given their concerns, it is understandable that they wouldn't share my perspective.
It's done recreationally, costs money, costs time, can cause injuries and joint problems, and is not productive. There are health benefits, but nothing that can't be had by much safer and less costly means of exercise.
That just sounds like a hypothesis (ie unfounded conjecture). Meanwhile, the counterclaim at least has a basis in empirical results. We should craft policy based on how people actually behave, not in how we wish they did.
I get that HN skews towards libertarian. My issue is that that the libertarian idea of how people operate is an idealist’s fantasy and not rooted in the real world.
Insurance companies work the same way.
EDIT:
There was a study that came out a month ago that showed that state by state when online sports betting became legal, there was about a $20/month reduction in retirement investments. Considering only ~12-20% of the population has taken part in sports betting, this is not an insignificant reduction in retirement investments.
Parent is dramatizing it, and one event probably wouldn't make _that_ much of a difference in life outcome, but I think there's a valuable lesson here. The dad was gambling.
That might be the best solution to gambling. At least in Canada, casinos are very well advertised and glamorized. They're often run by the government, but they still market themselves to attract customers in a way you wouldn't expect of say, a safe opioid consumption site. Their slot machines are just as addictive. Sure, there's lip service paid to preventing gambling addiction, eg a piece of paper on the wall instructing patrons to play responsibly. But if we took the same attitude towards it as we do to tobacco, it might just fade away without all the downsides of prohibition.
It is unfair and unjust to punish someone based on probabilities. A innocent person should not be treated like a criminal. A free person shouldn't be treated like a prisoner or a slave.
The government has no authority to punish citizens because they might commit a crime. Citizens are subject to the rule of law. But in exchange for compliance to the laws, we expect a fair and just treatment under that law. That is the contract.
Regarding "everyone knows" - right! Does "everyone know" this about sports betting apps? If no, then they should. If yes, then no problem requiring unambiguous disclosures.
this can also be spun in a positive way: if that does ever happen, the bookies are literally forcing someone to quit when they are ahead! isn't that considerate of them.
unfortunately, i think sports betting platforms just have many strong arguments that controlling bet sizes in this way is fine.
They're predicted to profit more than $400 million in 2025.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/draftkings-inc-nasdaq-dkng-br...
Somewhat like Amazon in its early days, their lack of profits was mostly because they were investing their money into growing the company. DraftKings spends hundreds of dollars to acquire each customer.
Humans are weak and easy to manipulate, and some more so than others. It seems like the question is always about the degree to which the governments ought to intervene to protect us from each other...and ourselves.
- a recognition that humans have exploits, we're not rational automatons. The power/resource asymmetries in a lot of these industries make it fundamentally "unfair" to model this like we would rational utility maximizers
- evaluate these things in terms of societal harm
That being said, yeah junk food should absolutely be regulated the industry is killing and crippling millions of people right now
The state can of course, claim that no one should be gambling on sports anyways, so its not a problem that people lose access, just as it can with any other vice. People who have no interest in sports gambling would of course, not care either way.
If there is no value assigned to having the freedom, in and of itself, then of course, banning anything becomes trivial.
I think under this criteria, as long as we can have an "effective" ban (ie: no black markets are created) on anything that is not healthy for people to participate in, it would be worth banning.
So basically, anything that is unhealthy, but not yet banned, is only allowed because the state cannot yet find an effective way to ban it.
Of course the entire business is built on creating the belief that a user can make a ton of money. Due to this mechanic, this is an actual lie.
> D.A.R.E.’s original curriculum was not shaped by prevention specialists but by police officers and teachers in Los Angeles. They started D.A.R.E. in 1983 to curb the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco among teens and to improve community–police relations. Fueled by word of mouth, the program quickly spread to 75 percent of U.S. schools.
> But for over a decade research cast doubt on the program’s benefits. The Department of Justice funded the first national study of D.A.R.E. and the results, made public in 1994, showed only small short-term reductions in participants’ use of tobacco—but not alcohol or marijuana. A 2009 report by Justice referred to 30 subsequent evaluations that also found no significant long-term improvement in teen substance abuse.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-d-a-r-e-p...
> Launched in 1983, D.A.R.E. was taught by police officers in classrooms nationwide. Their presentations warned students about the dangers of substance use and told kids to say no to drugs. It was a message that was repeated in PSAs and cheesy songs. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan even made it one of her major causes.
> Teaching drug abstinence remains popular among some groups, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's messaging to teenagers still focuses on the goal that they should be "drug-free." But numerous studies published in the 1990s and early 2000s concluded programs like D.A.R.E. had no significant impact on drug use. And one study actually found a slight uptick in drug use among suburban students after participation in D.A.R.E.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211217460/fentanyl-drug-educ...
You are raising an interesting question there. I always wondered why in US many things have to be either Yes or Now, Good or Bad, Black or White, Left or Right, Up or Down and so on.
No (or very few) things, opinions or anything in between.
This isn’t a good argument. Cannabis is harmless in adults that it’s harmless in. However, there’s a percentage of the population that has strong, adverse reactions to cannabis. Some of these can be life altering, requiring treatment to correct or mitigate.
The problem with cannabis is you can’t predict if any single person will be susceptible to negative outcomes until they have that negative outcome.
I don't even want to go into the proven CIA and FBI complicity in drug trafficking in the name of stopping "illegal" opiates or all the people in jail for using "illegal" opiates.
Sure, opiates cause suffering. Its just mostly at the hands of a supranational cartel that we are part of. We aren't even allowed to grow the same plant in the US for seeds that many nations eat as a staple food. However, the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to grow or buy opium from India, Turkey, and Australia and sell millions of derivative opiate pills around the world. But, me being able to grow a handful of plants to produce my own pain medicine or domestic commercial production is the height of evil.
If we were all allowed to produce opium personally or commercially we would effectively end the reasons for illegal opiate importers to exist, create jobs for our own people, and remove an immense amount of power from the UN and pharmaceutical companies. We would also remove the need for military adventurism in places like Afghanistan and Myanmar. As an aside, opium production in Afghanistan increased from 82,000ha to 233,000ha during US occupation, which I choose to believe was, mostly because we didn't care and the Taliban had been destroying opium crops.
