Sports gambling, like all gambling, ruins lives. It's certainly worth having the discussion about whether people should be able to run a train through their life and the lives of their families via app.
But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports. Players throw. They get good at subtly cheating. The gambling apparatus latches itself to the sport, to the teams and players, the umpires and judges, the sporting organizations. With this much money on the line, it's not a matter of if but when games are thrown, cheated -- the bigger the game, the bigger the incentive. It's even easier now because of the amount of side/parlay betting that is available. It exhausts the spirit of competition.
Sports gambling is diametrically opposed to sport itself.
Sports gambling has been legal in the UK since 1960. Gambling wasn't seriously problematic in this country until 2005, when regulations were substantially liberalised. Pre-2005, sports betting was something that old men did in dingy backstreet shops; post-2005, it became a widespread social phenomenon, turbocharged by advertising and the growing influence and accessibility of the internet.
There's a false dichotomy between prohibition and laissez-faire, which the US seems particularly prone to. You've seen similar issues with the decriminalisation of cannabis, where many states seem to have switched abruptly from criminalisation to a fully-fledged commercial market. There is a broad spectrum of other options in between those points that tend to be under-discussed.
You can ban gambling advertising, as Italy did in 2019. You can set limits on maximum stakes or impose regulations to make gambling products less attractive to new customers and less risky for problem gamblers. You can have a single state-controlled parimutuel operator. Gambling does cause harm - whether it's legal or not - but it is within the purview of legislators to create a gambling market in which harm reduction is the main priority.
I understand your position in theory but the reality is that, there is a false equivalency in here. Most physicians will agree that cannabis is fairly harmless.
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. A body of evidence has also demonstrated it leads to divorce, bankruptcy, poor health and sometimes incarceration in relative abundance. I personally don’t see a way of regulating out of this, not in the U.S.
White paper on recent UK reform of the Gambling Act for the digital age.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-stakes-gambl...
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.
This is not true in Western Australia, where Poker machines are illegal everywhere other than the one casino.
[delayed]
What? No they aren't. It's a cancer affecting the balance books of some specific clubs, but of the local aussie rules footy clubs my friends have played at, none have owned venues with pokie machines. There was one club in my brother's under 17s league that was attached to a pokies pub and everyone used to complain about them because their ones got paid too well.
If we ripped out pokies machines then some clubs would be screwed, but I would be seriously surprised if it was more than a handful per league. It would arguably be beneficial for the average team.
Could they ever operate without the gambling?
Yes, but as long as there’s money to be made people will try and maximize it.
The local sports clubs need the revenue from the machines, otherwise they'd not make any money at all, and might even cease to exist.
How do you propose to solve this problem? Higher fees from club members? or somehow get more gov't funding via taxing?
I don't see the issue with gambling revenue funding a club.
There are no pokies outside the Casino in Western Australia (Perth). And thus no pokies at sports clubs or bars etc. It’s glorious.
I admit to not being entirely sure what "Sports Clubs" are over east though or why they need propping up by gambling. In any case, it works fine here.
You CAN get a permit for a few bits of "gambling" that is mostly only for "sports clubs" but it's very VERY restricted, and mostly like actual games with people like Poker, Two Up, etc. It's not really a problem in nearly the same way, and no machines: https://sportscommunity.com.au/club-member/wa-gambling/
$15 pints are less glorious though!
A few years ago I had a chat with a mate over in QLD, and mentioned our ludicrous prices in WA. The standard line at the time here was "Beer has to be expensive in WA, because we're not allowed to subsidise the cost with pokies". His reply was there are bars in QLD with pokies, and bars without, and none of them charged anything like what we were paying for a pint in WA (nor did the bars with pokies charge significantly less than those without).
Real question: Is the price of a pint high because of operating costs or taxes? Also, can each state set their own alcohol tax rules, and does WA have very strict rules?
The sports clubs that depend on pokies also cease to exist - they become pokies venues that also have a sporting arm. They begin to drain the community instead of contributing back to them.
They’re able to use pokies profits to subsidise cheaper food and alcohol to bring in customers, and in turn get them to pump a money into the pokies, while starving other venues of those customers who can’t compete on price.
A (local) sports club doesn't need to "make ... money". It can get contribution from its members, and subsidy from the local government. Otherwise, your argument would sanction every behavior, even turning schools into strip clubs.
Um, what good are schools if you can't make a profit from them? /s
That's why UK Conservatives turned most of English education into for-profit businesses.
People here are always harping on about how the only reason for coordinating people (companies) is to make profit for the owners/bosses.
What pains me is that people are saying "the local club couldn't survive without {an external party taking a proportion of the gross income}". The maths means that without that external entity there would be more money.
Of course without addiction ruining lives people wouldn't give so much of their money away to these particular sports clubs. But, that just means the sports club is running off the destruction of people's lives in the local community. I mean, that's perfect capitalism, but absolutely inhumane.
fantasy land vs the real world.
I am sure most business owners don't want to be casinos, but would rather be clubs. When the bills are due, they have to find a way to pay up.
I think you confuse the real world for Ayn-Randistan. Local sports clubs don't need to make someone $5M/yr. They just need to provide sporting facilities, such as fields and tracks, to local sporters. They can be run by volunteers.
Likewise, running a business for a profit doesn't mean exploiting people to their ruin. If you can't make money ethically, you should do something else.
That absolutely cannot be true. If a business does not want to be a casino, it doesn't have to be.
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.
> 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.
because the gambling machines mainly fund the people who own these machines, not the club. the club could hold a single bingo evening and raise more money than a month of gambling machines would bring.
> Higher fees from club members?
Sounds good to me.
Drug dealers need revenue to be drug dealers, otherwise they might cease to exist.
Sounds ridiculous, but client's neurotransmitters are the same.
and i agree - why shouldn't these drugs be legalized? Regulate their sale, just like alcohol. Stop the drug cartels from making profit, and they will disappear.
After all, client's neurotransmitters are the same.
recommend googling 'opioid epidemic' in which people got addicted to perfectly legal painkillers they were prescribed. yeah cartels didn't profit (at first, anyway). neither did society.
The pharmaceutical cartels profited - and hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies as well, if not quite as dramatically.
It might surprise you that groups of people can and do organise things even without the promise of minmaxing monetary value.
What value does a "local sport club" provide exactly, to warrant a revenue?
Should we take from the most vulnerable in society in order to prop up these clubs? Its not rich people dumping all their money into the pokies, its retirees and people who are broke from gambling addictions getting into debt
Agree. I would add that it is a bit of a perfect storm:
- lower income families struggle for upwards mobility
- we are moving ever more towards a full material world, where you need to have a lot of disposable income just to keep up (remember the first over 1000 usd iPhone and people saying it was too much?)
- social media keeps reminding us that there are “successful” people who have all the stuff you dream, and can burn money (all a lie, but if desperate and poorly educated you buy it)
- vanishing of social construct: less weight of family in peoples life, less local communities (replaced by only pseudo-communities as twitter or insta) which translates into less emotional support, pushing you to consumerism for solace.
It’s no surprise that the hope of a quick buck (be it sports betting or also damaging scratch cards / lotteries) thrive in the context, and in particular with people desperate or with poor understanding of odds and biases….
Edit: I don’t think is necessary a poor-people-only problem, I think this is a symptom that a new definition of poverty is brewing - one beyond financial indicators… (stale life, no prospects of moving up, disenfranchising of society, resentment for feeling rug pulled from underneath, prone to absorb/consume anything that makes you feel “in the loop” or relevant like fake news or crazy theories, etc). I believe we are seeing this all across the Western world, yet us and our leaders fail to address it.
You just described South Korea to a T. What's the situation with gambling/sports gambling in South Korea, Japan, Singapore?
A lot of these nations serve as counter examples to traditional "reddit" or even "HN" orthodoxy on policy. 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.
I go there and listen to folks tell me that my freedom to buy a V8 sports car for 40K USD or less is worth every bit of the additional crime or whatever other risks of America there are.
I'd add another point to your list: decades of wage depression by rabid unchecked globalization, in urban areas combined with ever more power going to landlords.
The amount of money especially young people have to fork off of their paychecks just to have a place to live is outright insane.
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.
Lotto Quebec runs both lottery ads and gambling-can-ruin-your-life ads. The German ads have nothing on those.
Governments make tons of money on gambling/lotteries. So they keep it running. This shows how much they don't care about making positive impact to people's lives.
You do know that lotto is state run, and all profit that isn’t redistributed to players is given to charity (mostly deutsche sporthilfe, who fund a lot of sports who would otherwise have trouble running).
Lotto and sports betting in its modern incarnation are very different.
Lotto was created so that people’s desire for gambling is diverted towards charity.
How does operating expenses like salaries and bonuses look like? 10k bonus for every life ruined? I'm always worried about cronyism and corruption with this kind of monopolies.
When I was a cashier the state owned lottery monopoly had a training session for us on how to operate the lottery machines, and it was really dystopian how most of the time was spent on encouraging us to make upsells with sales pitches and being happy about gambling.
Sorry, but that is not true.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto#Verwendung_der_Einnahmen
50% for is the gamblers
23% is diverted towards the charity you mention.
