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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Ok, good, fine. You should have to seek out a black market connect to gamble on sports.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Even with a modern education this is a losing proposition for many people...
It is literally taking money from the poorest and most gullible Indians to the owners.
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".
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.
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.
Gambling in some of those same countries is now very aggressively advertised.
Imo this should apply to addictive apps as well. The damage here is mostly the time that is wasted.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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
Talking about Americans???