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bu...
That doesn’t mean that corporations should have the freedom to exploit society for profit while being a total net-negative. Enabling a vice in the name of "freedom" isn’t a virtue.
A little black market gambling is completely fine as long as the bookie is the one committing crimes and not their customers.
Are both illegal, because of the risk they pose.
One of the more challenging things with cannabis is it can trigger people who are more predisposed to issues. Some of these things can stick around for a while, after an initial incident. Compared to something, like alcohol, cannabis based issues don’t only affect heavy or long term users. You might just be the unlucky person that cannabis doesn’t jive with.
That being said, I think she largely thinks legal cannabis is good. She’s seen recovered alcoholics who’ve turned to cannabis as their outlet without killing their liver and destroying their body.
However, acting like there are no risks to cannabis is not helping anyone.
But turbocharged advertising and online “engagement” and “monetization” hyper-optimization by unscrupulous growth hacker types who heavily optimize for excessive and reckless gambling by targeting, with malice aforethought, people with issues and aggressively try to recruit new people into a risky activity seems maybe even worse?
How about door #3: keep it legal to avoid most or all of the downsides of prohibition, and absolutely fuck up the profitability of hyper marketing it?
So many problems have plausible if not compelling solutions if you always care more about the welfare of the vulnerable than anyone, anywhere, who is getting shit rich by doing harm.
It took a long time, but we finally took the gloves off with Big Tobacco. You can still buy cigarettes, but you so rarely see them anymore. Even I gave up (which I swore I’d never do) because it’s just impossible to smoke most places, they’re not sold everywhere anymore, and it’s expensive as hell.
There will always be diehard smokers, but it’s not the crisis it once was and you still don’t have drug dealers involved.
How is this not the playbook?
I've always found it very striking when the sports team jersey sponsers are betting companies.
It'd result in more people eating better though (instead of just eating slightly less worse, or eating worse differently while still not getting enough healthy food) and so there'd also be savings in the cost of health care and improvements in productivity.
Where do we stop? Drugs? Medication? News? Elections?
People choose bad things all the time. Thinking you know better is how you end up banning alcohol because it's obviously a terrible vice.
I'd rather we have the gambling.
I would have been in deep trouble with an appified, gamified, psychologically addicting betting app on my phone offering me free bets to log in again. I had a hard enough time breaking away from phone gatcha shit that I would mindlessly click while sitting on the couch.
* Deposit limits, per day/week/etc to limit the damage someone could do and also to limit money laundering. This could be self imposed or regulator imposed.
* Withdrawal limits. This was mostly to limit money laundering.
* Wager limits, per event/day/etc
* Self exclusion for a certain time period or forever. This kept people from using our stuff to make bets based on our best efforts to identify them. Sometimes we had a government ID, sometimes we didn't.
* Other exclusions, i.e. blacklisting for things like not paying child support.
* Geofencing to prevent people from using our app outside of the legal jurisdictions. Also, geofencing to only allow people to register for our apps in certain locations, such as a casino. That could easily be extended to prevent people from using the apps outside of a casino, but I don't think that was required anywhere.
These things are technically possible and would greatly help if required globally, short of an outright ban.
Gambling is one of the worst addictions one can acquire (no health drawbacks) and unfortunately young men seem more predisposed to such dopamine hits. I think it is one of the more less seen issues that is growing today. At least going to a casino is a friction point and optimizing for a one click app is probably not good. Perhaps we should cut it off before yet another insanely powerful lobby that feeds on addiction grows and can't be stopped. It seems the boulder is already rolling down the hill though.
Look at what happened with Robinhood when they made trading feel like a game and removed fees. That $10 commission used to make people stop and think, even for just a second. Now, there are tons of young guys who’ve lost a lot, if not everything, but we don't hear about them. My younger brother and his high school friends are literally counting down the days until they turn 18 so they can get on Robinhood, hoping to get rich like people did with Gamestop. Maybe we could have a higher age limit like 24 or something because the real issue is the youth who are prone to sabotaging themselves.
While it might seem like a weird place to draw a protective line, but I don't know, I'm sure many people today would want protections for half the stuff you mentioned if our congress was actually functional. I'd say we have to start somewhere and online gambling is definitely a behavior that is not worth optimizing our access to. If we know people are vulnerable to this stuff psychologically, why put more potholes that people can fall into? Are we really doing this just to build another multi-billion dollar industry that leeches off regular people? Let them go to a casino when they’ve saved up a couple hundred bucks for a fun night, not blow $100 in their car during a 10-minute shift break.
Anyway just my thoughts happy to hear counters, we could just allow people to make their own decisions but can anyone make the argument that overall society has the discipline to turn easy sports betting into a net positive? Perhaps but hey we can bet on it. :)
Regulated in many places. Some Energy drinks are frequently banned from sale to minors. Nutrition labeling is required. Taxed at different rates than other foods in some places.
> * Participating in dangerous sports (Football, Boxing, etc)
Professional boxing matches are heavily regulated. Doctors have to be onsite for most bouts. Helmets are extensively tested, and there are rules at all levels about safe and unsafe hits.
> * All forms of gambling
Deeply regulated, down to what games can be played, who can work in a Casino, how they can advertise, what happens if there is a dispute. Etc.
> * Alcohol, cigarettes
Again, deeply regulated. Age restricted. Courts can monitor your alcohol intake if you get in trouble. You have to have a license to serve alcohol in some jurisdictions. Manufacturing alcohol has a licensing process that takes years in most places. You can be held liable for what happens if you overserve someone. Cigarettes can't really be advertised in the US anymore. In Canada, the actual nicotine product is not allowed to be displayed at retail outlets.
> * Pornography
Extensive recordkeeping requirements. Hardly ever advertised. Age and ID restrictions.
You basically listed some of the most restricted and regulated products. Many of them are required to com with warnings about the dangers of using them, and can't be advertised to general audiences.
You won't see former sports stars taking a puff on a nice smooth Lucky Strike and telling you all about the tobacco curing process at half-time on the broadcast. But you will certainly see that same sport star breaking down the odds, and the bonuses that new customers get on that show.
But making it a flashy app is really what seems to drive meme investing.