16.7% is taxes
7.5% is provision
2.8% is for running the business
In other words, the "Aktion Mensch" gives round 1/4 to those in need.
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?
Some people believe that their beliefs and way of life should be enforced. Here, which human habits or activities are allowed or "OK" even if partially or very deletorious.
The desired force vector varies in magntitude and orientation, but can, in the extreme include removal of independence / imprisonment or less extreme banning and fining etc
Because a single or group of people believe it, it must be for everyone, equally.
Of course. Freedom and all.
My uncle gambled away a successful business, a beautiful house, his family, his friends. In my early memory he was a giant who carried me in the ocean, flying just above the breaking waves. Later on, when I was in elementary school, he lived with us for a bit. Some time later he lived in his Buick. He died alone and with nothing.
In my mind, we all should not allow a man to do that.
That still leaves you with a question if harm reduction is better approach than criminalization. At least you don't attract the mob into the business with the former.
Banning addictive things isn't as straightforward as people love to believe. Even during the worst theocratic times, you could get alcohol in Saudi Arabia by asking the right people; and Saudi Arabia had way harsher means at its disposal than democratic countries do.
(For the complete picture, my grandpa drank himself to death at 57 and even though he used to have a good income, on the order of 3x as much as an average Czechoslovak worker of that time, he left almost nothing behind. All "liquefied". Other people were able to build family houses for their kids with less money.)
It is nuanced.
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.
This boils down to a two question "should we as society allow a person to destroy his life." And because there is also a big external pressure from financially interested parties to convince a person to do things that are not beneficial to him, second question is "should we as society let smarter people fool less educated people out of their money/health/ happiness" (second one is more tricky) but low hanging fruits are advertisement for alcohol, gambling, smoking and other obviously non beneficial activities.
that's a good point.
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.
If we can, and it works out to less harm vs benefit than otherwise: Yes. But it turns out we can't for alcohol and cigarettes (except regulation). We fairly much can for workaholics - Norway has laws that stop working overtime except in certain situations, and they actually work fairly well. I don't know if we can for social media, though I see California is trying to stop some of the addictive forms of social media.
Well, you cannot advertise cigarretes, so yes, why can you plaster the Internet, primetime TV, and player's jerseys with gambling ads?
I hold the strong belief that gambling companies are evil and make the world worse and I wouldn't find the burning of them down by the loved ones of people's lives they ruined to be unethical.
However people should know what regulating ethics to this degree looks like: the modern PRC. In the PRC you get a government mandated timer on your MMOs to ensure you don't spend too much time playing videogames. In the internet cafes there's 24/7 a CPC bureaucrat prowling around keeping an eye on your chats - plus automated mandated filters which depending on the implementation can auto kick you from a multiplayer match, hence the entirely viable strategy when playing against PRC players to spam "FREE HONG KONG REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES CCP COMMITS GENOCIDE AGAINST UIGHUR MUSLIMS XINJIANG" into chat to get them kicked from the match.
There's industry level morality controls as well such as not being allowed to make a tv show featuring "feminine men" and the implicit ban on showing LGBT couples.
Personally I don't trust a State to choose the correct morals, be it aesthetically communist or aesthetically capitalist. We can look at America's history of moral laws to see another example, such as prohibition.
There’s a readily available example proving your slippery slope isn’t guaranteed to happen: gambling was illegal in most of the US very recently and it wasn’t anything like China.
So instead, you trust for-profit companies to direct the morals of society?
Surely the reason prohibition failed so badly was that it wasn't democratic. You can't mandate against vice unless you have the support of the majority.
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.
Of course all of the major leagues would say that they are not at all biased. Most probably have extreme suspension rules for being involved in gambling. But, we shall see. Human beings are fallible creatures; people forget, people slip. And it's hard to prove this. Especially nowadays, when you can do it over your phone in private.
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!
I wish people would just realize that sports betting is stupid. If matches can be thrown then they will be thrown no matter the consequences. People shouldn't engage in sports gambling because it can be rigged.
If you want to do it for fun then use fantasy points for it.
There was speculation whether a baseball player was actually behind his interpreters’ gambling scandal.
Pretty much what's happening in the NBA with Jontay Porter
And you start to wonder, he's just one who got caught. How many more. It sure didn't take long!
I've made solid side income gambling over a number of different games and sports, and I say it should definitely be banned.
It ruins lives, funnels money to terrible people, makes sports worse for everyone, and has no positive impact on society. The benefits of the "freedom" to let manipulation of your lizard brain drain you of your past and future earnings is not worth it.
Over the years I did get to know a couple of people that were winning players in poker and sports betting. I was never patient enough for poker, so I just played it for fun every now and then (probably break-even, maybe a bit minus) and just watched the discussions about it interested. As poker got harder, a lot of them switched over to sports betting, which I was never interested in, but I found it amazing how they analyzed the games.
But if you really think about it, yes there might be a tiny portion that wins overall, but they only win because there are a lot of people emotionally invested that ruin their lives. So yes, please ban.
Edit: While yes, it can be fun and I personally can have a lot of fun when I put 50 bucks into a slot machine once or twice a year, no matter the outcome, it doesn't really justify to keep that business alive
Where is the movement to ban those ticket machines from places like Dave and Busters/Chuck-e-Cheese where you exchange coins for tickets which are only redeemable for cancer inducing sugary foods or (at exchange rates which would please your local African warlord) occasionally game consoles?
Because that shit is legal in all 50 states and is worse for society in my opinion. No hysteria against this.
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.
Exactly. Sports gambling takes the fun out of sports for those who are not interested in gambling.
that's like saying alcoholics take the fun out of wine drinking for people who don't have a drinking problem.
Alcohol takes the fun out of socializing when stripped of it you are left with tables, chairs and a room. And company that spits and slurs!
Without alchohol social scenes may be more creative. Karoke. Board games. Social games. Deep conversatiobs. Challenges. Parties like you had as a kid.
Everything you mentioned is more fun with alcohol. Alcohol makes humans less shy and more sociable which is one of the main reasons people enjoy it.
I absolutely cannot imagine singing karaoke without alcohol.
Alcohol certainly does not preclude it.
Karoke is an alcohol+non alcohol friendlier gig than sitting at a table for 6 hours not even eating :)
Karaoke without alcohol sounds like a torture.
This would be true if wine was deliberately made worse quality in order to maximize some incentive behind manipulating alcoholics. I don't have a horse in this race, but this comparison misses the entire point of this particular counter to sports gambling. The sports in question are, purportedly, made worse - the outcome changed in arbitrary ways disconnected from the spirit of nature of the sport - in order to maximize the profits of the incredibly wealthy. There is no way to escape this when enjoying the sport; if deliberately throwing is rampant, you would always have to ask if a player's mistake was genuine, and your emotional investment in a game is poisoned as a result. Likewise, the comparison would be that no wine is immune from this kind of quality reduction. Eventually, a wine drinker will drink wine which has been reduced in quality on purpose.
Not really? It's more like saying alcoholics take the fun out of going to a restaurant that happens to have a bar.
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.
Extending the logic, should we ban the derivatives market? Cryptocurrencies/tokens that only seek to be a speculative asset (and not an actual currency). Venture Capital that seeks to use businesses as speculative assets (trying to artificially inflate the short-term share price of the business rather than its long-term health)?
I'm not putting up a straw man - I'm actually in favour of it. I agree that all forms of gambling ruins lives. We would improve society if we agreed that all gambling is bad.
The derivatives market is useful for hedging and for market efficiency. A lot of the nay-sayers I see tend to talk about how the nominal exposure is bigger than the market itself as if it were a compelling argument against it but it's not (the reason is that there is a counter-party for every "bet").
As for speculation around the "real" economy, in most cases it is widely talked about as the mother of all evil where in fact, the best way to increase the market value of a company is to turn it into a better company. And on the other end, companies go to 0 because they go bankrupt, not the other way around.
My point is that we are denying the entire market structure to punish the < 1% of bad actors, while it is quite useful for the rest.
Crypto is a different beast entirely. I have never believed in it and I still fail to see the value.
I think your comment illustrates that our current society is built on gambling. Most businesses dark. We want people to take the bet and invest into companies, because that's what gives us all these goods and services we use. This system allows people to voluntarily combine their skill and luck to try for a better future. Society benefits as a side-effect.
> We would improve society if we agreed that all gambling is bad.
As a professional gambler (aka farmer) I understand I am biased, but I have a hard time squaring that society would improve if we all agreed my gambling habit is bad. Especially if that means going as far as a ban. What would people eat? If you think Mother Nature is going to give up her bookie position, you're wrong.
One of the things that's getting confused in this thread is the distinction between games of skill and games of chance. Most outcomes in life are the result of a combination of skill and chance - so there's admittedly a gradient and a big gray area between the two.
But to use farming as an example, you undoubtedly apply skill in your trade to get a better outcome. Sure, your results depend heavily on things like the weather, but someone with zero experience and skill as a farmer will have less success at it than you do. This is a skill intensive game.
On the far other end of the spectrum is the slot machine - you pull a lever and wait. Labor is nonexistent, knowledge or skill is irrelevant. This is entirely a game of chance.
