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.
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".
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.
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.
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)
"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?"
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Alcohol certainly does not preclude it.
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.
The amount of money especially young people have to fork off of their paychecks just to have a place to live is outright insane.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"
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.
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.
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.
Clinicians aren’t the ones to go to for harms anyways, they’re largely not doing the research at any level.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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
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.
I think the “all it takes is the right information” model lacks a nuanced understanding of human behavior.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> foreign interest in US sport is limited.
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?
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.
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.
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.
24 legalized states, and not one chose this approach which is a shame.
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.
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.
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.
This is different from speculation (or bending over to tie shoes) in that a risk is being assumed with an outcome in mind.
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.
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.
Nicely put
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've always found it very striking when the sports team jersey sponsers are betting companies.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.