I was buying stocks and mutual funds on Schwab for years before RH came along, but it was boring (as investing should be).
Even if you’ve convinced yourself that being able to ruin one’s own life is a sign of a society with Great Freedom, you might be willing to oppose other people profiting from urging people to ruin their lives.
A shooting range I used to go to would not rent to unaccompanied men. They had to be members and take a class at least, or be in a group, or bring their own guns. This was to prevent impulsive suicides. Maybe if you want to keep any kind of gambling on sports, you should have to go to a sports book with your pals and watch some games together.
Putting the casino in your pocket feels like a social suicide.
you are either being hyperbolic, you are irrationally ideological, or you haven't thought about this enough.
surely you don't think that people should be allowed to have nuclear explosives in their house because until they have actually used them they haven't actually committed a crime yet. different people can have different ideas on where that line is but you must acknowledge that it exists.
So criticizing the concept of vice on the grounds that "everything that's fun is a vice" is somewhat of a semantic strawman - you're criticizing the word by changing its meaning.
Since many of you have commented about regulation, check out the SAFE Bet Act https://tonko.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...
Also, the GRIT Act may bring much needed federal funding into the prevention and treatment system across the US. https://www.ncpgambling.org/advocacy/grit-act/
A lot of the points in the article are valid. I have two major issues with online sports betting (OSB) in the US.
1. Sports betting advertising before, during, and after games is horrendous. There is no way to watch sports without being bombarded. Obviously, this is a huge issue for problem gamblers. Sports become unwatchable.
2. Self-exclusion is impossible. There's 40+ sports betting apps available. There is no centralized body a person can say "hey don't let me bet anymore" and then be automatically restricted from betting across all apps. This is something I think we can help with in the near future.
So what can be done now? I don't think OSB is going to be redeclared illegal. I don't think that would be a good idea either. Millions of people have started sports betting. If it becomes illegal, it won't make them stop.
Happy to discuss this further. Email is in my profile.
Still, the portfolio is public knowledge, so we can also verify what they say. In this case a stopped watch is still right sometimes.
It’s hard to make an argument that making murder illegal was a net harm to society. It’s really easy to make that argument with vices, in fact any history book probably will in the section on prohibition.
Sports betting is not any more insidious than any other type of gambling. Even if legalizing it has increased the amount of sports betting, which likely it has, we don’t know that it has increased the overall amount of gambling, and we certainly don’t know that it has increased the overall amount of societal harm from gambling, no matter how many great anecdotes we get from newspaper articles.
Perhaps people have simply switched from the lottery or slot machines to sports betting. Perhaps some are better off because sports betting has a much lower house edge than the lottery or a lot of other forms of gambling.
I could tell you for sure there is a whole lot of illegal sports betting going on, or at least there was. There is a seedy black market that I would be willing to bet has been largely destroyed by the ability to Gamble from your phone. (I’m far too removed from it these days to have any firsthand knowledge of the current situation.)
I can also tell you about the negative impact that gambling laws have on the lives of non-problem gamblers, myself included.
People always reflexively follow the train of logic: vice bad, make vice illegal. It failed when we made alcohol illegal, the war on drugs has been disastrous for the poor, far worse than the drugs we were fighting, and there’s not much evidence to believe it even significantly reduced drug use. The idea that any vice being illegal creates an overall harm reduction has pretty much been shown time and time again to be incorrect, and yet everybody just believes it because it seems like common sense.
I disagree - I think it would be a great idea. While some may argue that gambling is a zero-sum game (which isn't exactly great, in and of itself), it's really a net loss. While some people may win a bit of money, I'd argue that the degree to which their lives are improved is much less than the degree that some others' lives are destroyed. Gambling, ultimately, being a negative sum.
> Millions of people have started sports betting. If it becomes illegal, it won't make them stop
I disagree with this too. It's substantially easier for any random person to simply tap a few buttons on their phone to place a bet than to find and arrange opportunities with others to bet on sports or visit a brick & mortar betting site. The level of effort of placing a phone bet is so small (and with 24/7 access), you'd have a very hard time arguing that making OSB illegal would only marginally impact the amount of sports gambling taking place.
Bottom line: gambling is an addictive activity for all people and some more so than others. Limiting access to it will have a positive impact on pretty much everyone who does't own or work at a gambling company.
And not sure where you sit on this, but for me personally, gambling ads cross a line as gambling has major negative effects to public well-being, especially to those who are the most financially in need.
"Offshore sportsbooks" are another thing to consider. These companies are not regulated in the US market, but still take online bets from people in the US. The ease of placing bets online does not go away with making OSB illegal. Just eliminates any consumer protection we could have had.
Combatting vices with prohibition fails over and over, badly, and yet people can’t get past the “common sense” idea that it’s an overall harm reduction no matter how many times they see proof that it isn’t.
A much more surgical approach is called for.
You can make these kind of consequentialist arguments anyway. It's worthwhile discussion. But the legal decision itself wasn't made on a consequentialist basis. The court didn't decide PASPA was illegal because it was socially bad and we'd have a better world without it. The proposed "just ban it outright everywhere" can't happen under the current legal regime. It's fine to propose things that can't happen but we should acknowledge this becomes a hypothetical discussion.
And even if we look just at under-age audiences, a ban for them make sense, since that for a decent-sized portion of teenage boys, sports is an obsession. Having them pummeled by sports-betting ads at an age when they are often exploring new things is probably not a good idea, as it will make betting (and for some of these, betting addiction) a part of their lives while they are young.
Is it fair to say that's part of American culture then? Very few people are involved in making new private industries, and the regulatory systems don't seem well aligned with the general culture.
> how much profit
How much profit would have been lost if a company was public about supporting blacks and upsetting the white supremacist culture of the time?
That's why I say you can't really disentangle culture and regulation.
this sounds interesting, can you share any other examples?
As a professional bettor, you're not really outsmarting the sportsbook—you’re trying to outsmart the public. The key is finding moments where the crowd is wrong enough that betting the other side makes sense, even with the sportsbook’s fees. That means you’ll often skip betting when the odds are pretty accurate.
Most sportsbooks will limit how much you can bet if you're too successful, but they usually won’t ban you outright.
