Sports gambling has been legal in the UK since 1960. Gambling wasn't seriously problematic in this country until 2005, when regulations were substantially liberalised. Pre-2005, sports betting was something that old men did in dingy backstreet shops; post-2005, it became a widespread social phenomenon, turbocharged by advertising and the growing influence and accessibility of the internet.

There's a false dichotomy between prohibition and laissez-faire, which the US seems particularly prone to. You've seen similar issues with the decriminalisation of cannabis, where many states seem to have switched abruptly from criminalisation to a fully-fledged commercial market. There is a broad spectrum of other options in between those points that tend to be under-discussed.

You can ban gambling advertising, as Italy did in 2019. You can set limits on maximum stakes or impose regulations to make gambling products less attractive to new customers and less risky for problem gamblers. You can have a single state-controlled parimutuel operator. Gambling does cause harm - whether it's legal or not - but it is within the purview of legislators to create a gambling market in which harm reduction is the main priority.

Legalized sports betting and "weekly fantasy" leagues have severely reduced my enjoyment of NFL football.

Last week in the NFL there was a player that went down at the one yard line and his team ran off the rest of the clock to win. The game was under the O/U but would have been over if the player had gone into the end zone. The player made the choice so that his team could run out the clock without giving the ball back to the other team, and if he had scored then they would have had to kick the ball back to the other team who could potentially (although unlikely) scored a touchdown on the kickoff or in the last few seconds after the kickoff which would have given the other team the game. It was, objectively, the right thing to do in the circumstance.

The NFL analysts (who shill gambling apps) spent more time talking about if the player was responsible for everyone who lost on the O/U, and it just really killed it for me. Every. Single. Aspect is filtered through the lens of gambling. Games show the betting line on the screen and the analysts try to map out potential good parlays for the viewers. It's absolutely nuts and a very (in my mind) clear conflict of interest. It also blurs the line, in my mind, between objective reporting, analysis based on statistics, and paid promotion, and while I realize that sports reporting is probably the least important field in journalism, it's frustrating to see this unholy confluence and to see the impact it has on the ability for non-degenerate gamblers to enjoy the game.

In Australia gambling and poker machines have so deeply parasitised themselves into local sports clubs, that they can now _no longer operate without the poker machines_. They’ve co-opted sport so thoroughly, that gambling is now basically an ingrained part of organised sports from local level up.

It’s heinous.

Agree. I would add that it is a bit of a perfect storm:

- lower income families struggle for upwards mobility

- we are moving ever more towards a full material world, where you need to have a lot of disposable income just to keep up (remember the first over 1000 usd iPhone and people saying it was too much?)

- social media keeps reminding us that there are “successful” people who have all the stuff you dream, and can burn money (all a lie, but if desperate and poorly educated you buy it)

- vanishing of social construct: less weight of family in peoples life, less local communities (replaced by only pseudo-communities as twitter or insta) which translates into less emotional support, pushing you to consumerism for solace.

It’s no surprise that the hope of a quick buck (be it sports betting or also damaging scratch cards / lotteries) thrive in the context, and in particular with people desperate or with poor understanding of odds and biases….

Edit: I don’t think is necessary a poor-people-only problem, I think this is a symptom that a new definition of poverty is brewing - one beyond financial indicators… (stale life, no prospects of moving up, disenfranchising of society, resentment for feeling rug pulled from underneath, prone to absorb/consume anything that makes you feel “in the loop” or relevant like fake news or crazy theories, etc). I believe we are seeing this all across the Western world, yet us and our leaders fail to address it.

Gambling is generally against the law in South Korea, but any esports players or personnel who get caught fixing matches (this doesn't necessarily mean throwing a game, bets get placed on all kinds of things that aren't just the outcome of the game), they get a lifetime ban from the government from participating in esports in any way.

I think we need something like that for all sports here in the US. If you get caught fixing games or coordinating to fix bets in any way, you should be liable, fined, and banned from sports and anything sports related for life. If the entire team was in on it, the entire team gets banned for life. No second chances, no exceptions.

Or we could just make sports betting illegal again.

I've made solid side income gambling over a number of different games and sports, and I say it should definitely be banned.

It ruins lives, funnels money to terrible people, makes sports worse for everyone, and has no positive impact on society. The benefits of the "freedom" to let manipulation of your lizard brain drain you of your past and future earnings is not worth it.

I find it funny how in Germany the state lottery advertises itself on TV but needs to add the info that "Gambling can be addictive."

For example, this ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0-pKS_zx5E is made by "LOTTO 6aus49", which is "LOTTO.de", which is "Toto-Lotto Niedersachsen GmbH", which is the lottery company of the state Lower Saxony.

To me this is as if the state would place TV ads for wine which a state-owned winery produces, like "Landesbetrieb Hessische Staatsweingüter" also known as "Hessische Staatsweingüter GmbH Kloster Eberbach".

And the lottery numbers are then presented in the prime time news in the publicly funded television.

It really ruined watching games for me with the constant talk of odds and gambling right in the broadcast. I thank my lucky stars this happened after I was a teenager/twenty-year-old because having to find a shady bookie that would break my legs if I didn't pay was one of the main factors that kept me from being stupid like a number of my friends.

I would have been in deep trouble with an appified, gamified, psychologically addicting betting app on my phone offering me free bets to log in again. I had a hard enough time breaking away from phone gatcha shit that I would mindlessly click while sitting on the couch.

While everything you wrote I agree with, I’m not sure I arrived to the same conclusion. Alcohol, cigarettes, workaholics, social media apps all ruin the lives of the weak and those around them. Should we make them all illegal?

I think sports gambling should be legal because otherwise the Bookies will kill you if you can't pay your debts. At least with legal gambling the worst that can happen is bankruptcy.

The gambling institutions have some regulation as well.

I do think that gambling ads should be banned just like cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals.

USA and New Zealand are the only places that allow pharma ads and the public is uninformed to make that decision but the Agency problem means MDs will prescribe those drugs.

This only truly works if sports gambling is illegal globally. The reason this doesn't apply too much with the US is foreign interest in US sport is limited.

For example http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/426092.stm is why british people of a certain age all know the phrase "Malaysian gambling syndicates" and associate it with random blackouts.

Exactly. Sports gambling takes the fun out of sports for those who are not interested in gambling.

I love gambling. I go to Vegas 4-6 times per year, and I play poker at the local casinos/card houses almost every week.

I've NEVER liked sports gambling because it's so hard to predict and I also believe that it's rigged by Vegas and the Mafia. The NBA has already been outed as rigged via referees and the insane actions of refs in last year's Super Bowl by ignoring obvious penalties makes it even worse. The games are obviously tainted as this point. And the fact that none of the leagues want to implement rules that correct wrong penalties only solidifies the fact that they want these things to occur.

Unfortunately, banning it outright will probably only exacerbate problems.

If you, hypothetically, banned it outright in the US, then you go from having few levers on what you can mitigate in the industry to none, because if it's all banned and has more than a slap on the wrist punishment, there's no reason not to charge 200% interest on gambling debts, or other absurd things.

