Oh I understand why that's there, it's just another amusing instance of "I'll kn...

DoctorOetker · on April 26, 2018

yes it is another instance of ad hoc after the fact "I know it when I see it".

Since the problem does not affect me specifically (not a child nor a gamer, nor a parent of such a person) I can see why this seems ammusing in the sense that we see lawmmakers drown in their own rules again, even though I don't think it is amusing in general.

In fact it bothers me, because I am very much against "void for vagueness" rules, while in this case it is very hard for me to formalize a general prinicple differentiating good and bad (although I consider a lot of the insurance stuff nonsense tbh...).

If I had to formalize a principle, I think it would start from informed consent: i.e. a lottery ticket should define exactly the probability of each possible return scenario, and also the expectation value of the return. And then in order to legally buy lottery tickets you would need a non-expired certificate that proves you understand expectation value, where the certificate is issued after passing some automated exam say at the city hall. Just passing it once should not suffice to gamble the rest of your life after forgetting how expectation values work.

In this way children, or uneducated adults, or elderly with dementia are prevented from gambling unless they "regularly" prove to society that they understand what an expectation value of return of 50% means (if you buy $1000 worth of lottery tickets with 50% expectation value, on average you get $500 dollar back, and that is already taking into account the cases you win the top prize), and how to calculate this in general...

All the places where the tickets get sold would have to be mystery-shopper checked by the government so that if a place sells a ticket to a person without the valid certified status, they get a big fine.

If the same was done for insurance etc, then at least the consumer can be said to have given informed consent to the transaction. But don't get surprised if suddenly a large part of the population stops different kinds of insurance, or at least systematically en masse switch to whoever has the best offer, putting pressure in order to get democratic pricing of insurance etc...

Not just licenses for the gambling houses, but also for the gamblers, like driver licenses...