Sports gambling, like all gambling, ruins lives. It's certainly worth having the discussion about whether people should be able to run a train through their life and the lives of their families via app.
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.
Sports gambling has been legal in the UK since 1960. Gambling wasn't seriously problematic in this country until 2005, when regulations were substantially liberalised. Pre-2005, sports betting was something that old men did in dingy backstreet shops; post-2005, it became a widespread social phenomenon, turbocharged by advertising and the growing influence and accessibility of the internet.
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.
I was a big proponent of legalizing sports gambling before it happened here in the US. After that, one of my best friends lost 5 figures on sports gambling that he really couldn’t afford to lose. I’ve also watched sports talk shows degrade to simple betting tips, and TV is now borderline unwatchable due to the pharmaceutical and gambling ads. To me, a few regulations/restrictions seem useful. I think broad legalization went too far.
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.
Requiring gambling to be done at established facilities or even the sports facility itself and limiting the bets to five dollars or some nominal amount would solve 99% of the problems.
The other thing I’d add is a mandatory system where people can tell the company not to allow them to bet with a lengthy time delay (say 90 days) to remove themselves from the list. Most people with problems know they have them at least some of the time and it’s important to give them tools to prevent moments of weakness.
Self exclusion is something that is handled by each states gaming enforcement department. All 34 states that have a self-exclusion program also have wildly different policies.
They have a system for this in the UK https://www.gamstop.co.uk/ - though I only know it exists from TV adverts (presumably they are legally obligated to run these)
I'm pretty sure the owners of the licensed locations were principals in getting the online betting scene going. I am guessing here, but it seems likely they saw that it's inevitable that off-shore online sports books will exist, so they were driven to capitalize on it legally (from the US).
Why not just ban it? I fail to see the point of spending all of this money administering an industry with such a low total income. That would lose money every year and keep increasing.
A total ban ... on legal gambling ... would likely lead to at least some increase in illegal gambling, which of necessity allies itself to organised crime.
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.)
This is true of other vices as well. Many have argued that legalized sex work will decrease the amount of human trafficking, when reality has shown it actually increases it.
I'd really like to see an in-depth analysis of multiple such cases of ... what to call it? Vice permissivity? And what effects stack up.
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.
The problem with legalized sex work is that when a cop is faced with a human trafficking victim, there is nothing he can do if the trafficking victim does not testify and explicitly ask for police intervention, which is a high bar to clear for a victim that would at best become homeless in a foreign country and at worst receive severe repercussions for an escape attempt.
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 three frameworks of legalisation in Australia, none of which ban the selling of sex, all of which limit or criminalise brothels and forms of "organised prostition by third parties".
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.
Huh TIL that the usa taxes gambling winnings, and that you can offset with losses up to the amount of winnings (https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419)
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?
In the UK you can choose to pay tax on your stake when you place it, so that your winnings are tax free, or not, in which case your winnings are taxed.
Are you sure? I never make bets over £20 or so, but my understanding is if I hit it big there's no tax to worry about - this source seems to agree, unless you're a professional gambler which somewhat makes sense https://intelligentodds.com/gambling/do-you-pay-tax-on-gambl...
I don't have a strong opinion in the matter, but the argument is that banning things don't automatically make them go away. Banning things that people want to do will make organized crime spring up around it, which is often worse. The idea is, by allowing it in some limited legal way, you make it unprofitable for the organized criminals.
Yeah and I think I believed in aspects of this line of logic when my state legalized sportsbooks. I believe in harm reduction in most regards. What happened though, in my opinion, is an increase in access wound up creating an increase in net harm. Just my assessment. Timing is worth noting, this was rolled out to users initially during quarantine times.
The only actual problem casino gambling, lotteries, and sports betting has been intended to solve is to generate revenue for state and local governments. Limiting bets to $5 would ensure failure for that purpose. Gambling addiction, crime, cheating, game fixing, etc are unfortunate side effects, but not real problems, in the eyes of lawmakers.
Examples are not particularly hard to come by: All government regulations to reduce smoking, all regulations to reduce petrol cars. All regulations to ban drugs. All of those aim to reduce the sale of some item the government could or does tax. I’m sure more can be found.
It's a balancing act. We limit <some thing> if the damage to society caused by it is greater than <some amount>. With the caveat that getting those limits put in place can be complicated, given the influence of money on political will.
- We limit drinking by minors
- We limit smoking to outdoor areas
- We limit driving over certain speeds
We limit many, many things that an individual can do based on how they impact society as a whole. We even limit some things an individual can do that have no impact on society (but I disagree with this completely).
Society always has and continues to limit access to certain things at certain times in certain places for certain groups of people for reasons that vary. We call it censorship/restrictions when we don’t like it. We call it reasonable control when we do.
Groceries stores can only sell beer, wine, and malts. If you want vodka, schnapps, and other hard liquors, you gotta go to a dedicated state-run liquor store.
Most of them are pretty small, too, so if you want something uncommon, it can be hard to find. Luckily the OLCC runs a website where you can search for specific items and it will tell you which stores (if any) carry it.
Which is a methanol related health and safety measure grandfathered in as a holdover from the Volstead Act. All first world control have significant hazard analysis and supply chain integrity measures for food and drink.
Temperance related measures post-Volstead - an insidious loophole to appease the Bible Belt whereby liquour is specifically exempted from the federal oversight of interstate commerce.
I believe there's some relation between this and federal highway funding being tied to a minimum drinking age of 21, but I may be misremembering some half-read magazine article.
Tangential—methanol poisoning from an improper brewing or distilling process is largely, maybe completely, a myth. Where toxicity events have occurred they are almost always deliberate or accidental adulteration, e.g. fortifying moonshine with industrially "denatured" (deliberately poisoned) alcohol. There has been a lot of sloppy journalism in such cases that doesn't question the myth, as well as Prohibition-era propaganda that lives on to this day.
TIL. That said, I hadn't anticipated much rational in Prohibition rationale. The thread did support my suspicion that grappa hangovers are their own special category of hell though!
IIRC from Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The just so story is when the govt's monopoly on violence is devolved to individuals, people will police themselves.
We now know empirically that a well-armed society is certainly not polite.
Indeed, that is a nice sentiment, but not borne out by the actual data.
It's more like being armed makes not all, but far too many people, think they can be as much of an ass as they like at any time. It works fine, right up to the moment it doesn't and they get put down; but they never think of that in advance, so it doesn't stop that subset of the population being asses (or just shooting up the place), and the rest of us having to live life watching our sixes.
There's a reason that most civilized societies moved past it.
> 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.
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!
I think that one of the issues that really hurts the advertising is that the sports betting adverts will pay above and beyond what anyone else pays and it prices everyone out. It's the same problem we had with crypto and cigarettes. They need to spend infinite money to normalize their desired behavior. I feel like advertising for casinos around there being interesting non-gambling activities (e.g. concerts) is the right kind of indirect advertisement, but by necessity the online slots and online sports betting is monotone towards the outcome.
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.
Sports betting is a negative EV zero-sum game motivated by an addiction, for a significant fraction of the population.
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.
If you support banning sports betting because it's a zero-sum game that is generally -EV for non-professionals in aggregate, and if short-term trading of stocks is also zero-sum and -EV for non-professionals in aggregate, then do you support also banning short-term stock trading for non-professionals?
> One regulation would be banning gambling advertising, for the same reason why smoking ads are (I think?) banned.
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.
Interesting, using the under-age argument to ban these ads generally - guessing this is how smoking ads where banned - seems like a good technical way to ban them generally to the overall population.
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.
Sure, but I think that falls a bit short of what's really at play here. Advertising anything which tugs at our animal weaknesses is unreasonably manipulative. Images of food (especially marketing images, which are photos of inedible objects masquerading as food), ads for sex, drugs, gambling - these are vices for a reason. Humans, generally, are weak to these things. Adults shouldn't really be exposed to these advertisements either.
We're also susceptible to bright colors and certain screen movement patterns and topic sequences, as practical the entire internet industry has figured out and has been using against us with competing degrees of success for about 20 years.
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.
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.
I'm one of those people who has become convinced that device addiction has ruined the capacity to think or pay attention for an entire generation from the time they were most vulnerable, and we haven't even begun to realize the negative consequences of that. But yeah, gambling ads are bad too.
I had a small laugh when I read your comment and imagined legislation for fighting attention-grabbing sites, requiring them to all look like this site.
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.
Yes I live here and it seems quite successful. Most smokers I see now in my area (not counting vapes) are foreign Asian students who didn't grow up with it.
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.
HN doesn't let me reply to your reply so will reply on your early comment (think too many levels of nesting?).
But I agree about your comment on devices, smartphone addiction is having negative impact people's mental health - smartphones are a super-useful tool, but too much screen-time has led to detachment from the real world and depression.
> Images of food (especially marketing images, which are photos of inedible objects masquerading as food
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.
> 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
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.
This is an unfair framing of it. Addiction is a mental illness and these companies are preying on the mentally ill to make money. They rely on them ruining their own lives and others' to make a profit.
It seems more like a problem that should be solved elsewhere? Are there cases where the company forces you to gamble?
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?
I absolutely hate that gambling adverts on TV are legal in the UK. I've seen at least one friend's life ruined because of it.
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.
It's a mess. One player with a gambling sponsor on his shirt got caught match fixing. Another got caught betting against his own team - when he wasn't playing.
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.
Whenever I’m introduce a friend to the JLeague, 90% of the time the first they compliment is the lack of gambling adds. It really is a breath of fresh air. And I believe that if the JLegaue used this point in its international marketing, it would work to get a lot of people tired of gambling ads to want to follow the league.
It’s also unfortunately a problem in niche sports that don’t really have international gambling-ad-free leagues. e.g. If you want to watch professional curling, your options are pretty slim, and they’re gambling sponsored.
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.
Bans cost money to enforce, while diminishing personal choice and responsibility. Why not spend that money on education instead? I've not had an ad in my home or on my mobile devices for well over a decade, and I've spent exactly zero on additional hardware to make that happen. It takes less than 10 minutes to configure a new device to be completely ad-free. I won't purchase anything that can't be configured to be free of ads, including smart TVs and iPhones. I still watch whatever content I want on my TV via HDMI from a PC. If our governments are going to be involved, their focus should be on teaching people how to do what people like me do. It's not difficult.
I’m fairly pro-market, certainly more than most people. And I’ll agree that bans cost money, but it’s unclear how much for this specific instance. We may also “save” money for taxpayers who avoided sports betting losses because it was never shoved in their face (because the ads are banned).
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).
How do you prevent yourself or others from seeing banner/commercials around the city? Some cities are full of it. Just because you removed it from your phone or PC, it doesn't mean that there are no people who are affected by it by watching TV or while walking/driving around the city.
I think there’s an argument that behavioral change is much more difficult that just ingesting the information. (And I’m talking about people who want to change, not some nefarious change instituted by someone else or an institution). Think of how many people want to lose weight but struggle. It’s not usually from the lack of education; there are psychological, social, and environmental impediments to change.
I think the “all it takes is the right information” model lacks a nuanced understanding of human behavior.
I also mentioned personal choice and responsibility. If someone doesn't want to change, why should we attempt to force them? It's not likely to have the effect you desire.
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.
>belief that it'll lead us closer to where we want to go.
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.
If you watch a football (English premier league) match then you'll see that not only are there gambling ads at the side of the pitch, but the players are running around wearing gambling adverts.
Every state is supposed to be a "laboratory" of democracy, but we really screwed the pooch with cannabis legalization. At least one state should have gone the way with absolutely zero marketing allowed (like tobacco currently is), and all containers should be in standardized, sterile, black & white containers, with only the name & description of the product, and big warnings describing the dangers (like cigarette packs in Australia).
24 legalized states, and not one chose this approach which is a shame.
They're not cigarettes. Nobody is sitting down and smoking 40 joints a day. What serious dangers are there besides the fact that you might eat the entire bag of Doritos while watching Planet Earth?