I'm firmly of the belief that the only thing you can really do is tightly regulate it to the point that there's still enough gambling, with controls minimizing as much unexpected harm as you can, to avoid most people feeling tempted to seek out the unregulated illegal avenues with more exploitative arrangements.

I think history has shown that you can't effectively ban a lot of vices, you just wind up with them underground and even more destructive to people involved. The best you can do is try to minimize how easily one can destroy themself - look at Japan's reactive regulation around the most predatory gacha mechanics. Whether you think they strike the right balance or not, that's rather an example of what I mean - you can't really stop someone from deciding to deliberately spend their life's savings on things, you can just do as much as you can to avoid it being an impulsive choice.

Honest question: why cares about the effect on sports?

The most extreme example of cheating is sports theater, and even that has a fandom in the form of WWF.

So why not let the sports police themselves, and let the market decide whether they are doing a good job with their attention?

I don't care about sports, so I am asking from a naive position, but I from this position I can't fathom caring more about the sport than the people who compulsively wager on them, and destroy their lives.

Best make it legal then, so bookies have the threat of losing their license if they get caught rigging a match. Black market bookies couldn't care less.

This depends very much on how you define gambling. The stock market very much is gambling, though most people consider it investing.

I'd push back on the idea that gambling is inherently harmful. Gambling can be done at a scale where it is essentially play. It is particularly gambling against corporations or other non-individual actors, in games that they rig to be perpetually -EV, and market like crazy, that is inherently harmful.

I agree but I'd put in a carve out for the kind of gambling that reinforces sociality. Poker night with your neighbors or a fantasy football league with your pals from school (with a groupchat where you shit-talk one another) make some sense: you spend the buy-in in order to have something to talk about with your buddies.

A shooting range I used to go to would not rent to unaccompanied men. They had to be members and take a class at least, or be in a group, or bring their own guns. This was to prevent impulsive suicides. Maybe if you want to keep any kind of gambling on sports, you should have to go to a sports book with your pals and watch some games together.

Putting the casino in your pocket feels like a social suicide.

Very few political decisions can be said to be carved in stone.

The point is that reversing a popularly acclaimed law, while yes showing to be a mistake, leads to huge losses in political consensus at elections and an easy win to the other parties.

Gambling, in the same way as consumption of drugs can be indeed harmful for individuals and the people surrounding them.

But the solution is not forbidding them, but educating people and families on how to deal with them.

Alcohol consumption is even more dangerous than sport betting, however several cultures after generations have been able to develop a healthy relationship towards its consumption. You can clearly see that by comparing deaths in Mediterranean countries against other northern countries or other parts of the world.

I can feel that difference also directly in the way my Mediterranean cultural background has driven my relationship with alcohol. Me and my family love to drink wine or beer, but we despise getting drunk. The moment our heads get light headed we stop drinking. We enjoy the social aspect of it and its flavor, but we do not enjoy being incapacitated because of it. However the moment I started traveling north I noticed the difference in how people relate to alcohol:in a lot of cultures people just drink alcohol to get drunk or to disconnect from their every day lives. They have not learnt to stop on time and they develop a very unhealthy relationship to drinking.

Same could be said about sports betting. If it’s part of our culture or our individual interests we need as a society to be able to develop a healthy relationship towards it and not forbid it (with the exception of minors).

> But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports.

Is there really that much betting going on in the "little leagues"?

Professional sports are already and have always been ruined as they, by their very nature of existence, have to appeal to what entertains the crowd, not for what is ideal for the sake of sporting. Betting doesn't really change the calculus there; at most changing what makes for the entertainment, but then you're just going into a silly "my entertainment is better than your entertainment".

man im torn here

from sugar, cigs, to alcohol

from netflix, pornhub, to onlyfans

where do we draw the line

The nice thing about sports gambling is it's a strong signal that your local government has been captured by outside interests. If anyone complains about the way things are you can simply point and say well, look we know the government doesn't represent us or work for the people, we have legalized gambling. Of course there's all sorts of other tells too but none is as clear cut without any need of conspiracy theories.

unlike more complex policy areas where vested interests may be hidden behind layers of bureaucracy or decades of refined pseudo-moral talking points, gambling legalization is straightforward: the flow of money into lobbying, the rapid legislative changes, and the immediate establishment of large-scale betting operations make the influence unmistakable. It's a tangible, almost irrefutable sign that decisions are being made in favor of profit at the expense of public welfare.

> But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports. Players throw. They get good at subtly cheating. The gambling apparatus latches itself to the sport, to the teams and players, the umpires and judges, the sporting organizations. With this much money on the line, it's not a matter of if but when games are thrown, cheated -- the bigger the game, the bigger the incentive. It's even easier now because of the amount of side/parlay betting that is available. It exhausts the spirit of competition.

I 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.

> It's certainly worth having the discussion about whether people should be able to run a train through their life and the lives of their families via app.

Even if you’ve convinced yourself that being able to ruin one’s own life is a sign of a society with Great Freedom, you might be willing to oppose other people profiting from urging people to ruin their lives.

I know many in those era are even aggressively opposed to the Bible, but I have long seen it as a kind of change log, commit notes, code notes, etc. …

“hi, ancient people here. We learned this lesson hard over many iterations that gambling is bad, we are making a rule that you, future reader shouldn’t gamble or it will also result in your societal debt and likely contribute to your destruction too if you take on too many of the things we learned over millennia and many different civilizations and societies collapsing; and we wrapped it in nice allegories for so it appeals to your innate human proclivity to dream, imagine, and tell stories. Don’t say we didn’t want you!”

Unfortunately it seems our Digital Age civilization is hell bent on emulating its Bronze Age and Tower of Babel compatriots the way we are going.

The line between legitimate competition and gambling-fueled manipulation is becoming increasingly blurred now!

Perhaps it's not ruining sports, it's just forcing us to confront the emptiness of sports.

Extending the logic, should we ban the derivatives market? Cryptocurrencies/tokens that only seek to be a speculative asset (and not an actual currency). Venture Capital that seeks to use businesses as speculative assets (trying to artificially inflate the short-term share price of the business rather than its long-term health)?

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

Betting on a game makes watching the game 10x more fun though.

And on a good day,wall Street is orthagonal.

I'm going to suggest that you not use "run a train through" to mean "destroy".

Gambling triggers capitalism to ruin lives. If we had a well-designed society, you could lose a lot by gambling, but you could end up with $0 and still not be completely "ruined".

> it ruins the sports

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.

Unless you live by yourself in the middle of the woods you never ruin just your life.

same argument can be made about excessive athlete salaries and really any sports related business ventures. Athletes go after specific stats to hit contract goals, get their bonuses and live good lives. Gambling industry is just one of the hundred detractors to the sport itself.

Other things that ruin lives: eating, shopping, TV, the Internet, videogames, alcohol, accumulating things in your house, etc.

I had the pleasure of visiting a town on the Amazon river a few times over the course of a decade. I watched as western culture and civilization creeped in and ruined their society.

The first time I went, people were living off the land, fishing, gardening, children playing ball games, etc.

