Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Mistake

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64510095

The US already has plenty of legislation regulating advertisements of other vices, so I think a similar ban is totally appropriate here.

Gambling, however has previously in the U.S. shown to be the leading cause of suicide attempts (20% in total) among all forms of addiction (1). A body of evidence has also demonstrated it leads to divorce, bankruptcy, poor health and sometimes incarceration. Worth noting many of these studies centered around machine gambling and all forms of gambling are unique in terms of tendency for compulsion. Considering the landscape it is quite difficult for me to see a way of regulating out of this, not in the U.S. at least.

(1) Zangeneh and Hason 2006, 191-93

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.

Clinicians aren’t the ones to go to for harms anyways, they’re largely not doing the research at any level.

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.

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.

“

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s not a choice between prohibition and selling it in the grocery store. There are many nuances in between.

The thing that bothers me the most is that they know a lot of poitential employees have issues with the whole sector, so they try to give it a false veneer of acceptability. A good example of that was that both Paddy Power and Boyle Sports referred to themselves as suppliers of “risk-based entertainment” in their recruitment literature, something I found to be very sleazy.

I also know people who work for some of these companies and they tell me that all their talk about caring for problem gamblers is complete nonsense and that they actively seek ways to lure back problem gamblers who were able to quit.

It’s also very weird that as governments around the world are cracking down on alcohol poromotion at the same time they seem to be encouraging the promotion of gambling. I would say gambling can do as much harm to a family as alcohol addiction can. I’m frankly shocked at the amount of gambling adverts there are these days. And so many of them carry the subtle sub-text that if you don’t bet on your team then you aren’t a true fan.

The problem is that people will gamble no matter what, so providing a safe way to do so is better than banning it. I agree with you that it’s all about to what degree you allow gambling. At the very least I would ban advertising as it’s effectively normalising something that most definitely should not be normalised.

It’s heinous.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I run a pub. We’d never have any gambling (machines or otherwise) in it, and we charge less than most pubs for locally sourced beer/cider.

If you’re running your business to extract value from people rather than to create community with them, you’re a bad person.

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.

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.

After all, client’s neurotransmitters are the same.

Of course that won’t happen, it’s too ingrained in society. But it really is a scourge.

And I say this as someone who enjoys my beverages responsibly.

Legalizing heroin or the like will destroy parts of our society of nothing else changes.

Yep. Solved. Next question please.

There exists a deeper question here regarding “why do these clubs require so much money that they need to bleed it out of the community in the form of poker machines?” I’d posit a good number of them probably don’t need that much cash, and most of it is just profit.

– 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.

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.

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!

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.

If you want to do it for fun then use fantasy points for it.

Still, it really doesn’t matter,

After all, who wins the flag.

Good clean sport is what we’re after,

And we aim to make our brag

To each near or distant nation

Whereon shines the sporting sun

That of all our games gymnastic

Base ball is the cleanest one!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal

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.

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

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.

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.

Lotto and sports betting in its modern incarnation are very different.

Lotto was created so that people’s desire for gambling is diverted towards charity.

When I was a cashier the state owned lottery monopoly had a training session for us on how to operate the lottery machines, and it was really dystopian how most of the time was spent on encouraging us to make upsells with sales pitches and being happy about gambling.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Without alchohol social scenes may be more creative. Karoke. Board games. Social games. Deep conversatiobs. Challenges. Parties like you had as a kid.

(Incidentally, the restaurant in your analogy would probably not be viable without that bar!)

I’m not putting up a straw man – I’m actually in favour of it. I agree that all forms of gambling ruins lives. We would improve society if we agreed that all gambling is bad.

As 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.

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.

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.

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.

    > 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

I don’t see how this latest gambling fad ends except for another Black Sox scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal

It’s been a hundred years so I guess it’s time we learned our lesson the hard way, again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

If that were true, people would stop paying attention of it. What other criterion would you have for the quality of sports?

But the worst is how easily you brush aside that it “ruins lives”. Not that that’s your fault. It seems that almost nobody cares about it. It has been known for a long time that gambling is detrimental, to individuals and to society, yet a bunch of Wolf-of-Wall-Street-style financiers use it to get richer without the need for as much as a good idea. There’s less ingenuity and skill involved in betting than in drugs. It’s bottom of the barrel amorality, bribing and corrupting its way into politics.

And nobody cares.

It’s soul-destroying.

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.

“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?”

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.

We have forgotten the deeper reasons that certain things were prohibited or discouraged, assuming that these rules were only there because of a belief in a religion society doesn’t follow anymore. That was a naive view and it turns out that many “old” rules are actually pragmatic social codes disguised as beliefs. This isn’t limited to a particular tradition, either: pretty much every major religion has frowned upon things like gambling.

And so in the absence of any real coherent philosophy that aims to deal with complex problems like gambling, addiction, or excessive interest rates, you’re only going to get an expansion of what is already dominant: markets.

Don’t expect this to change until knowledge of ethics and philosophy becomes widespread enough to establish a new mental model for thinking about these issues.

The only working moral on this mortal coil is a dose of empathy for your fellow human (and if you can bring yourself to it: your fellow animal). It doesn’t require a new mental model, just proper stewardship.

No doubt it was. Workers were alienated before the industrial revolution too, and we were already emitting CO2 before the 1950s, but the scale of the problem changed in a very impactful way.

Of course I doubt we can get reliable statistics from 1920s, but I don’t think you should disregard their argument just because it was happening before. Gambling is as old as numbers, and it’s not going to go away, but we can still look for the factors that drastically increased the magnitude of the issue.

And yes, most religions have weighed in on gambling as most societies have been shaped by religion. Secularism is a recent thing.

> Secularism is a recent thing.

Sokrates and Buddha would like a word.