So one place where we run into problems and governments need to apply some regulation is when a game of chance gets misrepresented as a game of skill, or its odds are hidden or misrepresented. When any of those things happen it means we are actually looking at a form of fraud. The operator of the game is claiming you can do really great at his game but the matter is actually out of your hands, he's lying about the probable outcome of your participation. That is fraudulent and most members of our society agree that committing fraud should be discouraged and even punished when it occurs.
> On the far other end of the spectrum is the slot machine - you pull a lever and wait.
In the narrowest view, sure. But, for example, not all casinos, hell not even all machines in the same casino, offer the same odds. What about the work you put into determining which machine offers the best outcome? Is that not a skill? Obviously you can just sit down at any old random machine and see what happens, but that's the same as your "zero skill" farmer throwing some uncertified seeds on the ground and hoping for the best. In both cases there is an opportunity to improve your chances of success if you so choose.
Some aspects of farming lean on skill, but other aspects are pure chance. "Pull the lever and wait" is often all you can do. I'm not sure you are being fair in diminishing slot machine playing down to just one event, while happily considering farming as the sum of all its events.
Slot machines are guaranteed to provide a significant ROI to casinos. They're purely extractive. Comparing them to farming is really silly in my opinion.
Does anyone have a differing opinion? I expect there is good reason they have never been compared. Your opinion is noted, I guess, but what lead you to think it was worth sharing?
I don't believe games of chance are misrepresented as games of skill. But anyway, this article is about sports gambling which most certainly is a game of skill.
No skill at all. The farmer is referring to futures contract to derisk the things outside of the skill.
What is bad for society is zero sum games. They are profitable for individuals but take the same or more from elsewhere so they raise nothing. There are a few zero sum games where we think the side effects are good (i.e. in the pricing of stocks,) but in general they consume societies best minds in return for no progress.
> society is zero sum games
so do you believe the olympics are good or bad? because they're zero sum.
Not OP, but they're clearly a net loss. I would vote against them being hosted in my country.
The current hyper capitalized form of the Olympics may have been demonstrated to be economically harmful to the city that hosts it, but the Olympics have had huge societal value and impact especially in sociological aspects. I mean it's hard to put a price tag on Jesse Owens spitting directly into the eye of white supremacy but it certainly has value.
Advertising - one of the largest industries on the planet. It’s not even zero sum, it’s a net loss. The views loses $50 and 100 hours, the winners gain $50
Advertising improves information for consumers though, as long as you get advertised stuff you actually want but didn’t even know existed. I’m not saying it’s a net positive as it’s currently done, but advertising as a concept doesn’t have to be net negative.
Not ads in general.
Modern social media that makes and sells ads and panopticon datasets.
People like to play these games and thus probably good for societies
World would be pretty full without competitive games / sports
This is disingenuously stretching the definition.
Gambling, in a colloquial and legal sense, generally refers to putting in money for a game of mostly luck or beyond your control in hopes of getting a payout. The less influence you have over it, the faster the payout (or loss), and the higher the chance is of you coming out at a loss, the more strongly it fits into the understood definition of gambling.
Doing anything that takes a risk isn't gambling. Bending over to tie your shoes is a risk. There's a chance you'll strain your back and be immobile for a week. But if you don't take that chance, you won't be able to work. But if you don't do it stupidly, barring the heavens simply being against you that day, you'll be fine.
Farming is the same. If you're not being careless and the heavens don't decide to destroy your crops, and particularly if you're at a point where you can call it a job, you'll be fine. Once a risk is on a long scale, like farming, it's called an investment.
Are you trying to tell us that you think cryptocurrencies and venture capital fit the legal gambling definition, or are you trying to tell us that you didn't bother to understand the context under which the comment was posted?
Either way, you are out to lunch. Your definition is on point, but has nothing do with the discussion taking place.
It isn't gambling if there's no house. You're playing the odds, but so am I when crossing the street.
The stringent definition of gambling is that it is low effort to make the bet.
I'm not sure sitting in a comfortable air conditioned cab is all that much effort. It is fun! But as we're on the precipice of it going the way of full automation removing even that minimal effort, just how low effort is your bar?
> As a professional gambler (aka farmer)
You guys invented the option so ... yes.
And on a good day,wall Street is orthagonal.
Very few political decisions can be said to be carved in stone.
The point is that reversing a popularly acclaimed law, while yes showing to be a mistake, leads to huge losses in political consensus at elections and an easy win to the other parties.
>popularly acclaimed law I have the feeling that gambling is popularly acclaimed in the same way that cigarette smoking is.
People may like it but other than a few even the ones who like it wish it didn't exist.
At any rate every article I see about gambling is about how much it sucks. Probably the gambling industry doesn't have the top level public relations that smoking had once upon a time, otherwise I'd be seeing more ads about how gambling makes you a tough guy. Which, come to think of it, I do see a bit of that in Denmark, but Danes don't do advertising that isn't meant to be funny (laugh with) very well so these ads look ridiculous (laugh at)
> But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports. 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.
I vote we ban alcohol next :DDDDD
> But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports.
Is there really that much betting going on in the "little leagues"?
Professional sports are already and have always been ruined as they, by their very nature of existence, have to appeal to what entertains the crowd, not for what is ideal for the sake of sporting. Betting doesn't really change the calculus there; at most changing what makes for the entertainment, but then you're just going into a silly "my entertainment is better than your entertainment".
I don’t really understand the accusation here. Do you really think they rig (say) football games for ratings…? I’m a cynical guy, but that’s too much even for me. And how do you explain boring dynasties like the Warriors or the SF giants had in their sports for 4-8 years?
Either way, I know little about sports so maybe you’re right regarding American sports. But no way is footie rigged. I just don’t accept it; too many people care too much.
Rigged? No, probably not – at least not where driven by gambling, but professional sports leagues aren't shy about adjusting rules to make the game more enjoyable to watch, even if not what is best for the sport for the sake of sport. Such actions undeniably ruin the sport if you, like the previous comment, want to hold sport as having some kind of pure sporting existence (a nonsensical take, in my opinion, but whatever).
And the natural extension of realizing that professional sport is about delivering entertainment value is: Why not rig the sport if it improves the entertainment value? If people are most entertained by gambling and rigging a sport comes as part of that, nothing is ruined other than maybe your arbitrary personal feelings. But "my entertainment is better than your entertainment" is not a logical position.
Huh. What do you mean by “sake of sport”…? Like, to see who’s the strongest?
Regardless, I think you just misunderstood a bit: the concern here is deceptive practices, which when money is involved becomes fraud. No one cares that WWE is rigged; the difference is that the audience knows it’s rigged, and they don’t have money riding on the outcome with the understanding that it’s a fair match.
> Huh. What do you mean by “sake of sport”…? Like, to see who’s the strongest?
Okay, sure, let's say there is a "who's the strongest competition". Let's be more specific and say it is a professional arm wrestling competition. One where we find that the competitors are able to hold position for hours on end, which makes for really boring viewership. To combat that, the league starts allowing tickling in an effort to get a participant to fold sooner, and perhaps adding an additional comedic element that makes it more entertaining in general.
If you hold sport as some kind of purity that needs to be upheld (again, I maintain that is a nonsensical take, but bear with me) then the addition of tickling ruins it. Indeed, tickling is contrived, but professional sports are filled with all kinds of similar adjustments to make watching the sport more entertaining. The sports, from this "purity" point of view, were ruined from the get go as a necessity to get people interested in watching them – and thus a willingness to pay.
> No one cares that WWE is rigged
Exactly. I mean, a lot of people were upset when it came out that the, then WWF, was choreographed, and I'm sure that they lost of a lot of viewers over it, but the league has still managed to entertain a wide audience. Like you suggest, it doesn't really matter if a sport isn't held to some kind of purity of sport standard.
And it is pretty clear that sports gambling has brought out a new audience of people who are entertained by the gambling aspect. "My entertainment is better than your entertainment" is not a logical position. Something not to your personal preference is not a ruining.
There’s a real difference between modifying the rules of a sport and rigging/throwing. When you change the rules, you change the competitions. When you rig a sport, you get rid of competition.
Competition is essential to competitive sports (the only ones we could be talking about), so removing competition ruins the sport, independent of the idea of entertainment
> so removing competition ruins the sport
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.
> 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.
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).
Which culture are you implying has a healthy relationship with alcohol?
Mediterranean (or at least the GP's family, which they say is Mediterranean).
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.
Betting on a game makes watching the game 10x more fun though.
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.
Would gambling do so well without the constant brainwashing (advertising). Almost every advert I get on TV/web is designed to convince me how much fun gambling is. That seems to include every minute of sport, either player clothing, hoardings, or on-screen.
It's soul-destroying.
It's much easier to collect evidence for gambling itself than to collect evidence that a match was thrown.
Much, much fewer people would gamble if you had to do it by finding some weird person and handing them cash and trusting them to run a fair book, than just clicking some buttons on an app. After all, that’s why they’re apps that are constantly advertised; gambling services don’t have customers they attract with offers on the free market, they have victims who’s better sense they overcome through convenience and manipulation.
Black market bookies also would see consequences from getting caught rigging a sports match, anyway. For one, they would be punished by the law for being black market bookies.
Other things that ruin lives: eating, shopping, TV, the Internet, videogames, alcohol, accumulating things in your house, etc.