Here's what I saw last time I went: Gambling, alcoholism, plastic waste, sugary drinks, public advertising, and kids glued to their smartphones. Forests being cleared to raise cattle because now everyone wants to eat burgers.

They've managed to bring in the worst parts of modern society without the good parts (medicine, infrastructure, education, etc.)

I do believe that without a modern education, these people are not equipped to deal with modern vices. They've never taken a math class let alone learned enough probability to know that gambling is a losing bet. They've never had a nutrition class to learn that Coca Cola is disastrous to your health.

I think it's similar with all things that hook into our dopamine centers, like alcohol, food, sugar foods, tobacco, gambling, drugs, games, ... It has to be regulated to the correct amount to benefit society. Outlawing them, like with prohibition in United States, just moves it all to black markets. Having them completely free, as has been the case with all of them at some point, also brings harm to society. Somewhere in between those two points is where it's correctly regulated.

For example, maybe gamling can continue being legal but advertising for it be outlawed or severely restricted? Can gambling have the same sort of warnings as on cigarettes, maybe with children going hungry because the parent gambled away all the money for the month? Another way is that some part of the revenue from gambling could go to programs such as Bolsa Família that you bring up? Or to fight gambling addiction in some way?

That's my pragmatic view of these types of thing: try to find what actually works and hurts society the least. You'll never find any perfect system with no harm anyway.

Ban the advertising of betting, like cigarettes in many countries

I'd argue that sports betting is not the biggest concern. What we saw was the rise of online cassinos after a new law in 2023 classified them as "sports betting" too.

Betting your team will win the tournament has a very delayed reward: the game needs to play out for hours/minutes before you know if you have won. Only hardcore gamblers experience instant rewards and becoming a 'serious' sports gambler is no easy task: you have learn about the sport, then teams, the players, the outcomes, the time of the matches, etc. Cassinos, on the other hand, are just an app with a lever that provides instantaneous rewards and thus hook your brain with much more intensity in a shorter time span. A lot of people who don't care about sports or just won't be hooked by sports betting are now trapped in those online cassinos. It's a shame.

> The influencers, the biggest athletes and musicians are marketing it

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 impeachment has zero relation with this topic, you are using this space to drop in a political and highly controversial statement in order to try and gain visibility to your highly contentious POV. How is this not removed yet? Flagged.

Same thing is happening in India. For a poor country like India, Sports betting app that shows advertisements that you can make this much money should be banned.

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

The figures you state are misleading. Money bet is not money lost. For example, roulette payout is 97.3% and sports betting payout can be as high as 99% or even 100% (done to attract players so that they open an account).

There is simply no reason why this should not be better regulated here in Brazil. It ruins families and the sport. They can advertise themselves freely.

We’ve spent years conditioning an entire generation of kids on quick hits of dopamine from mobile phone apps. I personally believe that it’s a “glitch in the matrix” for a large enough segment of the population to cause societal chaos.

As a libertarian however, I break with the opinion of making consensual activities illegal even if they are self-harming. So I guess my stance is probably the same as addictive drugs. They could be legal, but come with the same labeling, warnings, ID requirements and age restrictions that come with a pack of cigarettes. We should probably be educating kids about the dangers of addictive apps like we once did with DARE on the dangers of drugs.

I used to support SG legalization quite a bit, but after seeing how quickly it can get people that I once thought were rock solid financially into a very bad financial situation quicker than I thought possible, I have no problem with heavily regulating bets sizes and interaction limits, if not an outright ban. Before it was slightly illegal and those people I guess avoided “bookies” as a result of being afraid of that whole scene. The most I ever gamble is when the lotteries get to ridiculously high amounts like $500 million and get a $2 ticket. However, people seem to get addicted to sports betting as fast as crack cocaine and it’s much wider spread than I thought, and contributes almost nothing to civilization other than the pocket books of the middle men. Is it because sports betting gives you quick feedback as oppose to lotteries making you wait or maybe the ease it is to drop your whole bank account as a bet? It seems like net societal negative in almost all ways other than a brief chance of thrill.

Not sure about total death rates but I think gambling addiction has the highest suicide rate of any of the big addictions out there. It seems truly ruinous. I suppose if any random person can blow their savings on out of the money options theyre unable to gauge the risk of then they might as well be allowed to do the same with crazy parlay bets but seeing the whole landscape of sports betting evolve over the last handful of years has still been quite eerie to me.

My gut these days tells me its probably better for the humans in society if this stuff is left only to black markets because it seems like it destroys lives.

The state of sports gambling in the UK is now such that Sky Sports (used to be a cable/satellite TV station catering purely to sports) is now basically just a series of gambling adverts with some sport thrown in to keep the punters hooked. They even launched a Sky Bet betting company which seems to have completely overtaken the TV channels - every sport is riddled with Sky Bet adverts and sponsorship. The biggest irony is that professional sportsmen (it's always men) keep getting bans for gambling on their own sport, and yet we somehow expect extremely rich young men in a "banter" culture to ignore the fact that every week they pull on a shirt with multiple gambling sponsors on it and then play in a stadium with endless gambling ads scrolling around the LED boards before being interviewed afterwards standing in front of a wall of gambling sponsors by a man with Sky Bet written on his microphone.

This is a very thoughtful post. I have witnessed similar gambling establishments in Japan/JRA and Hong Kong/HJC. Both are equally unappealing to me for various reasons that you mentioned.

Your post made me think more about sports betting vs a lottery. To me, they really are different. With a lottery, you need to wait days to get the result (mostly). The chance for multiple quick dopamine hits is exceedingly low. (Scratch tickets and high speed lottos are another matter.). Now think about sports betting: So many simultaneous events or races, so the customer (user?) has many more chances for multiple quick dopamine hits. Maybe a potential framework to talk about gambling harm is opportunities for for multiple quick dopamine hits. If very low, then many tolerate it in their community, especially if a significant portion goes to social causes.

One thing I am absolutely sure about: Advertising for sports betting should be banned. I put it in the same class as cigarette ads as a child. Damn they looked so cool and fun. What a terrible message to spread!

> because clearly there is some demand that must be met

There is demand it's not clear that it "must be met." The problem is not the betting or oddsmaking, the problem is, how do you handle settlements?

You're presenting the false dichotomy, that we should just allow gambling, because it's inevitable, and we can occasionally use the violence of the state and it's courts to run the settlement racket on behalf of short changed bookies.

> but we should not be enabling gambling

And we have no reason to. We should harshly penalize people who try to collect on gambling debt and they should have no access to the courts or to sheriff's over problems arising from it.

> cannot protect its citizens from every evil

That's why this is all so insidious because it's really only one you need to actually protect them from. Suddenly you'll find the industry self regulating customers with an obvious illness out at the front door. They'll get amazingly good at this.

Walking through the UK really does not lead to a good view of sports betting. The store fronts do not look like places that a happy person would go to.

While we don't have Ladbrokes, we do have a number of different companies running gambling halls, with slot machines and sports gambling. Those should be outlawed, there is nothing good about them, they provide absolutely no value to society. I'm fine with people being able to place a small bet on their local football team and I'm fine with casinos where people make it an occasional event, similar to going to the movies or seeing a concert.