Reincarnation, the soul, karma, etc aren’t exactly compatible with materialistic secularism.

Socrates and Buddha were 2,500 years ago and I don’t think I’d describe them as being secularists. Secularism is something that came out of the Enlightenment, in the West at least. It is absolutely a recent thing for the purposes of the discussion.

    > most religions have weighed in on gambling as most societies have been shaped by religion

Really? Except Islam, are there rules against gambling in Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism?

“The (Hindu) text Arthashastra (c. 4th century BCE) recommends taxation and control of gambling.”

“The Buddha stated gambling as a source of destruction in Singalovada Sutra. Professions that are seen to violate the precept against theft include working in the gambling industry.”

Instead of asking a lazy question as a challenge, you could have spent 3 seconds looking this up. It wasn’t particularly hard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling#Religious_views

The largest Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, teaches that, while games of chance aren’t intrinsically evil (ie running an MC simulation), and low stakes gambling is allowed (raffle), gambling must be

– fair. That’s obvious

– even odds for all participants

Presumably, no house advantage

– not be pathological

You cannot play if you’re addicted to gambling, have an addictive personality, or often that an addiction could arise

– not involve very high stakes as the money would have been better spent on the poor

No $10 000/hand table.

I don’t know if it comes verbatim from the Bible, but there are many denominations that find that gambling is sinful. Direct prohibitions from the scripture aren’t the only source of religious rules – especially for secular questions.

As another example, many denominations have strict rules against alcohol – despite the many positive stories about alcohol in the bible and the role of wine during communion.

The Quran, which id consider among those as a “Holy book” condemns gambling pretty outright multiple times.

If we want less money around college sports there need to be a lot more rules all over the place to make sure there is less profit to be had. Or we could just let people get paid for labor even though they are also students, which is the fair things to do and it’s something we do in just about every other context.

Million dollar salaries for the coach, hundreds of millions poured into the administration all on the backs of kids who were ruining their health (bad hits, concussions) had no benefits, and nothing to show for it after the left (1).

It was abusive

(1) their college tuition was free, but they weren’t given an education since they were expected to train 40 hr and TAs were expected to give free passing grades.

Then, in the Middle Ages, Catholic theologians added nuance introducing a concept of time value of money – ie when you lend out $100 you also lose the ability to use that $100 for the time of the loan. The concept of a small interest rate was adopted.

Which is fine, except it opened the flood gates until we eventually got the high interest rates we have today.

What makes our rates usurious? That they are issued with the issuer knowing the principal will never be paid off.

Also, the deflationary effects of high interest rates are not because it causes unemployment, but because it reduced the rate of increase of the money supply.

Of course, lowered money is recessionary, which leads to unemployment which puts downward pressure on wages; but wages aren’t the reason for inflation – the increase in monetary mass is.

I was dead for what we assume to be billions of years since this universe popped up, and soon I will be for what we understand to be far, far longer. These moment are precious, and those meals and the people we share them with are too. It makes so much sense to express gratitude for them.

That little moment to remind yourself that it’s all borrowed from the universe and will need to be given back is, I think, essential to actually living. Without that appreciation, does any of it really matter at all? Without it you’re only seeking the next thing to desire. Eventually there won’t be a next thing to desire, and you’ll have never had a chance to savour any of it.

Where it goes wrong though is if we take it too far and start connecting this to some non-existent deity, which in turn makes us construct an incorrect model of the world (such as if we’re not thankful for the food, then next year there will be a drought as a punishment).

I suppose codifying beneficial practices into religion or spiritual beliefs is just part of being human.

It has the advantage that it is compatible with most (all?) preligions, certainly the Abrahamic ones.

Try it as a therapeutic. To release all the angst and problems before going to bed.

(If you recall your catechesis, that’s laying your your problems at the feet of the cross)

Also, I think it depends on how you come to these rituals. If it’s just something you grew up with there’s a good chance it’s just some words you stumble through before a meal.

It’s not as if the latter are ingrates, but the social ritual of showing gratitude is not there among them, and maybe in some small way, that does breed less thankfulness in the long run…

I find religious people passionate about following the rituals of their religion (for many more than the intention), in a similar way as atheists are passionate about other rituals (their sport, their eating routines, etc.).

For me the absence of thankfulness equals more with awareness. Should I be thankful I have a house? I prefer to be annoyed other people don’t have, or that I can’t do better (ex: have a house that generates less carbon, etc.).

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.

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.

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.

Even with a modern education this is a losing proposition for many people…

Success in a modern capitalist society is driven in part by your ability to say no to things.

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.

Ok, good, fine. You should have to seek out a black market connect to gamble on sports.

IMO there’s plenty of room for hardline stances. Who cares if gambling goes to the black market? There’s a black market for every serious crime – doesn’t mean we should just okay it. And I’m not sure the USA’s halfhearted only-for-the-poor prohibition is proof that the concept of banning things is broken; if it proves anything unrelated to capitalism, it proves that you need societal buy-in and continued, consistent government pressure.

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”.

It is literally taking money from the poorest and most gullible Indians to the owners.

The government is marketing it.

Public concerts hosted by the municipality will have gambling ads posted all over, sponsored by the latest scam.

Sample size: Alagoas/Pernambuco. Cannot say anything about the gambling ads in the other states.

The comparison needs to be in terms of typical use, otherwise engineering for addictiveness gets a free pass because it often hinges on frequent small rewards and can have a near unity return on a single shot basis yet be a big money maker for the house.

Of course there are probably ‘safer’ forms of gambling that some addicts are presumably able to use to maintain their addiction at a level which isn’t disruptive to their life. … but single shot EV isn’t the right metric. Some weekly state lottery usually has pretty poor EV, yet is seldom ruining anyone.

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.