The important context is that life is short, just seventy years, and has stages, your early twenties are a magical time. Losing your ambition and wasting your early twenties are a subtle danger, but nevertheless a serious danger.
One of the more ridiculous assertions I have seen, as if cannabis causes people to lose ambitions, any more than a million other things that can happen in society.
You know, like wage stagnation in the face of skyrocketing real estate costs.
Is there any data to show population wide issues being caused by this “not your dad’s weed”?
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.
> 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.
FWIW the Netherlands used to ban gambling advertising, and then legalized it (purely due to corruption if you ask me, but that's besides the point). The change was night and day. Overnight, half the banner ads around town were promoting poker sites and sports betting etc. There really weren't lots of similar ads for "sports results" sites before then.
That is because the ban was universal. In Italy they only banned advertisements.
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.
It's the most blatantly corrupt thing I've seen our government do in a long time. It made things worse for everybody, to the benefit of a few gambling bosses and absolutely nobody else.
That's an enforcement problem, not a problem with banning advertising.
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.
This is the same issue where poker companies used to advertise their play money sites and use the play money sites to link to separate real money sites. The loophole exists although it is certainly closeable.
You probably don’t ban Facebook as a whole but if they fail to crack down on gambling links that violate advertising laws or allow gambling companies to advertise in spite of those laws they probably face heavy fines from regulators.
I think the issue he's raising is how you define advertising though. Is texting your friend a link advertising? What about posting a link on a forum? On Wikipedia? On your portfolio? On your footer? On your nav bar?
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.
It sounds like the most common way to do these things is to have one company operate one gambling and one non-gambling site and just tell people they operate the other site on each. No money's changing hands, so that's not advertising. Then you can advertise to go to your non-gambling site, and they can organically navigate to the gambling site which was disclosed, not advertised. You would almost have to ban companies which have any interest in a gambling product from advertising anything at all.
Pre 1970s it was something you did at the on-track TOTE and in Bingo Halls/Working Mens Clubs.
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.
> There is a broad spectrum of other options in between those points that tend to be under-discussed.
Where we fall on that spectrum is generally a matter of culture, rather than regulation. American culture is one of maximalism, especially when it comes to commercialization.
Regulation is the enforcement and control of culture. They cannot really be disentangled.
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.
I am pointing out that, the moment betting and marijuana got the "you can profit from this" nod, money poured in and profit seeking explodes. Build! Advertise! Build! Advertise! This is the American way. Capital circles potential profits like vultures waiting for regulation to die.
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.
> I don't think many other countries' private markets act as extreme in this regard.
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.
> How well do you know about what happens in other countries?
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?
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.
States changed their laws around cannabis as a measure to gather votes and to increase tax revenues. Theories of markets and economics have little to do with it.
I understand your position in theory but feel the comparison to cannabis is a bit unfair. Most physicians will agree that cannabis is fairly harmless in adults.
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.
> Most physicians will agree that cannabis is fairly harmless.
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.
I have a graduate degree in neuroscience, worked with colleagues who focused on psychopharmacology for their research, and many of my friends and neighbors are biologists of various stripes, including still-active neuroscientists, as well as epidemiologists, and clinicians. They all agree cannabis is fairly harmless, and would outright laugh you out of the room if you compared its negative effects (either in the individual or to society) to alcohol.
Clinicians aren’t the ones to go to for harms anyways, they’re largely not doing the research at any level.
What is the harmless dose? One join per year? Per month? Per week? Per day? Several per day, as I often saw in my youth? My father was addicted to cannabis, I can tell you that it reduces a lot ones' life outcomes and has consequences on your family.
"Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but… well, son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored. And it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything." - Randy Marsh, South Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Future_Self_'n'_Me)
that's the part they leave out. the cannabis they test in the labs is probably 5mg. The flower sold in the streets is over 20mg.
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.
If you are alcoholic enough, alcohol withdrawal can literally kill you. Likewise, consequences on family and your own outcomes are massive even before that stage.
Unfortunately, people with predispositions like that are even more drawn to marijuana (and other drugs). It's a form of self-medication-- that sometimes goes wrong.
For a while it was unclear if the link between cannabis and psychosis was correlation or causation, but causation was ultimately established. It seems to be a relatively small percentage of the population that experience such things, but that's largely the same part of the population prone to heavy, chronic cannabis consumption in the first place.
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.
edited to specify that I was addressing adult use. Agreed use in adolescence or even younger can be problematic. I also think that there isn't enough discussion around the impact of cannabis on cognition. Here in the U.S., though, as far as medical consensus there truly is not very much concern around cannabis use. A report found that there is limited evidence of the harms of cannabis, and ample evidence of medical use-cases- published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in 2017
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.
I'd challenge you to read those results again. They admit to the evidence for health effects being elusive (due to limited or no robust studies), yet there is still enough evidence to summarize the following:
"
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.
None of which are causal associations. Given the millennia-long history of cannabis use to self-medicate, and lack of evidence (not without trying!) for a biological mechanism of any of this, it’s probably safe to assume this is largely people with an issue (or a proto-issue) self-medicating.
This has also been studied more since 2017 now that there are a lot more people taking cannabis, and many of these links have been confirmed, although some have not.
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 evidence is closer to “completely harmless” than “mostly harmless” there’s literally never been a reproducible study that shows cannabis is in any way “bad for you.”
My wife is a psychiatrist. It’s not unheard of for her to have to deal with cannabis induced psychosis.
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.
The negative effect on brain development of young people has been extensively studied and proven, by many different studies across many different countries.
>> Most physicians will agree that cannabis is fairly harmless in adults.
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.
Well, most physicians will tell you the same about smoking and drinking (i.e. "less is better and none is best"), but some/many then go in their private lives and smoke and drink.
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.
It's looks like you have wrong assumptions about liberal philosophy. In liberal philosophy, price of human life is set to infinity, thus price of life of any individual (even worthless ones) is equal to price of life of any group (even top of the top).
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.
> most physicians will agree that cannabis is fairly harmless in adults.
This isn’t a good argument. Cannabis is harmless in adults that it’s harmless in. However, there’s a percentage of the population that has strong, adverse reactions to cannabis. Some of these can be life altering, requiring treatment to correct or mitigate.
The problem with cannabis is you can’t predict if any single person will be susceptible to negative outcomes until they have that negative outcome.
I didn’t refer to it as harmless. I referred to it as “fairly harmless”. An acknowledgment of what you are referring to. I don’t see this as terribly different than referring to cough syrup containing DXM as fairly harmless. If you are on MAOIs or have liver issues it can be quite dangerous- but for the vast majority of the population it is perfectly safe
That's fair, and I really don't fundamentally disagree with what they said I just wanted to add some cultural context here. Will plead ignorance that my experience working on issues of "addiction" or compulsions outside of the U.S. is incredibly thin but, knowing how compulsion tends to play out stateside- these are my observations. I'm genuinely concerned considering how poorly we've done treating those with substance use disorder, which I think is arguably simpler than gambling addiction in some respects
I don't necessarily disagree, but the original comment didn't suggest that gambling and cannabis are equally harmful, or even that cannabis is harmful. The point was that policymaking seems to tend toward all-or-nothing (either fully prohibited, or anything goes), and the legalization of cannabis is a recent example of that. The goods or harms of cannabis are beside the point.
I live in Dublin where a lot of the tech developement centres for many online bookmaker and casinos are based. I have been approached by recruiters for some of them and even though they offer VERY generous packages I refuse to work for them on moral grounds.
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.
Gambling isn't the only form of entertainment meant to tickle the part of the brain that craves risk. Movies have car chases. Amusement parks have roller coasters.
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.
There exists big sports betting exchanges like Betfair, where there isn't a "house" and where they don't really have an incentive to limit big winners. I have friends who make consistent profit from these sites - though it must be said they do ramp up the commission
How do you know that they make a consistent profit? You take their word for it? Gamblers are notorious liars and are also known to keep very poor record of their bets.
But that's not true. I know several guys who make a living at it. The casinos don't care because they make their vig on the action. The only losers are the folks on the other side of the bets.
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.
> There's a false dichotomy between prohibition and laissez-faire, which the US seems particularly prone to.
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.
Technology is the tool that magnifies both good and bad things. It's up to us to prevent bad things at the source, not ban the tool; it's the social media problem, really.
cannabis not a good example as it is still criminalize at Fed level including earning money in that industry and putting it in a federal licensed bank...
Legalized sports betting and "weekly fantasy" leagues have severely reduced my enjoyment of NFL football.
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.
In Australia gambling and poker machines have so deeply parasitised themselves into local sports clubs, that they can now _no longer operate without the poker machines_. They’ve co-opted sport so thoroughly, that gambling is now basically an ingrained part of organised sports from local level up.
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.
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.
Fewer dead horses on the track, but if the sport went away then there would be horses all over the country out of work, which generally doesn't end well for horses, and likely an overall reduction in the number of horses kept as pets.
What? No they aren't. It's a cancer affecting the balance books of some specific clubs, but of the local aussie rules footy clubs my friends have played at, none have owned venues with pokie machines. There was one club in my brother's under 17s league that was attached to a pokies pub and everyone used to complain about them because their ones got paid too well.
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.
There are no pokies outside the Casino in Western Australia (Perth). And thus no pokies at sports clubs or bars etc. It’s glorious.
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/
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).
Real question: Is the price of a pint high because of operating costs or taxes? Also, can each state set their own alcohol tax rules, and does WA have very strict rules?
Alcohol taxes / excise are controlled at the federal level in Australia. In WA I think the high cost is 1/3 ridiculously high rents, 1/3 high minimum wage and other costs, and 1/3 operators screwing the public because they can.
Higher median wage in WA than other states + higher operating costs to venues (WA liqour licenses used to be the most expensive unsure if this is still the case).
Wouldn't a higher median wage be more profitable for the operators though? They were all paying minimum wage the last time I was involved (which was many years ago), but they'd have been benefiting from the influx of FIFO money since the start of the mining boom?
The sports clubs that depend on pokies also cease to exist - they become pokies venues that also have a sporting arm. They begin to drain the community instead of contributing back to them.
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.
A (local) sports club doesn't need to "make ... money". It can get contribution from its members, and subsidy from the local government. Otherwise, your argument would sanction every behavior, even turning schools into strip clubs.
Um, what good are schools if you can't make a profit from them? /s
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.
I think you confuse the real world for Ayn-Randistan. Local sports clubs don't need to make someone $5M/yr. They just need to provide sporting facilities, such as fields and tracks, to local sporters. They can be run by volunteers.
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.
> If you're running your business to extract value from people rather than to create community with them, you're a bad person.
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.
We import our flour because taiwanese flour can't achieve authentic biscuit taste, at least in our hundreds of tests. But most wouldn't really notice that especially without a direct comparison - but for people that care a lot about biscuits, they can tell.
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.
because the gambling machines mainly fund the people who own these machines, not the club. the club could hold a single bingo evening and raise more money than a month of gambling machines would bring.
If the club holds the license the club owns the machines. Clubs are not for profits and need to return 100% of profits to the club & facility.
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.
and i agree - why shouldn't these drugs be legalized? Regulate their sale, just like alcohol. Stop the drug cartels from making profit, and they will disappear.
After all, client's neurotransmitters are the same.
recommend googling 'opioid epidemic' in which people got addicted to perfectly legal painkillers they were prescribed. yeah cartels didn't profit (at first, anyway). neither did society.
It was already tried in the US. The agreed upon results were that humans want alcohol and the downstream effects made society worse e.g. increase in alcohol consumption, empowering organized crime and corrupting the police.
I know. That’s why I’m not arguing that we actually try again. Plus I do enjoy drinking beer and other alcohol. But not all drugs are equal.
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.
>I don't see the issue with gambling revenue funding a club.
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.