But these commercial gambling halls, it's not some well of person who decides to pop in Friday afternoon and maybe lose €20 on a crazy sports bet or the slot machines and then go home and have dinner with the family. It is the some of our weakest and loneliest people who line up, waiting for the place to open and then spend the next 10 hours there. There are places who will provide free food for their best "customers", to ensure that they don't leave. We're transferring money from social welfare to private companies, using addiction and loneliness.

As for sports, I don't think professional soccer would like a ban on sports gambling. The revenue and salaries it have generated are to high for them to walk away now. It is hurting the sport though, in the sense that the community and local fans have been pushed out long ago. A local football club had to leave the premier league a few years ago, as a result they could no longer charge insane prices for tickets at the stadium. The result: They had more fans come to every single game, they sold more season passes, because the fans still wanted to see the games, and now they could afford it. Sure, they made less money, but the connection to the fans and the city grow.

Upvoted for the mention of state lotteries.

Little did you know at the time that your father was also gambling. His bet was against you. His reward was that you would align to his views.

Had his gamble failed, you would’ve been addicted at a young age to that rush, and his authority on many life matters would’ve been diminished in your young eyes.

> Casinos make me feel ill just walking through

I feel something similar, even though I never had a lesson like you did. I feel like I must be completely immune to gambling addiction because the thought that I could walk out of a casino with more money than I came in with is just unimaginable to me.

I had lunch with my dad recently and he mentioned he tried out one of the sports betting apps, because they gave him a free $20 to gamble with. My heart sunk a little. I know he likes a deal, but I didn't think he'd take obvious bait like that. I brought up what they were doing incase he didn't see what was in front of his face, and tried to make sure it wasn't going to become a problem. I'd hate to see him destroy his retirement with gambling, he worked so hard to get there.

His entire working life he was never a sports fan, but in retirement he seems really into it. There have been a lot of changes, and I really hope this doesn't become one of them. I could see him really getting into all the statistics.

> No one was going for any team in particular.

Honestly, I would expect the opposite. I wouldn't care who wins between the Cowboys and the Giants, but if I put a $10 bet down on the Giants, all of the sudden and find myself rooting for them. You should tell your buds to bet on a team and forget all the prop bets. ;)

“People don’t like what I like so they’re wrong!”

Contrary to you, there’s certain sports I find boring to watch as such (eg, American football) — but enjoy in a condensed version focused on bets (eg, RedZone and dailies on American football). The game of predicting individual performance and ensemble outperformance is more interesting to me than the underlying sport — and much more interesting to discuss than any single game.

You don’t have to gamble, but trying to portray it as some grievous fault people enjoy things differently than you is ridiculous.

Makes me sad to read this

I like that the religion of teams is going away

That part was weirder to me

Wait, you're upset because they aren't in love with a particular team? Lol I see nothing wrong with this. Do you not fill out a bracket for March madness? It's the same thing.

Edit: down voted, ok

I think the Netherlands has this and it sort of seems to work. In that I've never seen anyone really addicted to gambling, even if half the country provides the government some extra money in the 'national lottery' every month. We got a lot of random wins of boxes of ice cream and stuff growing up.

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

Well we do have that in some states of India, and guess what? It has the same effects. Moreover the government is incentivized to promote this as it's an alternate source of revenue. Roads are peppered with ads, and there's the constant infighting in the ruling government to see who gets the gambling and liquor sales portfolio (and usually it's a buddy or kid of the chief minister).

I think this used to be the case in (most of) Australia (it's still government run in Western Australia but that will change - they've already tried twice to privatise it but the first time was derailed by the pandemic and the second time no one was offering enough money).

I think privatisation happened quite a while ago (mid to late 1990s) but my vague memory is that there was some sort of deregulation in the mid 2000s (or at least that's when I remember the ads becoming incessant) and that seems to have coincided with the endless offers of bonus bets, deposit matches, bet returns etc.

In the US that’s called the lottery. Go into any gas station in a poor neighborhood and there’s a line of people buying tickets.

This sets up several conflicts of interest for the government. The money is just too good.

The UK sort of had this for a while via "The Tote" - set up in the 1920s by the UK government, it ran stores that took sports bets, had a presence at almost all horse races etc providing safe/legitimate services.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tote

It operated alongside other private operators, but was entirely State owned and operated until it was privatized in 2011. I forget the specifics of it, but the Tote uses (or at least used to) some kind of "pool betting" model that meant it didn't profit directly from customers losing bets, being agnostic about the results was meant to reduce predatory pressures etc.

I think this likely helped a lot to give those who wanted to gamble somewhere they could always trust to honor the arrangement and avoid "underground" operators, I don't know that it helped all that much in reducing the social harms etc though.

That was how it worked in Sweden and it solved nothing.

This is not so much than human are "really bad" at this. Here they're facing other human (scientists, psychologists, artists, marketers), computers, algorithms, spending all their waking hours devising scheme to make them addicted.

The C language may not help you much with clean memory allocation, but at least they are not using A/B testing and emotional appeal to coerce you into doing deadly memory management.

Sorry for the nitpick but I'm curious if I'm off here:

> that's why newer languages like Go and Rust force you to check errors in return values

Go doesn't require you check return values though, no? I can get a return of type (*Model, error) and just completely ignore the error portion of it and never check it. Rust doesn't let you access the value until you deal with the Result/Option wrapper, requiring that you at least acknowledge the potential for an error.

If human nature is truly that inherently bad and dangerous, then the worst possible thing we could do is to allow adult human beings to rule over other adult human beings as their parent, using the threat of violence to prevent them from doing things “for their own good”.

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

no victim == no crime

I am waiting for the day when one of them proposes to ban relationships altogether, because they have an inherent risk for partner violence... A certain TOS episode comes to mind, which depicted the aftermath of such a law.

This is basically where I am at. I live in Illinois and it used to be you could bet at the race track or a couple Off Track Betting locations, otherwise you would have to go to a casino which was probably a distance away. Then they legalized Video Gambling and it popped up in a bunch of bars, restaurants, and stand alone places. You even see it in gas stations sometimes. Now with sports betting online there are constant advertisements for it all the time. In just 15 years legalized gambling went from something relatively niche to extremely prevalent.

Its already expensive as it is, is it not? Like in a "people are losing heaps of money from their sour bets" kind of way.

My thought is it being more expensive is not going to stop gambling addicts since they are already willing to lose heaps of money by making the bet in the first place.

I agree about banning ads 100%.

I have participated in a few meetings of some lottery boards, and I have heard that there is a tension here between the illegal market and the pricing of the legal market. Some states charge the (relatively low) commissions that the illegal market charges because they would prefer to stamp out the illegal market, and others take your position but have a thriving black market for gambling. Those are basically the two options.

Expensive in terms of effort, yes. There must be several opportunities for higher brain function to over-ride the reptile brain before a bet is placed.

As a step one online betting should be banned. Make access to it more difficult as with all substances.

It’s already stigmatised - have you seen the quintessential meth addict/crack whores that hang around gambling/gaming joints?