One could give themselves hyponatremia by overdrinking water, so might as well not have laws preventing children from buying alcohol.
Being alive ruins lives, guaranteed
I think you mean:
"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?"
same argument can be made about excessive athlete salaries and really any sports related business ventures. Athletes go after specific stats to hit contract goals, get their bonuses and live good lives. Gambling industry is just one of the hundred detractors to the sport itself.
But all of those stats will help a team win in theory. But you can bet against yourself, perform poorly, and then get a payout. That is the antithesis of good sportsmanship.
The problem is that sports gambling introduces conflicting interests. It's one thing to coast and collect paychecks, it's a whole another thing for a player to actively sabotage their own team.
US sports is surprisingly "socialist", with systems like drafting ensuring that a team can't just buy up all the best players, so the league stays interesting. It seems obvious that player wages are kept lower in a system like this ... But I think they do pretty OK anyway.
Amateur sports (college and high school sports) is also much, much bigger in the US than most other places.
Both these trends I would guess have to do with the US's traditional ban on sports gambling.
Unless you live by yourself in the middle of the woods you never ruin just your life.
This, along with innumerable other things like lifting the ban on usurious interest rates, is ultimately a consequence of the same phenomenon Nietzsche describes as “the death of God.”
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.
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.
Well Nietzsche died in 1900 and was writing about forces he perceived as already under way, long before he was alive. So I don’t think using a hundred years ago as an example really works, and even then, gambling wasn’t the massive legal operation it is today.
And yes, most religions have weighed in on gambling as most societies have been shaped by religion. Secularism is a recent thing.
If you think Nietzsche's writing are representative, then we've never been "close to God".
> Secularism is a recent thing.
Sokrates and Buddha would like a word.
The death of God idea by Nietzsche is not about a real being actually dying. It is about the concept losing influence on society and what that means for things like ethics.
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.
Sadly, I'm not sure there's a correlation here: a lot of these learnings and restrictions are newer than secularism.
In a couple of years people will feel the same way about college athletes being compensated.
I don't think it's the same though. College athletes don't get addicted to being paid for the work they put in to attract paying spectators, and they don't ruin their families lives with that addiction
What are usurious interest rates? Is some amount of interest ok?
Although not directly interest, but in similar vein:
There was once a so called fair profit rate of 4% in the middle ages and early modern age, in Hungary. Greek wine traders operating there featured the number 4 on their seals and ornaments of their houses. (They were also often tried for violating this rule)
In those ages of course there was no constant inflation in the current sense, gold standard was used for payments, etc.
source, in Hungarian language, the site of the greek ethnic minority's cultural institute (the pictures feature one such ornament): https://gorogintezet.hu/kultura/2022/07/gorog-kereskedok-sze...
https://gorogintezet.hu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/15264.jpg
Depends on whom you ask, but this case had a major effect on removing restrictions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Min....
Prior to that, usury laws existed in most states that restricted consumer loans to something like 5-13%.
Personally I don’t have an issue with the concept of interest itself, but if you look at the huge amount of Americans in debt paying 20-30% on credit cards, it certainly seems excessive and usurious to me.
It depends (especially with inflation), and yes.
So it's ok to have high interest rates with the hope it will cause unemployment in the hope that reduces inflation?
Probably yeah, that's not usurious. Usurious is where you are basically using the loan to give you an excuse to repo / sell off the assets or collateral of the debtor.
<cough> buy here pay here car lots <cough>.
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.
That’s an interesting perspective, and it makes sense it works. Thankfulness is known to provide a lot of psychological benefits, such as greater appreciation of the thing you are thankful for.
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.
The older I get the more I wonder about how strange it is to be anything at all. How crazy it is to take it for granted.
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.
I am the opposite of you, a lapsed atheist I suppose. And I noticed that among the religious there is an openness to professing gratitude about everything. Amongst my secular friends, there is rarely a time anyone professes thankfulness (outside receiving something new).
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...
What is for you the purpose (or result) of (undirected) thankfulness?
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.).
I found this to be a good answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41667503
Yeah, today’s people have committed great sins that were proscribed for a reason. Homosexuality is the biggest one. But the great tragedy is the New Testament: a rejection of essential law relegated to the Old Testament.
People make fun but awareness of shatnez is important. Instead now we have synthetics with PFAS in our blood and genitals. We have turned from god and our punishment awaits.
Unfortunately Brazil also legalized it in 2018, after Dilma was impeached using very sketchy arguments (many call it a legal coup).
It is spreading as a cancer. This month the central bank published a report saying that in August 20% of the Bolsa Família, the largest money transfer program for very poor Brazilians, was spent on these bets.
Out of the 20 million people that receive it, 5 million made bets during that month. This is 2 billion reais (about $450M) spent in a single month by the poorest Brazilians.
It's a cancer. Everywhere you go there are ads. The influencers, the biggest athletes and musicians are marketing it.
Although I tend to be liberal, this needs to be heavily regulated.
I had the pleasure of visiting a town on the Amazon river a few times over the course of a decade. I watched as western culture and civilization creeped in and ruined their society.
The first time I went, people were living off the land, fishing, gardening, children playing ball games, etc.
Here's what I saw last time I went: Gambling, alcoholism, plastic waste, sugary drinks, public advertising, and kids glued to their smartphones. Forests being cleared to raise cattle because now everyone wants to eat burgers.
They've managed to bring in the worst parts of modern society without the good parts (medicine, infrastructure, education, etc.)
I do believe that without a modern education, these people are not equipped to deal with modern vices. They've never taken a math class let alone learned enough probability to know that gambling is a losing bet. They've never had a nutrition class to learn that Coca Cola is disastrous to your health.
> I do believe that without a modern education, these people are not equipped to deal with modern vices.
This isn't limited to the third world. The reason sports betting becomes such a problem is that people don't have a solid foundation in basic statistics.
People go bankrupt by thinking they can get out of a small debt by placing even larger bets at a negative expected value.
This is so sad to hear...
> They've never taken a math class let alone learned enough probability to know that gambling is a losing bet.
Even with a modern education this is a losing proposition for many people...
The education point is interesting. If you grow up as a hunter gatherer, there are powerful forces you don’t understand trying to take resources away from you. If you grow up in a capitalist society, there are powerful forces you don’t understand trying to force all sorts of “resources” on you.
Success in a modern capitalist society is driven in part by your ability to say no to things.
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.
>Outlawing them, like with prohibition in United States, just moves it all to black markets.
Ok, good, fine. You should have to seek out a black market connect to gamble on sports.
I’m pretty happy with our “no murdering” setup, even though it makes some people happy (in the moment).
IMO there’s plenty of room for hardline stances. Who cares if gambling goes to the black market? There’s a black market for every serious crime - doesn’t mean we should just okay it. And I’m not sure the USA’s halfhearted only-for-the-poor prohibition is proof that the concept of banning things is broken; if it proves anything unrelated to capitalism, it proves that you need societal buy-in and continued, consistent government pressure.
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.
Ban the advertising of betting, like cigarettes in many countries
> 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 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).
Pop quiz: What's better for your wallet? a game with a 66% expected payout that you will play twice before you lose interest, or a game with a 97.3% payout that you'll play 31 times on average?
The comparison needs to be in terms of typical use, otherwise engineering for addictiveness gets a free pass because it often hinges on frequent small rewards and can have a near unity return on a single shot basis yet be a big money maker for the house.
Of course there are probably 'safer' forms of gambling that some addicts are presumably able to use to maintain their addiction at a level which isn't disruptive to their life. ... but single shot EV isn't the right metric. Some weekly state lottery usually has pretty poor EV, yet is seldom ruining anyone.
We’ve spent years conditioning an entire generation of kids on quick hits of dopamine from mobile phone apps. I personally believe that it’s a “glitch in the matrix” for a large enough segment of the population to cause societal chaos.
As a libertarian however, I break with the opinion of making consensual activities illegal even if they are self-harming. So I guess my stance is probably the same as addictive drugs. They could be legal, but come with the same labeling, warnings, ID requirements and age restrictions that come with a pack of cigarettes. We should probably be educating kids about the dangers of addictive apps like we once did with DARE on the dangers of drugs.
It's funny you mention DARE because studies have shown the program was a complete failure, along with the War on Drugs™ and "Just Say No". The only reason it continued as long as it did was not because it was effective, but because it was popular with politicians and the general public because they thought – intuitively – that the program should work. It did not reduce student drug use. In face, it backfired and taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have found learned about otherwise. This ineffective program cost U.S. taxpayers $750M per year for 26 years. Let's not do that again.
What did work for smoking? From my understanding, that dropped significantly. Could we do what worked for smoking?
A large part of it was public awareness of the health risks and relatead damage to the image of smoking as cool and classy.
Now, the proportion of people who still take up smoking today do so in spite of all this, which is probably down to them having various specific user profiles that are unaffected by this (IE they live in communities/work jobs where its ubiquitous or are huge James Dean fans).
For gambling, you could possibly go a long way with awareness and labelling, but I think an issue is that gambling is a lot less visible than smoking. Nobody can smell that you popped outside to blow your paycheck on tonight's game. Making gambling deeply uncool might make some people not take it up, but most of the existing addicts would likely carry on in secret. They're already commonly hiding their losses from spouses and friends, so what's one more layer of secrecy?