Should we take from the most vulnerable in society in order to prop up these clubs? Its not rich people dumping all their money into the pokies, its retirees and people who are broke from gambling addictions getting into debt
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.
Agree. I would add that it is a bit of a perfect storm:
- 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.
> 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?)
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.
As the proud owner of a 200 usd iPhone SE (second hand) I agree. However that’s not what society thinks, looking how many people jump to the latest upgrade because it has (check notes) a new life-changing emoji generator
I'd add another point to your list: decades of wage depression by rabid unchecked globalization, in urban areas combined with ever more power going to landlords.
The amount of money especially young people have to fork off of their paychecks just to have a place to live is outright insane.
> For example, despite SK, JP, and Singapore having the best transit in the world by far, their people HATE using it and are desperate to buy expensive, crap cars to avoid using it.
This is pretty bold statement. I certainly would not say that most Japanese in big cities follow this trend. To be fair, in any wealthy, dense city, a small fraction will always buy a car. A well-to-do senior manager at an urban Japanese firm is much more likely to upgrade to "Green Car" (slightly nicer train car), rather than drive a car to work.
Last thought: Are there any highly developed, very dense cities in East Asia/Sino-sphere that do not have amazing mass transit? I struggle to think of any.
> [South Korea, Japan, Singapore] A lot of these nations serve as counter examples to traditional "reddit" or even "HN" orthodoxy on policy
Don't you know those countries don't exist? Whenever a redditor starts talking public policy the discussion is always America vs "the rest of the world", where the rest of the world means Europe. Sometimes they throw in the word "civilized", which is fun. For instance:
"The rest of the world abolished the death penalty."
"The rest of the world tries to rehabilitate criminals instead of punishing them."
"The rest of the world doesn't try to ruin people's lives for using/selling drugs."
So you see, South Korea, Japan and Singapore don't exist!
Gambling is generally against the law in South Korea, but any esports players or personnel who get caught fixing matches (this doesn't necessarily mean throwing a game, bets get placed on all kinds of things that aren't just the outcome of the game), they get a lifetime ban from the government from participating in esports in any way.
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.
I wish people would just realize that sports betting is stupid. If matches can be thrown then they will be thrown no matter the consequences. People shouldn't engage in sports gambling because it can be rigged.
If you want to do it for fun then use fantasy points for it.
Of course all of the major leagues would say that they are not at all biased. Most probably have extreme suspension rules for being involved in gambling. But, we shall see. Human beings are fallible creatures; people forget, people slip. And it's hard to prove this. Especially nowadays, when you can do it over your phone in private.
> Gambling is generally against the law in South Korea, but any esports players or personnel who get caught fixing matches
"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.
I've made solid side income gambling over a number of different games and sports, and I say it should definitely be banned.
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.
Over the years I did get to know a couple of people that were winning players in poker and sports betting. I was never patient enough for poker, so I just played it for fun every now and then (probably break-even, maybe a bit minus) and just watched the discussions about it interested. As poker got harder, a lot of them switched over to sports betting, which I was never interested in, but I found it amazing how they analyzed the games.
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 are inefficiencies that make certain bets positive EV if you are smart enough. It's usually a combination of playing in a weird way and having some insight that the maker of the game (the oddsmaker) didn't see. Gambling establishments don't mind because there are few enough of these and they will ban you if you take too much money from them.
Winning sports betting players often go on to set odds.
Sportsbooks make money by taking bets on both sides of a game and offering odds that work in their favor. For example, even on an "even money" bet, you might have to bet $105 to win $100. The more one-sided a game seems, the bigger the gap between the odds on either side because the sportsbook is trying to manage its risk. As people place bets, they adjust the odds to balance the action. The sportsbook isn't banking on you being wrong—they want enough bets on both sides so they win no matter what. The difference between the odds is basically their "fee."
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.
Many sportsbooks actually do not run that way. The name "sportsbook" implies that they do, but that is an older style of betting that has fallen out of favor. Modern sports books usually use fixed odds set by an oddsmaker (in modern times, algorithms set by the oddsmaker), but those odds are allowed to float with the probability of the outcome changing. I believe they take supply and demand into account, but you actually are betting against the house. That prevents the kind of trading against the crowd that would be normally viable.
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 can see the misunderstanding, but I was not actually describing parimutuel betting (horseracing). In parimutuel betting the odds continue to change up until the race even once you've placed your bet ensuring that the payout is always the total amount wagered less a fee kept by the house.
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.
>It's usually a combination of playing in a weird way and having some insight that the maker of the game (the oddsmaker) didn't see
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 have a friend who professionally plays video poker, and has been doing that for a very long time. He runs Monte Carlo simulations to find his strategies around various kinds of promotions and specials that casinos offer. He has about a 2-5% edge whenever he plays, and maximizes his bet size and machine time to take advantage of this. Casinos don't care about this sort of thing because the strategy he plays is usually batshit insane compared to how you would think video poker ought to be played (eg "throw away cards from a flush to mine for a straight flush" is a frequent rule he uses), and is very complicated. They lose ~$10k a week to the three people like him who can do this, but more than make up for it in the rubes that come in the door from those promotions.
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.
Where is the movement to ban those ticket machines from places like Dave and Busters/Chuck-e-Cheese where you exchange coins for tickets which are only redeemable for cancer inducing sugary foods or (at exchange rates which would please your local African warlord) occasionally game consoles?
Because that shit is legal in all 50 states and is worse for society in my opinion. No hysteria against this.
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.
I find it funny how in Germany the state lottery advertises itself on TV but needs to add the info that "Gambling can be addictive."
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.
You do know that lotto is state run, and all profit that isn’t redistributed to players is given to charity (mostly deutsche sporthilfe, who fund a lot of sports who would otherwise have trouble running).
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.
How does operating expenses like salaries and bonuses look like? 10k bonus for every life ruined? I'm always worried about cronyism and corruption with this kind of monopolies.
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.
I don't get why you are using the lottery ticket revenue as a baseline when in reality the lottery company mostly acts as a payment processor or intermediary. It'd be like arguing Visa only gives 2% to shareholders and shareholders should be owed all money transacted over the Visa network.
I don't think this really disproves their post? They said the profit that doesn't go to players goes to charity. Probably a smidge of the 10.3% that goes to the business and the lotto becomes profit, but out of the other 89.7% everything after taxes goes to either the players or the charity. Close enough; if they're off it's only by a couple percent.
Governments make tons of money on gambling/lotteries. So they keep it running. This shows how much they don't care about making positive impact to people's lives.
Advertising state lottery on TV is just a way for politicians to funnel money to their buddies in the marketing agency and TV. I guess they get some positive coverage for that or w/e. It's one of the most obvious signs of corruption imo. It happens in Poland as well and it's infuriating when you are a tax payer in that country.
It really ruined watching games for me with the constant talk of odds and gambling right in the broadcast. I thank my lucky stars this happened after I was a teenager/twenty-year-old because having to find a shady bookie that would break my legs if I didn't pay was one of the main factors that kept me from being stupid like a number of my friends.
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.
While everything you wrote I agree with, I’m not sure I arrived to the same conclusion. Alcohol, cigarettes, workaholics, social media apps all ruin the lives of the weak and those around them. Should we make them all illegal?
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.
That still leaves you with a question if harm reduction is better approach than criminalization. At least you don't attract the mob into the business with the former.
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.)
Perhaps ban is too strong. I think Canada has had a really positive result in how it has dealt with tobacco. Cigarettes are by no means illegal, you can get them at any gas station, grocery store, 7-11 or pharmacy. But they are heavily taxed, the packages have to be covered in graphic warnings, the branding has to be plain and just use a generic font of the brand name. Commercials aren't allowed. Advertising isn't allowed. As a result, a lot less people just take up smoking, and it's almost completely fallen off culturally.
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.
This boils down to a two question "should we as society allow a person to destroy his life." And because there is also a big external pressure from financially interested parties to convince a person to do things that are not beneficial to him, second question is "should we as society let smarter people fool less educated people out of their money/health/ happiness" (second one is more tricky) but low hanging fruits are advertisement for alcohol, gambling, smoking and other obviously non beneficial activities.
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.
Some people believe that their beliefs and way of life should be enforced. Here, which human habits or activities are allowed or "OK" even if partially or very deletorious.
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.
So? Literally the entire political apparatus depends on a few people enforcing their ideas of how the rules should be, and everyone else has to play by them.
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.
If we can, and it works out to less harm vs benefit than otherwise: Yes. But it turns out we can't for alcohol and cigarettes (except regulation). We fairly much can for workaholics - Norway has laws that stop working overtime except in certain situations, and they actually work fairly well. I don't know if we can for social media, though I see California is trying to stop some of the addictive forms of social media.
I hold the strong belief that gambling companies are evil and make the world worse and I wouldn't find the burning of them down by the loved ones of people's lives they ruined to be unethical.
However people should know what regulating ethics to this degree looks like: the modern PRC. In the PRC you get a government mandated timer on your MMOs to ensure you don't spend too much time playing videogames. In the internet cafes there's 24/7 a CPC bureaucrat prowling around keeping an eye on your chats - plus automated mandated filters which depending on the implementation can auto kick you from a multiplayer match, hence the entirely viable strategy when playing against PRC players to spam "FREE HONG KONG REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES CCP COMMITS GENOCIDE AGAINST UIGHUR MUSLIMS XINJIANG" into chat to get them kicked from the match.
There's industry level morality controls as well such as not being allowed to make a tv show featuring "feminine men" and the implicit ban on showing LGBT couples.
Personally I don't trust a State to choose the correct morals, be it aesthetically communist or aesthetically capitalist. We can look at America's history of moral laws to see another example, such as prohibition.
There’s a readily available example proving your slippery slope isn’t guaranteed to happen: gambling was illegal in most of the US very recently and it wasn’t anything like China.
So instead, you trust for-profit companies to direct the morals of society?
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.
> So instead, you trust for-profit companies to direct the morals of society?
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?
Local control has limits too. In the US one can now export pollution to ones neighboring states. Las Vegas exports it's externalities by marketing to out of state populations. (Or at least they did when gambling was more heavily regulated elsewhere)
Is your argument that Xinjiang is somehow autonomous from the CPC government? That's a very strange claim to make considering it's undeniably ruled completely by the whims of the CPC.
I think this is a false dichotomy between the state and private industry.
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.
Re your last paragraph, the New Testament addresses an argument about Christian grace, some said they should sin more because that left more room for God's grace. Not surprisingly the Bible's answer is, nu-uh (an emphatic no).
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).
Ehh is it? The CPC regulates videogames the way it does because it views it as a moral harm to society the same way people argue about gambling destroying lives. And gay sex harms the fertile output of the People and so also shouldn't be promoted. Capitalist imperialism is always at the gates trying to tempt people to turn on their fellow citizens and oftentimes it masquerades as a Christian Missionary so the State is obligated to keep a sharp check on religious organizations, not to mention to protect people from destroying their lives through cults (and ALL religions are cults). These needs require the regulation of speech and business.
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 think sports gambling should be legal because otherwise the Bookies will kill you if you can't pay your debts. At least with legal gambling the worst that can happen is bankruptcy.
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.
This only truly works if sports gambling is illegal globally. The reason this doesn't apply too much with the US is foreign interest in US sport is limited.
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.
The US has pretty strict laws against its citizens from gambling on the Internet. Other countries could pass similar laws for their own citizens.
> foreign interest in US sport is limited.
I am pretty sure that American baseball is very popular in the Carribbean and Japan. And American basketball is very popular in China due to the legacy of Yao Ming.
This would be true if wine was deliberately made worse quality in order to maximize some incentive behind manipulating alcoholics. I don't have a horse in this race, but this comparison misses the entire point of this particular counter to sports gambling. The sports in question are, purportedly, made worse - the outcome changed in arbitrary ways disconnected from the spirit of nature of the sport - in order to maximize the profits of the incredibly wealthy. There is no way to escape this when enjoying the sport; if deliberately throwing is rampant, you would always have to ask if a player's mistake was genuine, and your emotional investment in a game is poisoned as a result. Likewise, the comparison would be that no wine is immune from this kind of quality reduction. Eventually, a wine drinker will drink wine which has been reduced in quality on purpose.