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)

I’ve seen a lot of these talking points before by the pro-drug crowd. “It taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn’t have learned about otherwise” is laughable when subjected to scrutiny. You’d have to live under a rock to otherwise not learn about the drugs the DARE program teaches (and they don’t get particularly exotic either). The idea is asinine to begin with – you’d want kids to know about exotic drugs and their side effects to know to avoid them in the first place.

The worst part is that the pro-drug crowd, like yourself, touts these talking points in an attempt to end the program – to what end? If I accept your talking points blindly that the program has failed, does that mean we simply stop trying? It seems less that you disagreed with the implementation of the program and more that you don’t believe kids, or anyone, should be dissuaded from drugs.

> The Illinois D.A.R.E. Evaluation was conducted as a randomized field experiment with one pretest and multiple planned post-tests. The researchers identified 18 pairs of elementary schools, representative of urban, suburban, and rural areas throughout northern and central Illinois. Schools were matched in each pair by type, ethnic composition, number of students with limited English proficiency, and the percent of students from low income families. None of these schools had previously received D.A.R.E.. For the 12 pairs of schools located in urban and suburban areas, one school in each pair was randomly assigned to receive D.A.R.E. in the spring of 1990

https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/uic.htm

Yes, surveys do have flaws but they are a better approach than just giving up and saying any research is impossible.

I’d recommend we don’t simply stop trying, instead we test different programs, and only once we have shown their effectiveness do we role them out further.

Warnings serve to ruin their image in the public eye, which makes opposing further control harder.

As for gambling, there’s a simple solution. Ban all advertising of it. If people really need to gamble, they’ll find it on their own.

This will dramatically shrink the problem overnight.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve known several gambling addicts down through the years, the damage they did to their financial and family lives was tragic. Divorce was almost a given, homelessness occurred on several occasions. Being shunned by their parents and siblings sometimes followed after money was borrowed and never paid back.

Two things I never could understand after all the above. First, I couldn’t get any of them to attend GA meetings after I offered to attend with them and second, why they ever thought they had a chance to win consistently in any gambling endeavor when the gamble itself is connected to a computer. (Yes, I’m saying cheating can be involved. Imagine!)

These two are not at all the same, and one is much more dangerous and asocial than the other.

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.

Indeed, allowing this to occur has wrought orders of magnitude more death and destruction than sports gambling or drug use or prostitution.

no victim == no crime

I would very much like to believe that. But see what happened in Oregon after decriminalizing drugs.

But, what’s the alternative?

Going to a live event, for two bad teams, for four people, cost me over $500 a year ago. I can’t afford that.

Youth sports?

I live in Florida, and was hoping Jai Alai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_alai) would be a weird respite, but that was the original gamblers refuge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prediction markets are the best way we know of to synthesize the opinions of many parties. They should be protected as a class of economic free speech, but in the US there is an effort to eliminate prediction markets on the most important issues (like the outcome of an election).

Think about what it implies for the government to be against a kind of organized assembly that causes citizens to become more informed and allows individuals to de-risk the outcome of events.

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.

Casinos exist, but are basically a regulated service (possibly private, but as far as I know there’s only a single operator).

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.

At the very least, ads should be banned or require nasty images like tobacco products.

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 agree about banning ads 100%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

This sort of black-and-white position basically means either a complete ban (presumably with a harsh penalty for people who participate in the activity) or no regulation at all. A ban will just get circumvented if you don’t penalize people for getting around it, so you’re going to have to penalize addicts for illegal gambling, not just the people who enable that gambling. If you want to take the other extreme, are laws that force people to put lung cancer warnings on cigarettes “playing nanny”?

In real life, we usually take middle ground positions, and that means doing things that influence behavior, whether they are taxes or restrictions on labeling.

Labeling of side effects, calories, and similar topics fall into that category of empowering the citizen.

Sin taxes dont educate or empower, they simply punish and try to prevent individuals from acting on their own choices.

The two are very different.

Do you think sales of raw milk, which have been known to cause listeria outbreaks when people drink from an unsafe batch, should simply force labels of “this milk may be unsafe” or do you think that should be prohibited?

Do you think rhino horn should be legal to sell with the label of “this likely came from poached animals”?

I think raw milk should be legal, and the labeling requirement should depend on the actual risk level, not just a vague possibility.

rhino horn is a tricky one. Poaching animals is a form of stealing, so it is clearly illegal. Off the cuff, I think selling recently harvested rhino horn should be legal but required to have evidence that it was not poached.

Some of the other games that state lotteries are adopting are almost as bad as sports betting in terms of their availability (look up instant-play gaming), but sports betting feels like a game of skill, which certainly makes it worse from a psychological perspective. I still think it should be legal if people are going to do it anyway. Maybe banning the “specials” on combo bets or requiring them to be labeled as “this is still a bad bet” could help.

For the record, I have a vested interest in sports gambling being banned because I sell products involved in instant-play and other forms of gaming that are not involved in sports betting.

But this submission is about research showing that the legal market isn’t just replacing the illegal market. It expands the market and the bad effects.

That is, they’re able to track the deposits made to betting sites and other spending. Bets to illegal bookies are obviously not in that dataset. But if the legal gambling had replaced illegal gambling, the money going into legal gambling would appear to be coming from nowhere. Most likely a reduction in cash withdrawals? But that’s not the effect they’re observing. The money going into gambling is displacing other spending, including spending on +EV investments.

Given there is now evidence that the theory isn’t correct, there’s probably not much value in talking about it as if there really was a legitimate tradeoff here.

Every football game has an announcer giving his lock of the week pick for DraftKings. Every stadium has a brand new fancy looking sports book attached or next door. Hell they built a draft kings attached to the local PGA course.

Most people do it all via an app, no need to even leave your couch. People openly share their bets with friends. I don’t even do sports betting, but it’s basically all over and constantly in my face.