At any rate, what worked for smoking wasn't making smokers quit, but making fewer and fewer kids start doing it, so making it a pain in the ass to place your first bet might help.
I suspect what worked - at least in Canada - is making it very very inconvenient. The number of places you can smoke outside of your own house is very limited now. And "going outside for a smoke" at -20C is miserable.
It was already dropping a lot by the time most places implemented smoking bans, though I think it certainly helped push rates even further down.
> because it was popular with politicians and the general public because they thought – intuitively – that the program should work
Are you sure they did? Maybe they were just OK with programs that didn't actually work.
What does work is restricted access through age limits, closing times, and higher prices (through taxes is what's been studied, but it's safe to say making something illegal also increases prices). These are unpopular policies, and those who profit from alcohol/gambling/etc. have an easy time mobilizing opposition to it.
What has been studied little, but was a big part of historical anti-alcohol movements until total prohibition won out, was profit bans. Government/municipal monopolies were justified in that it took away regular people's incentive to tempt their fellow citizens into ruin, and the idea was that while government may be corrupted by the profit incentive, at least they carried the costs of alcohol/gambling abuse as well. (Some teetotallers didn't think that was enough, and came up with rules that e.g restricting municipal monopolies from spending the profit as they pleased)
Now there's New DARE (15+ years old at this point). Not sure if this has been scrutinized as much, but supposedly it is effective since it's eligible for funding that requires demonstrated effectiveness.
How could you possibly study such a thing? Even if you compare DARE students against non-comparable DARE students, how could you reliably capture measure how many did drugs? People can lie on surveys, particularly with respect to illegal actions. You could measure arrests but that's not going to capture how many used drugs without ever getting arrested, nor the social context in which they were used. It's a double-edged sword too because the control data would have similar issues with obtainment.
I've seen a lot of these talking points before by the pro-drug crowd. "It taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have learned about otherwise" is laughable when subjected to scrutiny. You'd have to live under a rock to otherwise not learn about the drugs the DARE program teaches (and they don't get particularly exotic either). The idea is asinine to begin with - you'd want kids to know about exotic drugs and their side effects to know to avoid them in the first place.
The worst part is that the pro-drug crowd, like yourself, touts these talking points in an attempt to end the program - to what end? If I accept your talking points blindly that the program has failed, does that mean we simply stop trying? It seems less that you disagreed with the implementation of the program and more that you don't believe kids, or anyone, should be dissuaded from drugs.
Surprisingly you can test this with a randomized field test:
> The Illinois D.A.R.E. Evaluation was conducted as a randomized field experiment with one pretest and multiple planned post-tests. The researchers identified 18 pairs of elementary schools, representative of urban, suburban, and rural areas throughout northern and central Illinois. Schools were matched in each pair by type, ethnic composition, number of students with limited English proficiency, and the percent of students from low income families. None of these schools had previously received D.A.R.E.. For the 12 pairs of schools located in urban and suburban areas, one school in each pair was randomly assigned to receive D.A.R.E. in the spring of 1990
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 do not really work in practice. What if these activities are not simply self-harming but destroy the families of the addict and large parts of the fabric of society? Even you mention societal chaos. How does the libertarian world-view accommodate that?
I tend to believe that warnings are somewhat effective otherwise cigarette manufacturers wouldn’t be so opposed to them.
Yes, they would still be opposed to them.
A measure could well be somewhat effective on its own, but then it would require the industry to get creative and work extra hard to still get people hooked, which they will do, but they'd rather not have to do it in the first place.
What's more, opposition to any type of well intended regulation is typical for harmful industries, even if the regulation might be ineffective. They do that on principle, as they don't want the precedent of getting regulated. The mere idea of having regulations for the benefit of society threatens their business models.
They oppose them, because they oppose any first steps on the slope to curtailing them.
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.
The (naive) libertarian world view wants people overdosing to have different providers bidding for Narcan just-in-time
I do favour a libertarian world view but a lot of people using that moniker believe in discussing a mother-child bond through a libertarian point of view
In most respects I would consider myself a libertarian, but when it comes to hard drugs or betting, I tend to be a lot more conservative. Pot is fine, actually better for you than alcohol, but drugs like cocaine are far too addictive. That addiction actively strips away one’s freedom due to their use, and thus I find it counterproductive to a libertarian society. I would argue most forms of betting fall within this category, and much like drug use disproportionately affects poorer areas.
Gambling is also ruining professional sports for me because I find the frequent gambling promos during the games depressing and disruptive.
Many years ago I worked at a company that had Ladbrokes in the UK as a customer. On my first visit to London, I noticed their storefronts and found them appalling. They were some of the sorriest, shabbiest public spaces I'd seen, clearly designed to extract resources from the least well off.
I don't really buy any of the arguments in favor of widespread legalization (and I include state lotteries in this). I could be ok with legalization for a few big events like the NCAA tournament because clearly there is some demand that must be met, but we should not be enabling gambling as a widespread daily habit.
Of course there will always be black market gambling and the state cannot protect its citizens from every evil, but nor should it actively enable them.
I used to support SG legalization quite a bit, but after seeing how quickly it can get people that I once thought were rock solid financially into a very bad financial situation quicker than I thought possible, I have no problem with heavily regulating bets sizes and interaction limits, if not an outright ban. Before it was slightly illegal and those people I guess avoided “bookies” as a result of being afraid of that whole scene. The most I ever gamble is when the lotteries get to ridiculously high amounts like $500 million and get a $2 ticket. However, people seem to get addicted to sports betting as fast as crack cocaine and it’s much wider spread than I thought, and contributes almost nothing to civilization other than the pocket books of the middle men. Is it because sports betting gives you quick feedback as oppose to lotteries making you wait or maybe the ease it is to drop your whole bank account as a bet? It seems like net societal negative in almost all ways other than a brief chance of thrill.
> Is it because sports betting gives you quick feedback as oppose to lotteries making you wait or maybe the ease it is to drop your whole bank account as a bet?
I suspect it's because unlike the lotto and games of chance, people can delude themselves into thinking they "know" the sport. It's not a gambling if they know better. It's also easy to externalize the blame for your loses "they would have won if not for <bad call, bad play, bad management, injury, weather, etc... Or combination thereof>"
You can dip your toe in betting on the obvious mismatched, where it's pretty clear who will win. This is priced into the bookmaking, so the payout is little, but this helps people convince themselves they do know the sport and chase longer odds with better payouts.
And then you get sunk cost fallacy, as they lose, they convince themselves they can win it back because they learned from before and their system will work this time.
I also don't think people realize how much money, effort, time, very smart (and well-funded) individuals are working on making those odds. They have access to decades worth of data, all the stats, and are entirely un-emotional or clinical about the data they are trawling through. Even if they miss something or get it wrong, it's usually minute and you as the gambler barely make any money out of it. Short of some black-swan like event or insider knowledge, you as a single individual would not be able to come up with a system that on average does better than the book makers.
At least (very loosely) with the lottery it's kinda random and your odds are "set" or rather your payout is not proportionate to your chance of winning. It's a happy surprise kind of thing as long as you don't overdo it.
You don't need to beat the bookies, you need to beat the odds. The bookies win either way. All they need to do is make sure bets on each side net out, minus their take.
If you have a reliable way to beat the odds (ie. Inefficient betting markets that get the odds of success wrong) you can theoretically make money - but its a similar scenario to daytrading, where you need to do extremely well because you have to overcome the negative drag from the booky take too.
It's not just the bookmakers either - there are syndicates, much like hedge funds, whose entire 9-5 job is trying to make money out of this stuff too, which forces the bookies into line and makes the prices on markets like Betfair fairly efficient.
Basically, as a guy on the street, you don't have a clue and you're up against MIT-tier brains trying to beat you.
It's interesting to me that more people don't realise this is intuitively obvious, though. No-one would look at the Olympics and think, oh yeah, I can run faster than Usain Bolt.
> 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.
Removing access the the courts results in alternative forms of justice
Do that and your access to the courts is immediately restored as the defendant. CEO goes to jail, company's gambling license is revoked.
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.
What about gambling suicide rates vs drug overdose or drug-related, non-violent death rates?
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.
Upvoted for the mention of state lotteries.
I think getting wiped out financially by lotteries is still pretty rare in comparison to stuff like sports betting and drug use.
State lotteries at least fund positive things, instead of just private profit. WA State as an example: https://www.walottery.com/PressRoom/Details.aspx?id=12129
My state makes lotteries illegal but I still support gambling. It’s one thing for someone to get ripped off in a private transaction that you can walk away from.
However the government is a monopoly, and has a monopoly on violence. Giving a mafia that can take your house away or put you behind bars their own casino is an incredibly bad idea.
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.
It's the same in Australia. I've seen little kids who are into a particular sport parrot off the odds for the game. It's crazy.
>The biggest irony is that professional sportsmen (it's always men) keep getting bans for gambling on their own sport
People pointing this out often leads me to an impression that athletes should be allowed to bet on their own games. Problem is, that leads to match-fixing.
Rule zero of bookmakers: No punter is allowed to have an edge. Rule one: see rule zero.
I met up with some old college friends on a trip after 20 years of not seeing them, and all they wanted to do on Saturday and Sunday was sit around, watch football on TV, and talk about their bets.