Your analogy is an improvement, but both of you are weirdly mapping "alcoholics" to "people who are interested in gambling". A valid analogy would speak of people who are interested in alcohol.
(Incidentally, the restaurant in your analogy would probably not be viable without that bar!)
>A valid analogy would speak of people who are interested in alcohol.
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.
Your off hand comment about spits and slurs makes me realize people all consume alcohol very differently. I feel like anytime there is a conversation around alcohol, dose needs to be stated. Obviously it's going to be hard to have deep conversations with someone who has had 12 beers, but someone who has had a drink or two, lowering their inhibitions, will likely open up more.
I sing a lot and my choir friends can do karaoke sober, but they are the only people I know who can sing in public with no social lubricant. Citing karaoke as a sober activity was very odd to me.
If you want to see this train wreck in action, look no further than eSports. Here you can see the gradual erosion of sportsmanship in a way that likely played out for conventional sports in the past.
I love gambling. I go to Vegas 4-6 times per year, and I play poker at the local casinos/card houses almost every week.
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.
Honest question: why cares about the effect on sports?
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.
As a fan, it absolutely sucks to have your team throw.
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.
Unfortunately, banning it outright will probably only exacerbate problems.
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.
Best make it legal then, so bookies have the threat of losing their license if they get caught rigging a match. Black market bookies couldn't care less.
Much, much fewer people would gamble if you had to do it by finding some weird person and handing them cash and trusting them to run a fair book, than just clicking some buttons on an app. After all, that’s why they’re apps that are constantly advertised; gambling services don’t have customers they attract with offers on the free market, they have victims who’s better sense they overcome through convenience and manipulation.
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.
Would gambling do so well without the constant brainwashing (advertising). Almost every advert I get on TV/web is designed to convince me how much fun gambling is. That seems to include every minute of sport, either player clothing, hoardings, or on-screen.
I'd push back on the idea that gambling is inherently harmful. Gambling can be done at a scale where it is essentially play. It is particularly gambling against corporations or other non-individual actors, in games that they rig to be perpetually -EV, and market like crazy, that is inherently harmful.
I agree but I'd put in a carve out for the kind of gambling that reinforces sociality. Poker night with your neighbors or a fantasy football league with your pals from school (with a groupchat where you shit-talk one another) make some sense: you spend the buy-in in order to have something to talk about with your buddies.
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.
Gambling, in the same way as consumption of drugs can be indeed harmful for individuals and the people surrounding them.
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).
Very few political decisions can be said to be carved in stone.
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.
>popularly acclaimed law
I have the feeling that gambling is popularly acclaimed in the same way that cigarette smoking is.
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)
> But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports.
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 don’t really understand the accusation here. Do you really think they rig (say) football games for ratings…? I’m a cynical guy, but that’s too much even for me. And how do you explain boring dynasties like the Warriors or the SF giants had in their sports for 4-8 years?
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.
Rigged? No, probably not – at least not where driven by gambling, but professional sports leagues aren't shy about adjusting rules to make the game more enjoyable to watch, even if not what is best for the sport for the sake of sport. Such actions undeniably ruin the sport if you, like the previous comment, want to hold sport as having some kind of pure sporting existence (a nonsensical take, in my opinion, but whatever).
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.
Huh. What do you mean by “sake of sport”…? Like, to see who’s the strongest?
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.
> Huh. What do you mean by “sake of sport”…? Like, to see who’s the strongest?
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.
There’s a real difference between modifying the rules of a sport and rigging/throwing. When you change the rules, you change the competitions. When you rig a sport, you get rid of competition.
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
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.
The nice thing about sports gambling is it's a strong signal that your local government has been captured by outside interests. If anyone complains about the way things are you can simply point and say well, look we know the government doesn't represent us or work for the people, we have legalized gambling. Of course there's all sorts of other tells too but none is as clear cut without any need of conspiracy theories.
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.
> It's certainly worth having the discussion about whether people should be able to run a train through their life and the lives of their families via app.
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.
> 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.
I know many in those era are even aggressively opposed to the Bible, but I have long seen it as a kind of change log, commit notes, code notes, etc. …
“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.
Extending the logic, should we ban the derivatives market? Cryptocurrencies/tokens that only seek to be a speculative asset (and not an actual currency). Venture Capital that seeks to use businesses as speculative assets (trying to artificially inflate the short-term share price of the business rather than its long-term health)?
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.
The derivatives market is useful for hedging and for market efficiency. A lot of the nay-sayers I see tend to talk about how the nominal exposure is bigger than the market itself as if it were a compelling argument against it but it's not (the reason is that there is a counter-party for every "bet").
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.
> 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.
One of the things that's getting confused in this thread is the distinction between games of skill and games of chance. Most outcomes in life are the result of a combination of skill and chance - so there's admittedly a gradient and a big gray area between the two.
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.
> On the far other end of the spectrum is the slot machine - you pull a lever and wait.
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.
Also, there are quite a few apps that offer daily rewards and bonuses to keep you hooked. For example, https://66lotteryy.app/ gives active users a daily free spin, and sometimes you can win actual money. It’s cool, but this perk is really meant for people who are already depositing and playing regularly. On top of that, they throw in free bonuses for those who log in daily, which makes it even more tempting to stick around. I've noticed that a lot of gaming and lottery apps follow this kind of system. So if you're spending time on these apps, these rewards can make it more interesting—and who knows, you might end up with a little extra in your pocket.
Slot machines are guaranteed to provide a significant ROI to casinos. They're purely extractive. Comparing them to farming is really silly in my opinion.
Does anyone have a differing opinion? I expect there is good reason they have never been compared. Your opinion is noted, I guess, but what lead you to think it was worth sharing?
> Some aspects of farming lean on skill, but other aspects are pure chance.
I frequently use this phrase when talking with people about their career path. Replace farming with (office work) career. Mike Bloomberg famously wrote: "Work hard and you might get lucky." I like that phrase because it appreciates the nuance of success.
I don't believe games of chance are misrepresented as games of skill. But anyway, this article is about sports gambling which most certainly is a game of skill.
And crop insurance which is usually heavily subsidised. To be clear, the range of agricultural commodities is surprisingly small. Example: There is no coverage for any fruits (except orange juice), not most vegetables.
Crop insurance, even of the subsidized variety, could refer to all kinds of different systems. But, I'll assume that which is under the USDA RMA. You don't consider any of the following to be fruit?
What is bad for society is zero sum games. They are profitable for individuals but take the same or more from elsewhere so they raise nothing. There are a few zero sum games where we think the side effects are good (i.e. in the pricing of stocks,) but in general they consume societies best minds in return for no progress.
To be clear, interest rate derivatives (futures, swaps, [edit] options, etc.) are very important for banks and corps to manage their interest rate risk. By definition, these are zero sum products.
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.
Sure, the stock market is clearly grounded in a positive sum game of enabling more investment options. Things like whether to penalize day trading for its zero sum aspects or appreciate it for side effects are an argument in legislation/regulation debates.
The current hyper capitalized form of the Olympics may have been demonstrated to be economically harmful to the city that hosts it, but the Olympics have had huge societal value and impact especially in sociological aspects. I mean it's hard to put a price tag on Jesse Owens spitting directly into the eye of white supremacy but it certainly has value.
Every zero sum game has some side effects people try to focus on.. When I look at the number of children who have been abused for the Olympics, I think there are better ways to have an international convention and to push a healthier level of fitness.
Advertising - one of the largest industries on the planet. It’s not even zero sum, it’s a net loss. The views loses $50 and 100 hours, the winners gain $50
Advertising improves information for consumers though, as long as you get advertised stuff you actually want but didn’t even know existed. I’m not saying it’s a net positive as it’s currently done, but advertising as a concept doesn’t have to be net negative.
As I said, I’m not claiming that it currently is a net positive for consumers. But even then, I don’t agree with your assertion. There are things that benefit the average person that aren’t optional, and not being optional doesn’t indicate it isn’t for your benefit. It could hypothetically be possible that people benefit from advertisement overall but would irrationally choose to opt out if they could. Just as some people would opt out of social security if they could but would probably regret it once they need it. Just to clarify, I’m not saying this is happening here, but the argument „I can’t opt out so it can’t be for my benefit“ is flawed.
As a farmer, can you tell us about the direct and indirect support you received from your govt to wear the risk of farming? In all highly industrialised countries, there are a huge amount of govt support for farmers.
Crop insurance is partially subsidized, but I am personally not a buyer. What fun is gambling if you’re going to insure the gamble? But I could theoretically benefit from that, to be sure. The farm property tax rate is lower than the commercial rate, so I guess you could say we're subsidized like residential property owners are. I can't think of anything else that is applicable to my farming operation. My country only really likes dairy and poultry producers, of which I am neither.
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?
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.
Are you trying to tell us that you think cryptocurrencies and venture capital fit the legal gambling definition, or are you trying to tell us that you didn't bother to understand the context under which the comment was posted?
Either way, you are out to lunch. Your definition is on point, but has nothing do with the discussion taking place.
I'm not sure sitting in a comfortable air conditioned cab is all that much effort. It is fun! But as we're on the precipice of it going the way of full automation removing even that minimal effort, just how low effort is your bar?
I think your comment illustrates that our current society is built on gambling. Most businesses dark. We want people to take the bet and invest into companies, because that's what gives us all these goods and services we use. This system allows people to voluntarily combine their skill and luck to try for a better future. Society benefits as a side-effect.
Gambling triggers capitalism to ruin lives. If we had a well-designed society, you could lose a lot by gambling, but you could end up with $0 and still not be completely "ruined".
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.
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.
same argument can be made about excessive athlete salaries and really any sports related business ventures. Athletes go after specific stats to hit contract goals, get their bonuses and live good lives. Gambling industry is just one of the hundred detractors to the sport itself.
But all of those stats will help a team win in theory. But you can bet against yourself, perform poorly, and then get a payout. That is the antithesis of good sportsmanship.
The problem is that sports gambling introduces conflicting interests. It's one thing to coast and collect paychecks, it's a whole another thing for a player to actively sabotage their own team.
US sports is surprisingly "socialist", with systems like drafting ensuring that a team can't just buy up all the best players, so the league stays interesting. It seems obvious that player wages are kept lower in a system like this ... But I think they do pretty OK anyway.
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.
This is only the annual drafts. Baseball TV revs are not shared between teams, like American football. So baseball teams in large, urban centers have a huge advantage to buy better players from free agency.
"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?"
Unfortunately Brazil also legalized it in 2018, after Dilma was impeached using very sketchy arguments (many call it a legal coup).
It is spreading as a cancer. This month the central bank published a report saying that in August 20% of the Bolsa Família, the largest money transfer program for very poor Brazilians, was spent on these bets.
Out of the 20 million people that receive it, 5 million made bets during that month. This is 2 billion reais (about $450M) spent in a single month by the poorest Brazilians.
It's a cancer. Everywhere you go there are ads. The influencers, the biggest athletes and musicians are marketing it.
Although I tend to be liberal, this needs to be heavily regulated.
I had the pleasure of visiting a town on the Amazon river a few times over the course of a decade. I watched as western culture and civilization creeped in and ruined their society.
The first time I went, people were living off the land, fishing, gardening, children playing ball games, etc.
Here's what I saw last time I went: Gambling, alcoholism, plastic waste, sugary drinks, public advertising, and kids glued to their smartphones. Forests being cleared to raise cattle because now everyone wants to eat burgers.
They've managed to bring in the worst parts of modern society without the good parts (medicine, infrastructure, education, etc.)