Other comments mention how fancy casinos look, theyre still disgusting. Most casinos ive been to are not fancy at all. There are large “fancy” tribal casinos and the Vegas casinos but even those reek of smoke and are mostly filled with morbidly obese.

Id go as far to say people who think theres no stigma in the US have only visited Vegas or seen it on TV and dont play pai gow in Spokane bowling alleys on weeknights.

The sheer amount of advertising for gambling and revenue growth for these companies indicates there is little stigma.

That doesn’t mean it should be allowed. Not all fun is healthy. It’s been known for over a century that gambling is detrimental, to both society and individual.

I think it’s cruel for us as a society to allow that to be exploited for financial gain.

Opposition to bans is sort of a libertarian dogma, they say bans never work and only make the problem worse or introduce new problems, and usually cite alcohol prohibition in America. But a lot of bans do work, and even that one apparently succeeded in reducing alcohol consumption even if it did empower organized crime. What’s more, it’s pretty easy to ferment alcohol in your basement but it’s a lot harder to hide fields of tobacco. Political dogma never captures the nuance of reality.

I think sports gambling is stupid and has largely ruined sports for me. Most people I know though seem to really love it, gamble completely responsibly and seem to enjoy sports they did not enjoy previously.

Unfortunately, there is no story to click on without some kind of moral outrage or “mistake” that the “smart” people need to correct. Especially appealing if it can bent into some kind of political bullshit narrative .

No, that’s not what we say. The primary argument for it is because we do not subscribe to a utilitarian morality. If we know that some decision leads to better outcomes from the POV of general quality of life and the like, we still wouldn’t support it if it trampled individual freedoms, because we consider the latter to be more important.

It’s not a difference of opinion over whether a certain theorem proves true or false. It’s a matter of different set of axioms altogether.

I think being born and raised in Naples, I’ve lived all my life in direct contact with organised crime, but many people live in places and don’t make the connection, but I’d suggest everyone who think about regulating or not, to keep in mind that in any place you’re in, there are 2 governments, one you can see, and one you can not

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.

But legalizing advertising for sports gambling was definitely a mistake.

Global warming suffers from “but it rained yesterday” and other misleading small scale variations making people disbelieve.

“More fires, more hurricanes: Climate change” then rebrands it as scary: need to take seriously.

The largest are probably mobile betting and allowing for instant credit card deposits.

There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.

I’d like to think the emerging prediction markets, like Polymarket, are much fairer systems, especially for winning players, and would be much better than sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.

Not to mention the Pandora’s box that prediction markets open, when the order book can begin to influence real life events – from match fixing, to assassination markets.

The upside of prediction markets is that it incentives people with information to make their honest estimates legible to society. E.g. an opinion piece in a newspaper has little skin in the game, other than the author’s reputation.

This does not apply to all bookmakers. Also, betting exchanges exist where the players bet against each other therefore there is no incentive for the operator to ban winning players.

I strongly believe it is better to have something legal and well regulated than illegal and left to illegal operators.

This is true for a number of vices.

With legalisation should come strong regulation, including advertising bans.

The UK made this mistake when they strongly de-regulated gambling in the early 2000s, it seems the US did not learn from that when legalising.

Regulation, however, might be OK. In the UK we are now at a stage where bookmakers have to do Know Your Customer (KYC), checks to do identity validation, you can’t gamble with credit cards (debit cards are fine), and “VIP Schemes” to incentivize those who gamble the most to gamble more are not allowed. All sites have voluntary limits for players on deposits or timeouts, and a lot of TV ad spots are about staying in control of your gambling.

What’s interesting is that most of this (except KYC and CC deposits), are not government-mandated – the industry has gone down a path of self regulation to try and keep the government out of it.

There’s expected to be some announcements in this space in coming months, and there is a fear of “affordability checks” being mandated – to bet above, say £100/month, you’ll need to show bank statements that indicate you can afford a higher level of betting. The fear is that this will just mean rich business for the offshore black market guys on WhatsApp and Telegram who are ready to move in.

I think what might actually be a better solution is for us to talk more widely about “value”, and educating bettors. There is little value in slots or casino games – you will rarely, if ever, be in a place to get +EV on those, and when those situations do arise it requires an incredible amount of expertise and insight to exploit them, far more than Hollywood or the books you may read suggest you need (Ed Thorpe invented the World’s first wearable computer to get +EV on roulette).

However, sports betting is different. Value is often there, waiting to be found. Particularly on prop bets. If you’re prepared to do the work in figuring it out, you will either win, or lose more slowly.

As such, I’d argue more education and more controls around bad habits seems a better way to go than banning it outright.

But then, I’m happy to do that work, I enjoy it, it’s fun. Most people don’t, and they’re losing money to me and people like me via a commission agent (the bookmaker).

Contrary to popular belief, running a sportsbook is a terrible business. Look at draftkings for instance. They’ve gotten gambling legalized nearly everywhere yet are still wildly unprofitable.

I guarantee you that they will never be profitable unless they are granted a monopoly which will never happen.

It’s fairly obvious. If you travel to Vegas and go to the Aria, one of the premier casinos on the strip, you will have to walk around to find the sportsbook. When you do you may be surprised to see that it’s not out in the center of the floor inviting people in, it’s in a dark remote enclosed corner that feels like a large coat room.

Now ask yourself why that would be? And why do casinos devote so much floor space to slot machines and table games?

Betting apps offer the terrible aspects of running a book- relatively unwealthy gamblers with the inability to cross subsidize more profitable games and alcohol along with the added drag of attracting disloyal users who can and will easily use other books to compare lines or take advantage of promos.

Normalising it? Yes.