>CCP COMMITS GENOCIDE AGAINST UIGHUR MUSLIMS XINJIANG
wow, you seem to really know what you're talking about!
> It seems like the question is always about the degree to which the governments ought to intervene to protect us from each other...and ourselves.
Of course. That's why I defined the degree I was advocating for
Are you making that argument by accident, because you felt compelled to nitpick some word choices, or do you seriously believe that?
The Hong Kong horse race track was a famous example of market-priced bets where the book was run the way you said and the crowd was exploitable in the way you are suggesting. It was one of the last books to work that way.
I think so.
> How much profit would have been lost if a company was public about supporting blacks and upsetting the white supremacist culture of the time?
In the 1970s? No idea. I didn't have a well formed brain until the 2000s.
> That's why I say you can't really disentangle culture and regulation.
Definitely. One depends on the other, and our commercial maximalist culture is reflected in our laws.
It is true that the casinos will find a way to ban people who find an advantage in traditional games like blackjack (think card counting), but that's different. In sports gambling, the profit is extracted with the vig/spread.
Maybe cars are sane analogy. You need to pass all kinds of testing and regulation to be allowed to drive a car or build and operate your own car, but only on public roads. You can in fact buy any kind of car you want or build one and operate it as you wish on your own property without any license. Even though cars can be used as dangerous and deadly weapons (terrorists use them on crowds all the time).
Yes, a line exists, that line is when you are engaging in privileged activity like driving, flying on a commercial plane or train, entering school property and such.
Maybe it might be productive if you used specific scenarios where you think allowing gambling would cause harm to others in and of itself, not as a side-effect (your nuke example is a direct effect).
It was a good learning experience for myself. My state does not have online gambling and I hope it stays that way.
It’s true with gambling too. You just likely haven’t seen the harm that happens because of it being illegal. Ever had a gun pointed at you over a game of poker? I have. Doesn’t happen online or in a casino. Ever met people who’ve been violently hurt because they couldn’t pay their gambling debts? I have. Draftkings or your bank aren’t out breaking knees.
Making it illegal does not make it go away. If you had been born into a world where alcohol was illegal for a long time, and then it were legal, you’d probably have the same opinion of that, but you know (because you were lucky to be born with the benefit of decades of hindsight) the world is less good that way. This is not different.
The harms of gambling can be mitigated much more effectively in ways other than prohibition. Regulation is always better than outright bans. Look at what we’ve done with cigarettes.
Making online betting legal was the right thing to do, it being illegal at all was the mistake, we just need to work on harm mitigation.
I just don’t even understand people who think vices should be illegal. I mean I do, their thought process is just overly simplistic and they don’t know what they don’t know, but there’s just so much evidence it is the worst possible solution and yet so many people can’t think past “it’s bad so it should be illegal”. Even intelligent people.
* If the thing you sell is addictive you cannot advertise it.
* The thing must clearly tell buyers it is an addictive product designed to extract money from you for the rest of your life.
* It should be taxed such that society can pay for the costs of the addiction.
* If it's gambling you can only wager low stakes. If it's food we need to draw the line on how much added sugar, salt, or other bullshit can be used to make food more addictive
<<The game industry lobby BURSTS through the wall like the kool-aid man to the parent post>>
The gambling institutions have some regulation as well.
I do think that gambling ads should be banned just like cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals.
USA and New Zealand are the only places that allow pharma ads and the public is uninformed to make that decision but the Agency problem means MDs will prescribe those drugs.
For a couple years you could make bank on MLS games simply because the odds were so broken you were almost guaranteed a good payout, it was mathematically impossible to lose money if you bet using multiple apps on the same games.
It does require the gun, but it doesn’t require that the gun get pulled out, because everyone knows the police WILL do so if you resist them. It’s implicit. The cop does have to be ready and willing to do so (contrary to your claim), or everyone would ignore the ban, as it would have no teeth.
People don’t obey laws that are inconvenient to them because of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because the police will draw down on them and force them if push comes to shove.
I think I felt disconnected from, and maybe above, gambling, so I had less sympathy for it happening in illegal ways. I think it was wrong to have less sympathy due to that, but I also think I was wrong to feel disconnected from gambling. I played MTG for years, which is in many ways just legal gambling, and I had to quit it completely to feel comfortable.
I don't know if I would have played if it were illegal, but I can understand what it would be like to do so.
I have seen people go into psychosis from weed. & no it wasn't laced. I have seen my gf's dad go from a non-smoker to rolling a blunt every hour. I have had friends drop out of college due to weed.
Maybe time to quit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Hard_Campaign_Against_V...
If that's not what you mean, can you help me understand what you're saying?
Our restaurant is almost certainly the cleanest in the neighborhood, which in Taiwan only a discerning customer would notice or care about. Other restaurants aren't filthy but they don't achieve the level of sterility we do.
We remember the names of most people who come in and call them by it when they return.
Hm what else. The fact that we let you choose between American "cheese" (what basically all taiwanese people think cheese is) and actual cheddar cheese if you order a bacon egg and cheese. We make our BEC on a pan with bacon grease and swap to the vegetarian pan sans bacon for vegetarians (non vegetarian restaurants in Taiwan wouldn't bother mostly). Etc.
The curling community is also pretty small, so even though I’m nowhere near pro-level, I overlap with some of them - would be disappointing if I couldn’t watch the events with curlers from my city/country.
Why, yes, that's a marvellous idea.
Betting your team will win the tournament has a very delayed reward: the game needs to play out for hours/minutes before you know if you have won. Only hardcore gamblers experience instant rewards and becoming a 'serious' sports gambler is no easy task: you have learn about the sport, then teams, the players, the outcomes, the time of the matches, etc. Cassinos, on the other hand, are just an app with a lever that provides instantaneous rewards and thus hook your brain with much more intensity in a shorter time span. A lot of people who don't care about sports or just won't be hooked by sports betting are now trapped in those online cassinos. It's a shame.
Jaywalking when being blinded by the sun is about as silly as you bringing it up to prove some point. Only a fool would do that, like someone who thinks they can beat a possibly rigged gambling system.