I do believe that without a modern education, these people are not equipped to deal with modern vices. They've never taken a math class let alone learned enough probability to know that gambling is a losing bet. They've never had a nutrition class to learn that Coca Cola is disastrous to your health.
> I do believe that without a modern education, these people are not equipped to deal with modern vices.
This isn't limited to the third world. The reason sports betting becomes such a problem is that people don't have a solid foundation in basic statistics.
People go bankrupt by thinking they can get out of a small debt by placing even larger bets at a negative expected value.
Martingale is dumb, but i think that's the point, it's telling you what not to do because the only way to recover your initial lost bet is to have a larger bank than the house (and why casinos restrict max bets, $2000 max, $10000 max) - martingale fails.
If you just gotta have a betting system because it helps quell the gambling anxiety or whatever, reverse martingale is fine. I made a video a long time ago about how it works[0] - but in essence, you only stand to lose your initial bet, and you have a bet schedule if you start winning. In "bet units" the way i do it is 1 unit until a win, then for each consecutive win: 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5 (etc). Everything after the first 3 unit bet is the casino's money you're gambling with, which is a good feeling. Note, this implies i consider each "round" that starts after a loss as separate from other rounds, obviously if you lose 20 times in a row and then win 3 games you're not suddenly in the green!
There's no system guaranteed to make you winner, but there are systems to help you lose more slowly, and reverse martingale is my go-to
>They've managed to bring in the worst parts of modern society without the good parts
IMHO That's the spontaneous action and unless curated carefully it happens everywhere. It's the spontaneous way because all the bad things about the Western culture are about getting rich or happy quick. I'm sure the outer civilizations also desire to get rich or happy quick and that's why they end up trying when exposed to the Western ways but unlike those cultures the west is very good at oiling the machine to run very productively. Maybe its something about being an industrialized high throughput individualistic culture, I don't know.
> I do believe that without a modern education, these people are not equipped to deal with modern vices. They've never taken a math class let alone learned enough probability to know that gambling is a losing bet. They've never had a nutrition class to learn that Coca Cola is disastrous to your health.
Isn't it also possible that the best in their society just left to find other opportunities? The people who couldn't leave would be more prone to gambling, alcoholism, etc.
The education point is interesting. If you grow up as a hunter gatherer, there are powerful forces you don’t understand trying to take resources away from you. If you grow up in a capitalist society, there are powerful forces you don’t understand trying to force all sorts of “resources” on you.
Success in a modern capitalist society is driven in part by your ability to say no to things.
Two things: OP said they were farmers, or peasants if you will. Now you are talking hunter gathers. To me, they are totally different levels of human development.
And, specifically about the few remaining hunter gather tribes in the Amazon, Brazil has a dedicated govt dept to keep these people safe from outside influence. As I understand, they have made great strides in the last 30 years to keep these tribes safe.
I think it's similar with all things that hook into our dopamine centers, like alcohol, food, sugar foods, tobacco, gambling, drugs, games, ... It has to be regulated to the correct amount to benefit society. Outlawing them, like with prohibition in United States, just moves it all to black markets. Having them completely free, as has been the case with all of them at some point, also brings harm to society. Somewhere in between those two points is where it's correctly regulated.
For example, maybe gamling can continue being legal but advertising for it be outlawed or severely restricted? Can gambling have the same sort of warnings as on cigarettes, maybe with children going hungry because the parent gambled away all the money for the month? Another way is that some part of the revenue from gambling could go to programs such as Bolsa Família that you bring up? Or to fight gambling addiction in some way?
That's my pragmatic view of these types of thing: try to find what actually works and hurts society the least. You'll never find any perfect system with no harm anyway.
Maybe a fine approach for the individual, but then the black market, and its general disregard for the law or the well being of others, comes along with them.
I’m pretty happy with our “no murdering” setup, even though it makes some people happy (in the moment).
IMO there’s plenty of room for hardline stances. Who cares if gambling goes to the black market? There’s a black market for every serious crime - doesn’t mean we should just okay it. And I’m not sure the USA’s halfhearted only-for-the-poor prohibition is proof that the concept of banning things is broken; if it proves anything unrelated to capitalism, it proves that you need societal buy-in and continued, consistent government pressure.
I think the problem is more the banning does not address the root cause and will not increase societal buy-in, hence will waste a lot of energy without a result.
Alcohol consumption is currently dropping in many (not all places) in Europe (some ref: https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/08/21/dry-january-where...), without any bans, so compared to the prohibition episode I would claim that it would be better to insist on finding and implementing "efficient stances".
So what? It's pretty hard to tackle the root causes of anything and we are plenty happy with solutions that stop bad habits in other ways.
Should we have the FDA just ban harmful substances or do we need to educate everyone about everything eatable?
Surely education would be better, but it's just not feasible and creating a world in which you have to dodge yet another scam seems bad to me.
I'd argue that sports betting is not the biggest concern. What we saw was the rise of online cassinos after a new law in 2023 classified them as "sports betting" too.
Betting your team will win the tournament has a very delayed reward: the game needs to play out for hours/minutes before you know if you have won. Only hardcore gamblers experience instant rewards and becoming a 'serious' sports gambler is no easy task: you have learn about the sport, then teams, the players, the outcomes, the time of the matches, etc. Cassinos, on the other hand, are just an app with a lever that provides instantaneous rewards and thus hook your brain with much more intensity in a shorter time span. A lot of people who don't care about sports or just won't be hooked by sports betting are now trapped in those online cassinos. It's a shame.
The impeachment has zero relation with this topic, you are using this space to drop in a political and highly controversial statement in order to try and gain visibility to your highly contentious POV. How is this not removed yet? Flagged.
Same thing is happening in India. For a poor country like India, Sports betting app that shows advertisements that you can make this much money should be banned.
It is literally taking money from the poorest and most gullible Indians to the owners.
The figures you state are misleading. Money bet is not money lost. For example, roulette payout is 97.3% and sports betting payout can be as high as 99% or even 100% (done to attract players so that they open an account).
I'm not sure I'd call them misleading because they didn't say the money was gone, just that it was spent (not implying it didn't come back). The fact that that much money was bet at all for an aid program is astonishing and unfortunate. Sure, not all of that money was lost, but I'd call any of those returned "winnings" an investment by the sports betting companies to secure clients for life.
I'm curious which statistic they actually used (spent vs lost). If you're playing a quick game with 99% payout, you could earn $1k of income in a month and "spend" $10k on gambling. It seems like money lost would be an easier figure to compare.
Pop quiz: What's better for your wallet? a game with a 66% expected payout that you will play twice before you lose interest, or a game with a 97.3% payout that you'll play 31 times on average?
The comparison needs to be in terms of typical use, otherwise engineering for addictiveness gets a free pass because it often hinges on frequent small rewards and can have a near unity return on a single shot basis yet be a big money maker for the house.
Of course there are probably 'safer' forms of gambling that some addicts are presumably able to use to maintain their addiction at a level which isn't disruptive to their life. ... but single shot EV isn't the right metric. Some weekly state lottery usually has pretty poor EV, yet is seldom ruining anyone.
There is simply no reason why this should not be better regulated here in Brazil. It ruins families and the sport. They can advertise themselves freely.
We’ve spent years conditioning an entire generation of kids on quick hits of dopamine from mobile phone apps. I personally believe that it’s a “glitch in the matrix” for a large enough segment of the population to cause societal chaos.
As a libertarian however, I break with the opinion of making consensual activities illegal even if they are self-harming. So I guess my stance is probably the same as addictive drugs. They could be legal, but come with the same labeling, warnings, ID requirements and age restrictions that come with a pack of cigarettes. We should probably be educating kids about the dangers of addictive apps like we once did with DARE on the dangers of drugs.
It's funny you mention DARE because studies have shown the program was a complete failure, along with the War on Drugs™ and "Just Say No". The only reason it continued as long as it did was not because it was effective, but because it was popular with politicians and the general public because they thought – intuitively – that the program should work. It did not reduce student drug use. In face, it backfired and taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have found learned about otherwise. This ineffective program cost U.S. taxpayers $750M per year for 26 years. Let's not do that again.
> It did not reduce student drug use. In face, it backfired and taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have found learned about otherwise.
I will never forget the day in fifth grade when a DARE representative came to our class with a briefcase full of samples of esoteric (to me at least) drugs. The way they were presented made them extremely appealing to me, similar to perusing the choices at a high-end candy store. I don't know for sure if this had any effect on me but I strongly suspect that it did.
A large part of it was public awareness of the health risks and relatead damage to the image of smoking as cool and classy.
Now, the proportion of people who still take up smoking today do so in spite of all this, which is probably down to them having various specific user profiles that are unaffected by this (IE they live in communities/work jobs where its ubiquitous or are huge James Dean fans).
For gambling, you could possibly go a long way with awareness and labelling, but I think an issue is that gambling is a lot less visible than smoking. Nobody can smell that you popped outside to blow your paycheck on tonight's game. Making gambling deeply uncool might make some people not take it up, but most of the existing addicts would likely carry on in secret. They're already commonly hiding their losses from spouses and friends, so what's one more layer of secrecy?
At any rate, what worked for smoking wasn't making smokers quit, but making fewer and fewer kids start doing it, so making it a pain in the ass to place your first bet might help.
I suspect what worked - at least in Canada - is making it very very inconvenient. The number of places you can smoke outside of your own house is very limited now. And "going outside for a smoke" at -20C is miserable.
Other replies have mentioned the positive reasons why smoking declined, and I'd like to believe that because I want to imitate it in my country. But in my most skeptical heart I suspect it's because of marijuana and vape instead. I haven't researched further to support this hypothesis but the first Google hit I get looks confirming.
> because it was popular with politicians and the general public because they thought – intuitively – that the program should work
Are you sure they did? Maybe they were just OK with programs that didn't actually work.
What does work is restricted access through age limits, closing times, and higher prices (through taxes is what's been studied, but it's safe to say making something illegal also increases prices). These are unpopular policies, and those who profit from alcohol/gambling/etc. have an easy time mobilizing opposition to it.
What has been studied little, but was a big part of historical anti-alcohol movements until total prohibition won out, was profit bans. Government/municipal monopolies were justified in that it took away regular people's incentive to tempt their fellow citizens into ruin, and the idea was that while government may be corrupted by the profit incentive, at least they carried the costs of alcohol/gambling abuse as well. (Some teetotallers didn't think that was enough, and came up with rules that e.g restricting municipal monopolies from spending the profit as they pleased)
How could you possibly study such a thing? Even if you compare DARE students against non-comparable DARE students, how could you reliably capture measure how many did drugs? People can lie on surveys, particularly with respect to illegal actions. You could measure arrests but that's not going to capture how many used drugs without ever getting arrested, nor the social context in which they were used. It's a double-edged sword too because the control data would have similar issues with obtainment.
I've seen a lot of these talking points before by the pro-drug crowd. "It taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have learned about otherwise" is laughable when subjected to scrutiny. You'd have to live under a rock to otherwise not learn about the drugs the DARE program teaches (and they don't get particularly exotic either). The idea is asinine to begin with - you'd want kids to know about exotic drugs and their side effects to know to avoid them in the first place.
The worst part is that the pro-drug crowd, like yourself, touts these talking points in an attempt to end the program - to what end? If I accept your talking points blindly that the program has failed, does that mean we simply stop trying? It seems less that you disagreed with the implementation of the program and more that you don't believe kids, or anyone, should be dissuaded from drugs.
It is well studied. I am pro-science more than I am pro-drug.
> D.A.R.E.’s original curriculum was not shaped by prevention specialists but by police officers and teachers in Los Angeles. They started D.A.R.E. in 1983 to curb the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco among teens and to improve community–police relations. Fueled by word of mouth, the program quickly spread to 75 percent of U.S. schools.