Unfortunately, our culture seems to have two settings: legal ban; full celebratory embrace. We don’t seem to be able to handle tolerating and discouraging (see smoking, which is slowly being banned across the once-civilised world).

Should the awesome power of the State be deployed to wield violence against people who bet money on sports? No, that’s insane. Should there be half a dozen betting ads every hour on primetime TV? No, that’s crazy too.

If something is legally banned, there’s generally a black market for it. Once it’s legalized, the bar for consumers to enter the market is nearly eliminated; large companies can pour a ton of money into gaining new users in the legal market and moving users from the black market to the legal market.

>> Should there be half a dozen betting ads every hour on primetime TV? No, that’s crazy too.

It’s even worse than that. There are betting ads during the actual game broadcast. Commentators read ads listing various odds on the current game. Betting companies sponsor a ton of stuff related to the teams and leagues. ESPN (Disney) both broadcasts games and runs its own sportsbook. You can’t watch a sports game without hearing about betting on that game itself, much less sports in general.

How so? Different kinds of gambling have different characteristics that could make them more or less prone to problematic behavior.

With the lottery, it’s so boring and there’s such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted or harder for addiction to become really problematic.

Addictions don’t reason. Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.

> or harder for addiction to become really problematic.

Example: a school teacher spending $200 a week on lotto tickets, not life devastating, but do we really want this in our society? This happens a lot.

Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of “winning it big!” It’s essentially a hope tax for the lower and middle class. I can think of better ways of collecting taxes.

Very, very few people spend $200 a week on lottery tickets — they spend a few dollars here and there a week. (Spending $200 is just silly and barely increases the chance of winning or return — if someone can’t see that, well, can’t stop them from wasting money) Of course, I would like state lotteries to be further restricted, but that’s still much much better than online sports betting — people can lose six digits of wealth quickly, and that has a much bigger and immediate impact on lives than state lotteries.

> Addictions don’t reason.

That argument was specifically based on how gambling feels and not reasoning.

> Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.

That sucks, but ease of addiction is a spectrum.

How do you explain the school teacher spending $200 per week, then? The teachers here collectively own one of the world’s largest hedge funds. These are very wealthy people.

It’s the same with the prohibition of alcohol.

The sooner we get rid of money, the sooner people will just bet their imaginary internet points on internet gambling instead of their real life right-to-live-points, and everybody will be better off.

We could solve that by banning/restricting gambling.

But it seems that’s just a patch on the bigger problem: That our citizens are insufficiently educated to see what is ruining their life and stay away from it.

Sure, some people waste all their money on gambling. But others waste all their money on drugs. Or theme park rides. Or model trains.

Would it not be better to have better training not to waste all your resources on something that doesn’t benefit you?

Unfortunately, since gambling is only recently more accessible/prevalent, I think it’s going to take a few mishaps to produce similar regulations.

> pattern day traders must maintain minimum equity of $25,000 in their margin account on any day that the customer day trades

> pattern day traders cannot trade in excess of their “day-trading buying power”

> If a pattern day trader exceeds the day-trading buying power limitation, a firm will issue a day-trading margin call, after which the pattern day trader will then have, at most, five business days to deposit funds to meet the call.

> Day trading, as defined by FINRA’s margin rule, refers to a trading strategy where an individual buys and sells (or sells and buys) the same security in a margin account on the same day in an attempt to profit from small movements in the price of the security.

(emphasis original)

There are no restrictions on trading with your own money, whether you can afford it or not.

Poor people who trade their grocery budget for gambling undeniably cause trouble for a population. Do rich people who trade their luxury handbag budget for gambling equally cause trouble for a population?

1) In Brazil there’s an entire industry of athlete’s from lower divisions and agents that sells transient results that is taken in consideration in the bets.

For instance, number of corner kicks, number of fouls, yellow cards and so on. It’s hard to trace it back the intention and there’s a player from the National Team being investigated due to betting patterns (1).

With 80% of players earning less than USD 300 (2) when someone have the offer to take USD 10000 to receive 3 yellow cards in 5 games, it’s hard to say no for those guys.

2) The problem that I see with the regulation is that not only in the sporting and social aspects (that is bad) but the money laundering and the lack of tracing in the money that goes in bet houses.

For instance, Germany has some regulation around the topic (3) but the reality if you go in some Tipico or some small bet house you can carry EUR 10000 and bet in anything, no questions asked; that’s the reason why a lot of people around the world come to Germany for sports betting (4).

Anecdotally speaking, an old colleague used to manage some players in Brazilian 3rd division and he had some connections with folks in places like Germany. Before the game he already knew the bets and then just told to the players what needs to be done (e.g. I want a penalty kick after 80min, or a yellow card before 70 minutes) and after the bet being payed the agent just passed the money to the players (more or less 30%).

(1) – https://onefootball.com/de/news/fa-want-to-ban-lucas-paqueta…

(2) – https://g1.globo.com/trabalho-e-carreira/noticia/2022/12/04/…

(3) – https://cms.law/en/int/expert-guides/cms-expert-guide-to-onl…

(4) – https://n1info.rs/biznis/fatf-nemacka-raj-za-pranje-novca-go…

Reshape the entire industry to be a decentralized/house-edge-free form, where any one player has a net 0% gain/loss outcome over time. Regulate what bets can be placed and their payouts so that winners win less amounts and losers lose less amounts (i.e. you don’t get wiped out).

It will feel like gambling, but overtime is no different than coin flipping for lunch money with a coworker every day. Essentially math away the “house always wins” part.

A problem is infection. As Sports Betting is more legal and profitable, Fantasy Sports gain more Sports Bets and pseudoanonymity and lose some of their community spirit for “micro-transactions” and other “extreme gamification” and the line between each blurs. (Including to the point where groups looking for one might be easily confused into doing the other.)