In Michigan this is part of the Responsible Gaming program. You can opt out for certain lengths of time and they will not let you back for any reason. It's on a per-casino basis though, not some global list.
You can also get restricted if you ever claim to support that you need the money, have to pay bills, can't wait on the withdraw, etc.
I made a mistake once, while upset at some promo conditions not being clear, that I was "counting" on it. I meant I was counting on using it to gamble more (lmao) but they thought I meant for bills and ended up having to go through a special process to get my account back.
Those who support unconstitutional overreaches by the federal government are perhaps not considering the unintended consequences of eroding the principle of governing in accordance with such constitutional limits. They ought to consider a type of government restriction that they oppose and find harmful, and consider how much worse it is when the federal government can nationalize it.
Second, once someone reaches the age of consent, they should be able to do things that run a high risk of ruining their lives. The only type of restriction that I could possibly see being justifiable for activity like this is on advertisements for such activity, which could be required to disclose risks and/or not communicate falsehoods.
You may have meant this facetiously, but just to be clear—there is no "need to" "keep up". I'm a software engineer making more than enough money and I still use budget Android phones for years at a time. We live in a world where corporations have persuaded people that they "need to" live beyond their means, but most things are still optional or doable with a budget version.
Sports gambling ads have become so pervasive that it’s hard to watch a game without being bombarded by manipulative promotions that say stuff like "BET $5, GET $200 INSTANTLY"...
I became a recreational sports bettor in college through offshore books. I always felt like I was doing something extremely dangerous and so was very careful - probably in large part because of the societal stigma surrounding sports betting. I feel like I benefited from having instilled in me a greater fear of gambling dangers that I wouldn't have now if I just started gambling after seeing all these prominent sports talking heads discussions, social media influencer promotions, and constant TV advertisements.
Trying stricter regulations feels like a no-brainer before totally reverting to a federal ban.
At a minimum, we should match the intensity of regulations for other legal vices: - National min. age of 21 for any state that legalizes sports betting, matching drinking regulations that were set 40 years ago. - Restrict advertising to audiences where you can confidently report that >70% of which are adults >= 21 years old, similar to recreational marijuana advertisement regulations in states like CA. - More intense warnings should follow each ad, clearly emphasizing the risks of addiction and the likelihood of financial loss, similar to the mandatory disclosures in prescription drug ads.
Additionally, for the unique vice of sports gambling and it's associated societal dangers, there should be: 1. More intense restrictions on ads: a. Clearly disclose all stipulations. For example, language like ‘BET $5, GET $200’ should be accompanied by fine print explaining that the bonus bet can’t be withdrawn, and any winnings must be wagered multiple times before withdrawal. b. Transparent statistics of users' outcomes at specific sports book. Something like: "Y% of our customers who have accepted a bonus bet have successfully turned it into real cash in their bank account. The remaining (100-Y)% lose it all." 2. Regulations on sports book's social media accounts promoting individual bettors' winnings - i.e. Sports books shouldn't be able to promote a story about someone winning $100k on a $1 20-team parlay. 3. Roadblocks, at a minimum, on betting losses for vulnerable groups -- e.g. after a bettor has lost X% of their initial deposit/yearly salary/net worth/etc, the bettor's account should be restricted in some way unless they say to a real person on the phone: "YES, I AM AWARE OF HOW MUCH MONEY I'VE LOST. I WISH TO RISK LOSING MORE MONEY." 4. A requirement that all bets be placed with money deposited via debit card/check/cash. A ban on taking on any kind of debt (like using a credit card to deposit funds into betting account) to place a bet seems reasonable.
However, unlike anarchy, any harm to human life is very costly (because value of human life is infinite!), for example: killing of someone, suicide, death because of incompetence or laziness, or self damage because of self medication, etc. are «sins» for libertarians.
I feel something similar, even though I never had a lesson like you did. I feel like I must be completely immune to gambling addiction because the thought that I could walk out of a casino with more money than I came in with is just unimaginable to me.
I hate it though the legalisation, especially since it turns out:it is as bad as they thought it was, no the companies do not do the required addiction checks and yes it ruins people's lives.
My overarching objection is that such laws are simply lazy. That laziness is infringing on people's liberties. Cigarettes are a good example, they shouldn't be outright banned as we both agree, but second-hand smoking should be banned as it affects others. I would even go as far as to say smokers should have higher premiums for the rest of their lives (I was one myself) when it comes to health insurance and such deliberate mishandling of your body might even cost you priority treatment for anything subsidized by the public. I am not against consequences at all.
I think like many legal issues, it boils down to what is "reasonable". If a "reasonable" person would find that possessing a nuke is an immediate danger to the public then of course possessing one doesn't amount to the government interfering in private lives. That is not the same as gambling and drug use, where the reason for restricting them is not an immediate concern of danger but an indirect and probabilistic anticipation of harm to others, which even if true, there are many other steps that can be taken to disincentivize or punish potential harmful interactions without outright restricting those things.
For example with drug use, it should only be allowed under medical supervision, when used outside of your own property. And as I stated earlier, gambling is bad financial decision making, so the fact that you are gambling and the details of your gambles should be made very public, so that others can steer clear of you as needed. It shouldn't be possible for a person to use a joint bank account to fund a gamble (to protect spouses and families), spouses should get notifications when their other half is gambling,etc.. That's hard and specific law making, instead of the lazy and unjust law making we have today.
The morals of society is directed by culture. The state does not and never have a monopoly on culture, because culture is embedded.
If a culture is against gambling, you need no regulation/laws at all. The daoist would argue that the need to have strict laws on behaviour is due to a deviant culture. As an aside the legalist argues that humans are evil, fickle and morally corrupt by default and need strict laws.
I'm just making shit up, but perhaps an Abrahamic culture needs salvation, thus it needs outlets of sin so that it generates demand for people to be saved.
That's not an iron-clad argument, as legal gambling can still have mob ties, and tacit permission of some illegal gambling might still permit some level of oversight. And of course, legal gambling doesn't ensure reasonable or effective oversight or regulation.
By establishing known, legal, and possibly even bettor-favourable facilities or systems, gaming becomes something which might have some level of oversight. The increase in online gambling does severely cut into this argument though.