> But for over a decade research cast doubt on the program’s benefits. The Department of Justice funded the first national study of D.A.R.E. and the results, made public in 1994, showed only small short-term reductions in participants’ use of tobacco—but not alcohol or marijuana. A 2009 report by Justice referred to 30 subsequent evaluations that also found no significant long-term improvement in teen substance abuse.
> Launched in 1983, D.A.R.E. was taught by police officers in classrooms nationwide. Their presentations warned students about the dangers of substance use and told kids to say no to drugs. It was a message that was repeated in PSAs and cheesy songs. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan even made it one of her major causes.
> Teaching drug abstinence remains popular among some groups, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's messaging to teenagers still focuses on the goal that they should be "drug-free." But numerous studies published in the 1990s and early 2000s concluded programs like D.A.R.E. had no significant impact on drug use. And one study actually found a slight uptick in drug use among suburban students after participation in D.A.R.E.
Surprisingly you can test this with a randomized field test:
> The Illinois D.A.R.E. Evaluation was conducted as a randomized field experiment with one pretest and multiple planned post-tests. The researchers identified 18 pairs of elementary schools, representative of urban, suburban, and rural areas throughout northern and central Illinois. Schools were matched in each pair by type, ethnic composition, number of students with limited English proficiency, and the percent of students from low income families. None of these schools had previously received D.A.R.E.. For the 12 pairs of schools located in urban and suburban areas, one school in each pair was randomly assigned to receive D.A.R.E. in the spring of 1990
Yes, surveys do have flaws but they are a better approach than just giving up and saying any research is impossible.
I’d recommend we don’t simply stop trying, instead we test different programs, and only once we have shown their effectiveness do we role them out further.
I'm a member of the "anti drug crowd" (lifelong organized teetotaller), and I rely on the research of Thomas Babor among others, for WHO among others. We know how to study social interventions. There's a lot of evidence this type of intervention doesn't work.
Now there's New DARE (15+ years old at this point). Not sure if this has been scrutinized as much, but supposedly it is effective since it's eligible for funding that requires demonstrated effectiveness.
I don't think it was a "complete failure" since we are talking about it here. I remember the whole thing quite vividly from elementary school, and it really scared me away from drugs, even as an adult to this day.
Counterpoint: DARE didn’t scare me away from drugs at all, and in fact taught me how to do the more common ones and what “street names” to ask for at an age where I wasn’t otherwise being exposed to that knowledge.
The War on Drugs is now considered a failure because it was unable to eliminate drug usage and led to a large number of people being incarcerated for drug offenses. But as drugs have been increasingly legalized/decriminalized in certain areas of the country, the results are even worse. I’m now becoming more convinced that the war on drugs wasn’t a failure, and in fact might be the best that can feasibly be accomplished. I think the “war” terminology doomed it from the start, as it primed us all to think complete and total victory was actually attainable, instead of a scenario where we are instead simply trying to keep society afloat.
In most respects I would consider myself a libertarian, but when it comes to hard drugs or betting, I tend to be a lot more conservative. Pot is fine, actually better for you than alcohol, but drugs like cocaine are far too addictive. That addiction actively strips away one’s freedom due to their use, and thus I find it counterproductive to a libertarian society. I would argue most forms of betting fall within this category, and much like drug use disproportionately affects poorer areas.
Warnings do not really work in practice. What if these activities are not simply self-harming but destroy the families of the addict and large parts of the fabric of society? Even you mention societal chaos. How does the libertarian world-view accommodate that?
A measure could well be somewhat effective on its own, but then it would require the industry to get creative and work extra hard to still get people hooked, which they will do, but they'd rather not have to do it in the first place.
What's more, opposition to any type of well intended regulation is typical for harmful industries, even if the regulation might be ineffective. They do that on principle, as they don't want the precedent of getting regulated. The mere idea of having regulations for the benefit of society threatens their business models.
The (naive) libertarian world view wants people overdosing to have different providers bidding for Narcan just-in-time
I do favour a libertarian world view but a lot of people using that moniker believe in discussing a mother-child bond through a libertarian point of view
This is, if anything, the opposite. "I got mine" is when people pull the ladder up after them, e.g. going to the government to pass rules restricting housing construction after they've bought a house and are now interested in raising housing prices through scarcity rather than housing affordability, or the AARP securing healthcare subsidies for affluent retirees by taxing the working poor.
It's not obvious how the notion is even relevant to sports betting. The analogous thing would be if some group had made a lot of money betting on sports and then wants to stop anyone else from doing it, but making a lot of money from gambling is not the common case and the libertarian position wouldn't be to stop anybody from doing it regardless.
As a libertarian myself, I've come to the conclusion that anything addictive is not really consensual, because addiction can't be controlled. Thus, selling or providing addictive stuff violates consent of the buyer, and should either be illegal, or have high taxes. Maybe there should be different laws to those who are already addicted and those who are not. Drugs which are not addictive, should be legal, but have all the information about their negative effects on the label.
Imo this should apply to addictive apps as well. The damage here is mostly the time that is wasted.
Gambling is also ruining professional sports for me because I find the frequent gambling promos during the games depressing and disruptive.
Many years ago I worked at a company that had Ladbrokes in the UK as a customer. On my first visit to London, I noticed their storefronts and found them appalling. They were some of the sorriest, shabbiest public spaces I'd seen, clearly designed to extract resources from the least well off.
I don't really buy any of the arguments in favor of widespread legalization (and I include state lotteries in this). I could be ok with legalization for a few big events like the NCAA tournament because clearly there is some demand that must be met, but we should not be enabling gambling as a widespread daily habit.
Of course there will always be black market gambling and the state cannot protect its citizens from every evil, but nor should it actively enable them.
I used to support SG legalization quite a bit, but after seeing how quickly it can get people that I once thought were rock solid financially into a very bad financial situation quicker than I thought possible, I have no problem with heavily regulating bets sizes and interaction limits, if not an outright ban. Before it was slightly illegal and those people I guess avoided “bookies” as a result of being afraid of that whole scene. The most I ever gamble is when the lotteries get to ridiculously high amounts like $500 million and get a $2 ticket. However, people seem to get addicted to sports betting as fast as crack cocaine and it’s much wider spread than I thought, and contributes almost nothing to civilization other than the pocket books of the middle men. Is it because sports betting gives you quick feedback as oppose to lotteries making you wait or maybe the ease it is to drop your whole bank account as a bet? It seems like net societal negative in almost all ways other than a brief chance of thrill.
> Is it because sports betting gives you quick feedback as oppose to lotteries making you wait or maybe the ease it is to drop your whole bank account as a bet?
I suspect it's because unlike the lotto and games of chance, people can delude themselves into thinking they "know" the sport. It's not a gambling if they know better. It's also easy to externalize the blame for your loses "they would have won if not for <bad call, bad play, bad management, injury, weather, etc... Or combination thereof>"
You can dip your toe in betting on the obvious mismatched, where it's pretty clear who will win. This is priced into the bookmaking, so the payout is little, but this helps people convince themselves they do know the sport and chase longer odds with better payouts.
And then you get sunk cost fallacy, as they lose, they convince themselves they can win it back because they learned from before and their system will work this time.
I also don't think people realize how much money, effort, time, very smart (and well-funded) individuals are working on making those odds. They have access to decades worth of data, all the stats, and are entirely un-emotional or clinical about the data they are trawling through. Even if they miss something or get it wrong, it's usually minute and you as the gambler barely make any money out of it. Short of some black-swan like event or insider knowledge, you as a single individual would not be able to come up with a system that on average does better than the book makers.
At least (very loosely) with the lottery it's kinda random and your odds are "set" or rather your payout is not proportionate to your chance of winning. It's a happy surprise kind of thing as long as you don't overdo it.
You don't need to beat the bookies, you need to beat the odds. The bookies win either way. All they need to do is make sure bets on each side net out, minus their take.
If you have a reliable way to beat the odds (ie. Inefficient betting markets that get the odds of success wrong) you can theoretically make money - but its a similar scenario to daytrading, where you need to do extremely well because you have to overcome the negative drag from the booky take too.
It's not just the bookmakers either - there are syndicates, much like hedge funds, whose entire 9-5 job is trying to make money out of this stuff too, which forces the bookies into line and makes the prices on markets like Betfair fairly efficient.
Basically, as a guy on the street, you don't have a clue and you're up against MIT-tier brains trying to beat you.
It's interesting to me that more people don't realise this is intuitively obvious, though. No-one would look at the Olympics and think, oh yeah, I can run faster than Usain Bolt.
That's a good point about being easy to externalize the blame. I'd also add on that likely a reason is the emotion of it. People are already emotional about sports and their team. With money on the line, that ramps up even more. The emotional aspect with highs and lows helps people crave more of that excitement.
Not sure about total death rates but I think gambling addiction has the highest suicide rate of any of the big addictions out there. It seems truly ruinous. I suppose if any random person can blow their savings on out of the money options theyre unable to gauge the risk of then they might as well be allowed to do the same with crazy parlay bets but seeing the whole landscape of sports betting evolve over the last handful of years has still been quite eerie to me.
My gut these days tells me its probably better for the humans in society if this stuff is left only to black markets because it seems like it destroys lives.
The state of sports gambling in the UK is now such that Sky Sports (used to be a cable/satellite TV station catering purely to sports) is now basically just a series of gambling adverts with some sport thrown in to keep the punters hooked. They even launched a Sky Bet betting company which seems to have completely overtaken the TV channels - every sport is riddled with Sky Bet adverts and sponsorship. The biggest irony is that professional sportsmen (it's always men) keep getting bans for gambling on their own sport, and yet we somehow expect extremely rich young men in a "banter" culture to ignore the fact that every week they pull on a shirt with multiple gambling sponsors on it and then play in a stadium with endless gambling ads scrolling around the LED boards before being interviewed afterwards standing in front of a wall of gambling sponsors by a man with Sky Bet written on his microphone.
>The biggest irony is that professional sportsmen (it's always men) keep getting bans for gambling on their own sport
People pointing this out often leads me to an impression that athletes should be allowed to bet on their own games. Problem is, that leads to match-fixing.
This is a very thoughtful post. I have witnessed similar gambling establishments in Japan/JRA and Hong Kong/HJC. Both are equally unappealing to me for various reasons that you mentioned.
Your post made me think more about sports betting vs a lottery. To me, they really are different. With a lottery, you need to wait days to get the result (mostly). The chance for multiple quick dopamine hits is exceedingly low. (Scratch tickets and high speed lottos are another matter.). Now think about sports betting: So many simultaneous events or races, so the customer (user?) has many more chances for multiple quick dopamine hits. Maybe a potential framework to talk about gambling harm is opportunities for for multiple quick dopamine hits. If very low, then many tolerate it in their community, especially if a significant portion goes to social causes.
One thing I am absolutely sure about: Advertising for sports betting should be banned. I put it in the same class as cigarette ads as a child. Damn they looked so cool and fun. What a terrible message to spread!
> because clearly there is some demand that must be met
There is demand it's not clear that it "must be met." The problem is not the betting or oddsmaking, the problem is, how do you handle settlements?
You're presenting the false dichotomy, that we should just allow gambling, because it's inevitable, and we can occasionally use the violence of the state and it's courts to run the settlement racket on behalf of short changed bookies.
> but we should not be enabling gambling
And we have no reason to. We should harshly penalize people who try to collect on gambling debt and they should have no access to the courts or to sheriff's over problems arising from it.
> cannot protect its citizens from every evil
That's why this is all so insidious because it's really only one you need to actually protect them from. Suddenly you'll find the industry self regulating customers with an obvious illness out at the front door. They'll get amazingly good at this.
Walking through the UK really does not lead to a good view of sports betting. The store fronts do not look like places that a happy person would go to.
While we don't have Ladbrokes, we do have a number of different companies running gambling halls, with slot machines and sports gambling. Those should be outlawed, there is nothing good about them, they provide absolutely no value to society. I'm fine with people being able to place a small bet on their local football team and I'm fine with casinos where people make it an occasional event, similar to going to the movies or seeing a concert.