There has to be a lower class. Not all but most of the people who inhabit it are just where they belong. Interventionist states with paternal social policies can’t magically raise the IQs of the dumbest 20% of their populations by 50 points, alas.

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.

Tobacco bans are the way of the future, with existing smokers grandfathered out of the ban to minimize political opposition. If you're born after X date then it will never be legal for you to but it.

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.

Just about everything that's fun is a "vice".

There's some evidence ludopathy has a genetic component (aside from obviously environmental).

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

I'm not sure it would work to make it expensive, I've lived in London for a while, and tobacco products are very expensive there, they were expensive for me, I knew few Ukrainian guys I would buy cigarettes from, for 2-3 pounds a packet, while I had enough money to buy 13 pounds cigarettes after I found a better job. I know a lot of people from when I was there, they were still buying cigarettes from those Ukrainians. You make gambling expensive? I'm sure lower classes can find someone who can let them gamble for cheap. I am no libertarian, but I think when it comes to vices, it's a lost battle, prohibition works for a the better-off part of the population, it leaves the one who need government the most, outside the government reach. I'd say things should be legalised, but money shouldn't be spent for anything except help programs, social programs, better working conditions for those who suffer and find peace in gambling and/or drugs. Legalising gambling was probably a mistake, but it was a way to keep it out of reach of organised crime.

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 would also suggest capping the amount that people can bet per week or month to prevent too many weak human minds from ruining their lives and worse than that ruining the lives of their wives and kids.

>> Unfortunately, our culture seems to have two settings: legal ban; full celebratory embrace.

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.

Prior to legalized sports betting, was "state violence" used against people who bet on sports as a casual hobby? It seems like it was basically tolerated as long as it was kept amongst friends/coworkers, etc.

This is specifically about something that is very addictive. Moderation was never a likely outcome.

Not doubting your Mr. Luntz's influence but it turns out gaming is an old term for gambling which still causes legal nightmares for anyone in my area trying to serve alcohol at a video game themed location. Ancient laws ban gaming and alcohol to be co-located.

The term "climate change" was used in research even back in the 50s. It isn't some new invention.

Is climate change a sinister rebranding?

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.

Polymarket works on mobile and allows instant USDC deposits. Are these somehow red flags elsewhere, but not here?

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.

> 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.

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.

College basketball for an unranked school probably fits the bill. I go watch my local uni's volleyball team play and it's super low budget, all run by volunteers, the fans are invested and local, and it's just all-around wholesome.

>Speeding on the highway and jaywalking may seem harmless

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

> why they ever thought they had a chance to win consistently

> isn't risk taking a part of most people's lives?

Do you not see how these things are different? Leaving the house contains a risk of an accident, but the "you don't stand a chance of winning" certainly does not apply.

Many comments in this thread seem blind to this nuance, yet I wonder how one can go through life without understanding that not all risks are the same. I imagine one would die pretty fast.

> Speeding on the highway and jaywalking

Are both illegal, because of the risk they pose.

I think this is a misapprehension -- there is a ton of regulation around sports gambling. They may not have put the specific regulation that you think is necessary (in this case, banning advertising) but there are pretty huge barriers to entry to get into the sports bookmaking business, including a number of background checks and interviews in an attempt to prevent organized crime from getting a foothold. This is why every time you see an add for gambling there's a note on the ad saying "if you have a problem with gambling call this help line".

I've thought that there should people, your family and/or friends, who have to sign on to enable you to gamble - where they will be on the line for any debt or a certain % of the debt the person has, etc.

E.g. Dana White of UFC appears to have a gambling problem, but maybe with how much money he earns it actually isn't a problem - but what if it at some point it gets out of control, and that is hidden from friends or people that care about him - and where that loss of control could be hidden from sight, kept secret until it's perhaps too late - however that looks?

* Make all bets above a certain threshold public information with the bettor's name and wager amount like political contributions.

I think this would result in some sort of credit score, which would be used by countless institutions. At least people wouldn't be able to hide it from their family. When a person wins the lottery, their name is supposed to be public although there's ways around this.

Obviously, it would create a black market for anonymous gambling, and lots of people would use an intermediary.

One thing that's not often talked about is how heavily gendered gambling addiction is - with something like 2/3 of gamblers being male[1] and an even more skewed ratio for problem gambling.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736715/#:~:tex....

Indonesia is also having an illegal online casino epidemic, too. That is in a country where gambling is currently illegal and will continue to be.

“Beautiful girls” What. Why would they be affected any differently?

My real wake-up call was the introductory class in my data science master's program. We spent a whole week learning about all the clever tricks Harrah's data scientists found to keep people in the gambling halls. The course's instructor really lionized Harrah's for doing this, and loved to talk about how much profit it made for the company.

For my part, I was horrified. I couldn't find a way to see some of these tricks the use as anything but a form of highly evolved confidence artistry. Legal con artistry, sure. But a legal scam is still a scam. Even if the people getting scammed never wise to the scam, it's still a scam.

The arguments about tax revenues and suchlike don't make me feel any better about it. All I see in their success is a demonstration that a great many people will happily turn a blind eye to abusive behavior if they believe they can materially benefit from doing so. And, of course, they never do, anyway. The promises of professional con artists that our communities will benefit if we grant them imprimatur for their operations turned out to also be a scam. Con artists pulling a con; quelle surprise!

> Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive.

Don't forget social media. I mean, we have some of the smartest, best paid people on the planet incentivized to use every bit of data they can to hack your evolutionary biology to keep you scroll, scroll, scrolling.

I think one reason I've sadly become quite disillusioned with technology is because I see it less and less as a tool for improving the human condition, and more about creating addiction machines to siphon ever increasing amounts of money from the system.

Agreed it feels like nothing more than taking advantaged of underprivileged people. There are likely people who have better means doing sports betting too but the way the ads are everywhere, I get mail from DraftKings even though I've never used it. Predatory is a good word for it. I feel similarly about state lotteries. The ads always manipulate people by making it seem like high-octane fun where people are just winning massive sums of money when the reality is you click a couple buttons and then allow random chance to decide whether or not your money disappears.

One might argue that gambling being illegal doesn’t protect anyone from it. As a former professional poker player who started off in illegal games, I can tell you, there’s plenty of gambling both legal and illegal available in most places.

The line at the gas station of people buying scratchoffs and lottery tickets is proof.

The part we likely need protection from is the marketing.

This reminds me also of the huge difference between gambling and gambling. Some games are at least somewhat beatable (sports betting, poker) even though the house is most consistent winner.

Then there is junk like every slot machine ever, 98 % of online casinos, etc.

Lotteries would belong to that category if they weren't such a useful way to sell something few people can afford, or to finance projects with an opt-in taxation.

I hate gambling, so I don't gamble.

However, if you want to gamble, more power to you. However, I don't want protection enforced by the government here. I want the government to protect the air, water, military, forces of nature, etc. I do not want them regulating and optimizing every facet of my life.

Drinking is objectively a drain on society, but you can see how well banning that in America went.