Another challenge, in the U.S., comes in the form of reservation casinos which can operate independently of other state prohibitions on gambling, which means that total eradication is at the very least difficult.
But that is an argument which might be made in answer to your "why not just..." question.
(I'm generally not a fan of gambling in any of its various forms. I'm cognisant of its pervasiveness and some of the worse aspects of it.)
How are gambling sponsorships/ads not a conflict of interest?
Which arguably is as much a problem with income inequality as anything else, but the point is, gambling exacerbates existing social problems.
Also yes, a large enough majority of homeless people got so because of poor life choices that the minority that didn’t isn’t even worth bringing up.
You’re also entirely correct that some people are destined for more success than others due to predetermined factors. That’s absolutely fine.
Taxes and benefits are extremely unequal in their application.
Humans have been fighting against "chance" for the whole evolution (chance of starving if you don't catch something, chance of suffering if you take a bug, etc.). I fully agree, you should not feel responsible for it, but you should not like it (or thank it) either.
Though the pre-2018 situation was that personal (that is, not intermediated by a company) gambling was legal, which provided an out.
Again: I'm positing the argument, I'm not advocating for it. And it does appear to be counterfactual.
With only two choices for everything the country is set up for polarization.
Of course doing it in a way so it can't be tracked keeps the IRS ignorant, which is a big deal to many people
If you are successful in getting a majority of OSB companies to allow bets to be placed via your app, then I would think this would lead to the various odds and payouts all converging as price discovery becomes much simpler through one app. This would make OSB less profitable as an industry, right? I see this as a good thing, but then I think you’d run into issues with getting (the bigger) OSB companies pulling their API access from you so that they can’t be compared and bet on as easily.
Smart well-educated people get caught in the gambling trap too. Addiction and emotions are the issue, not knowledge of how the house always wins.
Not much different from other addictions - people know alcohol and smoking are bad yet they don't stop.
Maybe they just don't enjoy the sport: they could get better at it and still not like it.
You would love water ballet if you learnt the intricacies of it.
It's bad for the atmosphere too. There are people in the stands ignoring the match in front of them because they're checking bets on other games on their phone.
I’ll never understand the mentality of “please govern me harder daddy”. If someone wants to self destruct they’ll find a way to do so. Taking away something that millions of disciplined people also love while simultaneously setting a precedent to let the government tell you what to do seems like a foolish and slippery slope.
The most extreme example of cheating is sports theater, and even that has a fandom in the form of WWF.
So why not let the sports police themselves, and let the market decide whether they are doing a good job with their attention?
I don't care about sports, so I am asking from a naive position, but I from this position I can't fathom caring more about the sport than the people who compulsively wager on them, and destroy their lives.
You know, like wage stagnation in the face of skyrocketing real estate costs.
I think society can generally be against something, yet it succeed. Most people consider greed to be bad, but it's the foundation of capitalism. I'm not sure if most people would say gambling is wrong. (This survey, https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/blog/post/gambling-sur..., found only 41 of self-selected UK gamblers rated it positively.)
A democratic state should reflect the desired culture, if it doesn't it's not being democratic. Businesses can also do that, as can other organisations. Most businesses goals are aligned away from benefiting society in general; whilst a democratic state should be at least loosely aligned with that end (by definition).
Thanks for a thought provoking response.
A more modern example might be people's failure to plan for their financial future or to value critical thinking enough not to be persuaded by charismatic bad-actor shysters to do bad things
This isn't just a gambling problem, having your team tank to get top draft picks also sucks. But if you enjoy the sport, you probably enjoy it in a "may the best player/team win" way.
It sucks to realize your team lost because the other team cheated, and it sucks to realize your team lost because somebody threw. If I wanted to watch scripted drama, I would put on succession. Or wwf.
“hi, ancient people here. We learned this lesson hard over many iterations that gambling is bad, we are making a rule that you, future reader shouldn’t gamble or it will also result in your societal debt and likely contribute to your destruction too if you take on too many of the things we learned over millennia and many different civilizations and societies collapsing; and we wrapped it in nice allegories for so it appeals to your innate human proclivity to dream, imagine, and tell stories. Don’t say we didn’t want you!”
Unfortunately it seems our Digital Age civilization is hell bent on emulating its Bronze Age and Tower of Babel compatriots the way we are going.
I agree with your overall point, but this is incorrect. I'm pretty sure there is already a law that says they cannot have fake food in commercials, at least for restaurants. There have been articles explaining how they take a "stock" hamburger (ok, they call it a "sandwich", technically) and dress it up for the commercial. But the interesting part is that the food photographers are constrained to using only ingredients from the store, they cannot use paint or plastic to represent the food. One of the little details I remember was they would use a brush to draw the ketchup to one side of the bun to make it look like it was liberally applied. It's quite interesting how they achieve the final goal - even though it looks NOTHING like the product that is delivered to the consumer.
Many graphics showing how art was swallowed by entertainment which was swallowed by distraction which was swallowed by addiction which is what Silicon Valley wants.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-202...
Customer acquisition and retention is still hard. Especially when you're not the only gambling parlor in town. You're selling an addictive product which is extremely effective over a population but you don't have a moat to make sure they're addicted to specifically you.
But government and society don't care about a specific business, they're counting the number of people addicted by the industry in total.
This thread is fun because the kind of black and white thinking neuro-spicy internet commentator on HN doesn't have an intellectual framework that can capture why alcohol, cannabis, and Oxy might be allowable but not heroine. And then an analyze gambling and sports betting in that framework. It's why the arguments keep circling forever.
I have heard many people say things like this and I always wonder "Instead of dreaming about buying a winning lottery ticket, why don't they just dream about finding one?"
If you just gotta have a betting system because it helps quell the gambling anxiety or whatever, reverse martingale is fine. I made a video a long time ago about how it works[0] - but in essence, you only stand to lose your initial bet, and you have a bet schedule if you start winning. In "bet units" the way i do it is 1 unit until a win, then for each consecutive win: 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5 (etc). Everything after the first 3 unit bet is the casino's money you're gambling with, which is a good feeling. Note, this implies i consider each "round" that starts after a loss as separate from other rounds, obviously if you lose 20 times in a row and then win 3 games you're not suddenly in the green!