I idly wonder if there is a way to shore up Fantasy Sports against the tide of Sports Betting profit.

I think you could raise money and then sustain a lean business.

Thus, your proposal might actually work, except what’s in it for the rubes?

But yeah, gambling should also be heavily regulated (as alcohol) and it is far from a “little pleasure”, it can easily become an addition even without throwing around ads, free first bets and gamification.

The Progressive ideal, which started as only a faint glimmer in the US at the turn on the 20th Century, has grown to dominate our social mores over the past 50 years. For most people reading HN, it’s all they have ever known. But there is a serious cost. We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement.

But at least fewer of them slip through the cracks.

It’s not “individuals slipping through the cracks of society”, it’s society and the people who run it consuming people (or animals) as fuel. Progressive politics might only be as old as the Roosevelts but they have surprisingly deep historical roots(0).

The improvement in material conditions from, say, the 1500s to 2024 is a function of changes in the law that made it worthwhile to produce those improvements. Or, in other words, nobody is going to innovate in phone apps when they have to give 30% to Apple and Google. Back then, the “30%” would have been indentured servitude, debtors prisons, and so on. Innovation increased when serfdom ended and more people were able to innovate.

Innovation in an economy is a function of how many people have access to appropriate levels of capital. Which is itself a function of the distribution of wealth. An economy in which five people own everything is one where nobody can innovate outside of that system. An economy with redistributive effects – whether that be through government action or otherwise – is more productive at the expense of the growth prospects of the ultra-wealthy. Economies built to make one participant fatter are eating their seed corn.

I have no clue what you’re going on about with infantilization. That seems like something downstream of several social trends.

(0) e.g. western feminism is older than the Declaration of Independence; abolitionism is at least as old as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lay

“prosperity required permitting unregulated sale of fentanyl!”… sounds nonsensical, because it is.

> We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement.

I played poker professionally for seven years. I’ve seen the full gamut of responses to gambling on the human brain. Gambling absolutely hijacks the neurocomputational circuitry of some people in a way that it doesn’t others. Infantilized? I managed my risk of ruin carefully and rationally, others didn’t. They invariably got ruined. Period. Those people should not be gambling. There was no safety net, which you falsely imagine exists. I wish there had been. The consequences to their lives outweighed, by far, the prosperity gained by permitting large-scale high-stakes gambling (which is at best a zero-sum game if the house is included). I do not think my former profession should be openly legal to everyone. Participating in it was an act of willful evil on my part. I am glad to have it regulated, for the sake of the families of the people whose lives I helped destroy.

There was absolutely nothing and nobody “infantilizing” me to induce “anxiety”. There was a largely unregulated free-for-all into a brutal, unforgiving world, in which you can lose a fortune in the blink of an eye if you elect to wager it and lose. Sure, I thrived in that environment, but it was at the expense of vulnerable individuals.

Seriously, what the actual fuck are you talking about. If you’d ever taken actual, life-altering financial risks in a society without a real financial safety net (the United States), you’d know that there is absolutely nothing between a foolish series of decisions while drunk (or much worse, in the thrall of a persistent gambling addiction) and complete financial ruin.

We can do better as a society, and we should.

While we’re at it, gosh, you know what would have improved the poker economy? Unregulated firearms at poker tables. Hell, let’s just make homicide legal if the other person bets their life. Or maybe even if they don’t! That would have really let us demonstrate our fully-enfranchised individual wills to power. No one would be confused as an anxious man baby! We could have thrived like real manly men! Letting people blow each other’s heads off at a whim during a gambling free-for-all (“between consenting adults!”) would surely improve prosperity. Great idea! Agreeing as a democratic society to regulate that behavior would only produce a society of emasculated degenerates incapable of expressing the full range of the human spirit! Think of the sacrificed business opportunities! /s.

I’ve made a ton of bad decisions in the course of my life. And I’m all richer for it. Don’t take that away from me.

I despise the nanny state policies of my homeland Finland. I’ve been a nomad for the past decade and a half due to it because I don’t want to settle down in a place where people think they should be able to force other people to not make what they (or “the majority”) think are stupid decisions.

You will always find justifications once you start going down the rabbit hole of “what’s best for them”.

None of that applies to gambling though. Not only is there nothing to learn from failing that you couldn’t have learnt before placing a bet, but success could mean addiction and the eventual ruination of your life and the lives of those you love.

Are you sure about that?

> Not only is there nothing to learn from failing that you couldn’t have learnt before placing a bet

Just look at investing with fake money portfolios vs. making decisions with real money. Or playing poker with play money. It’s a whole different game mentally and some lessons you just don’t learn unless you got a real stake in it.

> but success could mean addiction and the eventual ruination of your life and the lives of those you love.

In my case my success (in poker) led to a prosperous career playing professionally. No lives ruined. YMMV.

Poker, or sportsbetting, is not gambling any more than investing in the stock market is, or choosing a spouse. Sure, you can gamble and YOLO your life savings on either of them. But you can also learn to make better decisions, the hard way. Or try and fail and lose money in the process. Rather than having a small set of “safe” pre-chosen options laid out for everyone.

Disclaimer: Games where you play against the house (that has an edge) like slots or roulette is gambling. But again, just because there are people playing slots to make a profit doesn’t mean that we should ban being an idiot. Life is dangerous and you will eventually die from it. This is more of a personal philosophical opinion than a “what’s best for people” one (which I think is wrong).

Yes, investing on the stock market can be gambling, unless you have inside information or are extremely knowledgeable, you’re not going to beat a monkey. Investing in a diverse portfolio where you’re basically betting on the entire market growing is different.

I also know plenty of failures who are addicted to gambling and drugs.

Gambling, like all drugs, is a mental health / attitude problem.