Someone in the research offices at IBM had a bumper sticker that said “the lottery, a tax on people that don’t understand math”

Also the local conscience store I frequented at one job in newton, the owner put up a sign saying “people here have won $500,000 in the lottery last year”. I noted that seemed like a lot, she looked at me and said, I know what they spend, it’s not a lot, then proceeded to go on a little talk about gambling being bad. When another customer came in that ended. I bought my snack and moved on.

That said, I’ll loose 100$ every couple years gambling in person. I do enjoy it as entertainment. I can’t see how it’s enjoyable online though..

When you win something, it’s a little thrill. I can see how it can overwhelm you.

Also people only tell stories of “winning”. It rare to hear the loosing stories.

Well, it's not really their choice. If you're really good at picking your bets the sites will all limit or kick you off.

Sports betters really only allow losers to do it. There's a bit of a different ring to "We only let losers choose to play".

Impossible optimism can be a good thing too. My family and I play the lottery whenever expected reward is over purchase price. Of course we aren't going to win, but spending $20-50 a week to spend a couple hours dreaming about what we'd do with half a billion is such a fun uplifting family activity that makes us realize our true wishes are a lot closer than needing millions of dollars.

Also I probably talk to my father more often about fantasy football than for any other reason, despite not caring about football.. the gamification and having stakes can be a compelling social experience.

This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry and I think "we the people" need protection from these forces

No thank you, I can protect myself.

I have no problem with gambling. I used to frequent gambling boats that would go to international waters to do their thing. I have a huge problem with how sports gambling has been marketed lately (at least here in Florida).

Its basically the same as smoking/vaping for me. Allow people their choice. It should be illegal to market it in 'cool' / 'sexy' ways, which is what I am seeing in todays advertising.

I walked into the local convenience store the other day and it dawned on me that it exists solely to serve addictions. Nicotine addiction? Cigarettes and vapes galore. Sugar/fat addiction? Dozens of options. Gambling addiction? Multiple lotteries, scratch off, and a couple of video machines in the corner. Alcohol? Plenty of options there too.

Is there a viable way to limit the amounts but still make it enjoyable? I guess the issue is that $10, $100, $1,000 or $10,000 would be different for everyone. I myself only need $10 or $100 on something to "make it interesting".

> Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive.

A similar argument can be made with healthcare (especially the US insurance system). There is all sorts of information asymmetry, not only from available treatments/procedures, but then also providers

Kenneth Arrow wrote about this (in 1963), "Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care" (see §II. generally, and perhaps §II. B. specifically):

* https://assets.aeaweb.org/asset-server/files/9442.pdf

Some disagree with the above assessment:

* https://archive.is/q1nSN / http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/liberals...

I'm kind of the in "hey its their choice" camp but would love to hear an alternative perspective.

My main gripe is that it seems like a strangely weird place to decide where we need protection.

I would think a similar article could be written about, just off the top of my head:

* Junk food

* Participating in dangerous sports (Football, Boxing, etc)

* All forms of gambling

* Alcohol, cigarettes

* Pornography

All of which are also dangerous, potentially addictive, and probably has a larger net negative impact than sports gambling.

What principles could be adopted to not turn this into a larger and larger bureaucracy that decides which of these industries gets preferential treatment over another?

I find the power asymmetry is in my favour. I give money to the bookmaker or I don't.

If I don't, then the bookmaker is powerless as regards my money.

If I do, then I also gain some power over the bookmaker's money.

I don't expect many to see it the same way. Most people are more concerned than I am with the problems suffered by those whose decision making does not interact well with the existence of the gambling industry. Given their concerns, it is understandable that they wouldn't share my perspective.

>When i was younger I tended to think "hey it's their choice" but i've realized how unfair our society is in terms of things like this.

Where do we stop? Drugs? Medication? News? Elections?

People choose bad things all the time. Thinking you know better is how you end up banning alcohol because it's obviously a terrible vice.

> The older I get the more I hate gambling

> This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry

ive been fiercely libertarian most of my life but, like you, im starting to realize its just not practical.

libertarianism made sense 100 years ago; you still needed a limited but powerful government to monopoly bust, but the consumer was close enough to the source of all information. smart people could invent products and whole industries from the ground up. you could know whats going on.

this is no longer the case. god help me for the pseudomarxist thing im about to say (and believe), but individual people are helplessly separated from the source; everything is insulated by layers of abstraction. the gift of reduced margin via capitalism and globalisation has cursed us with powerlessness.

how many information wars are you prepared to fight? teflon, ddt, pfoas, bpa, bpb, bps, bpf, bpaf, lead, asbestos, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, psychedelics, birth control, opioids, hormones, climate change, plastic waste, electronic waste, landfilling, recycling, antibiotics, urban planning, housing development, GMO food, monocropping, wastewater, topsoil, algae blooms, overfishing, deforestation, AGI, LLM, ad tech, social media, diet (sugar, cholesterol, fat), msg, processed foods, radiation (cellular, microwave, electromagnetic power lines), conflict minerals, 3rd world labor and global supply chains, slavery (theres 10s of millions of literal slaves in the world, remember?), human trafficking, israel and palestine, north korea, china, Uyghurs, russia and ukraine, ongoing gender apartheid in parts of the middle east, war torn africa, local state and federal politics.

plus the hundreds i didnt think of and the thousands i dont know i need to care about.

I think at a fundamental level it is a freedom issue.

There is one and only one limit on freedom which I believe in: when one individual (or group) begins to infringe the freedoms of others.

The problem which I see in a lot of ideologies which purport to value freedom, is a naive idea that government is the only organization which can infringe on individual freedoms, and this is blatantly and obviously false. Corporations and religious organizations can and do infringe individual freedoms all the time, and a society which fails to address this problem becomes less and less free as these organizations become the de-facto oligarchy.

We don't need to set aside our belief in freedom to fight against these organizations, and I think when we do that, we're making a huge concession we don't need to make. Casinos and advertisers manipulating people to take their money and provide little value in return absolutely is a freedom issue: casinos and advertisers are manipulating us to give up the freedoms money allows us. When we make concessions like,

> This isn't some "freedom" issue

I think we lose a lot of the people who care about freedom, when we could be explaining to those people how these companies infringe their freedoms.

Yeah, the issue with "it's their choice" is that through addictive behaviors they are trying to take away that sort of agency from people. I don't have an issue with gambling in general but I have a huge issue with people trying to trigger and profit from addicting behaviors. It's a phenomenally cruel thing to do to people.

How shall we as a society decide who is to be denied agency in this way, because someone else determines they are to be infantilized, deemed incapable of exercising full responsibility for their own -- entirely voluntary -- actions?

Can you propose a universally acceptable formula or philosophy? Shall we just consult you on a case by case basis to determine when and where a putative power differential exists, and exactly when such a differnetial becomes large enough to verge into "unfair"?

Just wait 'til you read the case against free will...

It is a freedom issue. It's exactly that.

Why insist on broadening the premise with "regular people like us" and "we the people". If your message is potent you wouldn't need to try to speak for a crowd.