There's no system guaranteed to make you winner, but there are systems to help you lose more slowly, and reverse martingale is my go-to
Guess it's good my luck was terrible in Vegas or I might've inadvertently committed tax fraud. Though now I'm curious if I had won a few hundred dollars would there have been tax due?
I'm pretty sure it's tax free in most countries.
And then your costs have to be less than that.
Like any market, those with knowledge and power systematically enrich themselves by extracting wealth from those without.
If sports betting should be banned because it exploits those without wealth or knowledge, then other markets with many naive participants should also be banned, such as markets for stocks and crypto.
What kept Western Australia free from the gambling legalization mistake?
I strongly suspect that one element of legalisation is that it normalises the activity, which lowers all sorts of social and psychological barriers to participation.
Another is that it creates self-organised self-interest groups. This is actually a really great way to ensure the longevity of governmental programmes, with both positive and negative examples: welfare systems such as Social Security, Medicare, and the ACA in the US are all immensely popular with the elderly, a staunch voting block, to the extent that its general trend toward conservativism doesn't fully mute interest in social welfare. The military-industrial complex is another, and a recent discussion I'd heard of the Inflation Reduction Act highlighted the constituencies built in to support it even in deep-red southern US states.
In the case of legalisation of gambling, drugs, and sex work, what had previously been the purview of criminal gangs now becomes "ordinary business" (though the thought occurs that the distinction between the two may be less than is commonly understood). To the extent that established businesses prove to be highly effective at defending even the most indefensible of practices (tobacco, alcohol, asbestos, lead, plastics, fossil fuels) is well established, and the risks of that path should be strongly considered.
Another option is to decriminalise rather than legalise a practice, but focus on policing the most problematic elements of the practice. That might be the provider side (as with drugs and gambling) or the consumer side (as with sex work, targeting johns), or on going up-market and tightly limiting or prohibiting private aggregators (e.g., pimps, drug lords) rather than focusing on low-level actors (streetwalkers, individual workers, street crews within drug operations).
State-operated operations (gambling, lotteries, alcohol and tobacco sales, drug distribution *with integrated treatment), is another option, though it too isn't a surefire solution. My view is that lottery programmes in the US are out of control and a net negative, though in part that itself reflects the public-private partnership in the operation of many of these.
Besides, it was hardly gambling. He knew those games are rigged.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tote
It operated alongside other private operators, but was entirely State owned and operated until it was privatized in 2011. I forget the specifics of it, but the Tote uses (or at least used to) some kind of "pool betting" model that meant it didn't profit directly from customers losing bets, being agnostic about the results was meant to reduce predatory pressures etc.
I think this likely helped a lot to give those who wanted to gamble somewhere they could always trust to honor the arrangement and avoid "underground" operators, I don't know that it helped all that much in reducing the social harms etc though.
By this logic, we should ban cars because 5% of drivers experience collisions every year. Or maybe we should ban Free to Play mobile apps (5% of users result in 70% of the profits). Or maybe we should ban firearms, because a small number of users harm people.
There are always risks with every industry in regards to the safety of those who participate. What is the "acceptable" number of problematic cases for a billion-dollar industry to be legally acceptable?
I’ve seen first hand people throw their lives away for it, just like they do with drugs or alcohol. Addiction has familiar patterns regardless of the particular vice, and the answer is better mental health facilities, not criminalization.
All giving an addict a rap sheet does is make it harder for them to get a job.
Illegal gambling is an interesting underworld. You’ll be at the same table with drug addicts, local politicians (even police sometimes), successful businessmen, and everything else you can imagine.
It’s less in-your-face harmful than fentanyl but the processes they go through are similar.
I think legalizing gambling gets rid of a lot of problems, but of course, causes problems too. But just because legalizing it led to an upsurge in sports betting doesn’t mean the best option is to make it illegal again.
Cigarettes are the model to me for vices. It’s the best public health win I’ve lived to see. Instead of making them illegal, we made them expensive and uncouth. We made cigarette companies fund campaigns to get people off cigarettes, to huge effect.
That’s what I believe we should do for gambling. Legalizing it was not a mistake, and looking at the picture shortly after and deciding it was is short sighted.
In the late 90’s every big MTG tournament had a poker game going. It got to the point where game stores had to ban it because nobody was even playing Magic anymore.
That was the much less seedy side of underground poker. So much fun.
A lot of times people do things they don’t find too interesting because they really like the side effects. I used to play cards with friends that took it seriously and I never really won and wasn’t too into it but it was fun to hang out.
Thanks for the correction.
Want to see an image? Follow a link, sir. It is far too distracting to have it simply be there, between the words, enticing us.
And even if there were, how is it any different than being able to buy 80 proof vodka versus 4.5% beer.
I reject any argument for cannabis regulation as long as alcohol is less restricted. I don’t even use cannabis, or ever have. I just know from lots of experience that people high on cannabis have caused me zero problems, compared to an innumerable problems from people high on alcohol.
A data point for you...
I was on a train earlier this year and I was standing behind someone out with their wife/girlfriend. He had his phone in his hand the whole time with a gambling app opened (the green one, PaddyPower maybe?). I couldn't read the screen exactly but there was a list of fixtures for football matches and a button next to each one. From memory, I think each button was odds for the game, e.g. 10:1 Luton win vs Exeter or something.
Anyway, the point is that (again, from memory) at least 8 times in the journey, he opened and closed the app and clicked on 10+ of these odds buttons, while in conversation with his girlfriend who had put her phone away at the start of the journey.
I vaguely recall him checking his balance at one point too.
Anyway, I thought I'd back up your story by telling one of mine where I watched someone place 50+ bets on a 30 min train journey! It's frighteningly easy (emphasis on "frightening")
Edit: This happened a while back and I remember telling this story to people at the time so the numbers may be off but they're in the ballpark!
The idea was to destroy the 'brand value' and positive associations that cigarette companies have worked hard to build.
It does work, but I dont know that the concept would translate to digital media that well.
Investment in equities is principally a non-zero-sum positive EV game motivated by rational expectations for preservation and growth of wealth.
The fact that some financial actors have very good sharpe ratios or dominate capture of trading profits on millisecond horizons isn’t a significant detriment to the larger good resulting from retail investment.