Life is shit for most people and they think winning big is the only way they’ll escape that – and if I lose some money, oh hey, I was poor before, I’m still poor.

We need to put the blame on education and society raising mindless zombies good only to be employees for 40 years and pay off their mortgage (in the best case scenario).

The biggest surprise for me was that the people running the company were gamblers too. If someone beat them, then they wanted to beat them back (which made no sense to me… given that the statistics are running over the group, not an individual). If someone beat them badly, then it was okay because it’s good marketing (and the player would always bring that money back, they’d say). They would also say “all gamblers are addicts”. Rivalry with their players high, respect low… Except perhaps for their “Whales” where the social contract between the two parties was more explicit. Also worth noting that from what is saw, 80% of revenue comes from <10% of players.

There is no differentiation to the company between sports, slots, lotteries and other games.There are no noble games, just ways to extract money from confused or vulnerable people. Crash games seem to be deluding people the most currently.

I don’t believe it’s possible for these companies to behave anything close to ethically. Regardless of regulation, the business model is corrupt.

At conferences anyone I spoke to would say “you can’t leave the gaming industry, the money is just too good”. Which is why I promptly left.

It’s not that casual bets between friends should be banned, but this insidious industry that spends 100s of millions on marketing, and uses every tactic available to lure people and then get them addicted. That is such a far cry from not wanting people to gamble at all. Those who want to be a nanny and say boo hoo gambling bad are in a totally different category to the people who reasonably think that there’s a serious issue with this industry.

In September, the central bank released a report revealing that in August, 20% of Bolsa Família — the largest cash transfer program for Brazil’s poorest citizens — was spent on betting.

Out of the 20 million recipients, 5 million placed bets during that month, amounting to 2 billion reais (approximately $450 million) spent in just one month by the most vulnerable Brazilians.

Every day we are reading reports of family loosing their cars and saving because kids were betting, which is crazy.

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/business/2024…

If we are hell-bent on forcing people to play this artificial money game against their will, with no opt in or out, they’re just born and told they now have to work all their life for this piece of paper that some apes printed, then they should at least have total control over that money, anything less and the entire game is unjustifiably immoral.

Not everyone has their cushy little tech salary like you, the majority of people hate their lives and gambling provides an escape just like drugs, and the slim hope of winning big – something that was taken away from real life. The masses have been drained of any hope of improving their situations the old-fashioned way.

If you want to reduce self-destructive behaviour, make a fairer game, make it a game worth playing, offer decent rewards, make it a level playing field instead of the 1% owning 90% of the game. The average shelter in America costs $500k and the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and you wonder why people are gambling? Fuck me.

As an aside, a lot of smart, high quality people are drawn to the puzzle of sports betting, and are skilled enough to get out of slavery with it, why should those people lose their out? Their intelligence and self-control to beat the game was their birthright, just as an expensive education was likely yours.

Fundamentally, it’s an issue of freedom, the right to self-destruct, the right to throw your life away, as an act of protest or otherwise. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I’m not allowed to put everything I have on the line against someone else who’s willing to take it on. The government has no business infringing on that basic freedom of exchange between individuals.

And you know gambling will only be the start, eventually they will come for something you like because when it comes to removing freedoms and rights, one thing always leads to another. Outlawing gambling does nothing to change the circumstances that are churning out self-destructive humans, it doesn’t fix the root cause, our society is generating broken people and their needs for escape will always be met in any remotely free world.

Negatives aside if you are fine with the losses it could be viewed a bit like donating to the football clubs.

Larger football clubs could be fine taking pay cuts etc, but there would likely be many smaller clubs that can’t pay their players on the pro or semi pro level any longer.

The article is poorly worded — yes, advertisers spend a lot of money, but were those advertisers to disappear, other advertisers would buy those spots. So the question becomes, to what degree does the induced demand raise the marginal profit for advertising spots. And how that in turn affects how much networks are willing to pay the NFL for licensing, and that in turn affects how much the teams get in kickbacks from the NFL. So likely marginal at best.

The flipside is also how much viewership increases because of sports gamblers watching that would otherwise not watch. Also difficult to confidently assert the value of.

I am not from the US and NFL could probably handle it, but I am from a smaller country with smaller clubs. If betting companies sponsorship was banned many clubs, even in the top league, couldn’t play on the pro or even the semi pro level.

They gain the most, but in addition they benefit from the sport being popular so they are willing to help invest in making sure that would be the case.

When I was going to college I had multiple friends that would compulsively gamble whenever there was down time. They wouldn’t have lost half the money they did if gambling only took place at Casinos, or at least at dedicated terminals.

That being said I only do the 4mg option and usually after work with a beer. I dont think I’m addicted to them because I dont do them compulsively.

I know some people use nicotine to deal with anxiety or restlessness or something. I kind of like the buzz, since nicotine is a poison sourced from a plant.

Sorry tangential rant lol

But then I remember that so many are counting on the fact that people will stay uneducated so they can rip them off.

People see it as a game of skill where they win money from people who are worse at that skill than they are.

do you think heroin addicts and cigarette smokers never heard that it was bad for them?

For instance, Portugal had a crisis 25 years ago with sky high number of drug related deaths, HIV infections etc. The solution was decriminalization and education, e.g. about sharing syringes. And it worked, they went from the worst I drug related deaths to best. Heroin is still bad for you and I guess people still use drugs, but at least the outcome is not catastrophic anymore.

So yes, I do think education cures a lot of problems.

There’s a meme/“theory” in retail options trading about “max pain”. Wherein, the stock price will move as to maximize the total amount people lose on options.

the predatory part is the siphoning money off from the lottery to pay for “shools,etc.” but if there is inelastic demand for lottery gambling, that also makes rational sense.