No one was going for any team in particular. They were cheering for their bets to win. I lost all interest in the idea of me ever gambling after that.
There are certains sports I love to watch because I love the game. Gambling would ruin that for me. No thanks.
I had lunch with my dad recently and he mentioned he tried out one of the sports betting apps, because they gave him a free $20 to gamble with. My heart sunk a little. I know he likes a deal, but I didn't think he'd take obvious bait like that. I brought up what they were doing incase he didn't see what was in front of his face, and tried to make sure it wasn't going to become a problem. I'd hate to see him destroy his retirement with gambling, he worked so hard to get there.
His entire working life he was never a sports fan, but in retirement he seems really into it. There have been a lot of changes, and I really hope this doesn't become one of them. I could see him really getting into all the statistics.
This really resonated with me because at first glance I feel that these gambling apps have almost no effect on me because I don’t gamble, but the fact that they can so effectively lure people you love who are less cynical, that’s rough.
“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.
I re-read my comment and did not pass any judgement then, nor now. I simply shared my experience.
If you are triggered by something I wrote, that's all on you. I get it, no one dealing with addiction wants to be called out on it. That is less than helpful for either party.
I know what you mean in that i gamble when i golf.
golf is boring so i need some action to entertain myself. I suck at golf so i usually lose money, but as long as i go in knowing im risking money for entertainment then its really not unlike any other form of entertainment.
similar to you i prefer placing many small bets in order to keep myself entertained.
Makes me sad to read this
It is crazy to think that many countries ban cigarette advertising but not sports betting. The same moral and social arguments can be made for both, so why different rules?
So, gambling can ruin lives, sure, but the only reason lives are ruined is that money is so essential to everything in life. The problem isn't that our brains love to take risks and get immense pleasure from winning against the odds, it's that society is set up so that we can easily destroy our lives by doing otherwise harmless things that feel good. It very much reminds me of that Iain Banks quote: "Money implies poverty."
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.
Money is not the issue here. If something different, call it 'X', had a similar impact on life, then people would gable with 'X'.
Why not get rid of unhappiness while you're at it? Just do it man, I'm sure you can figure out how.
I was just talking about this issue last night with a friend.
When I was six, my father burned me with a lesson. We were at a fairground, and I saw a pyramid of cans. The standard game: throw a ball and knock em down. At six years old, I was already a good throw. I knew I could win. My father made me an offer. He gave me the money for the game and told me that was my lunch money. If I won, I'd get both lunch and the win otherwise .....
Of course, even the best six-year-old has a very low chance of knocking over those weighted cans. The house wins. I went hungry that day.
Since then, I’ve had a terrible reaction to gambling. Casinos make me feel ill just walking through and seeing all the sad faces. I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life. I always feel that hungry belly when I think of gambling and it turns me right off.
"But the more elegant solution is the blunter one: ban sports gambling once again."
I don't think anyone would call blanket banning "elegant", even if it would be the best solution.
"They estimate that legal sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence."
I'm sure the numbers are probably right, but I can't help but feel some of this is reaching a bit - many population causation studies seembto be more about triggers than true root causes. Just because betting triggered this doesn't mean betting needs to be banned. What this should lead to is better support and treatment for people affected by this type of violence. If it's not betting that set it off, it would be some other stressor (probably also money related or feeling like a loser). Trying to fix the person's behavior such as impulse control and anger management would be much better than progressively banning everything as the next trigger emerges.
I am waiting for the day when one of them proposes to ban relationships altogether, because they have an inherent risk for partner violence... A certain TOS episode comes to mind, which depicted the aftermath of such a law.
People highly underestimate the number of 18-21 year olds sports gambling. At college it seems like slightly over 50% of the guys I meet do. Some just using pick 'ems but it's not uncommon for them to use their parents identity to get on real sport books. The somewhat "nerdy" ones also just use crypto. Some are terribly in the gutter, I told my friend that India was all but guaranteed to win the chess olympiad and he bet on it somehow...
Gambling is a vice, and we should allow it but make it expensive and somewhat stigmatized.
At the very least, ads should be banned or require nasty images like tobacco products.
This is basically where I am at. I live in Illinois and it used to be you could bet at the race track or a couple Off Track Betting locations, otherwise you would have to go to a casino which was probably a distance away. Then they legalized Video Gambling and it popped up in a bunch of bars, restaurants, and stand alone places. You even see it in gas stations sometimes. Now with sports betting online there are constant advertisements for it all the time. In just 15 years legalized gambling went from something relatively niche to extremely prevalent.
There's a scene in Idiocracy where a the main character goes to a hospital and there are slot machines in the background (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70UdQJDzj4k). The last time I saw it I immediately thought of Illinois. Every time I travel to chicagoland I'm shocked to seem them everywhere. Their presence somehow makes otherwise normal places look very sad.
Higher res and earlier shot where the slot machines are focused on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcYbYhjdUb4&t=69s&ab_channel...
Bonus for phrases on them like "Play while you wait" and "Win free medical care"
SpongeBob is the voice of the doctor machine.
Slippery slopes and all that
As a step one online betting should be banned. Make access to it more difficult as with all substances.
I have participated in a few meetings of some lottery boards, and I have heard that there is a tension here between the illegal market and the pricing of the legal market. Some states charge the (relatively low) commissions that the illegal market charges because they would prefer to stamp out the illegal market, and others take your position but have a thriving black market for gambling. Those are basically the two options.
> Some states charge the (relatively low) commissions that the illegal market charges because they would prefer to stamp out the illegal market
Slight tangent, but I am now of the view the state should not be allowed to tax legal vices. (Drugs, gambling, alcohol primarily). The reason is it keeps pushing amazing conflicts of interest, and the state ends up incentivized to maintain the behavior it supposedly does not want.
Either [vice] is wrong and should be illegal, or is tolerated and regulated but in no way profited from by those that do the regulation.
I think the taxes thing is mainly to appease the voting public. People want the profits of the bad things to pay for the good things. It makes the ugly pill possible to swallow.
The tempting comparison is the tendency, at least in England, for things like church maintenance fundraisers to be funded by lotteries, by another name (raffle). i.e. donate money, and you might win.
Either gambling is bad or it's not, but in practice people like to be incredibly selective about it, as here, where as you point out sports betting lacks the positive externalities which for some part of the population offset the negative effects.
A church raffle only happens once a year, and the time between buying the ticket and getting the reward is relatively long. That is not going to lead to an addiction.
Having the TV blaring gambling commercials at you constantly and having the ability to place a bet from your phone at a moments notice is completely different. You’re comparing having a glass of wine on a special occasion with downing a fifth of whiskey every night.
> You’re comparing having a glass of wine on a special occasion with downing a fifth of whiskey every night
No one pretends one of those isn’t drinking though, whereas everyone pretends raffles aren’t gambling, or churches could hardly go in for it so much.
> That is not going to lead to an addiction.
So while the public described by the person I was replying to consider positive externalities sufficient to get around the “gambling bad” label for you it is all about how addictive you think an individual form of it would be for other people?
There are people that think all drink is addictive, and some people for whom this is true, but suggest banning alcohol and you are considered a crackpot.
I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending. For example, they would show up at the offices and demand to gamble in person because they couldn’t find enough in life to bet on. Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
> No one pretends one of those isn’t drinking though, whereas everyone pretends raffles aren’t gambling, or churches could hardly go in for it so much.
The raffles I see have a token amount as a reward, compared to the money raised. I think that makes a big difference, both rationally and emotionally.
> There are people that think all drink is addictive, and some people for whom this is true, but suggest banning alcohol and you are considered a crackpot.
Suggest reasonable restrictions on alcohol though and nearly everyone would agree that's a smart thing.
> I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending... Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
You can find equally horrific stories about alcoholics. We'd have to deal with greater numbers of "such people" if we didn't actively take steps to regulate addictive substances. Even with alcohol we have limits on where and when it can be used, and how it can be advertised. Gambling is available anywhere at anytime and ads are pushed right to addicts phones night and day to remind them to keep paying and broadcast to everyone during sporting events.
> There are people that think all drink is addictive
And? Should we legislate based on some peoples' belief that the rapture is imminent?
FYI charity raffles are actually lotteries that would be illegal if not for the charitable use of the funds and exceptions in the rules on lotteries. A lottery generally has three things:
1. A prize
2. Consideration - you must pay to enter
3. A game of pure chance - this differentiates a lottery from a tournament or a silent auction, for example
A raffle fits these definitions, but nonprofits are often allowed to run them specifically because they get an exception to the rules. That is also why many "buy my shit to win a prize" promotions have a way to enter without buying something (getting around the consideration rule) and some of these have a short math test that you need to do to claim your prize (making it a game of not pure chance).
All the big sports betting companies are now dumping money into political television commercials with school teacher testimonials and happy classroom shots urging how passing Bill X will benefit state schools, yet years into legalized sports betting, teachers still have some of the lowest compensation rates.
Taxing vices is how you control the amount of them while still allowing people to do them. Taxation is an important form of regulation.
Sort of. It's how you bankrupt poor people addicted to the vice while not meaningfully affecting the well-off.
Ideally you would make it extremely expensive to get started, but inexpensive if you're already addicted and beyond the point of thinking rationally about money.