Also the WA state has alternate revenue sources (mining royalties) that the other Australian states do not.
There is gambling in WA, just not physical slot machines/TABs/keno in every licensed venue.
In practice this takes the form of Club Board members giving themselves generous contracts to renovate/clean/manage aspects of the club (via services companies that they or a family member own).
There are sports leagues clubs in NSW that rival small Las Vegas casinos in facilities and amenity.
The USA doesn't take it quite so far but it did strongly regulate the socio-economic imperialism of Communism, leveraging State resources to attempt to convince socialist leaders to kill themselves (MLK) or just by assassinating and imprisoning them (Black Panthers). The State protects people from ruining their lives with marijuana, or from ruining the justice system by telling people walking into a courthouse about Jury Nullification. These needs require the regulation of speech (can't tell people Communism is super awesome and you should unionize and strike) and business (can't open a casino in downtown LA).
For the record gay sex isn't harmful to the fertility of the state and shouldn't be regulated, nor should speech about Jury Nullification, I was just making a point about both nations.
I don't think it'd work well online for similar reasons, the internet is global, it would just disadvantage local companies for no real gain due to our population. It would have to be a concerted global effort. I think there is quite a bit of overlap with accessibility too (simple and quiet is easier to parse for computers and humans than confusing noise), so maybe a push in that direction.
Yes.
Your first paragraph is about motive, which isn't enough to make those two actions the same.
Your second paragraph is just bad things the US did? I don't see how it's relevant to the question.
Talking about Americans???
It was this "commandeering" of the state legislature's right to legislate that was found unconstitutional, not the federal government's ability to regulate sportsbetting. So if congress wanted they could pass a law that made sportsbetting illegal at the federal level and put a federal agency in charge of enforcing it.
Its similar to the legal weed situation. States can't be forced to enforce federal laws, but the federal government itself can enforce those laws even if the state governments are unwilling.
Sports Betting was supposed to create jobs, and it did. But for every job created, several other people's finances were ruined. The vast majority of this revenue is going straight to the people at the top, so it doesn't even create all that many jobs.
Likewise, the lottery is one of the most insidious parts of our society. We dangle the carrot of unfathomable wealth in front of people, and let them spill huge amounts of money into a system that is so unlikely to produce a win that one can realistically conclude that it is a 0% chance. We act like it's beneficial because it funds things like scholarships, but those things could just be offered using public funds without destroying countless lives with gambling. In fact, if we just funded those scholarship with public funds, the impact to taxpayers would be substantially less than the impact on gamblers.
Even when someone eventually wins a huge jackpot, there are tons of stories about how those wins ended up hurting, or in some cases even killing, the recipient. The actual reward of winning isn't what people think it is, because most people who gamble enough to have a chance at winning are not prepared at all to handle that windfall appropriately.
The price paid for gambling is always too high, and dangling immense unearned wealth just serves to bait lower-income Americans into flushing their limited income down the drain in hope of a free ride.
Whatever notion people have about individual responsibility doesn't apply here. This form of exploitation is well understood, and it should not be legal to deceive people this way. The vast majority of gamblers don't understand the math behind it, and vastly overestimate their odds.
I've done my share of casual gambling, and personally understand that it can be a form of entertainment that can be enjoyed responsibly. Unfortunately, that is like saying that you've used cocaine a few times without overdosing or getting addicted: you're the exception, not the rule.
And almost everywhere has plenty of legal gambling. All that’s been changed is you can gamble on one more thing and not violate federal law. State law still applies.
In Australia a huge push is on to get it banned from tv.
How do you draw the line between someone who wants to gamble recreationally and someone who does it because they are addicted without harming the recreational parties?
The solution to this problem would be mandatory sex worker licenses and mandatory yearly counseling that acts as an escape path for trafficking victims.
There are many women police officers in vice and many means with which to tackle sex trafficking, with or without the testimony of specific victims (bearing in mind that sex trafficking almost always involves many victims).
Yearly contact seems ... sparse... there's more sense to be had in mandatory weekly or fortnightly STI checkups, etc. which incorporates contact with trained medical professionals familiar with the ins and outs of te game.
Granted, retail investors lose more often than they win - but there’s no incentive of the market that ensures this - merely asymmetry of information. In contrast, commercial gambling can _only_ work if the house always wins.
This isn’t belied by peer-to-peer gambling (save for non-commercial instances, like a poker game among friends), since in these cases the facilitator will take an exorbitant cut.
Moreover, the stock market serves an ethically legitimate purpose - the efficient allocation of capital. Not so gambling.
It's probably both illegal for some reason and unfeasible because it deliberately limits its own profits, but it would make for much healthier relationships with gambling than what we have currently.
Sportsbooks will open lines intelligently, but they absolutely do move the line in response to market forces in an attempt to balance money on both sides, because when the money is balanced, they are guaranteed profit.
It's true that when you make a sports wager, the house is paying you out of their wallet. It's also true that they employ a lot of energy and expertise in order to open the betting at accurate odds. However, no corporate, end user facing sportsbook is themselves fading action on one side of the match intentionally. They aggressively try to balance money on both sides so they can guarantee a profit.
Sports betting is way too easy to use and thanks to the "skill" part it tricks people into thinking they have even more chances. Turns out those are chances to lose even more money.
Unlike your example of drug use, AFAIK there are no studies saying the same effect happens for sports betting, or even betting in general.
This for me is all pointless. We're arguing about something that does not improve society in any shape or form. The typical argument "we've been gambling since forever" doesn't cut it. We've also been murdering since forever, and both are still a net negative in society.
If we really need this silly vice, then lock it down. We can't allow this free-for-all where everything is sponsored by betting with money straight from the pockets of addicts, kids are getting addicted with loot boxes and the only ones that profit are the few middlemen that are morally corrupt enough to go into this business.
Imagine you become an overnight hundred-millionaire through the lottery. Suddenly you need to worry about, e.g., friends treating you differently, strangers begging for money, and kidnapping. Would you really want everyone on earth to know your name instantaneously, with no time to prepare?
https://web.archive.org/web/20110615051217/http://www.foxnew...