I don't need protection from those supposed forces. In a functioning market economy - which essentially all developed nations possess - I can easily control what food I consume and I can easily control whether I gamble or not. That was true for the years when I was poor as an adult and it was true for my parents who were lower middle class / poor while I was growing up.

I don't personally like prostitution, and it should absolutely be legal.

I don't personally like cocaine or marijuana, and they both should be legal.

I don't personally like late-term abortion, and late-term abortion should absolutely be legal.

I find it disgusting when people glug glug glug 72 gallons of soda while they sit there 250 pounds overweight. It's grotesque. And they should absolutely be allowed to do it. It is a freedom issue.

It's either their body or it isn't. The same goes for abortion as it does what food you get to consume and whether you get to sleep with prostitutes, snort cocaine or gamble (with your brain/body and the money from your labor).

Who does your body belong to?

The moment you start dictating that the state owns your body and what you can do with it, you have started down the path of authoritarianism (whether fascism or other). You'd have to have an extreme authoritarian society, to follow your premise to its logical conclusion in terms of what it implies about the culture and the restraints to be imposed.

Add social media to that list

Polymarket

Also it's hard to be against gambling if your state runs a lotto, which is gambling.

Geewhiz, how do i know im addicted to it until im hopelessly addicted to it?

<<The game industry lobby BURSTS through the wall like the kool-aid man to the parent post>>

I also work in industry. I think a national self-exclusion scheme (like the UK has) would be huge.

> They’ve gotten gambling legalized nearly everywhere yet are still wildly unprofitable.

They're predicted to profit more than $400 million in 2025.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/draftkings-inc-nasdaq-dkng-br...

Somewhat like Amazon in its early days, their lack of profits was mostly because they were investing their money into growing the company. DraftKings spends hundreds of dollars to acquire each customer.

> running a sportsbook is a terrible business

For a couple years you could make bank on MLS games simply because the odds were so broken you were almost guaranteed a good payout, it was mathematically impossible to lose money if you bet using multiple apps on the same games.

Does the "correction" you speak of involve business failures and acquisitions until a monopoly does exist?

> So what can be done now? I don't think OSB is going to be redeclared illegal. I don't think that would be a good idea either.

I disagree - I think it would be a great idea. While some may argue that gambling is a zero-sum game (which isn't exactly great, in and of itself), it's really a net loss. While some people may win a bit of money, I'd argue that the degree to which their lives are improved is much less than the degree that some others' lives are destroyed. Gambling, ultimately, being a negative sum.

> Millions of people have started sports betting. If it becomes illegal, it won't make them stop

I disagree with this too. It's substantially easier for any random person to simply tap a few buttons on their phone to place a bet than to find and arrange opportunities with others to bet on sports or visit a brick & mortar betting site. The level of effort of placing a phone bet is so small (and with 24/7 access), you'd have a very hard time arguing that making OSB illegal would only marginally impact the amount of sports gambling taking place.

Bottom line: gambling is an addictive activity for all people and some more so than others. Limiting access to it will have a positive impact on pretty much everyone who does't own or work at a gambling company.

Am I wrong in thinking of your company not as Robinhood for Sports Betting, but rather Expedia for Sports Betting?

If you are successful in getting a majority of OSB companies to allow bets to be placed via your app, then I would think this would lead to the various odds and payouts all converging as price discovery becomes much simpler through one app. This would make OSB less profitable as an industry, right? I see this as a good thing, but then I think you’d run into issues with getting (the bigger) OSB companies pulling their API access from you so that they can’t be compared and bet on as easily.

Disappointed that YC helped with this.

There are such attempts, e.g. Smarkets. The general approach is called a "betting exchange" where you buy and sell bets with other people to set the market price for the various games / events going on. It's too complicated, though. Most people just want to bet on the Pats winning. They're not rational financial actors.

One way to look at this is it is already sort of the dividing line between traditional "Fantasy Sports" and modern "Sports Betting". Fantasy Sports involves finding a like-minded group and winnings are often as much "bragging rights" and camaraderie as it might be any actual pool of money. Sports Betting is certainly not that.

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.

great but who is funding that at %0? is it non profit? like website, company and math people there will have wages. so even 1% is impossible without incredibly big volume and liqudity.

Hot take: The entire goal of the gambling industry is to act as a one-way function for money (ie, laundering).

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

I don't think so, investors have the capital in order to afford to deal with regulations. Over regulating and making it expensive/hard to gamble legally, would just send people over to organised crime. I'd be happy if we forced gambling companies to hire addiction-psychologists in each of their shops for people to talk to, for one we could shrink the amout of gambling shops, as they wouldn't open one every 10 meters, and we would bring help directly to those who need it on the spot

I think it's reasonable to carryover retail investor protections to the gambling world. One market has much more history in taking advantage of the average Joe and as a result there are many sensible protections in place. If you can't withstand losing your entire investment, you probably shouldn't be able to place that bet in the first place.

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

Are you somewhere not-America? Day trading has zero requirements here.

Legalizing things only for rich people is truly awful government.

The reason the PASPA was unconstitutional wasn't because the federal government can't regulate sportsbetting. It was due to the specifics of how the PASPA implemented the ban. In particular the authors of the PASPA wanted to "grandfather in" certain states so rather than making sportsbetting illegal nationwide/federally they made it illegal for state governments to pass new laws legalizing sportsbetting in their states (which meant that states which had legalized sportsbetting already could continue to allow it).

It was this "commandeering" of the state legislature's right to legislate that was found unconstitutional, not the federal government's ability to regulate sportsbetting. So if congress wanted they could pass a law that made sportsbetting illegal at the federal level and put a federal agency in charge of enforcing it.

Its similar to the legal weed situation. States can't be forced to enforce federal laws, but the federal government itself can enforce those laws even if the state governments are unwilling.

> On the other hand, why would I restrict someone's freedom to choose to make a poor decision?

Ok, let's ignore the individual. But gambling losses that lead to bankruptcy hurt creditor, for instance. Since creditors can't really easily separate out gamblers from non-gamblers, those defaults get spread across society as costs.

The linked article asserts that a large proportion of government welfare funds in Brazil are gambled away.

The linked article asserts that losses inspire domestic abuse. Consider that net winners may only win 51% of the time-- that's a lot of losses even if the individual makes out better in the long run.

> why would I restrict someone's freedom to choose to make a poor decision?

Because there's a societal cost that goes beyond just the individual

The some people win argument isn’t even really true for sports betting. Casinos just ban anyone that wins with any regularity.

Of course any individual bet can win but casinos stack the deck by only taking action from players they know will lose over the long run.

Alcohol is definitely regulated and fast food is too a broad term to mean anything.

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.

It's more that gambling is now in the pocket and they have expanded what you can gamble on, like 12 year olds playing baseball

I would argue that they are the same thing.

Why not get rid of unhappiness while you're at it? Just do it man, I'm sure you can figure out how.

Money is not the issue here. If something different, call it 'X', had a similar impact on life, then people would gable with 'X'.

[dead]

The stock market has no house. Every winner is an investor.

Granted, retail investors lose more often than they win - but there’s no incentive of the market that ensures this - merely asymmetry of information. In contrast, commercial gambling can _only_ work if the house always wins.