That's one theory. Another Theory is that the state is simply piling on and further exploiting these people.
A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
> A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
A lot of things are only able to be legal because they are regulated in some way. I absolutely want the state in the position of "playing nanny" when it comes to things like telling companies they can't dump a ton of toxic chemicals into the rivers or how much pollution they are able to spew into our air.
It's legal to sell tobacco, and it should be, but I'm very glad there are rules against selling cigarettes to children. It's legal to drink alcohol, but it's a very good thing when the state influences behavior like drunk driving.
Nobody wants arbitrary laws restricting private individuals for no reason, but communities should have the power to decide that some behaviors or actions are harmful to the group and are unacceptable. Communities have always done that in one way or another. We've just decided that rather than stick with mob justice we would put away the tar and feathers and allow the state, our public servants who are either elected by us or appointed by those we elect, to enforce the rules for us. I'm glad we did. I've already got a job and can't go around policing all day.
I dont think stopping companies from polluting rivers is playing nanny. It is against the law, destroys others property, and the government should act.
Drunk driving is illegal too, for good reasons.
Im not against laws.
What I am against is the state taking things that are explicitly legal, and making your life hard and penalizing you if you do them.
The role of the government should be enforcing law. Enforcing social judgement and incentives on legal behavior should be left to non-governmental society.
Sin taxes are a classic example of this.
I'll admit that sin taxes imposed on the general public aren't usually a very good idea. For example, I'd much rather see government subsidizing the costs of healthy foods rather than add a tax on sugar.
I can see taxes and tariffs imposed on corporations being useful to limit the amount of certain harmful goods or to help offset the costs of externalities caused by those products. I'd still rather see companies regulated and held accountable for what they do more directly in most cases.
I think that is most closer to my position.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, I do think government should be more black and white, and the government should stay in it's lane. I support regulation that empowers and informs individuals to make their own choices.
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.
So do you believe that any behavior should be prohibited?
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"?
Raw milk should absolutely be allowed for sale if properly labeled. The risk is miniscule, and it should be up to individuals if they are ok with it or not. I myself grew up drinking raw milk every day, and nobody from my family got sick even once. It's absolutely ridiculous that it's completely banned in the US.
Yes, lots of behavior should be prohibited. Specifically when they cause direct and indisputable harm to another person.
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.
Inversely, Do you think the state should be able to criminalize selling or owning farmed Rhino horn?
Do you think think states should be able to ban the sale of meat or specific types of farmed meat?
I think illegal sports gambling was less pernicious. The usual bookie offered bets on the outcome of games which are much harder to manipulate than the stupid prop bets that people get addicted to now. The stigma of being involved in something illegal also slowed things down, you had to actually call up a bookie and not just press a button on an app.
For what it's worth, I agree with you, but that's the counter-argument: if prices are too high, you're going to essentially get people either circumventing restrictions (eg with VPNs) or turning to gangs.
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.
Did people do illegal online sports gambling before it was legal? Did it do as much harm as it does now?
Yes they did, and I don't know if we have harm data. It certainly provided a lot of funding to criminals. It probably did not cause nearly as much direct harm as we see today.
I mean, yes, that is a theory one could reasonably believe in. In the absence of evidence, it's not obvious at all whether it is true or false.
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.
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.
Indeed. Expensive in terms of money it already is, and it's not effective.
New federal law: all gambling bets must be placed by fax or mail accompanied by a legible signature, with results to be released no less than 24 hours after betting closes.
You jest but a serious proposal on the table in Brasil right now is constant/ongoing facial recognition on online betting sites to authorise the session.
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.
But his would those amounts be set? For some people $100/week would be a lot of money; for higher earners it'd be basically nothing.
that would be a good system, base it on income or wealth — you're limited to $100/week or whatever unless you can validate you can afford more
let's means test the rich for once
Just about everything that's fun is a "vice".
There might be someone hopelessly addicted to amateur astronomy, frequently disrupting their sleep schedule and taking out usurious loans to pay for their equipment. But, that's not happening on a scale that we need societal regulation. Gambling is a different sort of vice than many fun activities.
You have a bit of a point: things that are fun are much more addictive than things that are hard or boring. And vice versa: addiction makes people believe it is fun. An addict will accept any kind of rationalization before giving up the addiction.
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.
Playing tennis 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.
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.
You seem to have the assumption that libertarian opposition to bans is based on the practicality of such and not the principle of allowing adults to make their own choices
It never ceases to amaze me how much people love to tell other people what to do even when it has absolutely nothing to do with them.
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 .
> they say bans never work and only make the problem worse or introduce new problems
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.
Banning Tobacco while legalizing Marijuana has to be the worst combination you can ever dream of.
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
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.
That may be true for the UK, but in America it’s very different. Most casinos are big fancy places, the local casino by me on the Indian reservation has world famous DJ’s playing pool parties, an amazing restaurant, and valet parking with supercars out front every time I have been.
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.
What state is that? Sounds pretty bad.
Arizona
Im in the US, grew up in Washington where its legal to gamble at 18 and absolutely its stigmatized. I gambled somewhat frequently and a big part of the appeal was to be a jerk and go mingle with people we perceived as degenerate.
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.
I see so many younger cousins/niblings casually gambling on their phones all the time. And these are not poor kids/men, easily top 20% in the US.
The sheer amount of advertising for gambling and revenue growth for these companies indicates there is little stigma.
This is not the case in the US.
Rest is Politics Leading recently had an interview with Frank Luntz who, as well as rebranding “global warming” as “climate change”, rebranded “gambling” to “gaming”. A really eye opening interview https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sSaRKxclEFwz80cH2FwJu?si=N...
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.
In my view, gambling should be a service provided directly by the government. And I'm not talking a "public-private partnership", but an actual DoG that will be taking bets, running gaming rooms in select cities etc. -- all with the explicit mandate to make of gambling available but boring. No bonuses, no ads, no promotions, no glitzy websites.
Gambling is inherently exploitative and no amount of regulation will align the incentives for commercial operators. You also don't want to ban it outright, as it may descend into the underground otherwise, so this looks like a reasonable area for the govt to take direct control.
I think the Netherlands has this and it sort of seems to work. In that I've never seen anyone really addicted to gambling, even if half the country provides the government some extra money in the 'national lottery' every month. We got a lot of random wins of boxes of ice cream and stuff growing up.
Casinos exist, but are basically a regulated service (possibly private, but as far as I know there's only a single operator).
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.
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).
This sets up several conflicts of interest for the government. The money is just too good.
That was how it worked in Sweden and it solved nothing.
It's a strong sign of our overall civilizational inadequacy that betting on events where the discovered probability would actually be useful--like economic policy outcomes, natural disaster frequency and magnitude, etc.--is still illegal, while bets with no positive externalities are fair game.
Polymarket
There were tons of red flags that were completely set aside.
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.
> 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.
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.
Polymarket isn't legal in the US
Polymarket is based in New York, and all but tells prospective US users to use a VPN.
And yet the biggest markets on there are consistently us centric.
It has become an epidemic in Brazil. Lots and lots of people in debt because of it. Celebrities, influencers, beautiful girls... Everyone pushing for it.
“Beautiful girls” What. Why would they be affected any differently?
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.
Almost everyone involved knew it was a mistake, but was captured (directly or indirectly) by the profits to be made.
Also it's hard to be against gambling if your state runs a lotto, which is gambling.
> Also it's hard to be against gambling if your state runs a lotto, which is gambling.
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.
State lotteries also run games like Keno, which run every 5-15 minutes. They have also started to run apps which have instant-play games, which are roughly equivalent to turning your phone into a slot machine. Keno and instant-play games still feel like chance, though, and the apps often have warnings and usage limits that the sports betting sites don't have.
>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
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.
>> 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
> 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.
> Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!"
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.
Legalising is fine, failing to regulate is not.
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.
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".
Two interesting things that I noticed from the betting industry:
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...
For me, this topic is prototypical of a larger conversation which goes something like, "Should individuals be permitted to slip between the cracks of society?" For the first three centuries of the Industrial Revolution, the answer in the West was, "Yes, of course." c.f. indentured servitude, honor duels, and debtor prisons. By the way, this way of life was, for certain, a shining improvemnt for the average person who would have previously been trapped in serfdom under Feudalism.
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.
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.
Many are coddled, and I'd argue many are literally caged, and come into adulthood with all the behavioural issues you'd expect of a dog that spent its formative years in a kennel.
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?
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.
Here is a wild idea:
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.
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?
Sports gambling should be regulated like we do day trading (basically another form of gambling) — require a some minimum threshold of money in the account to deter those without disposable income from gambling away their savings (for day trading it’s $25k).
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.
America's requirements (https://www.finra.org/investors/investing/investment-product...):
> 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.
That link supports your parent, not you.
> 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.
Legalizing things only for rich people is truly awful government.
Is it? The role of government is to clean up individuals who cause trouble for the population at large.
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?
What about legalizing losing money?
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
A secondary effect is also a new venue for money laundering. In some EU countries it's pretty much an open secret.
What the fuck do you have against people "ruining their lives"?
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".
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.
> None of that applies to gambling though.
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).