But these commercial gambling halls, it's not some well of person who decides to pop in Friday afternoon and maybe lose €20 on a crazy sports bet or the slot machines and then go home and have dinner with the family. It is the some of our weakest and loneliest people who line up, waiting for the place to open and then spend the next 10 hours there. There are places who will provide free food for their best "customers", to ensure that they don't leave. We're transferring money from social welfare to private companies, using addiction and loneliness.
As for sports, I don't think professional soccer would like a ban on sports gambling. The revenue and salaries it have generated are to high for them to walk away now. It is hurting the sport though, in the sense that the community and local fans have been pushed out long ago. A local football club had to leave the premier league a few years ago, as a result they could no longer charge insane prices for tickets at the stadium. The result: They had more fans come to every single game, they sold more season passes, because the fans still wanted to see the games, and now they could afford it. Sure, they made less money, but the connection to the fans and the city grow.
My state makes lotteries illegal but I still support gambling. It’s one thing for someone to get ripped off in a private transaction that you can walk away from.
However the government is a monopoly, and has a monopoly on violence. Giving a mafia that can take your house away or put you behind bars their own casino is an incredibly bad idea.
I was just talking about this issue last night with a friend.
When I was six, my father burned me with a lesson. We were at a fairground, and I saw a pyramid of cans. The standard game: throw a ball and knock em down. At six years old, I was already a good throw. I knew I could win. My father made me an offer. He gave me the money for the game and told me that was my lunch money. If I won, I'd get both lunch and the win otherwise .....
Of course, even the best six-year-old has a very low chance of knocking over those weighted cans. The house wins. I went hungry that day.
Since then, I’ve had a terrible reaction to gambling. Casinos make me feel ill just walking through and seeing all the sad faces. I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life. I always feel that hungry belly when I think of gambling and it turns me right off.
Little did you know at the time that your father was also gambling. His bet was against you. His reward was that you would align to his views.
Had his gamble failed, you would’ve been addicted at a young age to that rush, and his authority on many life matters would’ve been diminished in your young eyes.
Not only is this baseless cynicism as another comment said (and, hey, I'm one hell of a cynic), but it also makes wild assumptions, based on absolutely nothing, about how the father would've handled the situation had he won.
That's not really an A/B scenario, there are a variety of outcomes there.
I have a 7 year old, and I think the parent is right. It would be very hard to unwind the winning experience from the psyche of a kid. They'd be talking about it for months - maybe even years. My kid still talks about the run-of-the-mill soccer goal he scored three weeks ago.
Parent is dramatizing it, and one event probably wouldn't make _that_ much of a difference in life outcome, but I think there's a valuable lesson here. The dad was gambling.
Many choices in life have some risk and some odds of failing. Calling them all gambling is plain wrong. Are you gambling that you will not be implicated in an accident every time you leave your home? There's definitely a risk, and a significant number of people lose every day.
Or maybe the odds do matter, as does the existence of a house that manipulates them.
I feel something similar, even though I never had a lesson like you did. I feel like I must be completely immune to gambling addiction because the thought that I could walk out of a casino with more money than I came in with is just unimaginable to me.
I met up with some old college friends on a trip after 20 years of not seeing them, and all they wanted to do on Saturday and Sunday was sit around, watch football on TV, and talk about their bets.
No one was going for any team in particular. They were cheering for their bets to win. I lost all interest in the idea of me ever gambling after that.
There are certains sports I love to watch because I love the game. Gambling would ruin that for me. No thanks.
I had lunch with my dad recently and he mentioned he tried out one of the sports betting apps, because they gave him a free $20 to gamble with. My heart sunk a little. I know he likes a deal, but I didn't think he'd take obvious bait like that. I brought up what they were doing incase he didn't see what was in front of his face, and tried to make sure it wasn't going to become a problem. I'd hate to see him destroy his retirement with gambling, he worked so hard to get there.
His entire working life he was never a sports fan, but in retirement he seems really into it. There have been a lot of changes, and I really hope this doesn't become one of them. I could see him really getting into all the statistics.
This really resonated with me because at first glance I feel that these gambling apps have almost no effect on me because I don’t gamble, but the fact that they can so effectively lure people you love who are less cynical, that’s rough.
If the person wins their first bet they are very likely to let their winnings ride until it is lost.
If the person loses their first bet, and it's against another player, then not only have they potentially hooked in a new player but they also rewarded an active user.
If the person loses their first bet and it's against the house then they just attracted a potential new player while paying $0.
Honestly, I would expect the opposite. I wouldn't care who wins between the Cowboys and the Giants, but if I put a $10 bet down on the Giants, all of the sudden and find myself rooting for them. You should tell your buds to bet on a team and forget all the prop bets. ;)
Contrary to you, there’s certain sports I find boring to watch as such (eg, American football) — but enjoy in a condensed version focused on bets (eg, RedZone and dailies on American football). The game of predicting individual performance and ensemble outperformance is more interesting to me than the underlying sport — and much more interesting to discuss than any single game.
You don’t have to gamble, but trying to portray it as some grievous fault people enjoy things differently than you is ridiculous.
I re-read my comment and did not pass any judgement then, nor now. I simply shared my experience.
If you are triggered by something I wrote, that's all on you. I get it, no one dealing with addiction wants to be called out on it. That is less than helpful for either party.
> No one was going for any team in particular. They were cheering for their bets to win. I lost all interest in the idea of me ever gambling after this.
You’re negative here — and I think you know it.
> I get it, no one dealing with addiction wants to be called out on it.
Wowza, calling me “triggered” and an “addict” because I enjoy something differently than you and thought your comment was negative isn’t appropriate.
I think your response here confirms my initial impression that you have issues with this topic.
"I" lost all interest. That's not a dig at them, or you. I've dealt with my own demons and am very comfortable differentiating between sharing my experience from the "I", and not drifting into giving unwanted advice.
I know myself, and I know if I gambled on my one sport where I follow one team, it would ruin the game for me. I would no longer watch for the intricacies of the game. I get worked up enough without the extra dopamine hits of gambling added into the mix. I hate the fact that half the advertisements are now for a product that ruins lives. My kids are being target with gambling ads when they watch with me.
These are still my old college roommates. Not good friends though. More like drinking buddies. And that's okay. I don't hop on airplanes to go see them anymore because I can get the same quality of interaction from our text message group. I'm at a place in life where I value deeper human connection, and its not there anymore.
That's all on me. I know plenty of people content to watch sports all weekend, with or without gambling. Good for them. It's just not my thing, and both perspectives can coexist just fine. One doesn't invalidate the other.
> You’re negative here — and I think you know it.
> you have issues with this topic.
I absolutely have issues with this topic. It's a cancer on society, as the article confirms.
Some in people can gamble and not ruin their lives. Same with drinking. If you are one of those who can moderate in dopamine fueled areas of life, congrats. I can't, so I chose not to participate.
I know what you mean in that i gamble when i golf.
golf is boring so i need some action to entertain myself. I suck at golf so i usually lose money, but as long as i go in knowing im risking money for entertainment then its really not unlike any other form of entertainment.
similar to you i prefer placing many small bets in order to keep myself entertained.
Golf is boring to you because as you said, you suck at it. When you can play well enough to execute reasonably well the strategic aspect of the game opens up. But yes, match play and betting do make things fun in their own way too!
Golf is so hard you can’t possibly get good at it and not love it. People golf for a variety of reasons. I play with guys that are relatively terrible because they never practice because it’s just not important to them. They don’t golf because they love the game but rather because they like to get out and away from everything for a few hours and to socialize.
A lot of times people do things they don’t find too interesting because they really like the side effects. I used to play cards with friends that took it seriously and I never really won and wasn’t too into it but it was fun to hang out.
Wait, you're upset because they aren't in love with a particular team? Lol I see nothing wrong with this. Do you not fill out a bracket for March madness? It's the same thing.
I'm not upset with them, at all. I chose to get on an airplane to go see them. Then wasted a weekend sitting around next to each other staring at the tv and not really being present. That was on me. I wanted to be with my old friends, and could have left and done my own thing at any time.
It was a good learning experience for myself. My state does not have online gambling and I hope it stays that way.
In my view, gambling should be a service provided directly by the government. And I'm not talking a "public-private partnership", but an actual DoG that will be taking bets, running gaming rooms in select cities etc. -- all with the explicit mandate to make of gambling available but boring. No bonuses, no ads, no promotions, no glitzy websites.
Gambling is inherently exploitative and no amount of regulation will align the incentives for commercial operators. You also don't want to ban it outright, as it may descend into the underground otherwise, so this looks like a reasonable area for the govt to take direct control.
I think the Netherlands has this and it sort of seems to work. In that I've never seen anyone really addicted to gambling, even if half the country provides the government some extra money in the 'national lottery' every month. We got a lot of random wins of boxes of ice cream and stuff growing up.
Casinos exist, but are basically a regulated service (possibly private, but as far as I know there's only a single operator).
Well we do have that in some states of India, and guess what? It has the same effects. Moreover the government is incentivized to promote this as it's an alternate source of revenue. Roads are peppered with ads, and there's the constant infighting in the ruling government to see who gets the gambling and liquor sales portfolio (and usually it's a buddy or kid of the chief minister).
I think this used to be the case in (most of) Australia (it's still government run in Western Australia but that will change - they've already tried twice to privatise it but the first time was derailed by the pandemic and the second time no one was offering enough money).
I think privatisation happened quite a while ago (mid to late 1990s) but my vague memory is that there was some sort of deregulation in the mid 2000s (or at least that's when I remember the ads becoming incessant) and that seems to have coincided with the endless offers of bonus bets, deposit matches, bet returns etc.
The UK sort of had this for a while via "The Tote" - set up in the 1920s by the UK government, it ran stores that took sports bets, had a presence at almost all horse races etc providing safe/legitimate services.
It operated alongside other private operators, but was entirely State owned and operated until it was privatized in 2011. I forget the specifics of it, but the Tote uses (or at least used to) some kind of "pool betting" model that meant it didn't profit directly from customers losing bets, being agnostic about the results was meant to reduce predatory pressures etc.
I think this likely helped a lot to give those who wanted to gamble somewhere they could always trust to honor the arrangement and avoid "underground" operators, I don't know that it helped all that much in reducing the social harms etc though.
Silly take: humans are really bad at controlling themselves and stick to doing the correct things, that's why newer languages like Go and Rust force you to check errors in return values, among many other additional checks/guardrails that didn't exist or weren't common in older languages. It is just easier to have the compiler checks these things for you instead of manually making sure things are correct. Same for sports gambling. Human nature is really bad, and it is really hard to control yourself. See that wsj reporting. Even someone as rich and educated as a psychiatrist can sink 6 digit amount of money into gambling. When the law allowed gambling, especially online gambling, it opened a can of worms.
This is not so much than human are "really bad" at this. Here they're facing other human (scientists, psychologists, artists, marketers), computers, algorithms, spending all their waking hours devising scheme to make them addicted.
The C language may not help you much with clean memory allocation, but at least they are not using A/B testing and emotional appeal to coerce you into doing deadly memory management.
Sorry for the nitpick but I'm curious if I'm off here:
> that's why newer languages like Go and Rust force you to check errors in return values
Go doesn't require you check return values though, no? I can get a return of type (*Model, error) and just completely ignore the error portion of it and never check it. Rust doesn't let you access the value until you deal with the Result/Option wrapper, requiring that you at least acknowledge the potential for an error.
The language doesn't force it but some common tooling does. They probably are using something like staticcheck in their setup and conflating it with the core language.
You can ignore it but the compiler will force you to assign it to something, usually `_`. That alone is helpful in reminding the programmer that return values need to thought of, but in addition you have pretty much all Go linters/analyzers force you to check its value and not use `_`.