This isn’t belied by peer-to-peer gambling (save for non-commercial instances, like a poker game among friends), since in these cases the facilitator will take an exorbitant cut.

Moreover, the stock market serves an ethically legitimate purpose - the efficient allocation of capital. Not so gambling.

I don't think those two things are connected. The US coddles children more than any other country, yet more people slip through the cracks in the US than in any other rich country, and witnessing the streets of SF and other major cities, that problem is getting worse, not better.

This seems like a false dilemma. Are you suggesting we need to bring back indentured servitude? Or should we keep trying to find a middle ground?

What on earth does any of this have to do with sports gambling?

You don't have a good handle on the problem.

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

you make absolutely no argument for why strengthening protection of individual rights requires living in a shithole where people are free to exploit well-known vulnerabilities in the human motivation system.

"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.

No, you should regulate driving so those 5% stop colliding with things all the time and the gambling 5% gamble a bit less.

I believe that making mistakes is an integral part of learning and the way our society views failure is totally wrong. When you’re failing as often as you are succeeding this means you are operating at or near your limit, absolutely something to be proud of.

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.

Do they find a way or are the ways engineered to squeeze every Cent out of them?

Yeah those dumb fucks should have just been rich.

This is a good argument against lotteries but not as good an argument against sports gambling. If you are better at sports prediction than the bookmakers, you can make money. Nobody gambles as an "average person", they gamble as themselves, and convincing an individual that they personally are bad at predicting outcomes requires more than saying "most people can't do it".

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

addictions are not cured by teaching people that they can play for fun from time to time but not get in over their heads.

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

I think the issue is that at some point the heroin and gambling leads to desperate situations for the fools, the fools start mugging people and stealing your property, then you feel like a fool for letting them get into that situation when it feels preventable.

I think the majority of people who are against these changes, like you, don’t want to ban people from gambling. The situation before was that bets between individuals on sports events was totally legal, but no businesses were allowed to profit from it.

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.

This is a motte-and-bailey fallacy that got brought up a lot by gambling proponents early on. The biggest difference is that by design investments on average will return a zero or net positive potential for return. Gambling will always return an average negative return by design.

EDIT:

There was a study that came out a month ago that showed that state by state when online sports betting became legal, there was about a $20/month reduction in retirement investments. Considering only ~12-20% of the population has taken part in sports betting, this is not an insignificant reduction in retirement investments.

Yeah its weird to me that gambling is regulated at the state level while investment contracts are regulated at the federal level and therefore have nothing in common, despite the user experience of throwing your money out the window being the same

The thing is when people around me are "ruining their lives" it does affect me.

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.

> how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?

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.

> vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?

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.

> how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?

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

drug addicts and people who lose all their money gambling are a nuisance to the public.

Yes. Lotteries always seemed like the thin side of a wedge that made other gambling seem less bad. It's also kind of evil for a government to prey on its own citizens' innumeracy.

Predicting the outcome of a sporting event is pointless.

There is zero risk associated with the result.

Maybe they can stammer like the swift compiler on type annotations or that Bachman turner overdrive song you ain’t seen nothing yet

Most people here need to be put on a stimulant because they can't control a gambling addiction?

Why, yes, that's a marvellous idea.

This is one of the most Reddit comments I’ve ever read on hacker news.

I think the core of the issue is that, much like social media addiction or nicotine pouches, the source of addiction is instantly available at any time in your pocket. There is no barrier to initiate the activity, even with smoking/vaping at least you had to go outside to get your fix.

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.

How do sports teams derive income from this? Is it just in the sense of increased viewership and the possibility of sponsorships from the gambling companies? As far as I understand they do not get any money from sports gambling directly and are mostly not allowed (through internal ethics rules) to do any gambling themselves.

hell, make it opt-in even!

I would like to see this get legal traction just to see the industry panic and writhe.

This isn’t about outlawing gambling. In the US it was legal to gamble between friends on sports events but businesses weren’t allowed to be involved. That changed in 2018 and business were allowed to be involved and then everything went down the drain.

you think a libertarian society solves the problems of unequal distribution of wealth? Or do you simply want libertarian gambling casinos to collect all the money from suckers, and the government should stay out of it?

How about alcohol consumption? That surely ruins a lot of lives as well and causes loads of health issues.

This is a really great: You don't mind when companies optimize for making money even if a company makes other people addicted to gambling or similiar things but then you don't want to help these people because its the peoples fault.

You know why you think like this? Because you are, by accident, on the side which benefits most of libertarianism.

You really think a human becomes homeless because of 'poor life choices'? No. They become homeless because they never got a chance, have neurological issues, bad parents, bad upbringing, whatever.

Its a lot easier to be a libertarian when you won the birth lottery... Man you are ignorant

Thanks for letting me decide.

Gambling was already an issue 100 years ago, when we were closer to God, allegedly. "God" and religion also aren't particularly interested in gambling, or it would have been forbidden in those holy books. On the other hand, you can blame Protestantism directly for subverting individualism to greed, and hence for exploiting human frailty, such as gambling addiction.

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.

In a couple of years people will feel the same way about college athletes being compensated.

Sadly, I'm not sure there's a correlation here: a lot of these learnings and restrictions are newer than secularism.

I think this is honestly ahistorical. While many Christian (speaking about what I know) philosophies would certainly not label gambling a virtue, it's also not widely considered innately sinful. Yes you can do it poorly, but it was always a tolerated evil. I'm not aware of any place other than the puritanical places like America where it's even enters much into the legal discourse. As far as I'm aware, the 'old world' which you reference -- to this day -- has much laxer gambling laws than America. Imagine my surprise when I go to Europe and gambling is everywhere.

this presumes everyone is going to the same conclusions about these things

What are usurious interest rates? Is some amount of interest ok?

"Of vices I am Gambling."

~Krishna, Gita

I have a trivial example: saying grace. As a lapsed catholic I found all manner of religious traditions extremely tedious as a child and especially as a teenager. I expunged all of them as soon as I turned 18. But recently we have been expressing gratitude before meals. This helps me slow down as I've always been a rapid eater and suffered indigestion; I also enjoy the food more as a result. The grace prayer is gratitude to God in whom I no longer believe. But I think acknowledging the enormous role played by pure chance in our lives is very important.

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Breaking windows with rocks is lots of fun and creates jobs too, but somehow no one is praising vandals.

The online (and IRL) sports books will severely limit the amount you can bet if you’re a plus-EV bettor.

This take, while correct, ignores the fact that chronic gambling will regularly — and predictably — destroy people's lives by virtue of its addictive qualities. Meaning, if it is legal, then we — as a society — will be negatively impacted as a whole. We all understand that a society is the sum of its people's strengths and weaknesses.

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.

"Creating jobs" without creating value is a bad thing.

Like all gambling it also has disproportionately negative effects on people who are already poor.

Ah yes, gambling. The haven for smart people. /s

By exposing complete and utter ignorance about the neurobiological mechanisms behind motivation and addiction, you've evinced a "stupid" opinion.

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.