Poker involves skill, I was not talking about poker. Unless you’re unskilled, in which case it’s gambling. Poker done right is a process in which safe failure can lead to skill growth.
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 worked briefly building sports betting software after being a part of an acquisition at a major brand.
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.
While betting may be harmful the cash rich industry has helped many to escape poverty by enabling money laundering.
I don't want to stop those who enjoy it from enjoying it for the sake of those whose decision making doesn't interact well with its legalisation. I think others care more about preventing people from acting in ways that have negative consequences than I do, so I don't expect many to agree with me.
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.
I didn't even know this was legal. When did that change??
There are various comments about fixing matches.
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.
yes ,, this is not a good thing to gamble
Humans would be absolutely nowhere as a species without the gambling trait, we would never have left the trees, never mind the caves, we need a certain percentage of the population to be turned on by risk and uncertainty, because the majority are terrified of it.
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.
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.
ban the advertising around it
I don't understand why the free speech rules everyone wants aren't also trying to be applied to these platforms.
I don't understand why there couldn't have been a middle ground where we legalized it but restricted the advertising so that it wouldn't be shoved down our throats so aggressively at all times whiched has ruined sports altogether.
You think?
Who is fighting against this veritable scourge? I'd love to join in!
Maybe there could be some sort of identity based limit on how much anyone can gamble in a month?
Couldn't fully read the article though.
If betting wasn't allowed it would be significant income loss for sports teams as well. Maybe you might think that they don't need that much money, but that is subjective.
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.
I live in a smaller country and all sponsors pretty much are betting companies. These sponsors by far are most lucrative compared to your usual brands exactly because of how much they make from betting. Other industries wouldn't be able to pay as much for sponsorship since due to not so large viewership they wouldn't gain all of it back.
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.
"Miller says the NFL doesn’t get a cut of the amount wagered with these companies. But the NFL and its television rights holders, which pay the NFL more than $13 billion a year to broadcast games, have seen a boon from advertising by the legal gaming industry." (https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/business/nfl-super-bowl-sport...)
So we're talking about the indirect income from advertising.
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.
Betting companies are willing to pay far more compared to other industries since they gain the most from this sponsorship as well.
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.
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.
I like nicotine pouches because its just plant fibre soaked/sprayed with nicotine. Its convenient like gum.
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
hell, make it opt-in even!
I believe things would improve if we raised kids explaining them that the house always wins. It's a rigged game. Most people can't predict outcomes better than picking randomly and that way they are guaranteed to lose money because of the margins the bookies have. So if you know that you can play for fun from time to time, but not get in over your head.
But then I remember that so many are counting on the fact that people will stay uneducated so they can rip them off.
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.
Except if you are actually better than the bookmakers, the platforms will kick you off as soon as they detect that.
You can't be better or beat the bookies because you don't play the same game. Their game is to get the money placed evenly on all outcomes so that their payout is the same no matter what happens. And people betting are in the business of predicting the future which is a fool's errand. You might think you're above average, but once you realize the game is setup so that the house always wins, you realize it's tough to get out of the hole.
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?
It's only an addiction if it becomes one. If you prevent it, you've solved the problem before it became one, which is usually the most effective way of solving problems.
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.
Article is correct. We should probably also ban government-run gambling (lotteries).
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.
if you accept that people are going to gamble no matter what the government does, a state run lottery may not be considered predatory if it siphons money off of organized crime numbers games.
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.
All the arguments here apply stronger to alcohol prohibition. Terrible drug. Banned in Islam for a reason. Source of domestic violence. Source of drink driving. Valueless. I am very libertarian but this drug must be banned.
Thanks for letting me decide.
In Argentina, they recently legalized internet gambling, and now there's a 'pandemic' of teenagers facing serious problems. It's ironic to see gambling ads during football games alongside state ads promoting support for gambling addicts.
and the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more...
surprised pikachu face
betting is entrepreneurship for suckers. it can only exist in places with zero upwards mobility as a sort of firefly at the end of the tunnel for the eternal serfs. Any libertarian society tolerating it,proofs its no longer a libertarian society with chances for all just feudalism were the aristocrats play meritocrars to calm their consciousness.
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?
Sports gambling is great and lots of fun. Also creates a lot of jobs and gives opportunities to make money from gambling if you are smart. I hope it expands more.
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.
If you're saying entertainment is not value then there are going to be a lot of things that fall into that category.
Putting a wheel in a rat cage is good for the rat.
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.
Like all gambling it also has disproportionately negative effects on people who are already poor.
It disproportionately affects people who are dumb, not people who are poor. Though the two can be correlated.
I would say that it's proportional to both, even if you factor out correlations.
I have friends who are extremely smart, but they find gambling addictive and lose control of themselves in a Casio.
Its a genetic issue.
You could end up with children who have the same issue.
...that's still bad?
‘Gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math’
Not always in the case of sports betting - although there are definitely math "taxes" like parlays and point buys and heavy chalk. Plus all the predatory "promotion" stuff they will throw out. Sharp bettors do exist though, and do make quite a bit of money. They're less than 1% though.
Yes, always.
There is nothing unique about sports gambling here.
With all due respect, absolutely not? If a book puts out a line of +200 and you've determined there is a certain percentage chance of winning, your expectation easily can be positive. The "gambling is a tax for those bad at math" is a misconstrued quote that usually applies to completely negative expectation games, such as scratcher tickets, in which the more you play you will always lose in the long run. There are very precise mathematical terms for these things, and strictly, you are wrong.
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.
>There is nothing unique about sports gambling here.
Sports betting exchanges are unique compared to other traditional gambling options.
Ah yes, gambling. The haven for smart people. /s
Sure, the average gambler is not sophisticated but people who do find edges are generally pretty smart.
I'm of the opinion that gambling as a whole should not be regulated.The only restriction should be on using other people's money instead of your own.
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.
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.
Too bad, that still doesn't give you authority over other people, before they do something harmful to you. You can policy sports corruption and crime, regulate bankruptcy more,etc.. but you don't have the right to police people as a whole "just in case". I did not suggest allowing gambling to be used as an excuse to cause harm. You prevent crime by punishing it. You reduce bankruptcy by adding costs to it. (no comment on sports, since I don't think it is a net positive in society to begin with).
> 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?
No, but gamblers are allowed to do all those things. and I am not against requiring a license for gambling either, so long as the barrier for entry is reasonable.
Oh ok, I thought you were saying it shouldn't be regulated at all.
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?
I wouldn't like that either. Instead, maybe issue licenses to gamblers and like with a credit score, the fact that you have a gamblers license can affect things like getting loans, renting things, what you can buy,etc.. Let others who suffer an increased risk based on interacting with you refuse to do so, or incur additional penalties. Your monthly cap idea still nannies citizens.
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.
> 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.
> People involved in gambling are not stupid.
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.
> I agree with punishing gamblers that cause harm.
The first people gamblers harm is their own family - long before any formal crime has been committed.
That's not right, many gamblers don't even have a family. Are you saying people's lives should be regulated so that they don't spend their money in ways that their family wouldn't want it spent? I mean, last I checked, divorce, emancipation is still allowed.
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.
> 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.
I'm not against requiring training on math and statistics for gamblers.
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.
> "active predators" should be restricted or punished because their intent is to cause harm at the cost of others for profit.
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?
drug addicts and people who lose all their money gambling are a nuisance to the public.
punish the nuisance then, so long as actual harm is involved instead of simple visual displeasure. not the perceived cause. Stay out of people's lives. Society is also a nuisance to drug users and gamblers. The foundation of liberty is the protection of rights for even the most disagreeable individuals.
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.
So you could have an abortion, convert to different gender because it's your liberty and your body? Why can't I use 10 bucks for betting on the weekend? And just to note, it's my money
This article can be summed up as: there’s a reason certain people are lower class, and they belong there.
I abhor gambling (mostly because it’s a loser’s game), and betting in general tends to corrupt the integrity of most of the sectors it touches as a regulated industry, but the gambling industry isn’t ‘ruining lives’. People ruin lives, namely their own.
Sports gambling in particular is a cancer vis a vis the sports being bet on (because the sports become subsumed by the industry and cease to be independent), but one can say this independently of some weird cry for society-wide paternalistic protections.
You can’t fix stupid, and people will bet on all sorts of shit, whether it’s in the open or not. All sports betting did was introduce risk pricing to a wider market.
If a person is stupid enough to flippantly gamble on sports or anything else with unknowable/incalculable risks and outcomes that by design have no knowable ex ante statistical distribution (in contrast to, say, a dice roll), then he deserves to lose his money. What that means for him is his problem and his problem alone.
“That dollar that could have gone to buying a home, getting a degree, or escaping debt instead goes to another wager”
This author, naive and idealistic to the point of hilarity, is too obtuse to understand that the canonical man being referred to in these studies is precisely the very last person who would be able to do any of those things, with or without legalised sports betting being the convenient boogeyman.
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.
I have a law degree from a top 30 law school (globally) and a BSc from a top 10 school (globally) in my specialisation (Physiology). I also did a minor in Psychology as a lol (again highly rated but who gives a fuck about an actual joke/sham subject).
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) but saying they have fucked up neuronal connections isn't tantamout to saying they're sick, any more than somebody who has his spinal cord severed is 'sick'. Again, we can't currently fix stupid.
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.