If human nature is truly that inherently bad and dangerous, then the worst possible thing we could do is to allow adult human beings to rule over other adult human beings as their parent, using the threat of violence to prevent them from doing things “for their own good”.
Indeed, allowing this to occur has wrought orders of magnitude more death and destruction than sports gambling or drug use or prostitution.
I used to think this, but do you really see the liberalization of gambling laws as having a positive effect? Would you describe the previous state of it being illegal as some kind of dystopia? Do you care at all about the wreckage it creates in the lives of individuals and their families?
I think laws should be viewed from the lens of human rights and the idea of what might be an actual justifiable application of violence, and not a naive “positive effect”.
It would have a positive effect if I went around summarily executing everyone accused of child exploitation, for example, but it would be insane and unjust. There’s a reason we don’t do it that way.
Threatening people with violence for what other people view as misapplication of their own resources is incredibly unjust.
If you don’t have the freedom to destroy yourself or your own resources, you don’t have freedom.
It isn’t the legal system that causes this wreckage (although you might disagree, “lifting” a ban isn’t an action - it’s cessation of the threat of future enforcement action), and it isn’t the legal system that is the appropriate solution to the problem. All bans are, practically, are the threat of someone pulling out a gun to force you to stop. If you personally aren’t willing to go to that length, you shouldn’t vote for or support such policies.
Are you willing to pull a gun on an addict to stop them from indulging in their addiction? If not, what possible moral justification do you have for instructing a cop to do same?
If stats showed that instances of gambling related social ills increased massively after liberalization would that impact you at all? is your ideology truly consequence-free?
edit: Also yes, I would use physical violence to stop someone I cared about from destroying their lives with gambling if it would help. I would hope for the sake of your loved ones you would be willing to do the same
I do not have to be willing to take out a gun for the ban, and neither does a cop. Cessation of easy online gambling would be enough for some high proportion of the problem. All that takes is the court shutting the company down and serving a cease and desist to their website. You may claim this requires a gun but as far as I know that's never been the case.
The only reason that a ban like that works is because there is the threat of a gun. You can pretend that it doesn’t require a gun but that’s what the ban is: threat of arrest if you don’t comply.
It does require the gun, but it doesn’t require that the gun get pulled out, because everyone knows the police WILL do so if you resist them. It’s implicit. The cop does have to be ready and willing to do so (contrary to your claim), or everyone would ignore the ban, as it would have no teeth.
People don’t obey laws that are inconvenient to them because of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because the police will draw down on them and force them if push comes to shove.
Look what happened in Mexico and California and many other places after criminalizing them.
They are not the same thing. One causes huge amounts of murder and violence, and the other is simply people destroying their own selves, as is their right.
Almost all of the gun crime in the US is the direct result of the prohibitions on the sale and manufacture of drugs.
Argentina is currently facing a huge teenager gambling addiction on illegal websites, we're talking about kids from 11 years old onwards. They gamble on school breaks, among their friends as something completely natural. Mobsters catch them by giving away for free an initial fixed amount of money, then they get hooked and keep betting and burning money. The worst part of it is that is an extremely silent addiction: parents would only realize about it once a kid is so full of debts that they get threatened by the mobsters that run these sites, in their despair they reveal the situation to their parents. They easily search them online through social networks and pressure them really hard for the money that they owe. In my opinion online gambling is a f***g disgrace and should simply not exist at all. It ruins lives and families. It should only be possible to play/gamble/bet physically in a casino or authorized venue.
"But the more elegant solution is the blunter one: ban sports gambling once again."
I don't think anyone would call blanket banning "elegant", even if it would be the best solution.
"They estimate that legal sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence."
I'm sure the numbers are probably right, but I can't help but feel some of this is reaching a bit - many population causation studies seembto be more about triggers than true root causes. Just because betting triggered this doesn't mean betting needs to be banned. What this should lead to is better support and treatment for people affected by this type of violence. If it's not betting that set it off, it would be some other stressor (probably also money related or feeling like a loser). Trying to fix the person's behavior such as impulse control and anger management would be much better than progressively banning everything as the next trigger emerges.
I am waiting for the day when one of them proposes to ban relationships altogether, because they have an inherent risk for partner violence... A certain TOS episode comes to mind, which depicted the aftermath of such a law.
This is basically where I am at. I live in Illinois and it used to be you could bet at the race track or a couple Off Track Betting locations, otherwise you would have to go to a casino which was probably a distance away. Then they legalized Video Gambling and it popped up in a bunch of bars, restaurants, and stand alone places. You even see it in gas stations sometimes. Now with sports betting online there are constant advertisements for it all the time. In just 15 years legalized gambling went from something relatively niche to extremely prevalent.
There's a scene in Idiocracy where a the main character goes to a hospital and there are slot machines in the background (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70UdQJDzj4k). The last time I saw it I immediately thought of Illinois. Every time I travel to chicagoland I'm shocked to seem them everywhere. Their presence somehow makes otherwise normal places look very sad.
Its already expensive as it is, is it not? Like in a "people are losing heaps of money from their sour bets" kind of way.
My thought is it being more expensive is not going to stop gambling addicts since they are already willing to lose heaps of money by making the bet in the first place.
I have participated in a few meetings of some lottery boards, and I have heard that there is a tension here between the illegal market and the pricing of the legal market. Some states charge the (relatively low) commissions that the illegal market charges because they would prefer to stamp out the illegal market, and others take your position but have a thriving black market for gambling. Those are basically the two options.
> Some states charge the (relatively low) commissions that the illegal market charges because they would prefer to stamp out the illegal market
Slight tangent, but I am now of the view the state should not be allowed to tax legal vices. (Drugs, gambling, alcohol primarily). The reason is it keeps pushing amazing conflicts of interest, and the state ends up incentivized to maintain the behavior it supposedly does not want.
Either [vice] is wrong and should be illegal, or is tolerated and regulated but in no way profited from by those that do the regulation.
I think the taxes thing is mainly to appease the voting public. People want the profits of the bad things to pay for the good things. It makes the ugly pill possible to swallow.
The tempting comparison is the tendency, at least in England, for things like church maintenance fundraisers to be funded by lotteries, by another name (raffle). i.e. donate money, and you might win.
Either gambling is bad or it's not, but in practice people like to be incredibly selective about it, as here, where as you point out sports betting lacks the positive externalities which for some part of the population offset the negative effects.
A church raffle only happens once a year, and the time between buying the ticket and getting the reward is relatively long. That is not going to lead to an addiction.
Having the TV blaring gambling commercials at you constantly and having the ability to place a bet from your phone at a moments notice is completely different. You’re comparing having a glass of wine on a special occasion with downing a fifth of whiskey every night.
> You’re comparing having a glass of wine on a special occasion with downing a fifth of whiskey every night
No one pretends one of those isn’t drinking though, whereas everyone pretends raffles aren’t gambling, or churches could hardly go in for it so much.
> That is not going to lead to an addiction.
So while the public described by the person I was replying to consider positive externalities sufficient to get around the “gambling bad” label for you it is all about how addictive you think an individual form of it would be for other people?
There are people that think all drink is addictive, and some people for whom this is true, but suggest banning alcohol and you are considered a crackpot.
I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending. For example, they would show up at the offices and demand to gamble in person because they couldn’t find enough in life to bet on. Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
> There are people that think all drink is addictive, and some people for whom this is true, but suggest banning alcohol and you are considered a crackpot.
Suggest reasonable restrictions on alcohol though and nearly everyone would agree that's a smart thing.
> I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending... Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
You can find equally horrific stories about alcoholics. We'd have to deal with greater numbers of "such people" if we didn't actively take steps to regulate addictive substances. Even with alcohol we have limits on where and when it can be used, and how it can be advertised. Gambling is available anywhere at anytime and ads are pushed right to addicts phones night and day to remind them to keep paying and broadcast to everyone during sporting events.
> No one pretends one of those isn’t drinking though, whereas everyone pretends raffles aren’t gambling, or churches could hardly go in for it so much.
The raffles I see have a token amount as a reward, compared to the money raised. I think that makes a big difference, both rationally and emotionally.
FYI charity raffles are actually lotteries that would be illegal if not for the charitable use of the funds and exceptions in the rules on lotteries. A lottery generally has three things:
1. A prize
2. Consideration - you must pay to enter
3. A game of pure chance - this differentiates a lottery from a tournament or a silent auction, for example
A raffle fits these definitions, but nonprofits are often allowed to run them specifically because they get an exception to the rules. That is also why many "buy my shit to win a prize" promotions have a way to enter without buying something (getting around the consideration rule) and some of these have a short math test that you need to do to claim your prize (making it a game of not pure chance).
All the big sports betting companies are now dumping money into political television commercials with school teacher testimonials and happy classroom shots urging how passing Bill X will benefit state schools, yet years into legalized sports betting, teachers still have some of the lowest compensation rates.
Ideally you would make it extremely expensive to get started, but inexpensive if you're already addicted and beyond the point of thinking rationally about money.
That's one theory. Another Theory is that the state is simply piling on and further exploiting these people.
A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
> A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
A lot of things are only able to be legal because they are regulated in some way.
I absolutely want the state in the position of "playing nanny" when it comes to things like telling companies they can't dump a ton of toxic chemicals into the rivers or how much pollution they are able to spew into our air.
It's legal to sell tobacco, and it should be, but I'm very glad there are rules against selling cigarettes to children. It's legal to drink alcohol, but it's a very good thing when the state influences behavior like drunk driving.
Nobody wants arbitrary laws restricting private individuals for no reason, but communities should have the power to decide that some behaviors or actions are harmful to the group and are unacceptable. Communities have always done that in one way or another. We've just decided that rather than stick with mob justice we would put away the tar and feathers and allow the state, our public servants who are either elected by us or appointed by those we elect, to enforce the rules for us. I'm glad we did. I've already got a job and can't go around policing all day.
I dont think stopping companies from polluting rivers is playing nanny. It is against the law, destroys others property, and the government should act.
Drunk driving is illegal too, for good reasons.
Im not against laws.
What I am against is the state taking things that are explicitly legal, and making your life hard and penalizing you if you do them.
The role of the government should be enforcing law. Enforcing social judgement and incentives on legal behavior should be left to non-governmental society.
I'll admit that sin taxes imposed on the general public aren't usually a very good idea. For example, I'd much rather see government subsidizing the costs of healthy foods rather than add a tax on sugar.
I can see taxes and tariffs imposed on corporations being useful to limit the amount of certain harmful goods or to help offset the costs of externalities caused by those products. I'd still rather see companies regulated and held accountable for what they do more directly in most cases.
In my mind, the government is a heavy hammer, backed by lethal force. As such, it should be used sparingly to prevent concrete damages, enforce laws, and enforce property rights.
If a person or company is causing people real harm, that should be actionable by the government. If they are poisoning someone or killing their land, that is well within the remit.
Inversely, the government should not be a tool for optimizing society, or increasing the subjective efficiency or morality.
Government is a powerful tool, but that doesnt mean it the right tool for everything. Restraint and respecting other people's autononomy is a difficult skill to lean when you have the power to simply force compliance and "know" you are right.
Subsidizing the cost of health foods would actually be a lot more expensive. In fact, ideally it'd include increasing the accessibility of healthy foods while a tax on sugar would be much easier to implement.
It'd result in more people eating better though (instead of just eating slightly less worse, or eating worse differently while still not getting enough healthy food) and so there'd also be savings in the cost of health care and improvements in productivity.
How are they roughly equivalent, let alone "exactly equivalent"? It seems to me that are vast differences any way you compare them.
Economically, there are major differences in who pays them, There are differences in impact/cost. There are also huge moral differences between subsidizing desired behavior, and penalizing undesirable behavior.
Subsidies increase the amount of money in circulation and taxes decrease it. The price of goods is set relative to the amount of money in circulation (this is what inflation does). Hence, exact equivalence of taxing sugar and subsidizing foods without sugar.
https://archive.ph/CmsIZ