So if this is your take, then you should be perfectly willing to be heavily taxed on all of your bets so that those who can’t control themselves can receive prompt and proper care to revert their addiction, and assist their families to recover from the financial ruin caused by forces outside of their control; understanding that an addiction is often uncontrollable without a lot of time and a lot of help.

If you have a problem with that, then you are signaling that you only care about society’s strengths, because you are benefiting from them, and not its weaknesses, because you have not felt the gravity of a boot on your neck in awhile. Thus, I believe that your opinion is moot and also in the minority.

Giving the rat a lever to randomly apply cocaine or an electric shock is bad for the rat, even if the rat is addicted to pulling that lever.

You can extend this to things like poker as well – is that a tax on people bad at math? Of course not, that’d be a stupid argument, because it’s not a purely negative expectation game.

It makes no sense, it is the person’s money and life, and it is theirs to ruin as they wish. We are not properties of the state. If a person cannot be allowed to do what they wish with their own money, because they might harm themselves or others as a result, then how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?

Every gun sold to a person is a gamble on whether they use it to cause harm on others (same with the things i listed above).

This same logic applies to regulation of drugs in general as well in my opinion. Regulating other peoples lives is not the purpose of the government, especially when they’re not harming others or being a nuisance to the public.

Crime goes up, bankruptcy goes up, corruption in sports goes up, etc.

I agree that people should be given freedoms, but we live in societies and people aren’t independent, disconnected, autonomous units.

These are all fairly strongly regulated. Did you choose bad examples on purpose?

So like,what about making gambling work like credit cards: you get a license that allocates a monthly cap based on a combination of credit score and income. It starts very low and scales up to, I don’t know, 10% of income?

We should be free to ruin ourselves if we so wish, but if we are set on a track like that, others should be made aware so they can react as they wish.

Same with drugs, if you get a drug use license, then employers can deny you jobs, you may not be allowed to drive, be trusted with loans,etc..

You get rights, but they come with responsibilities and restrictions.

Comparing Oranges to Potatoes. People involved in gambling are not stupid. They are either 1. Not quite smart or mathematically smart, so they don’t understand the odds or 2. Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco. Of course, there is 3. Having a little fun with a little money; but this is not the audience that’s making money for gaming.

I agree.

> Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco

Addicted people are still responsible for their actions. case in point: drunken driving. I agree with punishing gamblers that cause harm. but gambling itself should not be regulated. Tobacco, alcohol, hard drugs,etc.. they should all be allowed. But to balance that, punishment for crime needs to be severe when you’re an addict.

How can we regulate what a person does with their hard earned wages from their labor and precious time and then still claim that person has liberties of any kind? If you think about it, this is the one and only fundamental liberty that is foundational to all other liberties.

Even slaves get food and shelter as well as some freedom of movement and expression. What they don’t get is to be able to buy what they want and own it.

3 of these require significant training or at least licensing and the last one is banned in the majority of western nations.

I’m with you that personal responsibility and freedom should be the norm, but active predators (Drug dealers, bookies, social media companies) should probably have limits put on what they’re allowed to do.

For your last statement, I agree, “active predators” should be restricted or punished because their intent is to cause harm at the cost of others for profit. but if they’re just selling the “drug”, why should that be restricted? You can force them to inform their customers of the harm,but that’s about it.

This is the entire gambling industry! Do you think they don’t know that their best customers are addicts who are blowing their kids’ college fund?

You don’t deserve any rights or liberties if you can’t accept the rights of the drug addicts,gamblers, homeless people and many more types of people out there.

It is a fundamental aspect of the human experience to self-determine one’s fate.

When, in your own time, your ignorance leads you to make “stupid” decisions, I hope there’s a safety net in place to protect you and people who depend on you. I also hope there’s a support network to help people you mislead with your idiotic parenting, should you breed, which at the moment I hope you choose to defer.

In the meantime enjoy congratulating yourself for accomplishments you almost certainly didn’t earn purely in virtue of your perceived “intellectual superiority” while denigrating others for mistakes we could have helped them avoid.

Your lack of compassion does not withstand rational scrutiny. I sincerely hope that as you gain experience in the world you continue to reflect on your relationship with other human beings, and that in your own way you develop a deeper and less idiotic understanding of others.

While I’m happy to read more of your brilliant insights into the type of person I must be (try to miss the mark slightly less next time, little bro), I have no interest in hearing you cry about addiction and other made up ‘illnesses’ (in the medical sense) that in fact just reflect a defective or damaged frontal cortex and subsequent executive dysfunction. Ultimately some people are stupid and that’s due to the physical arrangement of their brain circuitry and other issues with neuronal arrangement and efficiency (again very physical problems). Saying they have fucked up neuronal connections isn’t tantamout to saying they’re sick, any more than saying that somebody who has his spinal cord severed is ‘sick’. Again, we can’t currently fix stupid. If and when we can repair damaged neural circuitry (by removing neurofibrillary tangles, for example) or give patients highly targeted pharmacotherapies that can fix neurotransmitter dysfunction in a controlled and directed as opposed to a crude ‘whole brain’ way, we’ll let people like you know (see Parkinson’s progression and L Dopa’s efficacy with time to see what happens when you crudely direct a neurotransmitter into a general area – even something as localised as the substantia nigra – for long periods of time, as opposed to directing it very specifically at its intended receptor cells, and ONLY those cells). Until then, people with those issues are fucked, and there’s nothing you or any other paternalistic genius can do about them.

The bottom line is that no respectable person goes to a casino except as a gag to throw away expendable income. Some labourer spending 80% of his wages at Ladbroke’s is a symptom of his stupidity, not the cause of it. If he wasn’t blowing his money or beating up his gf (who is as stupid as he is) over his gambling losses he’d be losing the money or beating her up anyway for some other putative reason.

Thanks for the laugh. And hey – smile bro, you learned something today.