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
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.
No thank you, I can protect myself.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
By that standard, we're done, the matter has already been concluded in favor of "allow gambling."
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is mostly nonsense
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
Insurance companies work the same way.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Are you making that argument by accident, because you felt compelled to nitpick some word choices, or do you seriously believe that?
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.
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.
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
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?"
And then your costs have to be less than that.
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.
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.
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.